Election subversion update

In the primaries last Tuesday, Republican election subversion supporters in four states are poised to take control if they win the upcoming general election in November. The New York Times writes:

In 4 Swing States, G.O.P. Election Deniers Could Oversee Voting

With Tuesday’s primary victories in Arizona and Michigan added to those in Nevada and Pennsylvania, Republicans who have disputed the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and who could affect the outcome of the next one are on a path toward winning decisive control over how elections are run in several battleground states.

Each has spread falsehoods about fraud and illegitimate ballots, endorsing the failed effort to override the 2020 results and keep former President Donald J. Trump in power. Their history of anti-democratic impulses has prompted Democrats, democracy experts and even some fellow Republicans to question whether these officials would oversee fair elections and certify winners they didn’t support.

There is no question that victories by these candidates in November could lead to sweeping changes to how millions of Americans vote. Several have proposed eliminating mail voting, ballot drop boxes and even the use of electronic voting machines, while empowering partisan election observers and expanding their roles.

The 2022 general election will be a test run for election subversion measures by the fascist Republican Party. If their measures do not deliver adequate results, there is will be focused efforts to improve on the Republican version of “election integrity.” That effort will be greatly aided by the Supreme Court decision in the pending Moore v. Harper case, which is due by the end of next June.

What the Republican Party wants is obvious: Elections must have so much integrity that Democrats can never again control state legislatures, major state offices, including governorships, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court.  

Iron-fisted single party rule is the Republican vision of satisfactory election integrity.

Republican belief without evidence = absolute truth

Law school time: Perjury vs. lying to the court

This 3 minute video shows a defendant had made false statements to the court in a defamation lawsuit. Alex Jones lied under oath in a deposition about what was on his cell phone. Jones falsely denied under oath that there was any content related to Sandy Hook on his phone. But no one could know that until his attorney accidentally sent the contents of his cell phone to the attorney hired to sue him for defamation about the Sandy Hook mass school shooting in 2012. Jones lied about the mass shooting many times in his radio broadcasts and in person in public. He finally got sued for defamation for his lies. Jones called Sandy Hook a deep state hoax. He falsely said that the murdered children were crisis actors and still alive.[1] 

In theory, lying to the court while under oath is a crime. In practice, lying or false statements to the court is almost completely ignored (maybe ~99.9999% of the time [~1 in a million]). When lying to the court is discovered, it is usually ignored because evidence standards are hard to meet. Liars always claim they didn't mean what they said or were unaware of what their words meant or didn't know that their statement was false or did not say what they said, or their lie didn't affect the outcome of a civil or criminal lawsuit.  

One source comments on perjury:

Perjury, or lying under oath in court, is often called “the forgotten offense” because it is not only widespread, but rarely prosecuted, especially in America, where it’s been a crime since 1790. According to an article from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, prosecutions for perjury have traditionally been rare, with only 335 criminal cases total from 1966 to 1970.

Most commentators attribute the absence of indictments and convictions for perjury to the highly technical nature of the offense. They point to problems in drafting indictments, in proving materiality of the alleged false testimony and in meeting the stringent evidentiary rules.

But a false statement by itself is not quite perjury—it has to affect the issue at hand, and people are usually not convicted for false statements that don’t influence the court.

That last highlighted bit is a potent shield that protects defendants from liability for lying under oath. The line between a false statement and the crime of perjury is often blurry. The shield in perjury ranks right up there with the power of plausible deniability to protect lawbreakers, especially white collar criminals accused of complex crimes. 

The broader significance for demagogues and elite criminals: 

Difficulty proving perjury + plausible deniability + presumption of innocence

= weak rule of law

The point of this post is not mostly about Jones. His situation exemplifies a far more important and broader point. Lying is common in politics, commerce, religion, society and just about everywhere else. It is very rarely a crime. Sophisticated liars know this. The rarity of penalties for lying constitutes a rationale for lying and feeling no moral qualm about it. 

That is why: 

• Our constantly lying, treasonous ex-president published a book where he proudly proclaimed that he employed “truthful hyperbole” in his business dealings. Because there is no punishment, a businessperson can easily believe that lies are just truthful hyperbole because they do not rise to the level of a punishable effect in a business deal. Lies are legal. Everything legal is sanctioned by society.
• In a recent conversation between Matt Gaetz and Roger Stone, these comments were recorded: “Well, you’re a bullshit artist, not a liar,” Gaetz said. “Correct,” Stone said. “There’s a big difference.”  

What is the difference between bullshit and lies? Usually little or none. But in the minds of Gaetz and Stone, there is a significant difference of some sort. For Gaetz and Stone, bullshit is OK, but lies are less OK to some unknowable degree for some reason(s) that is unclear to me. Maybe it mostly boils down to how people like Gaetz, Stone and the ex-president define lies to favor their own rotten agendas. 

