The Dangerous, Irrational Path Forward

The radical right GOP is struggling with how to maintain power and not lose too much public support. There is a split among hard core supporters of the president and the rest who appear to be uncomfortable to some degree with what he stands for, says and does. 

Regardless, the GOP will continue to act in the GOP's best interest first and in the public interest second. The fundamental struggle stays the same, i.e., concentrated power and wealth (autocracy) on the political right vs. distributed power and wealth (democracy) on the political left. What also looks to be constant is the irrationality and incoherence the radical right seems destined to continue to rely on in its messaging (dark free speech). 

A couple of recent articles support that assessment of the game going forward. A New York Times article discusses GOP thinking about upcoming the impeachment trial. The NYT writes:

But it remained unclear whether the 17 Republican senators whose votes would be needed to convict Mr. Trump by the requisite two-thirds majority would agree to find him guilty. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, worked feverishly to whip up opposition to a conviction, arguing that it would only further inflame a dangerously divided nation.

Senators considering breaking with the president needed to look no further than Ms. Cheney to understand the risks.

In a petition being privately circulated among Republicans on Capitol Hill, a group of lawmakers led by Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, and Matt Rosendale of Montana, claimed that Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach the president had “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.”

“As we figure out where Republicans go from here, we need Liz’s leadership,” Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, said, praising her for being “unafraid to clearly state and defend her views” even if they were unpopular. “We must be a big-tent party, or else condemn ourselves to irrelevance.” 

The internal split is obvious. So is the radical right's incoherence and autocratic attitude. Graham's concern about further inflaming a dangerously divided nation is nonsense. The truth is that the GOP has relied heavily on dark free speech to successfully inflame and divide Americans. The radical right needs Americans to be inflamed and divided. By now it is clear that an impeachment is not going to significantly change that. 

The radical right's autocratic core ideology is on display in the rationale attacking Cheney because she “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.” What Biggs and the other hard core radical right authoritarians cannot tolerate is dissent within the party. They had their RINO hunts to get rid of internal dissent. The only disrepute to be found in what Cheney did is in the radical right tribe itself. With the rest of the public, what Cheney did created some credibility for the GOP and tended to reduce division, not foment it.

For context, it appears that the insurrection of last week is causing some loss of support for the president. Given that, convicting him of insurrection arguably would be more socially unifying than divisive. 

Disapproval is approaching an all-time high 

In another NYT article on the impeachment, the radical right's heavily biased perceptions of reality and thinking is apparent. That is highlighted in the following:

That the comparisons were apples and oranges did not matter so much as the prisms through which they were reflected. .... But [the president's] allies complained that he had long been the target of what they considered unfair partisan attacks and investigations. “Donald Trump is the most dangerous man to ever occupy the Oval Office,” declared Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “The left in America has incited far more political violence than the right,” declared Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida. The starkly disparate views encapsulated America in the Trump era.

Gaetz, a hard core supporter of the president and radical right autocrat, points to political violence of the left as if that somehow justifies what the president did. In this case, two wrongs do not make a right. Gaetz is reduced to blatant irrationality in his attempt to defend and deflect attention from what the president did.  

Assuming that people like Biggs and Gaetz represent the majority of the GOP leadership, the way forward looks to be irrational, reality-detached and dangerous. So far, Cheney's dissent is not the controlling mindset among radical right elites, which Cheney is part of. The threat her mindset poses to rationality and democracy is somewhat less. That appears to be the better part of the radical right.

He is Impeached: What's Next?

Piss off -- you don't pay me enough to take this job seriously

Welp, he's impeached again. The rhetoric from the majority of republicans who opposed impeachment did not signal any means or hint of reconciliation. They did not recognize the president's role in what happened. 

One radical right GOP line of argument was to point to the damage an impeachment would do. That clearly signals that future allegedly unwarranted and unreasonable democratic bad acts will justify similar future bad acts by republicans, e.g., impeachment. That logic is simple: If there is a democratic wrong in our opinion, we will do a second wrong when we get the chance. In other words, there was no hint of House republicans even wanting to rise above partisanship despite what the president did. What the president did is simply beside the point. It was not even something most House republicans acknowledged. So, if the dems do something in the future that republicans believe is bad and unjustified, republicans damn well will do the same back at dems when they get the chance. That logic is just plain nuts.

Another indication of the depth of partisan poison is McConnell's apparent change of heart about what the president did. Yesterday, he said he supported impeachment. Today he said he is unsure.

