The use of whataboutisms

 Criticize Jan. 6 - and you get "whatabout" BLM riots.

Criticize Trump - and you get "whatabout" Joe Biden sniffing hair or Hunter Biden's laptop.

Whataboutism is an argumentative tactic where a person or group responds to an accusation or difficult question by deflection. Instead of addressing the point made, they counter it with “but what about X?”.

https://flaglerlive.com/176623/whataboutism-explained/

But let's be honest, we all do it, sometimes subconsciously. Criticize Biden, "whatabout" Trump, or those Christian Fascists, etc. 

So, first question: CAN IT BE a useful tool. Example - to point out hypocrisy? You say this about my guy but your guy does the same thing or worse. Or is there NO excuse for using whataboutisms?

Despite useful advice on how to counter whataboutisms, they usually don't work, or so I've found, but nevertheless, some suggestions found here:

https://www.careelite.de/en/whataboutism/

Finally, how about the "ok, let's talk about that" method? If you are talking Trump, and someone tries to whatabout mentioning Joe Biden, say to them "ok, what about Joe Biden? Can you point to something that Joe Biden did that equals what we are talking about concerning Trump?" Or will THAT just lead to a circular argument?  My guy is worse than yours.

That leads to my 2nd question: When confronted with a whataboutism, how do YOU handle it? 

Whatabout you post a meme that is in English? 

News bits: A glimpse of extremist Republican governance; Tweaking the Standard Model of the universe; Etc.

We get a glimpse of extremist Republican legislators and governors in Texas governing. It is ugly. A  NYT opinion opines: 

Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, is expected to sign a bill in the next few days that would make it immeasurably more difficult for cities in the state to govern themselves. The bill would strip cities of the ability to set standards for local workplaces, to ensure civil rights, and to improve their environments, trampling on the rights of voters who elected local officials to do just that.

The bill, recently approved by the Texas House and Senate, would nullify any city ordinance or regulation that conflicts with existing state policy in those crucial areas, and would give private citizens or businesses the right to sue and seek damages if they believe there is a discrepancy between city and state. That means no city could prohibit discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. employees, as several Texas cities have done. No city could adopt new rules to limit predatory payday-lending practices. No city could restrict overgrown lots, or unsafe festivals, or inadequate waste storage. Cities would even be banned from enacting local worker protections, including requiring water breaks for laborers in the Texas heat, as Dallas, Austin and other cities have done following multiple deaths and injuries.

Business lobbyists and Republican legislators who have pushed the bill said its purpose was to rid the state of a patchwork of conflicting regulations.  

Already the state won’t let cities ban discrimination against low-income renters, and it prohibits them from cutting their police budgets. Dozens of other bills have been introduced to restrict election reforms by Texas cities and counties, including one that would let an official, most likely a Republican, overturn election results in a single place: largely Democratic Harris County, which includes Houston.

Common extremist Republican priorities are on display here:

1. support for discrimination against LGBTQ employees and LGBTQ people generally

2. support for predatory lending

3. opposition to and preventing dissenting local control and power

4. opposition to and intolerance of democracy and free and fair elections

Power flows to authoritarian Republican politicians and the rapacious business community. That is core GOP anti-democracy ideology.

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Poking a little hole in the Standard Model?: The Standard Model of the universe occasionally gets tweaked when an observation that violates the model pops up. Unexplained things need to be explained.  

A little violation may have popped up. This needs to be verified before we know for sure there is a violation. Using our friend, the giant atom smasher, physicists have created a Na-39 (sodium) atom that has more neutrons in it that the Standard Model can account for. The paper's abstract:

The new isotope $39\mathrm{Na}$, the most neutron-rich sodium nucleus observed so far, was discovered at the RIKEN Nishina Center Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory using the projectile fragmentation of an intense $48\mathrm{Ca}$ [calcium] beam at $345\mathrm{MeV}/\text{nucleon}$ on a beryllium target. Projectile fragments were separated and identified in flight with the large-acceptance two-stage separator BigRIPS. Nine $39\mathrm{Na}$ events [atoms] have been unambiguously observed in this work and clearly establish the particle stability of $39\mathrm{Na}$. Furthermore, the lack of observation of $35,36\mathrm{Ne}$ [neon] isotopes in this experiment significantly improves the overall confidence that $34\mathrm{Ne}$ is the neutron dripline nucleus of neon. These results provide new key information to understand nuclear binding and nuclear structure under extremely neutron-rich conditions. The newly established stability of $39\mathrm{Na}$ has a significant impact on nuclear models and theories predicting the neutron dripline and also provides a key to understanding the nuclear shell property of $39\mathrm{Na}$ at the neutron number $N=28$, which is normally a magic number.

