Kara Swisher RULES!

@13:00 "Hitler didn't need Instagram."

  

This was lovely.

I posted a comment.

OK, look, I’m just an ordinary heterosexual guy who appreciates an attractive woman as much as anybody. I have long thought that they don’t need to be painted up and adorned. An example I always use is Tammi, Coach Taylor‘s wife in “Friday Night Lights.“ During the episodes when she’s dealing with her new unplanned infant. No makeup, no nothing just incredible acting talent and attractiveness. I feel totally the same way about Kara Swisher. You just can’t improve on that. Those smarts, that perception, that humanity. And she looks just fine. This was a totally fun 30 minutes. Thank you.

@KaraSwisher

Her rise in serious national media is absolutely no accident. Her forthcoming book (Feb 27th) will surely be killer.

 

"Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and for Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once say: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”...

 

Burn Book is part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for of modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world...

 

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say Swisher has interviewed everyone. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few who Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in one famous case, literally..." [Amazon blurb]

I've cited her before, e.g., here and here.

 

Kara RULES!

ALSO ON DECK

I'm fixin' to go bonkers awaiting this release (also Feb 27th). Harks to my priors going to #Disinformation. (And, no, it harks, not "harkens back.")

AMAZON BLURB

An urgent, comprehensive explanation of the ways disinformation is impacting democracy, and practical solutions that can be pursued to strengthen the public, media, and truth-based politics

MSNBC's legal expert breaks down the ways disinformation has become a tool to drive voters to extremes, disempower our legal structures, and consolidate power in the hands of the few.

"One of the most acute observers of our time shares . . . a compelling work about a challenge that—left unexamined and left unchecked—could undermine our democracy." —Eric H. Holder Jr, 82nd Attorney General of the United States

American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.

In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it. The book includes:

• The authoritarian playbook: a brief history of disinformation from Mussolini and Hitler to Bolsonaro and Trump, chronicles the ways in which authoritarians have used disinformation to seize and retain power.
  
• Disinformation tactics—like demonizing the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts; stoking violence—and reasons why they work.
  
• An explanation of why America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation and how it exploits our First Amendment Freedoms, sparks threats and violence, and destabilizes social structures.
  
• Real, accessible solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, increasing media literacy in schools, criminalizing doxxing, and much more.

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country’s hard-won democracy.

When you need it done right, send in a woman.

UPDATE: SPEAKING OF WOMEN

Got this for Christmas. Fabulous.

"In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism where a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the “women’s pages.” But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s, and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four remarkable women came along and blew it off the hinges.

Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie is journalist Lisa Napoli’s captivating account of these four women, their deep and enduring friendships, and the trail they blazed to becoming icons. They had radically different stories. Cokie Roberts was born into a political dynasty, roamed the halls of Congress as a child, and felt a tug toward public service. Susan Stamberg, who had lived in India with her husband who worked for the State Department, was the first woman to anchor a nightly news program and pressed for accommodations to balance work and home life. Linda Wertheimer, the daughter of shopkeepers in New Mexico, fought her way to a scholarship and a spot on-air. And Nina Totenberg, the network's legal affairs correspondent, invented a new way to cover the Supreme Court. Based on extensive interviews and calling on the author’s deep connections in news and public radio, Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie will be as beguiling and sharp as its formidable subjects."

My wife and I have been NPR / PBS contributors for decades. This is a great fun read.

UPDATE: ELON MUSK IS NOT HAPPY ABOUT THIS

Ouch.

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Timely new book release pending

Disinformation. Where have we heard that word before?

Release date Aug 22, 2023

[Amazon blurb] A powerful, pocket-sized citizen’s guide on how to fight back against the disinformation campaigns that are imperiling American democracy, from the bestselling author of Post-Truth and How to Talk to a Science Denier.

The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulatea populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth.

McIntyre takes readers through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. Along the way, he also demonstrates how today’s “reality denial” follows the same flawed blueprint of the “five steps of science denial” used by climate deniers and anti-vaxxers; shows how Trump has emulated disinformation tactics created by Russian and Soviet intelligence dating back to the 1920s; provides interviews with leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism; and spells out the need for algorithmic transparency from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens—from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media—as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take.

Compact, easy-to-read (and then pass on to a friend), and never more urgent, On Disinformation does nothing less than empower us with the tools and knowledge needed to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late.

The author:

 

 I'm close to finishing one of his prior books.

 

Very interesting, very well-written. Squares with a ton of my prior study. Goes to my Deliberation Science Jones.

 

 UPDATE

 

Finished the McIntyre book. Loved it.

 

______
 

As of August 12th, there are 451 days left until the 2024 U.S. national election. Will our Democracy remain thereafter? Can we continue to successfully juggle all of these major existential balls?

Some days my dubiety enervates me. But, stay calm and carry one, I guess.

 

EXIGENCY UPDATE

 

Ugh. 

 

[AUG 12th UPDATE] A catastrophe. Death toll will likely soon surmount three figures. Lahaina (on Maui) has been reduced to ash.

 

Highly recommend her book.

