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.
How political extremists deal with online free speech
This is about a personal online incident from yesterday.
I've mentioned several times here that a few months before the 2020 elections, I started to engage with seven large pro-T**** online politics sites. All seven wound up blocking me, some starting with my first comment, but none banned outright. My comments just stopped showing up, sometimes labeled as in moderation or being spam checked. The rest with no explanation at all. Clearly, T**** supporters and fascist pro-T**** sites cannot handle, or will not accept, inconvenient facts or sound reasoning.
A couple of days ago, a commenter here cited OffGuardian or OFFG (tagline: Because facts really should be sacred) as an information source. Since that one was new to me, I checked it out. I picked an article, The Propaganda War (And How to Fight It) because I'm interested in fighting propaganda. And, facts really are critically important in defense of good things including democracy, the rule of law and social comity.
The article turned out to be crackpot conspiracy theory and as deranged and fact-free an attack on the COVID vaccine as anything I've ever seen. It was a based on lies and argument that doesn't even qualify for motivated reasoning. It is almost as false, offensive and socially damaging as anything I encountered on the pro-T**** sites. The recommended anti-vaxx action item was this:
OK, here comes the big idea, which will only work if enough people do it. You probably won’t like it, but what the hell, here goes…
This is the red inverted triangle the Nazis used in the concentration camps to designate their political opponents and members of the anti-Nazi resistance. Make one. Make it out of fabric, paper, or whatever material you have at hand.
Put a big, black “U” in the center of it to signify “Unvaccinated.” Wear it in public, conspicuously.
The article went on to tell people to tell other people why they are wearing the U Nazi symbol in public and to encourage other people to also refuse the vaccine. The article indicates that although this tactic will not work on people who are New Normal segregationists, even those miscreants should also be told to refuse the vaccine. No, I don't know or care what a new normal segregationist is.
Being curious about this site and its loyal followers, I posted this comment:
People who could but do not get vaccinated are responsible for the deaths and social and economic damage they cause. The evidence is clear that vaccines work and are safe enough to be used to prevent COVID infections or reduce their severity. It is disheartening to see this kind of anti-vaccine disinformation-propaganda being passed as real information. What has happened to the a significant slice of the human race? It’s gone nuts. Facts are lies and lies are facts. Maybe we will self-annihilate. The seeds of it are in our minds. Those seeds are being nurtured by mass disinformation.
Some time later that day (yesterday) I got some responses, all negative. By then, my comment had accumulated 12 downvotes and no upvotes. At the moment it's at 47 down and 0 up. My three attempts to respond yesterday got blocked, allegedly to check for spam. My one attempted one sentence response today is also being checked for spam. I doubt that any will ever be posted.
From that wonderful encounter, I assumed that OFFG is a far left crackpot and conspiracies site. Having an inquiring mind, off to MBFC I went. Sure enough, it's crackpot in reasoning and sloppy with facts. MBFC comments in its rating of OFFG: "Founded in 2015, the OffGuardian is an independent news and opinion website that “takes its name from the fact its five founders had all been censored on and/or banned from the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ sections.”" Woof! From that, one can tell one that one is dealing with some serious firepower here.
Based on the anti-vaxx article, I would rate OFFG Tin Foil Hat & Quackery, with Very Low fact accuracy and maybe far left extremism (I'm not quite sure about it being far left - it may be too nutty to be categorized in any political scale way). But heck, that's just silly old me, where facts are sacred and so is sound reasoning.
One can wonder, what sites actually get Tin Foil Hat & Quackery, with Very Low? Those places must be enchanting. But that's for another blog post. But I digress.
In another way, this site is a lot like some of the fascist radical right sites that booted my sorry backside off in 2020. They sanctimoniously bleat that they revere free speech and are open to all ideas, but it just ain't so, i.e., it's a big, fat lie. This is some of the meaningless drivel from the OFFG comment policy page:
OffGuardian has a completely open comment policy. People can post without signing in or confirming their identity.We have never banned anyone from this site, and unless you are grotesquely racist, abusive or spammy, you will be able to post any shade of opinion you like here.Please note also that we do have an automated system that holds back any comment containing three or more hyperlinks. This is intended to help filter out spam. If your comment contains three or more hyperlinks it will be held back until we clear it, but it will be published eventually.