Is there more basis for optimism than I am seeing? If so, what am I missing? 

And, I am still trying to wrap my brain around the deplatforming of the president. The radical right is livid about it.

The Nipah Virus: The Next Pandemic?

Now that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is still out of control, it is time to widen our focus. Global monitoring efforts have produced a list of potential future pandemic pathogens. Included on the top ten bad bug list is the innocent-sounding Nipah virus. Who could be afraid of a little Nipah? 

This little stinker lives in fruit bats and occasionally infects humans. There is no treatment for it and the death rate is at least 40% (up to 75%). The BBC writes:

It's first light in Battambang, a city on the Sangkae River in north-west Cambodia. At the morning market, which starts at 05:00, motorbikes weave past shoppers, kicking up dust in their wake. Carts piled high with goods and covered in colourful sheets are perched next to makeshift stalls selling misshapen fruits. Locals wander in and out of the stands, plastic bags bulging with their purchases. Elderly ladies in wide-brimmed hats crouch over blankets covered with vegetables for sale. In other words, it's a fairly normal morning market. That is, until you crane your neck to the sky.

Hanging quietly in the trees above are thousands of fruit bats, defecating and urinating on anything that passes below them. On closer inspection the roofs of the market stalls are covered in bat faeces. "People and stray dogs walk under the roosts exposed to bat urine every day," says Veasna Duong, head of the virology unit at the scientific research lab Institut Pasteur in Phnom Penh and a colleague and collaborator of Wacharapluesadee's.

The Battambang market is one of many locations where Duong has identified fruit bats and other animals coming into contact with humans on a daily basis in Cambodia. Any opportunity for humans and fruit bats to get near to one another is considered a "high risk interface" by his team, meaning a spillover is highly possible. "This kind of exposure might allow the virus to mutate, which might cause a pandemic," says Duong. 

From 2013 to 2016, Duong and his team launched a GPS tracking programme to understand more about fruit bats and Nipah virus, and to compare the activities of Cambodian bats to bats in other hotspot regions.  

Despite the dangers, the examples of close proximity are endless. "We observe [fruit bats] here and in Thailand, in markets, worship areas, schools and tourist locations like Angkor Wat – there's a big roost of bats there," he says. In a normal year, Angkor Wat hosts 2.6 million visitors: that's 2.6 million opportunities for Nipah virus to jump from bats to humans annually in just one location.

Two of these are Bangladesh and India. Both countries have experienced Nipah virus outbreaks in the past, both of which are likely linked to drinking date palm juice.

At night, infected bats would fly to date palm plantations and lap up the juice as it poured out of the tree. As they feasted, they would urinate in the collection pot. Innocent locals would pick up a juice the next day from their street vendor, slurp away and become infected with the disease. 

There you have it pandemic watchers. Remember the little Nipah.

Question: Should some resource and effort to develop a Nipah vaccine be initiated, or should the US wait until it mutates into a more transmissible, pandemic-ready version, then put Trump in charge of the US response so that we develop herd immunity the old-fashioned way?

 

As tech giants recoil from Trump and Parler, is free speech at risk?

 In the realm of social media, the fallout from violent mob action at the nation’s Capitol has been swift and vast. Does it amount to censorship of conservatives?

The drama of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol Building in Washington played out largely in real life, to tragic effect. But it has culminated in one of the most significant changes in the landscape of political social media in recent memory. The leader of the United States has been banned from his favored means of communication, and his conservative allies are throwing about accusations of censorship and unconstitutionality.

So what happened?

Really, there are three related but distinct sets of events that occurred. The first is the de-platforming of President Donald Trump from Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. The second is social media’s mass banning of QAnon and Capitol-assault-related accounts and media. The third is the at least temporary collapse of Parler, a right-wing Twitter clone that promised to be a haven for free speech. They should be treated separately.

Let’s start with Mr. Trump and his social media accounts, particularly Twitter, on which he was followed by 88 million people. In the aftermath of the Capitol invasion, a federal crime that resulted in five deaths, Mr. Trump and his team continued to post material that could be interpreted to endorse the riots. Facebook, Twitter, and other major social media companies viewed this as a violation of their terms of use – the rules under which users agree to use the companies’ services – and deactivated Mr. Trump’s accounts.

Isn’t that an unconstitutional violation of the president’s First Amendment rights?

No. The First Amendment is specifically about the limits of what the government can do to regulate speech. Twitter is a private company, and is entitled to restrict its services to customers however it wants (subject to certain federal laws).

