What if Election Interference Becomes Impossible to Trace?

The New York Times is reporting that China is interfering with upcoming elections in Taiwan. The point is to undermine Taiwanese democracy and nudge it toward dictatorship. The NYT characterizes the Chinese operation as “still largely unverified.” The NYT calls the Chinese effort “a multipronged effort to finance pro-Beijing candidates, buy off voters and sow disinformation on television channels and on the internet.”

A NYT story from a couple of weeks ago described the situation:

“A man claiming to be a disillusioned Chinese intelligence operative has told the Australian authorities that China’s military intelligence agencies were directly intervening in politics in Hong Kong and Taiwan, buying media coverage, infiltrating universities, funneling donations to favored candidates and creating thousands of social media accounts to attack Taiwan’s governing party.  

So far, some Western diplomatic officials believe the claims by an asylum seeker named Wang Liqiang to be reliable at least in part, according to two people briefed on the matter. While some of his details appeared speculative and impossible to verify, the officials were taking his claims seriously, the people said.”

This sounds very familiar because it is what has been happening in the US at least since 2014. About that time, the Russian government ramped up its endless disinformation campaign to divide Americans and prod them into irrational distrust, fear, anger, bigotry, disgust and other fact- and logic-killing emotions. Russia’s goal for the US is the same as China’s goal for Taiwan -- destroy democracy and the rule of law and replace it with corrupt tyranny and mass oppression.

A growing problem is proving the scope of Chinese and Russian involvement. As time passes, these kinds of attacks will become harder to trace and prove. Both China and Russia deny any interference in the US despite contrary evidence. There is good reason to believe that over time external enemies will become both more effective in their propaganda and harder to trace, maybe impossible.

In July of 2018, Robert Mueller indicted 12 named Russian intelligence agents as responsible for interfering with the 2016 US election. According to the NYT, the Russian effort included “phishing attacks to gain access to Democratic operatives, to money laundering, to attempts to break into state elections boards, the indictment details a vigorous and complex effort by Russia’s top military intelligence service to sabotage the campaign of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.”

New York Times - July 13, 2018

No doubt that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was very unhappy, maybe furious, to see how much detail US intelligence could gather on his intelligence agencies and their activities. That situation will probably not be allowed to happen again without some people being shot for failing to hide well enough. Mueller’s indictment not only named names, it also specified days on which some attacks occurred and the role that the indicted officers played. For example, the Mueller indictment included this: “Defendant VIKTOR BORISOVICH NETYKSHO (HeTanmo BHKTOp Bopnconnq) was the Russian military officer in command of Unit 26165, located at 20 Komsomolskiy Prospekt, Moscow, Russia. Unit 26165 had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC, as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign.”

The day will probably come when it will no longer be possible to trace the origin of Russian and Chinese attacks on democracies. That day may already be here. Invisibility of attacks adds to the plausibility of the plausible deniability that China and Russia routinely deploy to try to deceive the world and their own people about how they operate and what their goals are. To the extent that China, Russia and other hostile nations are able to hide and deny their online activities, that adds to the pressure on open democracies to somehow defend themselves against the onslaught of tyrants.

It is not clear to what extent our president’s refusal to accept the reality of the situation damages American security and democracy. Given that Russia has been relentless with disinformation campaigns against the US for decades, one could credit them with some of the blame, e.g., maybe about 20%, for the rise of the anti-fact, anti-reason, pro-distrust mindset that has poisoned American conservatism and populism. And, it may be beginning to poison the rest of American society, if it hasn't already accomplished that to some extent.

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?

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.

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.

Gun Violence Statistics

FOR THOSE WHO CARE:
 https://lawcenter.giffords.org/facts/gun-violence-statistics/

Average Deaths per Year1
Total 36,383

https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/

Marketing Unproven Medical Treatments

The Washington Post reports on a growing industry that uses hardball marketing tactics to patients with terminal diseases. The industry sells stem cell treatments for progressive lung disorders, Parkinson's disease and other untreatable diseases. Because the patients are desperate, they fall prey to the sales pitches. The sales tactics include telling patients how they can raise the needed money, e.g., fundraising on GoFundMe. None of the treatments have been proven safe and effective by the FDA. Some people spend all of their remaining money for these treatments.

It is hard to imagine why such businesses are allowed to operate legally. It is bad enough that useless treatments and products such as nutritional supplements and homeopathy products are legal. These stem cell treatments are worse because they falsely claim to treat serious diseases. Nutritional supplements and homeopathy products all must carry a warning label stating that the product has not been shown to treat or improve any disease or symptom.

One of these fake medicine companies, the Lung Health Institute, doesn't show that disclaimer on its website. The only disclaimer is innocuous and in small print, “Each patient is different. Results may vary.”

Indeed, results will vary. They will vary from failure to failure coupled with bankruptcy and homelessness.

What is government for?

One can ask about the role of government here. It is clear that government isn’t concerned about companies selling fake treatments to sick people. In this instance, the role of government is mostly to protect companies and their business interests. Patient welfare is of little apparent concern although these companies presumably cannot poison their patients under current law. This is the face of modern anti-government conservative and populist ideology. 

Question: Is it irrational or incorrect to assert that, for this industry, the role of government is to protect companies and their business interests more than protecting consumer from health treatment scams?