None of my comments had three or more hyperlinks. Like with the fascist T**** sites, no one ever openly banned me. My comments just mysteriously failed to appear. Maybe my one allowed comment was grotesquely racist or abusive to OFFG, but it seemed rather mild to me. Or, maybe telling the truth is too abusive. None of my attempted but now blocked responses to people who responded to me has been posted yet. People there responded to me mostly with insults, and/or derision, e.g., liar. On the bright side, they let me post one comment before shutting me down. A couple of the free speech loving, fascist[1] pro-T**** sites would not let me post even one comment.
What a fun place. /sarc
What an immoral place. /not sarc
Question: In view of the damage to society and democracy that sites like OFFG cause, should their taxable income be taxed at a high rate, or should they be required by law to pay a high monthly or annual license to operate fee, or should they be free to spew their divisive and damaging lies, hate and disinformation regardless of the consequences?
Footnote:
1. I know, I know. Free speech loving fascist is an oxymoron. Of course, that's not oxymoron if one defines free speech as only what supports fascism and the dictator and its supporting autocracy and kleptocrats.
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
The Billionaires' Big Lie About Space
The Wrong Stuff
I'd like to frame this conversation in the terms used in two interviews on MSNBC. The first, by Ari Melber of a sober looking Neil Degrasse Tyson:
ARI MELBER: I put both questions to you what is the potential public good and research? I know you love research and what about the larger issues of inequality and ethics?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So we should make a few obvious first points, that there has been inequality and hunger and poor and racism and all these problems all that long predates anybody's attempt to fly in space. So to now look at success in space launches and say because we're doing that is why we have not solved the rest of these problems is kind of a false equivalence. . . In a democracy, an elected republic, we vote every year for representatives to then create a budget of things we value. . . We do things because that's the identity of the country we want to create and we're wealthy enough we can do it all. So don't just say why are we spending there when we should be spending [ elsewhere ] well let's spend it in both places period.
ARI MELBER: Now by the way I did the math on this i want to know how rich Jeff Bezos is. The 200 billion dollars is, at last I checked, his wealth. . .
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: . . . [ He's ] got plenty of money. He can do that and 20 other things, so if you want to complain about Jeff Bezos, complain that he's not helping the poor the hungry or his workers but that specifically wouldn't have to directly address the fact that he wants to go into space and . . . with Branson [ create ] an entire new [ branch of economics ]. . . This this is America. If you don't think that it should happen that way, that's a different country. . .
The second, by Mehdi Hasan of Anand Giridharadas:
MEHDI HASAN: One estimate suggests Bezos has spent around five billion dollars on his space quest so far, which is also ironically around what he would owe if an Elizabeth Warren style wealth tax were brought in. He's clearly got the spare change for it.
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: [ What ] we saw today was as you say an advertisement for wealth taxation in America, and for breaking up these concentrated fortunes. Because what you saw is literally the money that could have been paid as wages, should have been paid as wages, could have been paid as taxes. . . [ Bezos' fortune comes from ] monopoly money that, you know, wouldn't be there in that amount if it didn't have the abusive and precarious employment practices . . . [ We ] know where that money comes from, it comes from those antisocial and abusive, and frankly, anti-democratic practices.
And so the money paying for that jet fuel, the money paying for those rockets, the money paying for the PR . . . is the money that properly belongs to Amazon workers and the tax authorities. And something actually really important happened today on that score, which is of all people on Earth, Jeff Bezos acknowledged that in what might have been a slip of the tongue. He said Amazon customers paid for this, which is sort of an obvious thing to say, but then he said Amazon workers also funded that. And that is actually a stunning admission from a CEO [ whose fortune ] . . . is funded by withheld wages.
Even if one agrees with him, no serious person can be anything but embarrassed for Neil Degrasse Tyson. In one sense I do feel bad for him, as he's an astrophysicist who is clearly out of his depth on economic and historical matters. Yet however out of his depth he might be, he is both stridently assertive and blithe to the point of being willfully ignorant. He opens with what is plainly a non-sequitur, as the fact of the problems he describes as existing prior to the space program is irrelevant: money did pre-exist the space program. Neither is money so abundant that it cannot be said spending more on ICBMs ( an ulterior aim of the Apollo missions ) does not prevent us spending more on education or food stamps.