In the case of the ex-president’s business dealings, one can begin to see how difficult it would be to prosecute for tax evasion. He overstates his net worth to get bank loans, but understates the value of his properties to minimize his taxes. It is a win-win for him. 

When one couples lies with plausible deniability and the legal presumption of innocence as tactics in politics or business, one can see how a sophisticated demagogue or a criminal can get away with a hell of a lot of illegal behavior. The courts are simply unable to reach most if it for lack of evidence.

In essence, the rule of law has come to be mostly a protective shield for elite demagogues and criminals, while being a sword for most everyone else. Maybe it always was that way. This points to a basis for sociologist Brooke Harrington’s observation about wealthy people and the law: 

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

Footnote: 

1. In addition to lying about his cell phone, Jones had also testified under oath that his business operations were being deplatformed and he was not getting much revenue. That was another lie. During some of the time he claimed poverty, his businesses were taking in over $800,000/day. When Jones lies, he lays out some real whoppers.

A ray of hope from Kansas

My concerns about deadly threats to democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law and civil liberties are well known to everyone here. Lately there have not been many hopeful signs. But one hopeful sign came from Kansas yesterday. Voters there were unwilling to given up a personal right to decide to have an abortion. 

What was hopeful was a couple of things. First, the margin of pro-abortion rights sentiment, 58.8% compared to people who voted to terminate abortion rights, 41.2%.  

That was from a deep red state. That was not too far off of national sentiment of 61% in favor of retaining abortion rights.

Second and more importantly, voter turnout was high, and barriers to voting were also high. To insure a win with the loss of abortion rights, Kansas radical right Republicans put this ballot measure (1) in a primary election, not the general election, (2) in a midterm election, and (3) worded the ballot measure confusingly such that a no vote meant yes to keeping abortion rights and yes meant no. All three of those tactics heavily favored extremist Republicans. 

That is because, (1) independents and Democrats tend to have lower turnouts in primary and midterm elections, and (2) Republican extremists tends to vote heavily in all elections, (3) confusingly worded ballot measures tend to favor the interests who write the measures, and (4) Kansas is a state with closed primary elections, leaving independents there with only ballot measures to vote for, which disincentivizes independent voters. That indicates that at least for important issues where Republicans are taking rights away, there is significant voter sentiment in opposition to loss of rights and people are willing to take action to vote, even if it is inconvenient.

See the confusion inherent in the Republican attack?

Of course, the fascist Republican Party will learn from this. One lesson is to double down on getting rid of voter power in elections. To accomplish the radical right Christian nationalist goal of imposing Christian Sharia law on everyone, elections have to be subverted and neutered. Voters simply cannot have the power to influence policy by direct elections, which is what ballot measures are. The radicals are OK with indirect elections where their influence is diluted by gerrymandering voting districts. They are not OK with raw voter power. The Republican Supreme Court is going to make sure that voter power will be greatly reduced in a decision that will be handed down next year, most likely in June.

The open question is whether voters will oppose Republican Party attacks on democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law and civil liberties with the same level of intensity. 

Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios

Current Republican climate change policy -- 

demagogue the reality and the risk, 

keep polluting as usual

Apparently, some climate scientists are getting really scared about what could happen if we keep doing business as usual with the climate. As discussed here in several posts, climate change business as usual includes watching the pro-pollution Republican Party, backed by polluting corporations and their free speech (campaign contributions) block serious efforts to pass climate legislation in congress.

In a paper published yesterday, Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios, which discusses scenarios about what might happen if the human species continues to be pro-pollution. The experts write:

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. .... We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. .... It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.  

How bad could climate change get? As early as 1988, the landmark Toronto Conference declaration described the ultimate consequences of climate change as potentially “second only to a global nuclear war.”[1] Despite such proclamations decades ago, climate catastrophe is relatively under-studied and poorly understood.

Why the focus on lower-end warming and simple risk analyses? One reason is the benchmark of the international targets: the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 °C, with an aspiration of 1.5 °C. Another reason is the culture of climate science to “err on the side of least drama” (7), to not to be alarmists, which can be compounded by the consensus processes of the IPCC (8). Complex risk assessments, while more realistic, are also more difficult to do. 

This caution is understandable, yet it is mismatched to the risks and potential damages posed by climate change. We know that temperature rise has “fat tails”: low-probability, high-impact extreme outcomes (9). Climate damages are likely to be nonlinear and result in an even larger tail (10). Too much is at stake to refrain from examining high-impact low-likelihood scenarios. The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need to consider and prepare for infrequent, high-impact global risks, and the systemic dangers they can spark.  