A thermometer doesn’t give you a different answer depending on how you vote. Even in the U.S., climate change used to be a respectably bipartisan issue well within most of our lifetimes. In 1998, a Gallup poll found that 47 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun. In 2003, Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, then a Connecticut Democrat, introduced the Climate Stewardship Acts. As recently as 2008, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and current House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, cozied up on a love seat in front of the U.S. Capitol to film a commercial about climate change. “We do agree, our country must take action to address climate change,” Gingrich said, while Pelosi added, “We need cleaner forms of energy, and we need them fast.”

Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (p. 5). Atria/One Signal Publishers. Kindle Edition.

DISINFO UPDATE FROM THE OCCAM'S CHAINSAW NEWSFEED

Iowa Trump supporter's conspiracy theory leaves CNN's John King stunned

CNN's John King came away stunned after an Iowa supporter of former President Donald Trump argued that Western support for Ukraine in defending itself against Russia is part of an elaborate plot to cover up President Joe Biden's corruption.

While talking with Iowa Trump fans, King asked them if any of them supported aiding Ukraine against Russian aggression -- and none of them raised their hands.

One of the Trump supporters then outlined how he believed the entire war was an effort to cover up crimes committed by the Biden family.

"You don't have to that smart to connect the dots, right?" he said. "And so is the war to cover up sins committed to cover your tracks? There is too much money that has been thrown over there!"

King appeared skeptical of this and asked the man if he really believed every NATO country would spend massive amounts of money and send over huge troves of military equipment to Ukraine just to help keep Hunter Biden out of prison.

"It all depends on [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, how much dirt he has on Biden, to keep the money coming," the man said…

 

SPEAKING OF "YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT"

 

Seriously?

 

Asked and Answered. The Show Must Go On.
 

apropos of the foregoing topic: Amanda Ripley's "High Conflict."

 

OK, ENOUGH OF THIS DEPRESSING STUFF.

BRIEF OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

One of my Swedish friends (a fellow Santa Fe fan), hipped me to Henrik Hansson, also from Sweden. Lives in Japan. This is perhaps the most wrenchingly beautiful and painful song I've ever heard. Astonishing vocal.

Yikes...

 

More to follow...

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X-rated, LikeWar

X’s Trust and Safety team says it’s working to remove false information related to the Israel-Hamas war. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is sharing conspiracies and chatting with QAnon promoters.

[via WIRED] ...WHAT’S left of the Trust and Safety team at X (formerly Twitter) announced the measures it was taking to try and curb the virulent spread of disinformation around the Israel-Hamas war on its platform.

The statement, issued three days after the conflict began, reads: “As the events continue to unfold rapidly, a cross-company leadership group has assessed this moment as a crisis requiring the highest level of response.”

One person who does not appear to be part of this crisis team is X owner Elon Musk.

Instead of tackling the dangerous disinformation problem on his platform, Musk instead spent yeterday night into this morning continuing to spread disinformation about the conflict, conversing with a known QAnon promoter, boosting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and laughing at a video detailing how transphobic content on X can get you new followers.

Musk also promoted a new feature that allows X Premium subscribers to see only replies from other people willing to pay $8 a month, which Musk said would “help a lot with spam bots” on the platform—an issue Musk previously claimed he had already all but eradicated.

“ If successful, X will evolve to be the collective consciousness of humanity or, more accurately, the human-machine collective,” Musk posted in reply to a follower who said he was doing a great job running the company.

Meanwhile, disinformation about the conflict in the Middle East continues to rage on the platform, driven primarily by verified accounts.

Yesterday evening, X’s Trust and Safety team, which is currently leaderless after Ella Irwin resigned in June, wrote on X that it had “removed newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts” and was working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an industry body that helps coordinate content moderation across social media platforms, to “try and prevent terrorist content from being distributed online.”

The Safety team’s statement also lauded the user-generated Community Notes system and said new accounts were being enrolled to address the flood of disinformation on the platform. The Safety team also revealed that it had removed “several hundreds accounts for attempting to manipulate trending topics.”

Since Musk took control of the platform just under a year ago, he has restructured it to encourage engagement over everything else. As a result, accounts that subscribe to X Premium now have a monetary incentive to post content that is engaging regardless of how truthful it is. This was highlighted clearly on yesterday night when, at the same time as the Safety team posted its update, a new viral piece of disinformation was spreading unchecked on X.

Sulaiman Ahmed, a self-described investigative journalist, posted the false claim that the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, one of the oldest churches in the world, was destroyed by an Israeli bomb. The post received over 1 million views in the span of three hours.

Ahmed is a subscriber to X Premium, which means his posts are given priority in search results and newsfeeds over other users, and he also allows followers to subscribe to his content directly through X, allowing him to profit from increased engagement with his content…

Click here.

 

UPDATE

...We end by considering the far-reaching implications of a world in which every digital skirmish is a “war” and every observer a potential combatant. These implications inform a series of actions that governments, companies, and all of us as individuals can undertake in response.

Our research took us around the world and into the infinite reaches of the internet. Yet we continually found ourselves circling back to five core principles, which form the foundations of this book.