Ironically Degrasse Tyson complains throughout his interview with the all too sympathetic Ari Melber that the criticisms of Bezos's riches funding a private space program are not serious. He states, rather flatly, that the American democracy is responsive to voters wishing to reign in the power and wealth of Croesus himself, and that massive inequality is the American way - were it otherwise, it would not be America. One can't help but wonder if he agrees with Drumpf and Tucker Carlson that Ilan Omar ought to back to the country from which she came.
Where Degrasse Tyson constantly conflates state funding of original science research with three billionaires privatizing the profit from public expenses, Anand Giridharadas makes a cogent and concise repudiation of the entire project. Bezos's wealth, like Branson's, like Musk's and Suckerberg's and Bill Gates's, is possible only through paying workers less than the post-war average share of GDP. They can do this because like Bezos and Gates, they headed a monopoly. Or because like Musk and Suckerberg they were able to capitalize on the work of others, with Musk particularly benefitting from public expenditures. Now that he's profitable, he of course moves out of a state which has given him millions of taxpayer subsidies because, you know, they'd like to see a small part of that investment returned.
I think Giridharadas makes his point clearly enough that I don't have to dwell on it. I'd like to bring out another point: these billionaires aren't playing space age Wright brothers because they want to help humanity. In fact none of these projects will EVER meaningfully affect the lives of 99.9% of all Americans. They're doing it because they want more. Picture Christopher Plummer in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World.
And that "more" will come in the form of near-future competitions for US Government weapons programs. This is not about space tourism, as in Degrasse Tyson's adolescent and totally out of touch dreams. It's about more.
More money, certainly. But what these neo-aristocrats want more of is control. Is Gates "giving back" with his investments in failed approaches to education? Or is he solving problems as he sees fit, because he sees fit to do it? During the 50s and 60s the "space race" was ultimately about "conquering space," about weaponizing space to threaten terrestrial enemies. That's still the case today. But this "race" isn't being run with bland government officials liasing with private companies nobody's ever heard of, such as Thiokol. However much he profited from his various companies doing military related work, even Howard Hughes was nowhere near as personally associated with the space program of his era than Bezos is today. Why do you think that is?
SOMETHING IS WRONG AT FOX NEWS!
Hannity: 'I believe in the science of vaccination'
https://twitter.com/i/status/1417300107960094720
Fox Faces Rising Delta Variant Crisis: On-Air FNC Hosts Urge Vaccinations, All LA County Staff To Mask Up, Says Company
Even listening to Fox radio - briefly this morning - while on one had trying to mock Fauci and the CDC, the hosts were urging all Americans to get vaccinated!
WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON HERE?
The social science of political cults and their leaders
False, hypocritical praise has long been thought to be a problem for powerful rulers, as the testimony of political moralists and advisors to princes in both the East and the West indicates. Clearheaded rulers have long understood its dangers; a ruler who cannot see through the praises of sycophants is at risk of losing power, since flattery is not credible as a signal of their loyalty. Yet many ruler “courts”, both ancient and modern, appear to be prone to flattery. Indeed, in some cases flattery of the ruler becomes so widespread and excessive that scholars speak of “cults of personality.”
In many cases, such flattery does not remain confined to elite figures in the media or in the ruler’s immediate court, but gives rise to widespread ritual practices of ruler worship, genuine “cults” of the leader that demand the participation of many different social groups to recognize the leader’s exalted status. The cults of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China, the Kim family in North Korea, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany are the most well-known of these, but such phenomena can be found elsewhere as well, including in comparatively open political contexts like the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez. These forms of flattery seem sometimes humorous or bizarre. Yet they are puzzling, disproportionate to the achievements or charisma of their object: who could possibly believe that Hafiz al-Assad was indeed Syria’s premier pharmacist, and what could possibly be the point of publicizing this ridiculous claim? -- Xavier Márquez, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ; The mechanisms of cult production; In Kirill Postoutenko, Darin Stephanov (Ed.), Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond: Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics (pp. 21-45), 2020
An opinion piece by Paul Krugman opines on how current social science sees the basis for the rise of a personality cult leader. We all know what this is about. Krugman writes:
“The Mechanisms of Cult Production” compares the behavior of political elites across a wide range of dictatorial regimes, from Caligula’s Rome to the Kim family’s North Korea, and finds striking similarities. Despite vast differences in culture and material circumstances, elites in all such regimes engage in pretty much the same behavior, especially what the paper dubs “loyalty signaling” and “flattery inflation.”