There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 (15), carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon (16), and the apparent slowing of dampening feedbacks such as natural carbon sink capacity (17, 18). These are likely to not be proportional to warming, as is sometimes assumed. Instead, abrupt and/or irreversible changes may be triggered at a temperature threshold. Such changes are evident in Earth’s geological record, and their impacts cascaded across the coupled climate–ecological–social system (19). Particularly worrying is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another (20). Temperature rise is crucially dependent on the overall dynamics of the Earth system, not just the anthropogenic emissions trajectory.

A climate risk framework

The AP interviewed the paper’s lead authors and reports:

Good risk analyses consider both what’s most likely and what’s the worst that could happen, study authors said. But because of push back from non-scientists who reject climate change, mainstream climate science has concentrated on looking at what’s most likely and also disproportionately on low-temperature warming scenarios that come close to international goals, said co-author Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in England.

There is, Lenton said, “not enough emphasis on how things, the risks, the big risks, could go plausibly badly wrong.”  

There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered. For instance, recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming (23). Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.

There we have it, pro-pollution politicians, e.g., the entire Republican Party leadership and pro-pollution industries backed by decades of relentless, well-funded propaganda and lies have been effective, The pro-pollution forces have been howling for decades that climate scientists are alarmist and their mild risk projections are unrealistic or flat out lies. 

In other words, pro-pollution propaganda forces effectively cowed the science community from doing risk assessments for catastrophic climate outcomes. Propaganda and unwarranted doubt work, as discussed in this post here two days ago. This is another example of the fact that liars and propagandists routinely influence public opinion to the detriment of the public and the environment. The liar-deceivers are shameless and aggressive.

The uncertainty comes from tipping points, which are thresholds we might cross but be unaware of for decades. The catastrophic outcomes the scientists are examining are currently deemed to be low possibility events. Human extinction is deemed to be very low probability. With some luck, future risk assessments will not uncover something catastrophic that appears to be uncomfortably likely, e.g., has ~10% likelihood of inflicting catastrophe by ~2100-2150. That would be really scary.

Q: In response to this, will the Republican Party and major polluters like Exxon-Mobile, (1) mostly employ one or more of the doubt-sowing propaganda tactics** (discussed here two days ago) that worked so well in the past, (2) mostly employ the KYMS (keep your mouth shut) tactic, or (3) employ a mix of KYMS with some sowing of doubt and lies? 

** For example, tried and true deceit and doubt-fomenting propaganda tactics like (i) emphasizing research study design and/or data analysis flaws or uncertainties that have only minimal effects on outcomes, (ii) recruiting misguided, biased or dishonest experts or influencers (politicians, industry, journals, doctors, scientists, health officials) to defend pollution and downplay climate risks, or (iii) misrepresenting risk data by cherry-picking or conducting meta-analyses to dilute inconvenient data into something harmless or not believable (the research paper is here).

Footnote: 

1. In keeping with the cheerful topic of this post, there is this from the New York Times this morning:

The secretary general of the United Nations warned on Monday that humanity was “just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” citing the war in Ukraine among the conflicts driving the risk to a level not seen since the height of the Cold War.

“All this at a time when the risks of proliferation are growing and guardrails to prevent escalation are weakening,” the official, António Guterres, said. “And when crises — with nuclear undertones — are festering from the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Jews, atheists and how Gab sees the world

The Jerusalem Post writes:

Jews and other non-Christians are "not conservative" because it is "an explicitly Christian movement" and because the US "is an explicitly Christian country," said Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab and reportedly a consultant for state senator Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, in a livestream responding to recent condemnations of Mastriano and Gab.

Mastriano has come into the public eye in recent weeks after US media outlets reported that he had spent $5,000 on advertising on Gab, a social media network favored by the far-right. The candidate has also reportedly paid for "campaign consulting" from the platform, with reports that new Gab users are set to automatically follow him.

What is Gab?

Gab is a radical right Republican hate, lies and crackpottery site. It is unusual in that it allows people like me to actually see what folks there are saying. Here's a couple of screenshots to help us understand just how fracking** demented the far right really is. These are from this morning's crop of wonderful information and thoughts that users there generously share with the world.

** Not referring to hydraulic fracturing, a technique to get oil out of rocks and rock formations by injecting specialized (toxic, trade secret) fluid into cracks to force them to open further so the oil can be recovered and overcharged for. Fracking here refers to the slang term first used in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series. It continues to be used throughout different versions of the Battlestar Galactica franchise and, more generally, as a profanity in science fiction. I'll let readers here figure out which profanity.

Gab champions free speech, individual

liberty and (mis)information flow online

We just gotta watch those sneaky drop boxes!

There we have it, vaccines kill people dead, 

crash carts make no difference

-- it's murder

Yeah, the 1/6 Committee

exonerated DJT!! MAGA!!

