Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Monday, July 26, 2021

The disinformation industry is alive and thriving

In May, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal.

A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it.

But it asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists.

Some recipients posted screenshots of the offer. Exposed, Fazze scrubbed its social media accounts. That same week, Brazilian and Indian influencers posted videos echoing Fazze’s script to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire.

Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies.

They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability.

“Disinfo-for-hire actors being employed by government or government-adjacent actors is growing and serious,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, calling it “a boom industry.”

Similar campaigns have been recently found promoting India’s ruling party, Egyptian foreign policy aims and political figures in Bolivia and Venezuela.  
A wave of anti-American posts in Iraq, seemingly organic, were tracked to a public relations company that was separately accused of faking anti-government sentiment in Israel.  
The trend emerged after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, experts say. Cambridge, a political consulting firm linked to members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was found to have harvested data on millions of Facebook users.

The controversy drew attention to methods common among social media marketers. Cambridge used its data to target hyper-specific audiences with tailored messages. It tested what resonated by tracking likes and shares.

The episode taught a generation of consultants and opportunists that there was big money in social media marketing for political causes, all disguised as organic activity.

Ahh, the stench of dark free speech in the morning. There's nothing quite like it. But, plausible deniability comes pretty close.


Questions: How can democracy and truth defend themselves against the endless onslaught of lies, deceit, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation (fear, anger, bigotry, distrust, hate, intolerance, etc.), motivated reasoning and the like? How can any defense intended to protect democracy and truth be prevented from use by demagogues, tyrants, crooks and kleptocrats to attack, and maybe even destroy, democracy and truth? Is the dark free speech market just a reflection of capitalism and the invisible hand doing its free market thing, or is it something else? And then, there's Israel, again.

The best answers get awarded a gold star: ⭐

Perfect answers get two: ⭐⭐




Sunday, July 25, 2021

After the rule of law gets vindicated: ‘Complete, dysfunctional chaos’

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of American Indians in a lawsuit claiming that an 1800s Treaty agreement with the US government was being violated in Oklahoma (OK). That sort of thing had been common since the 1800s. US Treaties with Indian tribes, supposedly the law, were being ignored by the US government, including federal courts.  

In a surprise last year, the Supreme Court ruled for Indian tribes in OK, holding that about half the state was Indian territory. That was in accord with existing Treaty law. The non-Indian part of OK was in shock. Indian tribes were happy, to say the least. Non-Indians were in shock.

In his dissent in the 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma case, Chief Justice John Roberts warned that chaos would be the result of the decision. The reason was that many crimes prosecuted by the state of OK would be invalid because they were improperly tried by OK, not the Indian tribes or the federal government. 


Indian territory in Oklahoma


Robert's warning is now playing out. There is much chaos and shock in OK. The Washington Post writes:
Kyle Willis hadn’t seen Kimberly Graham in years, since the day she was sentenced to 107 years in prison after she drunkenly plowed her truck into a group of motorcyclists in Tulsa, killing five people, including his mother and stepfather.

So it was a shock when he saw her at a court hearing last month — tanned, dressed in a frilly purple top and jeans and laughing — a free woman. Graham, who is Native American, was let out of prison in April after a Supreme Court decision last year that found that a large part of eastern Oklahoma is still Indian country. Despite a century of state and local prosecutions, the court ruled that crimes there were the province of federal and tribal courts.

“She’s enjoying life as if nothing ever happened,” said Willis, 34, of Broken Arrow, Okla., who said the sight of Graham left him numb. “It’s bizarre. It’s crazy.”

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma said prosecution of Native Americans for crimes in the expanded Indian country must be carried out in federal and tribal courts, rather than by state or local officials. It was celebrated across the country by Native Americans last July, who saw it as a historic affirmation of treaties signed with the U.S. government in the 1800s.

But in the year since, the ruling has upended Oklahoma’s criminal justice system, imperiled convictions in thousands of cases, sowed confusion for police and emergency responders and led to the direct release of more than 50 criminals convicted on charges including second-degree murder and child abuse, state records show.

A local power plant is challenging an increase in its property taxes. The state is fending off a move by the federal government to strip its ability to regulate mines on Indian land. The state has also raised concerns about a potential loss of tax revenue.

The fallout has exacerbated long-standing tensions between Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and the leaders of five tribes involved. Stitt held a community forum on the issue this month that degenerated into raucous shouting, with attendees booing and chanting, “Treaties are the law of the land!”

“We are living a nightmare out here,” said Ryan Leonard, the Oklahoma governor’s special counsel for Native American affairs. “It’s complete, dysfunctional chaos in the state of Oklahoma.”
The WaPo article goes on to note that OK estimates that up to 79,000 criminal have to be released. About one-fourth of those will probably be re-prosecuted. Since the state has to step back, Indian tribes in OK expanded their legal operations by adding prosecutors, marshals and victims services personnel. So far, the Cherokee Nation recently added six prosecutors, two district court judges and 13 marshals and filed about 1,300 cases this year. 