The nuclear dripline refers to the boundary beyond which atomic nuclei can emit a proton or neutron. On other words, if there are too many protons or neutrons, the atom can emit one or more of them to make the atom more stable. Such unstable atoms leak protons or neutrons sort of like a faucet leaks water drops. 

For example, lithium-11, has four more neutrons than its heaviest stable isotope, but it has such weakly bound neutrons that it is called a halo nucleus. The least tightly-bound neutron orbits the nucleus as if it were an electron, but with a much smaller orbital radius than an electron has. An orbiting neutron is just plain nuts, right? This is really interesting stuff.

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From the Why Democracy Falls to Authoritarianism Files: Recent research suggests another factor that leads some people who claim to support democracy to support authoritarianism is fear of the opposition. A nature human behavior article comments:  

Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding

Around the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. Here we present evidence that this behavior is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first. In an observational study (N = 1,973), we find that US partisans are willing to subvert democratic norms to the extent that they believe opposing partisans are willing to do the same. In experimental studies (N = 2,543, N = 1,848), we revealed to partisans that their opponents are more committed to democratic norms than they think. As a result, the partisans became more committed to upholding democratic norms themselves and less willing to vote for candidates who break these norms. These findings suggest that aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy and that we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side’s commitment to democracy.

Around the world, antidemocratic leaders are convincing their supporters to vote away their political rights. While 78% of the world’s population reports wanting to live in a representative democracy, democracies continue to erode, with 70% of the population living in autocracies. Citizens in Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary strongly endorsed democracy while casting votes for authoritarian leaders Chávez, Erdoğan and Orbán, respectively. In fact, in Venezuela, citizens who claimed to support democracy the most were no more likely to vote for a democratic candidate.  

The puzzle deepens when one considers that the modal form of autocratization today is democratic backsliding, in which democracies die a slow death, leaving years for a democracy-loving public to hold their representatives accountable. Why, then, is democracy slipping away from so many citizens across various regions, cultures and socio-economic conditions?  

In the US context, Donald Trump spread misinformation about Democrats subverting democracy from the start. Early in his 2016 campaign, his website stated, “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging this Election!”. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he repeated, “This is a rigged election”. These accusations continued through the 2020 election, and Fox News amplified this message, repeatedly proclaiming the existence of “an all-out effort to depress and suppress the pro-Trump vote”.

Once again the power of dark free speech to attack and kill democracy is on display in the research data. Authoritarian Republicans, including most Christian nationalist elites and brass knuckles capitalist elites, openly support laws that are intended to suppress non-Republican votes and/or to subvert inconvenient election results. Republicans have firmly convinced most of its rank and file that Democrats want to impose a corrupt, atheistic, socialist tyranny on America. That sounds a lot like aspiring corrupt Republican autocrats instigating democratic backsliding by accusing their Democratic Party opponents of subverting democracy. 

Lest we forget, despite their deflections and vehement denials most Republican Party elites in congress and/or state governments include these authoritarian policies among their high priority goals:

1. Opposed amending the Electoral Count Act, which tried to prevent another 1/6 coup attempt 

2. Support limiting voting rights and/or subverting elections where a Democrat wins

3. Support limiting abortion rights

4. Supported, justified and normalized the corruption, disrespectful vulgarity, crimes and treason of Trump

5. Oppose efforts to accept or deal with climate change despite overwhelming contrary public opinion

6. Persecution and oppression of the LGBQT community

What corresponding horrors do most Democratic Party elites support?