But Twitter is a public forum!

Not really. It is tempting to think of Twitter, and the internet generally, as the modern version of the town square. Many have made that analogy. But social media companies are corporations. So rather than a public town square, Twitter is a privately owned stadium where the Twitter corporation has built the facilities, hired the security, and handed out megaphones to everyone walking in the doors. They don’t charge admission, but it’s their property, and so they can let in – and kick out – whomever they want.

But aren’t they gagging the president by cutting him off from one of the world’s biggest social media platforms?

No. The president has unrivaled access to the media. Every broadcaster on the planet would leap at the chance to interview him. He has regularly called into programs on Fox News to chat live. And he has a White House press office with a press corps dedicated to reporting whatever he might say.

That’s not the same as Twitter. The press can filter him; on social media, Trump can say exactly what he wants.

That’s true. And the White House has a public website that could publish Mr. Trump’s words unfiltered. Mr. Trump has options – more than almost anyone else on the planet – to get his message out.

But what about all those other accounts being banned? They don’t have the same sort of options.

Let’s back up a moment to discuss what happened there. In addition to de-platforming Mr. Trump, multiple social media companies – Twitter being at the forefront – launched a campaign this weekend to ban users advocating misinformation and violence that led to the Jan. 6 riot, as well as users planning for a follow-up event on Jan. 17.

Twitter’s specific focus was on QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory alleging a cabal of satanist pedophiles in government. Many accounts were banned, including several high-profile ones like that of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump recount lawyer Sidney Powell. Many conservative figures complained that their follower numbers dropped by the thousands over the weekend, and accused Twitter of censoring conservatives broadly.

Well, isn’t it censorship?

Again, not in any legal way. Twitter can kick out whomever it wants to. And all of these users already agreed that Twitter could kick them out. If you’re a Twitter user, you have to.

Part of signing up for Twitter includes agreeing to its terms of service, which lay out a range of allowed and barred behaviors. You almost certainly didn’t look at them; most people don’t. But in a court of law, they would be considered effectual (so long as they’re reasonable – a term that included a promise to pay Twitter a million dollars wouldn’t fly). So all those people being thrown off Twitter already consented to Twitter’s decision, under the law.

But there are plenty of people on Twitter who violate those terms and haven’t been kicked off. Twitter is being completely arbitrary!

Yes, it is. Twitter, among others, has been very inconsistent in application of its rules, particularly regarding misinformation. Mr. Trump, for example, has had many tweets marked and/or hidden for misinformation, while it was only this weekend that Twitter deleted a Chinese embassy tweet that claimed Uyghur women were being “emancipated” by the ongoing internment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.

Still, Mike Masnick, founder of the tech/legal blog Techdirt, writes that a couple of years ago, his team “took a room full of content moderation experts and asked them to make content moderation decisions on eight cases,” and they “couldn’t get these experts to agree on anything.” So while Twitter’s inconsistency is frustrating, it’s par for the course.

What about Parler? It has minimal moderation, and now Big Tech is shutting it down.

Let’s discuss what happened to Parler, as it’s caught up in a different set of issues, mostly dealings between corporations.

Posts on Parler have shown that it was a communications nexus for planning around the Capitol invasion on Jan. 6. Several users have also made what appear to be violent threats against members of the government, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence, who were both inside the Capitol during the siege.

On Jan. 8, Apple warned Parler that if it didn’t institute a moderation policy to deal with violent threats within 24 hours, the app would be banned from its App Store. Google suspended the Parler app from the Google Play store shortly thereafter. Though Parler did delete some posts by Trump-connected lawyer Lin Wood about Mr. Pence, Apple removed the app from its store on Jan. 9. That same day, Amazon Web Services announced it would stop hosting Parler, effectively shutting the social media service down until it finds a new host.

Why isn’t that censorship?

This is all about private entities severing contracts with one another. Parler and Apple had a contract that Apple chose to end – the same with Google, the same with Amazon. In fact, it’s only Amazon’s termination that has affected the inner workings of Parler. The two store bans did not reach the service itself – Parler could have offered other means to users to access its services, perhaps a web interface, as Twitter does.

But let’s put that aside for a moment and look at what Parler’s corporate partners were specifically criticizing. Amazon wrote to Parler that “we cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others.” Apple and Google’s complaints were similar, and for good reason. Incitement to violence is not protected speech under the First Amendment. Parler users who were engaged in such speech were not exercising their rights.