Signaling is a concept originally drawn from economics; it says that people sometimes engage in costly, seemingly pointless behavior as a way to prove that they have attributes others value. For example, new hires at investment banks may work insanely long hours, not because the extra hours are actually productive, but to demonstrate their commitment to feeding the money machine.
In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?
And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”: The Leader isn’t just brave and wise, he’s a perfect physical specimen, a brilliant health expert, a Nobel-level economic analyst, and more. The fact that he’s obviously none of these things only enhances the effectiveness of the flattery as a demonstration of loyalty.
Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.
Many people, myself included, have declared for years that the G.O.P. is no longer a normal political party. It doesn’t look anything like, say, Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party or Germany’s Christian Democrats. But it bears a growing resemblance to the ruling parties of autocratic regimes.
The only unusual thing about the G.O.P.’s wholesale adoption of the Leader Principle is that the party doesn’t have a monopoly on power; ....Unfortunately, all this loyalty signaling is putting the whole nation at risk. In fact, it will almost surely kill large numbers of Americans in the next few months.But politics is nonetheless clearly a key factor: Republican politicians and Republican-oriented influencers have driven much of the opposition to Covid-19 vaccines, in some cases engaging in what amounts to outright sabotage. And there is a stunning negative correlation between Trump’s share of a county’s vote in 2020 and its current vaccination rate.That is, hostility to vaccines has become a form of loyalty signaling.
Seeing the ex-president as a cult leader and the fascist GOP as key the cult leader enabler mostly fits with historical precedent. The FGOP and most rank and file followers likely see and rationalize this differently in public. Some believe he was chosen by God to do God's work as they see it. One can only wonder what they think and say privately. If it is about the same as their public pronouncements, this country is in deep trouble at least until the cult leader dies or becomes fully incapacitated.
Monday, July 19, 2021
Israel: Friend, Enemy or Pakistan?
Over the decades it has come to look like Israel is much more enemy than friend to the US, or at least something akin to Pakistan in terms of relationship with the US. Despite massive US diplomatic and economic support ever since 1949, Israel these days seems mostly independent. It is willing to deal with whoever best serves its interests. It acts as if US interests are of little concern. Over the years, US interests have absorbed great damage over its support for Israel. The US has paid dearly for defending and supporting Israel.
One of the constant acts of an enemy is Israel's aggressive spying on the US. That has been going on for decades and it continues today. Its aggression in this area goes beyond what one would expect from allies. The latest Israeli insult comes from a sophisticated hack of cell phones of some key people by an Israeli hacker company. The Washington Post writes:
The Pegasus Project, an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations in 10 countries, was coordinated by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and advised by Amnesty International. Those two groups had access to a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that included surveillance targets for clients of the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which they shared with the journalists. Over the past several months, the journalists reviewed and analyzed the list in an effort to learn the identities of the owners of the phone numbers and to determine whether their phones had been implanted with NSO’s Pegasus spyware.
The investigation was able to link more than 1,000 government officials, journalists, businesspeople and human rights activists to numbers and to obtain data for 67 phones whose numbers appeared on the list. That data was then analyzed forensically by Amnesty International’s Security Lab. Thirty-seven of those showed evidence of an attempted Pegasus intrusion or a successful hack.Further analysis indicated that many of those intrusions or attempted intrusions came shortly after the phone number had been entered onto the list — some within seconds — suggesting a link between the list and subsequent surveillance efforts.The most sophisticated spyware is generally deployed by law enforcement or intelligence agencies, and there is a robust private market to provide those tools to nations that can afford them, including the United States. It has long been suspected that terrorist groups and sophisticated criminal gangs also have access to spyware. Spyware from another Israeli company, Candiru, was used to infect the computers and phones of activists, politicians and other victims through phony websites masquerading as pages for Black Lives Matter or health groups, cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab said this month.NSO has long said that Pegasus cannot be used to successfully target phones in the United States and that it should be used only against “suspected criminals and terrorists.” But research groups have found that it’s also been used to spy on political figures, journalists and human rights workers — findings confirmed by the Pegasus Project investigation.There is little meaningful legal protection against being targeted by spyware in most of the world. NSO says Pegasus cannot be used on numbers inside the United States, Israel’s most important ally. The United States has some legal restrictions on spyware, including the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was enacted in 1986 and bans “unauthorized access” of a computer or phone, but its vague language has meant that it’s often unevenly applied in court. Some states have passed cybersecurity and privacy laws, such as California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, which bans electronic tampering or interference. WhatsApp has cited both laws in an ongoing court case against NSO.