Yes Morhpeus MAGA, there is a name for it,

and it's called you are a crackpot

I could show many more fun-filled screenshots, but all that Gab free speech, individual liberty and whatnot made my tummy upset.

The science of propaganda, spin and doubt: A short summary

At the least, the information in this post should be mandatory knowledge for both a high school degree and for any post high school credential. If a person does not know this, they are more susceptible to the dark arts than is justifiable in American democracy. -- Germaine, 2022

Context

Lots of books and thousands of research articles have been written on propaganda and why and how it works so well. Propaganda became sophisticated in America a couple of years before World War 1. To get the US into WW1, president Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information. The CPI was a gigantic US government deceit and emotional manipulation machine. Tens of thousands of spinning con artists worked for it. Wilson's goal was to con the American people into supporting American entry into the war and feeling emotionally justified, e.g., making the world safe for democracy. Some of the greatest propagandists of the 20th century, maybe of all time, worked on that effort. It was a smashing success.

Wilson's massive public disinformation effort jump-started modern propaganda ("public relations") in support of businesses and commerce (discussed here). Business leaders watching how effective propaganda could be to get people to walk into a brutal war quickly realized that good propaganda wasn't just for governments to use to deceive people into making the ultimate self-sacrifice. It could be used by businesses to deceive both customers and governments. It was, and still is, a freaking super rich gold mine chock full of diamonds, platinum, lithium and all the hot, juicy cheeseburgers that T**** could ever eat.

A short summary of propaganda tactics

In 2021, two researchers, Rebecca Goldberg and Laura Vandenberg, at the University of Massachusetts, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, and School of Public Health and Health Sciences, published a very nice summary of spin or propaganda tactics from 5 major sources.[1] Their paper is entitled, The science of spin: targeted strategies to manufacture doubt with detrimental effects on environmental and public health.

The paper's abstract includes these comments:

Results: We recognized 28 unique tactics used to manufacture doubt. Five of these tactics were used by all five organizations, suggesting that they are key features of manufactured doubt. The intended audience influences the strategy used to misinform, and logical fallacies contribute to their efficacy.

Conclusions: This list of tactics can be used by others to build a case that an industry or group is deliberately manipulating information associated with their actions or products. Improved scientific and rhetorical literacy could be used to render them less effective, depending on the audience targeted, and ultimately allow for the protection of both environmental health and public health more generally.

The list of tactics that special interests who used them is shown below in Table 1 from the article. Table 2 lists the logic fallacies the propagandists tend to rely on.

Tactics or strategies 1, 2, 3, 8 and 21 were all used by all five sources of deceit and doubt.

• 1. Attack Study Design: To emphasize study design flaws in A** that have only minimal effects on outcomes. Flaws include issues related to bias, confounding, or sample size
• 2. Gain Support from Reputable Individuals: Recruit experts or influential people in certain fields (politicians, industry, journals, doctors, scientists, health officials) to defend B** in order to gain broader support
• 3. Misrepresent data: Cherry-pick data, design studies to fail, or conduct meta-analyses to dilute the work of A
• 8. Employ Hyperbolic or Absolutist Language: Discuss scientific findings in absolutist terms or with hyperbole, use buzzwords to differentiate between “strong” and “poor” science (i.e. sound science, junk science, etc.),
• 21. Influence Government/Laws: Gain inappropriate proximity to regulatory bodies and encourage pro-B policy

** “A” refers to information generated to combat scientific evidence and facts

“B” refers to information generated to promote narratives that are favorable to the industry

Logic fallacies

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Larry Motuz for bringing the work of these two researchers to my attention.

Footnote: 

1. The researchers describe the five sources of propaganda like this:

The first, Big Tobacco, is widely considered to have “written the playbook” on manufactured doubt [1]. The tobacco industry has managed to maintain its clientele for many decades in part due to manufactured scientific controversy about the health effects of active and secondhand smoking [1, 2, 4, 6, 10,11,12,13].

The other industries we examined include the coal industry, whose employees often suffer from black lung disease [14], yet the industry has avoided awarding compensation to many affected miners by wielding disproportionate influence in the courtroom [15,16,17,18,19]; the sugar industry, which distracted from its role contributing to metabolic and cardiovascular diseases [20] by deflecting blame toward dietary fat as a plausible alternative cause for rising population-level chronic disease rates [21,22,23,24,25]; the agrochemical business, Syngenta, manufacturer of the herbicide atrazine [26,27,28], which conducted personal attacks against a vocal critic of atrazine whose research revealed disruptive effects on the endocrine systems of aquatic animals [29, 30]; and the Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank comprised of Cold War physicists eager to maintain their proximity to government, and associated scientists who deliberately misrepresented information to the government to both minimize and normalize the effects of fossil fuels on global temperatures [1, 4, 31].