First, the internet has left adolescence. Over decades of growth, the internet has become the preeminent medium of global communication, commerce, and politics. It has empowered not just new leaders and groups, but a new corporate order that works constantly to expand it. This pattern resembles the trajectory of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television before it. But the rise of social media has allowed the internet to surpass those revolutions. It is now truly global and instantaneous—the ultimate combination of individual connection and mass transmission. Yet tumultuous as the past few years have been, social media—and the revolution it represents—is only now starting to flex its muscles. Half the world has yet to come online and join the fray.

Second, the internet has become a battlefield. As integral as the internet has become to business and social life, it is now equally indispensable to militaries and governments, authoritarians and activists, and spies and soldiers. They all use it to wage wars that observe no clear borders. The result is that every battle seems personal, but every conflict is global.

Third, this battlefield changes how conflicts are fought. Social media has rendered secrets of any consequence essentially impossible to keep. Yet because virality can overwhelm truth, what is known can be reshaped. “Power” on this battlefield is thus measured not by physical strength or high-tech hardware, but by the command of attention. The result is a contest of psychological and algorithmic manipulation, fought through an endless churn of competing viral events.

Fourth, this battle changes what “war” means. Winning these online battles doesn’t just win the web, but wins the world. Each ephemeral victory drives events in the physical realm, from seemingly inconsequential celebrity feuds to history-changing elections. These outcomes become the basis of the next inevitable battle for online truth, further blurring the distinction between actions in the physical and digital realms. The result is that on the internet, “war” and “politics” have begun to fuse, obeying the same rules and inhabiting the same spectrum; their tactics and even players are increasingly indistinguishable. Yet it is not the politicians, generals, lawyers, or diplomats who are defining the laws of this new fight. Rather, it’s a handful of Silicon Valley engineers.

Fifth, and finally, we’re all part of this war. If you are online, your attention is like a piece of contested territory, being fought over in conflicts that you may or may not realize are unfolding around you. Everything you watch, like, or share represents a tiny ripple on the information battlefield, privileging one side at the expense of others. Your online attention and actions are thus both targets and ammunition in an unending series of skirmishes. Whether you have an interest in the conflicts of LikeWar or not, they have an interest in you.

The modern internet is not just a network, but an ecosystem of nearly 4 billion souls, each with their own thoughts and aspirations, each capable of imprinting a tiny piece of themselves on the vast digital commons. They are the targets not of a single information war but of thousands and potentially millions of them. Those who can manipulate this swirling tide, to steer its direction and flow, can accomplish incredible good. They can free people, expose crimes, save lives, and seed far-reaching reforms. But they can also accomplish astonishing evil. They can foment violence, stoke hate, sow falsehoods, incite wars, and even erode the pillars of democracy itself.

Which side succeeds depends, in large part, on how much the rest of us learn to recognize this new warfare for what it is. Our goal in LikeWar is to explain exactly what’s going on and to prepare us all for what comes next.

Singer, P. W.; Brooking, Emerson T. (2018-10-01). Likewar. Loc 430-455, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Interesting. Just now diving in. Below, a couple of relevant resources cited in prior posts. Here, and here.

__________

 

Science Magazine: Timely new AAAS Editorial

Truth and democracy in an era of misinformation

   

Concern about misinformation and its toxic effects on democracy is widespread. A survey of nearly 1500 experts by the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation (the latter being intentionally spread, whereas the former may arise accidentally) as the top global risk during the next 2 years. Examples of misinformation-fueled events abound. In the United States, baseless claims about election fraud in 2020 by the losing presidential candidate, Donald Trump, culminated in a violent insurrection against the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. At the time of this writing, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are fearful of the future after Trump baselessly alleged on national TV that immigrants there were eating their white neighbors’ pets—a racist trope dating back centuries...

 

Although specific instances of disinformation-fueled tragedies can be readily identified, the scientific landscape surrounding misinformation is sufficiently nuanced to require careful unpacking. Two intertwined issues are particularly challenging: the adjudication of what exactly constitutes misinformation and the identification of the intentions of the communicator, the latter of which is crucial to differentiating misinformation from disinformation.

We know that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic was not caused by 5G telecommunications equipment. We know that Trump did not fake having COVID-19. We know that there was no widespread irregularity or fraud during the 2020 US presidential election. Those are facts, established with sufficient certainty that, in the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould, “it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” Any attempt to refute them can be unambiguously labeled as misinformation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that independent professional fact-checks of false claims have been found to not only correlate highly with one another but also with the ratings of bipartisan samples of the public.

 

But just because truth can often be readily ascertained, it does not follow that facts can always be unambiguously identified ... The existence of such ambiguity and contestation should provide the impetus for us to hone our evidentiary skills in adjudicating competing claims, in the same way that, throughout the history of science, uncertainty has stimulated development of better theories and methodologies to resolve challenging issues.

 

The existence of ambiguity does not license the claim that researchers should stop studying misinformation altogether, as some have suggested by appealing to the difficulty of adjudicating competing claims ... [R]esearch on misinformation identified the decades-long disinformation campaign by the tobacco industry that has contributed to the deaths of millions of people, despite the fact that the truth value of some specific assertions is difficult to adjudicate.