1. Amending the Electoral Count Act 

2. Defense of voting rights and opposition to subverting elections regardless of who won

3. Abortion rights

4. Punishment of the corruption, disrespectful vulgarity, crimes and treason of Trump

5. Efforts to deal reasonably with climate change in accord with overwhelming public support

6. The LGBQT community

News bits: The universe is going to evaporate; Etc.

Steven Hawking's famous hypothesis about black holes slowly evaporating has received an update. Assuming the hypothesis is correct, and it might not be, the whole freaking universe is going to evaporate in a short ~1 x 10¹²⁴  years or thereabouts! Guardian Mag writes:

Hawking's revised theory Predict Universal Evaporation, New study

Stephen Hawking's most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate.

In 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes eventually evaporate by losing what's now known as Hawking radiation — a gradual draining of energy in the form of light particles that spring up around black holes' immensely powerful gravitational fields.

Now, a new update to the theory has suggested that Hawking radiation isn't just created by stealing energy from black holes, but from all objects with enough mass.

If the theory is true, it means that everything in the universe will eventually disappear, its energy slowly bled from it in the form of light.

"That means that objects without an event horizon [the gravitational point of no return beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole], such as the remnants of dead stars and other large objects in the universe, also have this sort of radiation," lead author Heino Falcke, a professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "And, after a very long period, that would lead to everything in the universe eventually evaporating, just like black holes. This changes not only our understanding of Hawking radiation but also our view of the universe and its future."  

According to quantum field theory, there is no such thing as an empty vacuum. Space is instead teeming with tiny vibrations that, if imbued with enough energy, randomly burst into virtual particles, producing very-low-energy packets of light, or photons.

The scientists wrote in their paper:

We present a new avenue to black hole evaporation using a heat-kernel approach analogous as for the Schwinger effect. Applying this method to an uncharged massless scalar field in a Schwarzschild spacetime, we show that spacetime curvature takes a similar role as the electric field strength in the Schwinger effect. We interpret our results as local pair production in a gravitational field and derive a radial production profile. The resulting emission peaks near the unstable photon orbit. Comparing the particle number and energy flux to the Hawking case, we find both effects to be of similar order. However, our pair production mechanism itself does not explicitly make use of the presence of a black hole event horizon.

A cranky physicist at reddit poo-pooed the whole thing as a kerfuffle in a teapot:

At first glance this just means that the theory predicts gravitational fields can create radiation outside of event horizons. this is based on the Schwinger effect, which showed that radiation can be produced by electromagnetic fields. Reporters need to stop magnifying physics out of proportion. This was already *almost* predicted by naive use of the equiv. principle, which supposes that Unruh thermalization should exist in gravitational fields. However, Unruh radiation (production of radiation from the thermalization) hasn't been confirmed and until now Hawking radiation was the closest theory to actual Unruh radiation.

To that, another cranky physicist commented: Doomed ... doooomed I say!

Holy Schwinger, Schwarzschild and Unruh! To prepare for bumpiness ahead, I purchased self-defense technology protect myself and my family:

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Spin tyranny update: From the Russian Motherland, we get this uplifting story:

In Russian Schools, It’s Recite Your ABC’s 

and ‘Love Your Army’

The curriculum for young Russians is increasingly emphasizing patriotism and the heroism of Moscow’s army, while demonizing the West as “gangsters.” One school features a “sniper”-themed math class.

Teaching the wee tykes in Russia

A new version of the ABC’s in Russia’s Far East starts with “A is for Army, B is for Brotherhood” — and injects a snappy phrase with every letter, like, “Love your Army.”

A swim meet in the southern city of Magnitogorsk featured adolescents diving into the pool wearing camouflage uniforms, while other competitors slung model Kalashnikov rifles across their backs.

It is reassuring to know that humanity is definitely not not a collision course with peace, civility, tolerance, democracy or long-term sustainability. 

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Meanwhile, an observer opines over at the Capitalism v. Socialism reddit channel:

A very common argument for socialism that I have seen is ranting about how bad the US is.

But I don't think that makes much sense because many of the supposedly bad things the US does or has don't apply to many other capitalist countries (e.g. healthcare, wars, expensive college education, 2 party system etc.)

Often these are very US centric and specific elements.

