Breitbart's Rare Moment of Candor

“There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers, and more averse to one another, than if they were actually two different nations. The effects of such a division are pernicious to the last degree, not only with regard to those advantages which they give the common enemy, but to those private evils which they produce in the heart of almost every particular person. This influence is very fatal both to men’s morals and their understandings; it sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even common sense. A furious party spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints, naturally breaks out in falsehood, detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancor, and extinguishes all the seeds of good nature, compassion and humanity.” -- President George Washington

For hard core partisans, candor is rare. A recent article in The Atlantic reports on several such moments in recent years.

Rush Limbaugh: Limbaugh “responded to GOP losses in Congress by admitting that he hadn’t been leveling with his listeners about their political party. He declared, “I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, ‘Well, why have you been doing it?’ Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat Party does.””

Morals and beliefs: Note the mindset and morality that led a person like Limbaugh who was followed and believed by millions of Americans to hold his political ideology and values in higher esteem that facts and logic or conscious reason (Washington's ‘common sense’). This is another example of why political ideology poisons reality and reason, a point this channel repeatedly makes. Truth and reason get in the way of sacred ideological beliefs* of people who elevate their political, religious, economic or other beliefs above both truth and reason.

* A sacred ideological belief mindset is defined here as a mind that elevates personal ideological and morals beliefs above both truth and reason such that lying, deceit, unwarranted emotional manipulation, and/or flawed reason are acceptable. In other words, the ends justify the means for the sacred belief mindset, at least to the extent of engaging in lying, deceit, etc. For some such mindsets, it extends to accept and engage in violence in the name of defending sacred belief.

Glenn Beck: “Then it was Glenn Beck, looking back on his stint as one of the right’s most popular cable-news hosts, admitting to Megyn Kelly in 2014, ‘I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart,’ a reference to his rise to national fame fueled by scrawling unhinged conspiracy theories on chalkboards.”

In this example, one can see how easily the sacred belief mindset can slide into social discord and even edge a society toward violence.

Breitbart's moment of candor: “The latest cynical purveyor of misinformation to confess his sins is Alex Marlow, editor of Breitbart, one of the most highly trafficked news and analysis website on the right. He told CNN last week that the publication he runs, reporting to Steve Bannon, wasn’t honest in its coverage of Roy Moore’s Senate campaign. Rather than letting the merits of the race dictate coverage, Breitbart skewed its work and cast doubt on Moore’s accusers to protect President Trump: Marlow said he had no regrets about Breitbart's coverage of the race and stressed that the nationalist, populist website will not be changing course as a result of it… Until Election Day, Breitbart seemingly did everything in its power to try to discredit Moore's accusers.”

Marlow's reasoning reveals yet another sacred belief mindset. According to The Atlantic article, Marlow believes the news media was trying set a purely allegation-based sexual misconduct standard that President Trump could never meet. Marlow commented: “I think that's the playbook here. And I think it's part of the reason why it was so important for Breitbart to continue our coverage of the way we covered it ... and for Steve in particular to hold the line -- it's not just about Judge Moore, it is not even just about establishment, anti-establishment. It's about what's coming next for President Trump.”

Although Marlow claimed Breitbart has been “much more careful”, which he claims requires a “certain level of detail ” in sex misconduct allegations. Despite those claims, and whatever that standard amounted to in practice, it didn't impede Breitbart from relentlessly pursuing sacred goal of protecting Trump: “Marlow also stressed that he was personally uncomfortable with the behavior attributed by The Post to Moore, and noted that he did believe the accusations from [Moore accuser] Leigh Corfman had ‘a lot of credibility.’”

This is how partisan politics and partisan morals work in practice, at least for modern conservatives and populists. Ideological and personal goals talk and truth and reason walk.

It is unfortunate that there are so few moments of candor that reveal the moral basis of partisanship and ideology, or the lack thereof.

Question: Do the means of lying and deceit justify the ends of defending sacred political, economic, religious or philosophical ideological beliefs? Is violence justified under circumstances of domestic political disagreement?