 

The existence of ambiguity also does not license the willful dissemination of falsehoods ... But even accepting that ethical imperative, how can we identify when a communicator is intentionally spreading disinformation rather than inadvertently misinforming others? How do we know that Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election is really a lie?

 

By definition, lies are intentional, and it is therefore unsurprising that they can leave fingerprints that differentiate them from truthful information.

At the level of individuals’ speech, many machine learning models exist that can identify willful deception from text, often with accuracies exceeding 90% ... 

 

At an institutional level, the legal system is no stranger to ascertaining intentionality on a daily basis. Inferring intentionality is the difference between manslaughter and murder, and the concept of perjury rests precisely on the identification of willful lies ...

The fact that the legal system is anchored in the notions of truth, honesty, and evidence entails two additional ways in which willful dishonesty can be identified. First, there are instances in which even literal truths can be found to be deceptive and hence subject to legal sanctions, for example, when sellers fail to disclose all relevant information about a product even though they truthfully report some of the information. Identifying truthful but misleading or deceptive information is particularly crucial in light of research that has found the impact of misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines to be greater overall than that of clearly false information. Second, because the penalties of lying to the court are severe, lawyers tend to be painstakingly honest in court. Hence, when they or their clients make statements in public that differ from those made in court, willful dishonesty in public can be inferred.

We know that Trump’s “big lie” about the election was a lie because his public accusations of fraud were made at the same time that his lawyers, who filed more than 60 (unsuccessful) lawsuits to overturn the election results, admitted in court that there was no evidence of fraud. Two lawyers who did claim fraud were sanctioned and fined by a federal judge ...

Although politics differs from jurisprudence, democracy similarly requires some degree of epistemic integrity. For example, citizens must know that elections are fair and that an incumbent will transfer power peacefully when voted out of office. Democracy also requires reliable shared knowledge for meaningful debate and to ensure normatively good policy outcomes ...

In summary, identifying the truth value of some assertions can be difficult, but that does not make clear falsehoods any less false. Similarly, it can be difficult to infer the intentions of a communicator, but that does not mean lies are suddenly truths, and it does not mean we cannot (or should not attempt to) identify lies. On the contrary, the distinction between truth and falsehood and the ability to infer intention has been at the heart of jurisprudence for centuries if not millennia, and the impetus and frameworks for making these distinctions are similarly critical to ensuring the integrity of democratic societies. Relinquishing these principles is unthinkable.

Read all of it. And, join AAAS. 

Goes to my prior post on Artificial Arguments.

See also #OnDisinformation. Mental Immunity, anyone?

32 days to election day. Ahhhh... The Daze of Our Lives.

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SATURDAY OCT 5TH UPDATE

Exactly one month to election day. I Finished Matthew Taylor's bracing book The Violent Take It By Force.

Couple of Money Quotes.

So, any and all manner of human logical & evidentiary "reason-based" arguments are irrelevant in the face of Biblical citations and summary "prophetic apostolic" assertions?

Silly me. A Science of Deliberation? Why bother?

 

Below: These are the lind of dopes we face.

 

_____

I minimally commend to you these two books for close study ASAP, one month out from Election Day.

 

Cited Ari's book here.

 

SUNDAY UPDATE

   

"On Sept. 28, JD Vance spoke at a Christian political event hosted by the most influential religious leader you’ve probably never heard of.

His name is Lance Wallnau, and he is one of the chief proponents of a radical religious doctrine called the Seven Mountain Mandate. He’s an election denier. He’s said Kamala Harris engaged in “witchcraft” in her debate with Donald Trump and that an “occult spirit” is working “on her and through her.” And he’s a leader of one of the most dangerous political factions in America: the religious movement that helped fuel the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In fact, as Matthew Taylor wrote in his important new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy,” Wallnau himself was instrumental to the insurrection. “I sorted through hundreds of social media profiles of Christians who were present for the riots and the protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,” Taylor said, “Strikingly, a common denominator you can find across many of those accounts are clips of Wallnau’s Facebook Live rants and links to episodes of ‘Flashpoint’” — a program on a Christian television network called the Victory Channel."... [NY TIMES]

 Read all of it.

 

Tangenitially apropos:
 

 

My TwitterX observation:

Uhhh… “RELIGION,” anyone? Jumps right off the pages, for me. “King,“ “Lord,“ “worship,” “God said,”… etc. anthropomorphism.

Justin Gregg.

 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

 

Facebook friend posted about this.

On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism...

The Case For Christian Nationalism?

 

 

Not buyin' this one.You can read the Amazon preview if you've time to waste.

A lengthy review here: "The Rise of Right Wing Wokeism" (pdf).

I first encountered Stephen Wolfe, through his writing, when I was doing my doctoral work. We were both working on similar intellectual themes and looking at similar sources. I quoted Wolfe—who has a PhD from Louisiana State University and is now a “country scholar at Wolfeshire”—once or twice in my dissertation. Since then, I’ve read an article here or there from Wolfe and have tracked with some of his comments on Twitter. When I saw that he had a massive book coming out making The Case for Christian Nationalism, I was eager to read a serious exploration of such a timely and controversial topic.