More less socialists are saying they are unhappy with how the US is run, they want better healthcare and they hate their politicians.

But that does not justify socialism in any way as many other capitalist countries don't even have the same problems and socialism had rather poor outcomes so far.

So the rational response to this would be to fix issues in their own country instead of dreaming about an unrealistic socialist utopia that never existed.

I think that the commenter, u/Agile-Caterpillar421, makes a couple of good points.

A hypothesis about AI subverting elections: Clogger vs. Dogger

The Conversation published an article by Harvard professors Archon Fung (Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard Kennedy School) and Lawrence Lessig (Professor of Law and Leadership) about a potential artificial intelligence (AI)-driven political campaign:

How AI could take over elections – and undermine democracy

Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election.

While platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube use forms of AI to get users to spend more time on their sites, Clogger’s AI would have a different objective: to change people’s voting behavior.

As a political scientist and a legal scholar who study the intersection of technology and democracy, we believe that something like Clogger could use automation to dramatically increase the scale and potentially the effectiveness of behavior manipulation and microtargeting techniques that political campaigns have used since the early 2000s. Just as advertisers use your browsing and social media history to individually target commercial and political ads now, Clogger would pay attention to you – and hundreds of millions of other voters – individually.

It would offer three advances over the current state-of-the-art algorithmic behavior manipulation. First, its language model would generate messages — texts, social media and email, perhaps including images and videos — tailored to you personally. Whereas advertisers strategically place a relatively small number of ads, language models such as ChatGPT can generate countless unique messages for you personally – and millions for others – over the course of a campaign.

Second, Clogger would use a technique called reinforcement learning to generate a succession of messages that become increasingly more likely to change your vote. Reinforcement learning is a machine-learning, trial-and-error approach in which the computer takes actions and gets feedback about which work better in order to learn how to accomplish an objective. Machines that can play Go, Chess and many video games better than any human have used reinforcement learning.

Third, over the course of a campaign, Clogger’s messages could evolve in order to take into account your responses to the machine’s prior dispatches and what it has learned about changing others’ minds. Clogger would be able to carry on dynamic “conversations” with you – and millions of other people – over time. Clogger’s messages would be similar to ads that follow you across different websites and social media.

The messages that Clogger sends may or may not be political in content. The machine’s only goal is to maximize vote share, and it would likely devise strategies for achieving this goal that no human campaigner would have thought of.

One possibility is sending likely opponent voters information about nonpolitical passions that they have in sports or entertainment to bury the political messaging they receive. Another possibility is sending off-putting messages – for example incontinence advertisements – timed to coincide with opponents’ messaging. And another is manipulating voters’ social media friend groups to give the sense that their social circles support its candidate.

Clogger has no regard for truth. Indeed, it has no way of knowing what is true or false. Language model “hallucinations” are not a problem for this machine because its objective is to change your vote, not to provide accurate information.

If the Republican presidential campaign were to deploy Clogger in 2024, the Democratic campaign would likely be compelled to respond in kind, perhaps with a similar machine. Call it Dogger. If the campaign managers thought that these machines were effective, the presidential contest might well come down to Clogger vs. Dogger, and the winner would be the client of the more effective machine.

Political scientists and pundits would have much to say about why one or the other AI prevailed, but likely no one would really know. The president will have been elected not because his or her policy proposals or political ideas persuaded more Americans, but because he or she had the more effective AI. The content that won the day would have come from an AI focused solely on victory, with no political ideas of its own, rather than from candidates or parties.  

In this very important sense, a machine would have won the election rather than a person. The election would no longer be democratic, even though all of the ordinary activities of democracy – the speeches, the ads, the messages, the voting and the counting of votes – will have occurred.

The AI-elected president could then go one of two ways. He or she could use the mantle of election to pursue Republican or Democratic party policies. But because the party ideas may have had little to do with why people voted the way that they did – Clogger and Dogger don’t care about policy views – the president’s actions would not necessarily reflect the will of the voters. Voters would have been manipulated by the AI rather than freely choosing their political leaders and policies.

Another path is for the president to pursue the messages, behaviors and policies that the machine predicts will maximize the chances of reelection. On this path, the president would have no particular platform or agenda beyond maintaining power.  