Not surprisingly, OK sees this as a mess and Indian tribes see it as a great opportunity to assert their long-denied rights. Justice Gorsuch who wrote the 5-4 decision commented: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word. Dire warnings are just that, and not a license for us to disregard the law.” 

At least some of Robert's warnings are coming true.

Questions: What is more important, continuing to violate Indian treaties and the rule of law in the name of avoiding legal chaos, or to try to live up to Indian Treaty legal requirements even if it means some chaos and bad outcomes with bad people being let off the hook and out of jail? 

Are the people who allowed Treaty violations to exist in the first place responsible for the chaos now, or are they well-meaning people (or not well-meaning bigots) who committed forgivable mistakes, assuming (i) any of them are still alive, and (ii) there is at least some legal means to hold them accountable? 

Should the Supreme Court take this case up again and rule against the Indian Tribes for convenience or based on new arguments, e.g., the Treaties don't mean what they say, or for some other reason?[1] 


Footnote: 
1. The current Christian nationalist Supreme Court would probably overturn McGirt and go back to the good 'ole days of blowing off Indian Treaties in OK. Jimcy McGirt was convicted in state court and jailed as a child molester. McGirt, argued that the state did not have jurisdiction to prosecute him because he was a Native American on tribal land. There is one (assuming Kennedy was a radical Christian nationalist) or two more radical Christian nationalist judges now on the Supreme Court than there were when McGirt was originally decided.

Saturday, July 24, 2021

An alleged source of Republican opposition to cracking down on tax cheats



Tax cheats underpay taxes by an estimated $1 to $1.4 trillion/year. Years ago, conservative anti-Obama and anti-government propaganda argued that Obama weaponized the IRS when Obamacare imposed a tax penalty for not signing up. That appears to be a major part of fascist Republican Party opposition to giving the IRS the budget it needs to collect taxes. So, us honest taxpayers are just suckers because we don't cheat and the fascist GOP (FGOP) has no problem with it, at least not enough to do anything fix the annual festival of tax cheating. The New York Times writes:
A plan by Democrats to pay for infrastructure investments by beefing up the Internal Revenue Service to catch tax evaders has resurfaced old resentments for Republicans, whose distrust of the agency has simmered for years, erasing hopes of a bipartisan legislative accord built on narrowing the so-called tax gap.

Republican senators backed away this week from a provision to toughen tax enforcement at the I.R.S., gutting a crucial source of financing for an infrastructure package that would devote about $600 billion to roads, bridges, broadband and other public goods. That has left lawmakers scrambling to figure out how to pay for the legislation and has again put the I.R.S., whose funding and ability to conduct audits has diminished over the past decade, in limbo.

For conservative activists, who have harbored enmity toward the I.R.S. for more than a decade, the agency is considered a threat that is beyond reclamation.

“As we learned in 2013, Democrats have weaponized the I.R.S. as a political tool, and now they want an even more powerful I.R.S. to target their political enemies just as they did under Obama,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a free-enterprise advocacy group. “Their proposal is not cost effective even by optimistic estimates and it’s just another example of the vicious tactics of the radical socialist left.”  
The tax collection agency was never particularly popular with Republicans, who tend to embrace small government and low taxes. But their animus toward the I.R.S. became more impassioned in 2010, after Democrats and the Obama administration used it as a tool for enforcing the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that everyone buy health insurance.
Also note that the FGOP has got its messaging about Democrats in place and down pat. Almost always these days, Democrats and the Democratic Party are slandered as the radical left, socialist left, radical socialist left or something like that. 

Nothing the Democrats propose to pay for federal spending by collecting taxes owed is socialist. Paying for spending on infrastructure isn't socialist either. The FGOP argument is a red herring used to distract people from inconvenient truths such as (i) the FGOP condones massive tax cheating and has for years, and (ii) the FGOP hates government and (a) wants to starve it to death by cutting off federal revenues as much as possible, and (b) wants to privatize as much government activity as possible in its ongoing push to capture much more power and wealth for powerful and wealthy people, groups and special interests. 

Questions: Is it radical to try to pay for federal spending on infrastructure or to try to reduce tax evasion? Is domestic spending for, e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, social security and infrastructure, all of which the FGOP hates and wants to get rid of, socialist and doomed to fail as inherently flawed central planning? Should the the free market be free to deal with these matters because all socialism always fails and free markets always succeed?


Take next exit -- the off ramp is free and clear

Friday, July 23, 2021

Blog note

My Disqus notifications have almost completely stopped working properly. I need to figure a different way to keep apprised on comments, assuming there is one. That applies to both emails and inbox notifications. Some others are reporting the same problem to Disqus but I don't know when or if the problem will go away. In the meantime, if I don't respond, it is because I'm not getting notices of responses until up to 10 days later.