B&B orig: 12/30/17

Global Warming: What They Don't Tell You

Deer in the meadow

The discomforting news: A lead essay in the Economist magazine reports that assumptions under the 2015 Paris climate accord include not just reducing CO2 emissions. The proposed temperature target of trying to limit temperature increase to less than 2ᵒ C includes removing about 890 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 by 2100. In scientific terms, that's a lot. That point is not well-reported.

The Economist sums it up: “Stopping the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is not enough. It has to be sucked out, too. . . . Unless policymakers take negative emissions seriously, the promise of Paris will ring ever more hollow.”

The good news: In summarizing promising technology advances for 2017, Scientific American reports on progress in technology that removes CO2 from air and converts it to fuel. Scientists have been working for decades on an artificial ‘leaf’ that uses sunlight, water and CO2 in the air to make alcohol fuels. In a significant advance, scientists at Harvard reported an artificial leaf that was much more efficient in converting CO2 and water to alcohol fuels than plant leaves are at converting CO2 and water to sugars (biological fuels).

In using sunlight for energy production, a plant uses about 1% of the energy in sunlight to make glucose (a carbohydrate or sugar). By contrast, the artificial leaf operated at 10% sunlight efficiency in converting CO2 in air to fuel. That system pulled 6.3 oz of CO2 from air per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.

The scientists are in talks with industry to prototype large scale facilities to generate tons of fuels.

The technology includes (i) a non-toxic, biocompatible catalyst that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight, and (ii) genetically engineered bacteria that use CO2 and the hydrogen to make fuel. The lead scientist envisions also using genetically engineered bacteria in soil to take CO2 and nitrogen from air to make fertilizers for plants.

So long as climate change deniers don't decide to intervene to stop or impede research,[1] there are developing technologies that can potentially have an impact on CO2 emissions. Presumably this technology an also be used to achieve at least some of the negative CO2 emissions that are believed necessary to stabilize the climate.

The unknown: Whether this and other developing technologies can be scaled up and still be economically competitive in time to make any difference is unknowable. It is possible that humans have already set in motion biological-geological processes that could lead to human extinction, e.g., anoxic oceans leading to a toxic atmosphere. The timescales and odds for very bad outcomes are impossible to know with any degree of certainty.

Footnote:
1. In the case of gun control research, gun advocates and political conservatives have successfully blocked funding for research on the public health impacts of gun ownership since 1996. Conservatives in congress today want to cut funding for Earth and climate science research to block research and new information that reveals the scope and nature of climate change. In this case, conservatives and/or economic interest who feel threatened by this new source of energy cold stop research and or development of this new technology. Much of the effort to stop science and new knowledge is well-funded and operating in as much secrecy as possible.

Where does this path lead, survival or extinction?

B&B orig: 12/31/17

Essentially Contested Concepts: What is Hate?

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., hate, fairness, constitutional, legal, moral, good, evil, etc.), but not on the best realization or definition thereof. They are concepts the proper definition or use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper definitions or uses on the part of their users. These disputes cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone. The disputes are unresolvable, but unfortunately are quite common in politics. Disputes over essentially contested concepts cannot be resolved by anything other than compromise, an imperfect resolution, because the definitions are heavily influenced by personal cognitive and social factors such as morals, political ideology, and social- and self-identity.

A Washington Post article discusses whether the hate group list that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has compiled is fair, dangerous or otherwise detrimental. The article starts with a member of the Family Research Council (FRC) pointing out the bullet holes in the group's lobby. The FRC, a conservative Christian anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage advocacy and political lobbying group, is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. A deranged man with a gun came to kill people in the FRC because the FRC was on the SPLC hate list.

Is it fair or safe to identify groups like the FRC with the same language, hate group, as the Klu Klux Klan? What is the definition of hate in the context of politics?

