Friday, December 6, 2019

What Should One Do About Trolls?

DP etiquette: Please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that.

Troll: a person who starts quarrels or upsets or insults people; trolls act, consciously or not, with an intent to have fun, and/or to advocate an ideology or agenda, e.g., by distracting or sowing discord or distrust; trolls tend to provoke reason-killing emotional responses using, e.g., inflammatory comments, insults, bad faith arguments or deflecting or distracting comments such as straw man arguments and logical non-sequiturs

Since moving to this blog at the end of last August, I've banned 15 people. The most recent casualty was yesterday. The trigger was refusal of a poster to provide any evidence that (1) debunked pro-Trump conspiracy theories are true and not debunked, or (2) any other false assertion the poster make was true. After at least six requests for information from me, the final retorts were:

“You mistakenly assume there is some burden to disprove a positive claim you've yet to falsify. ..... You are shifting the burden of proof and making ad hom attacks against me. If you think that's worthy of a ban. So be it. But make sure you understand why you are doing this... not because of what I believe.. but because of how you feel about it.”

I know exactly how I felt about it. I was frustrated that a person continually adducing false information and lies as truth refused to provide one shred of evidence in support of the false claims. It had nothing to do with disagreement per se. It had everything to do with the lack of a rational basis for discussion.

When a person is banned, Disqus allows reasons for the banning to be listed. I always list reasons. The reasons for banning 13 out of the 15 are first, “troll, liar, insult”, second is “troll, liar” and third is “troll.” Yesterday's ban fell into the 2nd category, although I never once called the poster a liar in my online comments to him/her and also never made an ad hominem attack. That was another of the liar’s lies.

What should one do?

America is now awash in dark free speech, (deceit, lies, unwarranted emotional manipulation, etc.). Most of it (~85% ?) is coming from the the president, the GOP, conservatives and pro-Trump populists, collectively “the right.” In my opinion, decades of dark free speech coming from the right is mostly responsible (~90% ?) for the breakdown in trust, civility and fact-based reasoning that now dominates both rhetoric and behavior by the right. It is possible that the anti-evidence and anti-logic mindset may be or is slowly poisoning most everyone else who is not on the right.

When confronted with a commenter who adduces information that is shown to be false by links to reliable information sources and a refusal to provide evidence that the false information is true, what is a reasonable response? Should that kind of anti-evidence and anti-reason content be allowed a platform to further foment distrust and incivility? Why should lies and bad faith arguments be given equal footing with honest attempts to be reasonably grounded in facts, truths and sound reasoning?

Bad faith arguments from the right include assertions that the evidence I cite isn't proof and it thus does not carry any probative weight. Bad faith arguments also include (1) outright rejection of evidence from fact checkers, (2) assertions that reliable news sources do not have law enforcement power to investigate anything and thus everything they report is unreliable and not evidence at best, or a pack of lies at worst, and (3) since I do not agree with their assertions, I am a liberal extremist or radical socialist hell bent on enslaving the American people and establishing an American tyranny.

Why should bad faith arguments even be rebutted? Responding to trolls and their bad faith arguments takes time and effort. Is it unfair to ask for an information source(s) that supports something a person disagrees with? If a discussion is based only on unsupported personal opinion, what value is it to society? At the very least, some relevant facts need to be identified and agreed on. After that, reasoning or logic can be discussed. Maybe reasoning is flawed because it is too partisan biased or doesn't logically flow from the facts. Those disagreements are mostly (~99% ?) not resolvable, but at least they can shed light on why people disagree. In my opinion, that has some social value.

Questions this raise include, is there social value in engaging with trolls and their false and bad faith arguments? If so, what is the value? Can a troll be identified by means other than taking the time and effort to try to engage with them?

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Taylorism Returns: Life under the algorithm, how a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class

I'm only putting up three paragraphs from this article off The New Republic, as I don't want to cause any copyright headaches. This is a long, detailed article and is well worth your time. It is a review of two recent books on this gig economy Victorian redux narrative.

In her new book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Guendelsberger re-creates a version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous experiment in Nickel and Dimed. Guendelsberger, a reporter for the alt-weekly Philadelphia City Paper until it was sold off and shut down in 2015, went undercover at three low-wage workplaces: an Amazon warehouse in Indiana, a call center in North Carolina, and a McDonald’s in San Francisco. Whereas Ehrenreich’s main discovery was that there still existed an exploited working class—a controversial point in the late 1990s and early 2000s—Guendelsberger takes inequality and exploitation as given, asking instead what these jobs are doing to the millions who work them. 

In her first job, at an Amazon “fulfillment center,” Guendelsberger finds a regime that is Taylor’s “vision incarnate.” (One co-worker, sensing Taylor’s ghost, theorizes that Amazon is “a sociological experiment on how far a corporation can push people.”) Guendelsberger, a “picker,” is made to carry on her waist a scanner gun, which monitors her location, tells her the precise item among the hundreds of thousands in the warehouse that she is to go pluck from the shelves, its location, and how much time she has to do it. A sliding bar counts down as seconds go by, haranguing her. When she’s identified the shelf in the vast facility, dug through the bin, and scanned the item, the next one appears right away.  

Seen from Guendelsberger’s point of view, America’s working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse: “Chronic stress drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.” We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump. No wonder our society fell apart. 

https://newrepublic.com/article/155666/life-algorithm

Here's a videoclip of relevance from PBS Newshour:

An inside look at injury rates in Amazon warehouses

https://www.pbs.org/video/prime-risk-1574896564/

I really do not know why the formatting is all over the place, nor how to correct it. My apologies.

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Summary of the Ukraine Issue

A 3 minute video accurately summarizes the House fact findings in the first phase of the impeachment inquiry. The summary is less than 100 words long and is a description of the section headings in the ~300 page House document.

The 3-minute video is here: https://youtu.be/Tk2ABtEzcXQ

The House report can be read here.

Congressional republicans continue to reject this as untrue, unfair, a hoax, nothing impeachable and/or mostly lies, with the facts mostly not being facts or evidence of anything impeachable. Elsewhere in the same broadcast, Maddow showed videos of Lindsey Graham speaking about impeachment in 1999 and in 2019 regarding impeachment. Graham has evolved from saying impeachment is about cleansing the office of the presidency and no laws need to be broken to impeach a president, while also complaining that senators need to listen to facts before deciding. Now, Graham considers the current matter nothing of concern and he will not even read witness testimony because he believes the impeachment process is s sham.

Another term for that kind of evolution in thinking is called partisan hypocrisy.