This is a long review, so let me state my conclusion up front: I understand and sympathize with the desire for something like Christian Nationalism, but if this book represents the best of that ism, then Christian Nationalism isn’t the answer the church or our nation needs. For all the fine retrieval work Wolfe does in parts of the book, the overall project must be rejected...

And, we have @TheTheoBros on TwitterX.

I've started following them. LOL. Have to wonder whether it's a spoof site.

BTW: Learned a new word today: gynocracy.

 

More to come...

_________

  

"When you need the job done right,

bring in the women."

  

 

A long-favorite riff of mine, that post title.

OK, I finished Barb McQuade's book the other day and have now plowed well into Kara Swisher's killer read. This stuff could not be more timely. I present below for your convenient edification one extended cite from each. You hardly need my take; these formidable women (like all of the many I cite here) are eloquent, logical, and clear (and more). Both of these books are must-reads.

____

BARB, "CH 10: THE WAY FORWARD"

I was visiting Ireland in the spring of 2018, when the country was considering a referendum that would end the nation’s prohibition on abortion. In a country with an official Catholic faith, I imagined that the debate would be raging with the passion of a blood feud. Instead, I was surprised to find that advocates on both sides of the issue stood on street corners, passing out literature and politely engaging passersby who expressed interest in learning more about the issue. To this day, I still keep on my desk a button that says “Tá,” Irish Gaelic for “yes”—the choice that would change the law to permit abortion and the side that ultimately prevailed in the election by an overwhelming margin. Irish feminist Ailbhe Smyth observed that the country was able to conduct the vote without becoming split. She attributed that success to “creating an empathetic framework of discourse so that people are not at each other’s throats.”

Combating disinformation is a massive undertaking, and defeating it will require the kind of empathy I saw in Ireland. The Irish people were committed to preserving their national unity above all else. As I saw in Ireland, I do not expect us to find unity on the substance of issues—we will always have differences of opinion on issues such as criminal justice and government spending—but we must be united in the process of how we solve problems. The ability to solve any problem requires a shared understanding of facts and truth.

What is truth? Philosophers and religious scholars debate the meaning of the term. There are some truths that may be unknowable to the human mind, such as the meaning of life or whether intelligent beings exist elsewhere in the cosmos. But truth is different from fact. Facts can be verified, even if our perceptions of them may vary. The color of the traffic light at the time of a car accident is often a knowable fact. So is the number of votes a particular candidate received in an election. Finding facts requires investigation, discovery, documentation, and testing. Scientists find facts. Researchers find facts. Ordinary people find facts every day. Are we out of milk? Did Dad take the car? These are facts that are knowable. Our opinions about facts may vary: Is the coffee hot? Do we need to fill the gas tank? Reaching conclusions requires interpretation, and reasonable minds may disagree. What I deem “hot” may be different from the preferences of others; the fuel level at which I think a car requires a refill likely varies from the risk tolerance of others. We can tell the difference between opinion and facts. And while we are all free to form our own views, we must commit to debating them from a shared set of facts.

Overcoming Fear

How do we preserve our democracy when political opportunists are willing to grab power through lies instead of adhering to democratic norms? I think the answer lies in the same strategy basic to every relationship: we need to care more about maintaining the relationship than getting our way. In American government, that means needing to care more about ensuring democracy than about imposing our will.

In How Democracies Die, authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt examine not only the demise of democratic governments but the factors that permit them to survive. They conclude that democracies thrive when leaders abide by “unwritten democratic norms.” In America, these norms have been “mutual toleration” and “forbearance.” They define mutual toleration as the acceptance of the opposing party as a legitimate part of our political system. In the United States, political candidates engage in mutual toleration when they concede elections to the winning opponent. Forbearance is the use of restraint in exercising power. Presidents exercise forbearance when they refrain from using their veto power over measures enacted by other branches of government.

In American history, both parties have been guilty of failing to exercise forbearance at times. Legislatures engage in gerrymandering to create voting districts that will give advantages to their party. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have granted ill-advised pardons. But in recent years, the Republican Party seems to have abandoned forbearance, perhaps because its leaders see their political power dwindling. While losing the popular vote for the presidency in five of the six elections between 2000 and 2020, the GOP nonetheless managed to capture five of eight open seats on the Supreme Court during that same period, in part by violating norms. Senator Mitch McConnell was unabashedly duplicitous in holding a confirmation vote for President Trump’s nominee Amy Coney Barrett following the death of a sitting justice in an election year, after refusing to provide a hearing for President Obama’s nominee under similar circumstances.

And now, we have reached the point where some political opportunists have even sacrificed the democratic norm of mutual toleration, the acceptance of the legitimacy of political rivals. Is this the natural end of American democracy?

Sometimes democracies die. Perhaps ours has outlived its natural life. But the alternatives to democracy, as Churchill said, are inferior forms of government. Democracies protect the sovereign power of the people to choose who will serve and represent them. The people can hold leaders accountable and express their dissatisfaction by voting them out of office. Allowing decisions to be made in any way except by the will of the people risks creating preferences for one group of people over another, a far cry from the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal.