The WaPo writes: “‘Labeling people hate groups is an effort to hold them accountable for their rhetoric and the ideas they are pushing. Obviously the hate label is a blunt one,’ Cohen concedes when I ask whether advocates like the FRC, or proponents of less immigration like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), or conservative legal stalwarts like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), really have so much in common with neo-Nazis and the Klan that they belong in the same bucket of shame. “It’s one of the things that gives it power, and it’s one of the things that can make it controversial. Someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s without nuance.’ … But we’ve always thought that hate in the mainstream is much more dangerous than hate outside of it. The fact that a group like the FRC or a group like FAIR can have congressional allies and can testify before congressional committees, the fact that a group like ADF can get in front of the Supreme Court — to me that makes them more dangerous, not less so. … It’s the hate in the business suit that is a greater danger to our country than the hate in a Klan robe.’”

Context: For context, the FRC operates ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which are set up in poor neighborhoods. From the outside, they appear to be medical centers that provide professional medical access to abortion services. These centers have been called unethical for deceiving pregnant women by applying pressure tactics that range from lying about abortion options, e.g., falsely telling a woman that abortion is illegal or unavailable, to exerting intense psychological pressure to prevent a woman from having an abortion. These centers often seek to delay long enough so that a woman is forced by law to give birth. People running crisis pregnancy centers typically have no formal medical training at all and instead are Christian activists in white lab coats trying to prevent abortions by any means possible short of illegal actions such as threats of physical violence.

In view of lies, deceit and misery that crisis pregnancy centers were inflicting on low income women who were being tricked into bearing a child, California passed a law “intended to compel crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to offer factual information about all options available to pregnant women and to disclose if a facility is unlicensed. . . . . NPCC asserts that 91% of unlicensed CPCs provided defective medical information such as a false link between abortion and breast cancer or suicide.”

What is hate? Do deceit-driven tactics related to abortion, like what the FRC and other groups engage in, amount to hate? Do other activities such as lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges to abortion or same-sex marriage amount to hate?

Hate (verb): to feel intense or passionate dislike for someone, a concept, e.g., the idea of abortion, or something.
Hate (noun): an intense or passionate dislike or loathing for someone, a concept or something.

Clearly, lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges are legal political activities. Can legal activities amount to hate? If it isn't hate, what can it more reasonably be called? Aggressive conservative or Christian activism? Immorality or unethical?

It appears that much or most of the activities the groups on the SPLC’s hate list amount to mostly legal activism infused with a rigid unwillingness to compromise. If one believes that, for politics in a liberal democracy, compromise is a core moral value and necessary for democracy to function properly (a concept or belief advocated here), then a refusal to compromise can be seen as immoral.

Is immorality the same as hate? If the definitions of hate given above are generally accepted as maybe incomplete but generally accurate enough, then it would logically seem that refusal to compromise alone will often or usually include a component of hate in it. Is that reasoning sound or flawed? Is compromise the only or best form of resolution for disputes over contested concepts?

The WaPo is right to raise this issue. A deranged man with a gun used the SPLC hate list to find a target for murder. That would seem to be no different than president Trump continually referring to journalists as ‘the enemy of the people’, thereby inciting a few people to begin to act to kill journalists. Is that hate?

If nothing else, one can see from the foregoing why essentially contested concepts lead to intractable disputes and how the disputed concepts can foster actions that lead to misery or even social conflict and outright murder. Essentially contested concepts can be dangerous because of the heavy cognitive (moral) and social (identity and social context) loads they carry. From that point of view, it is easy to see why (i) disagreements over essentially contested concepts are not resolvable, and (ii) compromise must necessarily be a pillar of peaceful, non-tyrant, democratic society.

B&B orig: 11/15/18

Propaganda, Social Media & A Weakening Union

Managing editor Mark Gimein’s essay in November 16 issue of The Week is interesting.

“How you whip up hatred and distrust has never been much of a secret. More than 50 years ago, Jaques Ellul, in his landmark book Propaganda, wrote, ‘Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, and that it’s actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened.’ Substitute ‘tweets’ and ‘memes’ and you have social media today, in which an algorithm feeds you the information you are likely to click on -- because you have clicked or retweeted or reposted something j ust like it. The techniques that once worked on TV and radio have been supercharged by microtargeting. This is not merely an echo chamber: It’s a pinball machine, into which manipulators cynically drop memes -- the Black Panthers support the democrats! -- to bounce around and amplify.