Admittedly, the line between hyperbole and incitement is blurry. Parler would need moderators to determine which side of the line users fall on. But that just goes to the point Apple raised with its initial 24-hour warning.

So now conservatives don’t have a social media home. Doesn’t this just make things worse?

Yes. While everything that has happened is legally sound, the social media upheaval, particularly Parler’s deactivation, raises societal concerns.

There’s a reason that people have drawn the comparison between social media and the town square – it’s a 24-hour version of the “market place of ideas” coined by Justice William O. Douglas. The launch of Parler was the start of a major fracturing of that marketplace into ideological camps, and its involuntary shuttering threatens to deepen the fracture.

Parler’s CEO, John Matze, has said the service will relaunch once it finds new hosting services. And it will undoubtedly find ways to circumvent the bans by Google and Apple to reach its users once again. But the new Parler will likely end up more isolated from the rest of the social media ecosystem, with a more embittered user base. That may only exacerbate problems that social media companies cannot solve.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2021/0111/As-tech-giants-recoil-from-Trump-and-Parler-is-free-speech-at-risk

Political Communications Corporations: Sources of Deceit

It is a lie -- not every voice matters

The Washington Post reports that on Jan. 6 (the day of the insurrection), Cumulus Media, which employs some popular conservative talk-radio hosts, told its show hosts to stop spreading the president's lies about the 2020 election. Cumulus owns 416 radio stations in 84 markets. Many of its stations broadcast in a talk format, which has been dominated by conservatives for decades. WaPo writes:

“We need to help induce national calm NOW,” Brian Philips, executive vice president of content for Cumulus, wrote in an internal memo, which was first reported by Inside Music Media. Cumulus and its program syndication arm, Westwood One, “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved and there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths.’ ”

The memo adds: “If you transgress this policy, you can expect to separate from the company immediately.”

The new policy is a stunning corporate clampdown on the kind of provocative and even inflammatory talk that has long driven the business model for Cumulus and other talk show broadcasters.

On his program on Tuesday, the day before the march on the Capitol, for example, [show host Mark] Levin fulminated about Congress’s certification of electoral votes for Biden, describing the normally routine vote as an act of “tyranny.”

“You think the framers of the Constitution … sat there and said, ‘Congress has no choice [to accept the votes], even if there’s fraud, even if there’s some court order, even if some legislature has violated the Constitution?’ ” Levin said, his voice rising to a shout.

[The Cumulus memo] reveals some of the hidden corporate hand behind what is said and discussed on talk-radio programs. Rather than a medium of freethinking individuals expressing passionately held beliefs, the memo reminds that hosts are subject to corporate mandates and control.

“It’s naive not to recognize that a corporate imperative goes into all media,” said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers magazine, which covers talk radio. “Corporations have always called the tune ultimately. Everyone pays attention to the guys at the top and always has.”

Asked how hosts who have repeatedly promoted Trump’s claims of fraud can now credibly flip to acceptance, Harrison said: “I would hope they put their personal feelings aside and come clean with their listeners. I encourage them to pursue the truth and to tell their audience something that Trump may not like.”

However, there’s some question as to whether stars such as Levin will comply with the recent edict and whether Cumulus will discipline them if they don’t.

On his syndicated radio program on Thursday, a day after Cumulus sent its memo and Trump supporters breached the Capitol, Levin didn’t seem to be backing off. “It appears nothing has changed in 24 hours,” he said on the air. “Not a damn thing. The never-Trumpers, the RINOs, the media — same damn thing.”

He went on to add: “I’m not stirring up a damn thing. Everything I say is based on principle and mission. Everything is based on liberty, family, faith, the Constitution. … My enemies and my critics can’t say the same.” (emphasis added)

What does Cumulus actually believe?

Apparently, Mark Levin actually believes the president's lies about the election and his innocent motives in what he does. If Cumulus does not fire Levin, then that will show how powerful individuals can be. Whether the company memo stops the flow of lies about the election remains to be seen.

It is worth noting the the Cumulus memo does not say the election was free and fair. It only said the election is ended, not that it is valid. That makes clear what the bosses at Cumulus actually believe about it. If they believed the election was valid, the memo would have said that. Since it didn't, the belief of the people in power can reasonably be inferred. 

So even in this case, powerful radical right conservative elites cannot see or accept that the election was free, fair and untainted by widespread fraud or manipulation.