Demanding Leaders Who Speak the Truth

To preserve our democracy, we must commit to working together for the greater public good. That means choosing leaders who will reject the use of disinformation to achieve political gain. Democracy requires an informed electorate. While our pluralistic society will always contain differing opinions, we must start from common ground so that we may engage in meaningful debate and make decisions that are in the best interests of our country. The solutions suggested in the last chapter can help us reduce disinformation and blunt its impact, but defeating disinformation will require something more.

We have real problems to solve—climate change, persistent racial injustice, growing disparities in wealth distribution, a changing economy, public health challenges, global conflict, refugee crises, poverty, crime, cyber threats, and many more. To rise to the challenges we collectively face, we need leadership that can bring us together. Our abilities to solve problems have never been greater: Technology offers unimaginable advances in medicine, food distribution, and alternative energy. Distance learning presents opportunities for job retraining and access to higher education. Social media allow us to maintain relationships with family members and friends and to collaborate with people on the other side of the world. Certainly, we face significant challenges, but leaders who offer rational solutions give us our best chance to solve them. Navigating that world requires leaders who will bring out our best hopes rather than prey on our worst fears. As he took office during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to people’s courage when he told them, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” assuring Americans that they could meet any threat that might come. At this moment, America needs leaders who can unite us to face our challenges with courage and optimism.

We the People

But leaders in a democracy, of course, are simply a reflection of the voters who elect them—all of us. In a time when we spend inordinate amounts of time and money on spectator sports, movies, and reality television shows, it can be argued that we get the leaders we deserve. In a democracy, a government of the people, we need responsible leadership not just from our elected officials but from our citizenry. We the people need to recognize that the use of disinformation as a weapon to exercise political power is a threat to democracy, and we must work to abolish it. We must use our voting power to insist on leaders who use facts to solve problems instead of lies to divide us. Voters must accept reasonable compromise from our leaders rather than demanding ideological purity at any cost. We can hold candidates and leaders accountable by refusing to elect or reelect those who knowingly perpetuate false claims and engage in deliberately divisive rhetoric. We should call out those who stand with any political party over country, who allow political ends to justify unscrupulous means. We should condemn leaders who glorify violence and bigotry. If we do not, we will be opening the door wider to greedy hucksters and power-hungry opportunists.

We must also exercise mutual tolerance and forbearance in our own lives. We need to do the work to verify facts needed to make informed decisions about significant societal issues, such as health crises and climate stabilization. We must avoid the temptation to go along with the con when our own side uses disinformation to advance its goals. We need to exercise restraint when we see a snarky comment online. Sharing, liking, and adding a mocking comment for cheap, fleeting laughs to “own” our opponents just exacerbate divisions and fuel disinformers.

Lasting Peace among Ourselves

An essential way to begin to heal our divide is by offering olive branches to people with whom we disagree. We must see people with different views not just as our political opponents but as our fellow Americans. People who have been duped by constant lies, as we have seen, will be reluctant to change their minds. The way to persuade them of the facts is not by mocking their foolishness or judging their enabling behavior. According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, those who have followed duplicitous leaders “may feel ashamed and unwilling to admit their errors in judgment unless they are approached with the right spirit of openness, at the right time.” In a polarized society, people can “dig their trenches deeper, or they can reach across the lines to stop a new cycle of destruction, knowing that solidarity, love, and dialogue” can conquer political demagogues. Taking this approach requires grace.

According to journalist Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders, a book on political reconciliation, we must meet people where they are. If we want to win over the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans, we can’t insist that everyone share all of our views. “In a time of escalating and cynical right-wing attacks on so-called wokeness,” he writes, we should all work to make space for “the still waking.” While we may have strong commitments to certain values like fighting hate and respecting personal pronouns, we should express “gentleness toward people who haven’t got it all figured out, who are confused or even unsettled by the onrushing future.”

This model is not a fantasy. It was at work in Ireland in 2018. It has worked in our own history. As president, Abraham Lincoln understood the need to welcome fellow citizens back into the fold, even after a bloody civil war. As the war ended, he delivered his second inaugural address, which ended with a plea for reconciliation:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Respecting each other means telling each other the truth. While we can never rid politics of spin and advocacy, we can insist on facts and refuse to perpetuate assertions we know to be lies simply to make a buck or somehow get ahead. Allowing public leaders, media, businesses, and institutions to propagate falsehoods assaults the integrity of our democracy. If we want to protect our rights from tyrants and con men, we must fight disinformation as unpatriotic, a betrayal of the American people. We must denounce as traitors the liars who use members of the public as their unsuspecting political pawns. To love America is to love the truth. We must make truth in democracy our national purpose.

Only an unyielding commitment to the truth can save us from the fate that met Rosanne Boyland, Ashli Babbitt, and Brian Sicknick. We can best honor their memory, and the memories of the service members who have sacrificed their lives for our country, by working to save American democracy from death by disinformation.