The government of the US was constructed, as James Madison wrote, ‘to break and control the violence of faction’. Now faction is ascendant, and it is the union that is breaking. There are no more big tents. Centrist Republicans such as Bob Corker and Jeff Flake have quit politics; centrist red-state democrats Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp didn’t survive Tuesday’s vote. In congress, it becomes harder for elected representatives to do anything but vote in lockstep with their parties. When Donald Trump was elected, it was said that he had ‘broken’ the republican party. The opposite is true: The parties are stronger than ever. Except now party loyalty is enforced by you own friends and acquaintances, who will make sure you don’t step out of line on Twitter or Facebook. That’s something that autocrats[1] and demagogues of the past could only dream of. How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused? In the coming two years of divided government, we will most likely find out.”

When Gimein asserts that how to whip up hatred and distrust is common knowledge, he seems to miss the mark. America has witnessed the whipping up of hatred and distrust to an amazing extent since President Trump came to power.[2] The minds now driven by hate and distrust do not know that they have been manipulated and used. They think that happened to the opposition, not themselves. Manipulators certainly know how to do it. But if everyone knew the trick, it would be harder for that manipulated mindset change to happen on such a large scale in such a short time.

This is an example of what can happen to a society whose people are untrained in defense against the dark arts. The American people are, for the most part, defenseless against manipulation by dark free speech** operating ways that social media make more effective than ever before.

**Dark free speech: Lies, deceit, misinformation, unwarranted opacity and truth hiding, unwarranted emotional manipulation, mostly fomenting fear, anger, hate, distrust, and/or disgust, bogus (partisan) logic, unwarranted character assassination, etc.

Gimein’s reference to Bob Corker and Jeff Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’ reflects the power of rhetoric to obscure unreasonable extremism in the mantle of a reasonable-sounding label like centrist in the context of the republican party. By standards of 25-30 years ago, Corker and Flake would have been seen as far right conservatives on most issues by the republican party. There is nothing centrist about them now. Sure, on a few occasions they ineffectively squeaked at their colleagues in feeble protest over something or another, but it didn't amount to a hill of beans.[3] They both voted the republican way about 84% of the time. By no stretch of the imagination of anyone neutral is it possible to argue that there was not extremism in many of those votes.

That someone today refers to Corker and Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’, shows how extreme the republican party has become and how well the right and/or trapped minds has obscured that fact. Gimein is deceived and wrong. A better label for folks like Corker and Flake is something along the lines of far right republican, with the rest of the party being extreme right. The concept of centrism has no place in the republican party at present. Decades of RINO hunts have insured a thorough ideological and moral cleansing.

Finally, Gimein asks a question with an interesting tell in it: “How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused?”

Mr Gimein apparently disapproves of dark free speech being deployed on social media to deceive and manipulate the public. Otherwise he would not see it as manipulation or misuse. Presumably, he also sees the same tactics on all other sources of media the same way. For better or worse, there is not a thing anyone can do about it. It is all constitutionally protected free speech, no matter how dark and deadly it is. Therein lies democracy’s greatest weakness.

Footnotes:
1. Gimein made a mistake by referring to autocrats and demagogues in the same breath. As we all know, that pairing seems discordant with Aristotle’s taxonomy of political regimes. Gimein probably meant either autocrats and monarchs or, more likely, he meant oligarchs and demagogues.

2. Yes, partisan hate and distrust had been building for decades, especially since influencers like Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich injected their poison into politics a few decades ago. Trump brought the emotion to a whole new, more toxic level. It is reasonable to think that Trump was probably helped significantly by years of Russian propaganda fomenting hate and distrust among the American people. That said, it is far and balanced to give Trump most of the credit for us being where we are today. As long as he is in power, the buck stops with Trump whether he likes it or not.

3. For example, both Corker and Flake voted for the nuclear option for supreme court nominees, thereby killing the filibuster. That was not centrist, not even close.

B&B orig: 11/17/18