Israeli spies whop are caught and jailed in the US are treated as national heroes in Israel once they get out of the slammer. Johnathan Pollard spent 30 years in US jail for spying for Israel. He was arrested in 1985. His escapades cause major damage to US national security. The AP comments on his fun story:
America stabbed Israel in the back, so Israel stabbed America in the back
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
In this Nov. 20, 2015 file photo, convicted spy Jonathan Pollard leaves a federal courthouse in New York. Pollard, an American who served a 30-year sentence for spying for Israel, defended his actions in his first interview since arriving in Israel to a hero's welcome in December 2020, saying America had “stabbed Israel in the back” by withholding intelligence from its ally. In excerpts from the interview with the Israel Hayom daily published on Monday, March 22, 2021, Pollard describes his happiness at being a free man in Israel.Jonathan Pollard, an American who served a 30-year sentence for spying for Israel, defends his actions in his first interview since arriving in Israel late last year. He says America had “stabbed Israel in the back” by withholding intelligence from its ally.
In excerpts from the interview with the Israel Hayom daily published Monday, Pollard describes his happiness at being a free man in Israel while expressing regret that he was not able to father children because of his incarceration.
Pollard, now 66, sold military secrets to Israel while working as a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy in the 1980s. He was arrested in 1985 after trying unsuccessfully to gain asylum at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and pleaded guilty. The espionage affair embarrassed Israel and tarnished its relations with the United States for years.
Pollard was given a life sentence. U.S. defense and intelligence officials said his spying caused great damage and strenuously argued against his release. But after serving 30 years in federal prison, he was released in 2015 and placed on a five-year parole period. Pollard arrived in Israel to a hero’s welcome in December.
He told Israel Hayom that at the time of his spying the U.S. government was keeping intelligence from Israel and lying to it, claiming he witnessed it himself at meetings.
“I know I crossed a line, but I had no choice,” he told the newspaper, adding that the threats to Israel were “serious.”
After all the US has done for Israel and the huge damage it has suffered in the process, it is arguably time to stop supporting that nasty little country. The cost-benefit is bad, sort of like the cost-benefit from tax breaks for religion in the US. It is long past time to cut the financial and diplomatic umbilical cord and acknowledge and treat Israel for what it is, an enemy that just won't back down.[1]
Questions: Does such criticism, and other criticisms, of Israel amount to anti-Semitism, holocaust denial, Nazism and/or fascism? Those are the standard Israeli and Israel supporter responses to criticism of Israel.
In terms of relations with the US, is Israel almost completely a friend, almost completely an enemy, Pakistan (~70% enemy and ~30% friend or ambiguous) or something else, e.g., ~50% friend/ambiguous and ~50% enemy?
Should the US continue its generous financial, military and diplomatic[2] support of Israel?
Footnote:
The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.
The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.
Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols.
Reputed to be lax? That is a gross understatement. Known to be lax, sloppy and unconcerned is much closer to the mark.
The latest round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians ended in the usual way: with a cease-fire that left Palestinians worse off and the core issues unaddressed. It also provided more evidence that the United States should no longer give Israel unconditional economic, military, and diplomatic support. The benefits of this policy are zero, and the costs are high and rising. Instead of a special relationship, the United States and Israel need a normal one.
Once upon a time, a special relationship between the United States and Israel might have been justified on moral grounds. The creation of a Jewish state was seen as an appropriate response to centuries of violent antisemitism in the Christian West, including but hardly limited to the Holocaust. The moral case was compelling, however, only if one ignored the consequences for Arabs who had lived in Palestine for many centuries and if one believed Israel to be a country that shared basic U.S. values. Here too the picture was complicated. Israel may have been “the only democracy in the Middle East,” but it was not a liberal democracy like the United States, where all religions and races are supposed to have equal rights (however imperfectly that goal has been realized). Consistent with Zionism’s core objectives, Israel privileged Jews over others by conscious design.
Standard Israel response to criticism: You're just a hateful baby-killing, Nazi anti-Semite
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