McQuade, Barbara. Attack from Within (pp. 308-315). Seven Stories Press. Kindle Edition.

BURN, KARA, BURN

Social media sites were built and monetized on engagement, and nothing, as I pointed out often, fueled engagement like enragement. Zuckerberg kept yammering about “creating community,” while forgetting that nothing pulls a community together faster than hating on another community. Zuckerberg once called me late at night in early 2017, to get feedback on an essay he wrote with the riveting title “About Community Standards.” In one of its first sentences, he asked: “Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: Are we building the world we all want?” Zuckerberg mused on this subject for six thousand words, finally arriving at the conclusion: “There are many of us who stand for bringing people together and connecting the world. I hope we have the focus to take the long view and build the new social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come.”

I dubbed the essay, “The Mark Manifesto,” and while I thought it was in desperate need of a copy editor, I appreciated his incessant need to virtue signal for a better experience, even when it never seemed to happen. Yet, I was also astonished at his inability to anticipate just how badly things on his platform could go. I told Zuckerberg that I did not share his hopefulness of creating a constructive community. In fact, I was certain that Facebook was moving toward becoming a mecca for those intent on destruction.

In our interview in 2018, Zuckerberg remained painfully simplistic, as if all he really needed to know about free speech that he learned from CliffsNotes. “Freedom of speech and hate speech and offensive content. Where is the line, right?” he said. “And the reality is that different people are drawn to different places, we serve people in a lot of countries around the world, a lot of different opinions on that.” You can still make choices, I told a man who did not want to make choices, other than the choice of capitalism over community.

What Zuckerberg wanted most was to wash his hands of it. “You know, what I would really like to do is find a way to get our policies set in the way that reflects the values of the community, so I’m not the one making those decisions. Right?” he said. “I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world. But things like, where is the line on hate speech? I mean, who chose me to be the person that [decided].”

Well, Mark, you did. And what he was saying in 2018 was disingenuous since the hands-off attitude was already deeply entrenched at Facebook. That much was clear in 2016, when a memo titled “The Ugly Truth” was leaked to BuzzFeed just days after the 2018 FTC settlement announcement. Written by Facebook vice president Andrew Bosworth, one of Zuckerberg’s tight circle of advisers, the memo addressed the thorny issue explicitly: “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still, we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

Reaction to the memo was very fast and very furious. Zuckerberg said Bosworth got it wrong and clarified that “We’ve never believed the ends justify the means.” He added: “We recognize that connecting people isn’t enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together. We changed our whole mission and company focus to reflect this last year.” Bosworth himself backed away from his own memo, deleting it once it was leaked and insisting he only posed this terrible scenario and immoral conclusion to start a debate internally. His how-dare-you-question-me defense was painful to witness. “If we have to live in fear that even our bad ideas will be exposed then we won’t explore them or understand them as such,” he wrote in his 2018 memo about his 2016 memo. “We run a much greater risk of stumbling on them later.”

But stumble Facebook had and stumble they would continue to do. Many began to question what role the company played in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Russian government manipulated Facebook’s platform to help elect Donald Trump. While I do not believe it was the only venue for the malevolent players of that country, initially Facebook tried to act as if it had no part. When he was asked in 2016 about possible Russian interference via spreading misinformation, Zuckerberg’s original reaction was to pooh-pooh the very notion. “The idea that fake news on Facebook—of which, you know, it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea,” he said in an interview with David Kirkpatrick at the Techonomy conference. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

While Zuckerberg was right that many underestimated the appeal of Trump, to then pole-vault that into an argument that it was crazy to ascribe any impact from Facebook seemed disingenuous verging on ignorant. The kneejerk dismissal of the assertion as “crazy” made me wonder if the company had tried to gauge the extent of the problem at all. As famed management guru Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

In fact, Russian attempts to interfere and impact the election on Facebook were ongoing and persistent, which was no surprise since it was the biggest platform. Facebook engineers had already detected suspicious Russian activity months before that. Years later, the Justice Department would act against more than a dozen Russians and three companies “for executing a scheme to subvert the 2016 election and support Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign,” according to the New York Times. “While the indictment does not accuse Facebook of any wrongdoing, it provided the first comprehensive account from the authorities of how critical the company’s platforms had been to the Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election,” the Times noted. “Facebook and Instagram were mentioned 41 times, while other technology that the Russians used was featured far less.”

When I first heard the disturbing “crazy” quote from Zuckerberg, I dialed up Sandberg, who was politically savvy. Sandberg had spent time in D.C., including working at the Treasury Department as Larry Summers’s chief of staff. It seemed like she would understand my concerns about possible foreign influence and the need to investigate before speaking. I was trying to catch a flight to John F. Kennedy Airport, so when we connected on the phone, I was unable to take notes. Still, I remember clearly that I unloaded on her about Zuckerberg making statements about important issues that might be inaccurate. There was no way, I said, without a proper and deep investigation, for anyone at Facebook to know the extent of the potential manipulation by those seeking to misinform for political gains. I added, if this turned out to be true, even in part, who would take responsibility for allowing it to happen? As someone deeply concerned about propaganda and its impact on our democracy, I was intense, especially when I added, “This is going to end very badly for Facebook.”