The Power of Tribal Politics to Stupefy

The tribe is displeased

Stupefying tribalism

Republican reactions to the president's attempted coup have been mostly muted or non-existent. Some are reasonable and some are incoherent. The silence and incoherence reflects the toxicity of tribal politics. In particular, the incoherence in defense of tribe loyalty leads some into an inability to think clearly or rationally. For example, Senator Patrick Toomey (R-PA), a Harvard graduate commented “I do think the president committed impeachable offenses,” and the president's “behavior this week does disqualify him from serving.” Toomey then went on to complain that House democrats would probably  “politicize” the impeachment process.

The politicized process criticism is incoherent. First, since republican politicians refuse to act quickly to remove the president, they have already politicized the situation. Second, by objecting to the election results, GOP politicians politicized the final vote certification on the basis of no objective evidence. Third, by definition, impeachment is a political process because it is not a judicial or legislative process. That is true whether an impeachment succeeds or fails. The question is whether an impeachment has merit or not, not whether it is political. 

Clearly, Toomey's brain is scrambled into incoherence by his tribal loyalty to the GOP. Such loyalty is inherently anti-democratic because it replaces inconvenient facts and sound reasoning with partisan motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning creates false realities that are usually (~95% of the time?) needed to create to get to a desired belief. Inconvenient facts are simply swept aside.

The art of the lie: Truth- and reason-based democracy is a deviation

A New York Times news analysis article, The Art of the Lie? The Bigger the Better, focuses on tribalism in politics. The NYT writes:

Lying as a political tool is hardly new. But a readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has become a driving force in politics around the world, most recently in the United States.

In a cable to Washington in 1944, George F. Kennan, counselor at the United States Embassy in Stalin’s Moscow, warned of the occult power held by lies, noting that Soviet rule “has proved some strange and disturbing things about human nature.”

Foremost among these, he wrote, is that in the case of many people, “it is possible to make them feel and believe practically anything.” No matter how untrue something might be, he wrote, “for the people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity and all the powers of truth.”

Mr. Kennan’s insight, generated by his experience of the Soviet Union, now has a haunting resonance for America, where tens of millions believe a “truth” invented by President Trump: that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the November election and became president-elect only through fraud.

A readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has in recent years become a driving force in politics around the world, notably in countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines, all governed by populist leaders adept at shaving the truth or inventing it outright.

“The art of tribal politics is that it shapes reality,” Mr. Kreko said. “Lies become truth and explain everything in simple terms.” And political struggles, he added, “become a war between good and evil that demands unconditional support for the leader of the tribe. If you talk against your own camp you betray it and get expelled from the tribe.”

What makes this so dangerous, Mr. Kreko said, is not just that “tribalism is incompatible with pluralism and democratic politics” but that “tribalism is a natural form of politics: Democracy is a deviation.”

The utility of lying on a grand scale was first demonstrated nearly a century ago by leaders like Stalin and Hitler, who coined the term “big lie” in 1925 and rose to power on the lie that Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I. For the German and Soviet dictators, lying was not merely a habit or a convenient way of sanding down unwanted facts but an essential tool of government.

It tested and strengthened loyalty by forcing underlings to cheer statements they knew to be false and rallied the support of ordinary people who, Hitler realized, “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie” because, while they might fib in their daily lives about small things, “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths.” 

Despite his open admiration for Russia’s president and the system he presides over, she said, Mr. Trump, in insisting that he won in November, is not so much mimicking Mr. Putin as borrowing more from the age of Stalin, who, after engineering a catastrophic famine that killed millions in the early 1930s, declared that “living has become better, comrades, living has become happier.”

“That is what the big lie is,” Ms. Khrushcheva said. “It covers everything and redefines reality. There are no holes in it. You so either accept the whole thing or everything collapses. And that is what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed.” (emphasis added)

What we are witnessing with millions of Americans who sincerely but falsely believe that Biden is an illegitimate president-elect is what Kennan, called “some strange and disturbing things about human nature.” Can American democracy somehow cope with American stupefied tribalism? Or, will it revert to the mean, showing once again that democracy is just a deviation?

One thing is certain, some or most of the conservative tribal minds in modern America have been deceived, manipulated and betrayed. 

A big lie in Turkey: Protesters outside a courthouse in Turkey in 

2013 where 275 people were accused of trying to overthrow the

government. Turkey’s leader later acknowledged the case was a sham.