Sandberg, for her part, listened and then said in her silky-smoothest of voices some version of “Calm down, Kara. We’re handling it.” Well, they didn’t handle the propaganda. Not from the Russians. Not in Iran. And not in Sri Lanka, where a Buddhist mob attacked Muslims over false information spread on Facebook, prompting a government official to tell the New York Times in the most perfect of metaphors: “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.” More like a hurricane. There have been deeply reported and detailed stories about the misinformation that flooded Facebook and the platform’s weak efforts to stop it, full of examples from across the world.

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos put it best in a piece about the reckoning coming for Big Tech, most especially Facebook, writing, “Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings.” Bingo. Whether it was used to boost fears of Hillary Clinton or spread anti-vax nonsense, Facebook was a platform designed to create crisis and rage as the rubles rolled in. It was a system-wide problem and company execs continued to act as if it was easily fixable. If that were true, why didn’t they ever fix it? The truth is moderating the flood of information they facilitated was an impossible task.

What was particularly galling was that Facebook executives repeatedly made the argument that not many people were impacted, like it was a minor leak in its social network basement, and they might have mopped up the dampness while missing the large mold infestation. And when the mold flared up again, they would shift to saying their job was to just create tools and that they had no responsibility for what happened when people used those tools as weapons. Zuckerberg never seemed to deviate from this attitude, including in 2018 when I asked him if anyone at Facebook should have been fired for the Cambridge Analytica mess.

“Well, I think it’s a big issue. But look, I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to get fired for this, it should be me,” Zuckerberg said with a “mistakes happen” verbal shrug.

I naturally followed up. “But to be clear, you’re not going to fire yourself right now? Is that right?” I was not trolling him—I wanted to know what level of responsibility he felt for the unintended consequences of his creation.

It seemed to me that he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. “Not on this podcast right now. Do you really want me to fire myself right now? Just for the news?” he said. “I think we should do what’s going to be right for the community.” And what was right in his estimation, at least, was more Mark Zuckerberg since Facebook was born as and always would be a Mark Zuckerberg production. The rest of us would continue to pay the price for his education.

Into this mess and void, naturally, moved a master manipulator and chaos creator like Trump, whom Facebook and Zuckerberg would inevitably cozy up to, until he went too far on January 6, 2021. Trump—the greatest troll in social media, as I dubbed him—understood intuitively that much of his success would depend on connecting with his base, whether it was in person or, at scale, via social media. Which is why Trump—with a big assist from Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel—summoned all the tech leaders, including Sandberg, to that gilded room at Trump Tower. He had needed and used the help of Silicon Valley to spread his propaganda. And now that Trump had squeaked out a win in three pivotal states, they needed him.

So, I didn’t even bother to dial up Sandberg either before or after that meeting, because she seemed long past listening and what was the point? I did call one person, though, whom I thought could make a difference.

Hello, Elon. It’s me.

Swisher, Kara. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (pp. 208-214). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. 

See my Dec 2016 "TrumpleThinSkin" post, just fer grins.

It is to my indelible, wistful regret that I never got to meet Kara back when I was posing as a Silicon Valley Health IT Startup Photojournalist while doing my actual QIO gig. She rocks!

 

Personal note: Kara, your recounting of the loss of your Dad... Sister, there are no words.

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OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

So, Nikki Haley has reportedly dropped out ot the MAGA Party Primary race, eh? How long before her husband changes his name to Heidi? (arf, arf) Word is that Mitch is changing his name to Coco Chow. (arf, arf)

 

UPDATE

 

Interesting Substack piece:

Trump super fans are impossible to argue with because they don’t actually believe in logic
The far-right worldview is incomprehensible until you realize that devotees believe truth flows from authority rather than reality

Ever since Donald Trump emerged on the American political scene, many of his critics have sought tirelessly to raise many different arguments about his policies, rhetoric, and criminal actions to help his supporters see just what their unrequited loyalty is enabling. Occasionally, these efforts have yielded fruit, but overwhelmingly, they are unsuccessful.

Last September, the head of an anti-Trump Republican political action committee called Win It Back, formalized the despair of many critics in a memorandum summarizing what his group had learned after testing more than 40 different television ads on 12 in-person focus groups.

“All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” David McIntosh wrote...

The essay continues:

The roots of authoritarian morality extend deep into human history. Many ancient civilizations operated under theocratic or monarchic systems where rulers were seen as divinely appointed or even incarnations of deity. These systems established a precedent where the ruler’s will was equated with moral rightness, a moral order centered around authority and obedience...

Y'know, maybe I need to cash in on this stuff. Couple of minutes in Photoshop for starters...

 

Hardly an original idea. Search "Make America Godly Again" on Amazon. The swag is voluminous.

Our Father,

In Mar-a-lago,

Hallowed be Thy Game...

 

LET US PREY

 

'eh? "2 Corinthians walk in to a bar..."

 

[And, yeah, I know, it's not really funny.]

 

BACK TO REALITY: SISTERS IN LAW PODCAST

 

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