It would be possible to avoid AI election manipulation if candidates, campaigns and consultants all forswore the use of such political AI. We believe that is unlikely. If politically effective black boxes were developed, the temptation to use them would be almost irresistible. Indeed, political consultants might well see using these tools as required by their professional responsibility to help their candidates win. And once one candidate uses such an effective tool, the opponents could hardly be expected to resist by disarming unilaterally.  

The possibility of a system like Clogger shows that the path toward human collective disempowerment may not require some superhuman artificial general intelligence. It might just require overeager campaigners and consultants who have powerful new tools that can effectively push millions of people’s many buttons.

This raises interesting questions. Will politicians and their campaign embrace AI-driven campaigning? Hell yes. The temptation to use AI would be irresistible, not merely almost irresistible. That seems obvious.

The authors seem to imply that AI would be untethered from facts and truth. That's probably true for forces who are comfortable with, deceit, lies, slanders, etc. But I imagine that respect for truth can be built into honest AI if that's what a campaign wants.

But then one can see a possible split. The AI of the side more accepting of and reliant on dark free speech (DFS) would have few or no limits on its rhetoric. DFS AI could say things like the 2020 election was stolen and if Trump loses in 2024, that will have been a rigged election too. Can honest AI effectively counteract DFS AI? 

Or, would the temptation of DFS AI unleashed by one side simply overwhelm morals and force the other side to reply in kind with its own DFS counter AI? Can honest AI be just as effective as DFS AI in politics? These are fascinating questions. I wonder if any of that has been tested by AI researchers.

Moral qualms aside, we are going to see AI tried out, honest or not. Another question will be, will we even know what is AI generated and what isn't? Probably not, especially from the dishonest side.

Another question is this: How different is a DFS-driven AI campaign from the kind of DFS campaign that people like Trump routinely rely on? Trump and radical right propagandists routinely test out rhetoric to see what works and what doesn't. If a certain lie or slander is most effective, then that is what is used. Truth has nothing to do with those tests. Truth is almost completely irrelevant. Public response is far more relevant than truth.

Maybe the ultimate questions are (i) how much better can AI learn to win compared to humans, and (ii) can honest AI match DFS AI, or are we doomed to right DFS AI vs. left DFS AI warfare? Or, are we just doomed to spin dictatorship?

We live in interesting times.

Is it human or is it AI? 

Or, does it even matter?

News bits: The always present matter of false equivalence; Etc.

A Talking Points Memo article brings up the common false equivalence fallacy that the authoritarian radical right constantly raises in defense of its endless stream of indefensible lies, corruption, crackpottery and irrational emotional. TMP writes:

The False Equivalence Between The ‘Far Right’ And The ‘Hard Left’

Throughout the debt-ceiling crisis, news reports have wrongly suggested that each party's activist wings balance one another out

Here’s how, in its lead story Thursday, the New York Times described the House’s vote to resolve Republicans’ self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis:

“With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks.”

It’s not just the Times. This false equivalence between the two parties’ activist wings has been on display in press coverage throughout the debt-ceiling votes. Politico Playbook on Sunday described Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal’s mixed reaction to the debt-ceiling compromise as indicating that the bill may have “a chance to win votes from some on the far left.” A Washington Post sub-headline that same day noted that “far-left and far-right corners of the House have criticized the compromise.”

This idea is, of course, farcical — both in terms of the vote on the debt-ceiling bill and our politics more generally. Yet whenever Congress is debating a high-profile piece of legislation, the media returns to the easy description of pressures exerted by the far-right and far-left, as if these are similar forces.

It is not the far or moderate left that supports and passes laws to support anti-democracy policies. The GOP is in full support of policies that (i) limit civil liberties, (ii) openly attack non-heterosexuals by law, (iii) protect tax cheats, (iv) subvert elections, (v) normalize and justify political violence, (vi) teach Christian nationalist lies to innocent home schooled children to be bigots and hate secular education, and (vii) attack pro-democracy institutions and norms. That is what America's authoritarian radical right Republican Party and its Christian nationalist radicalism routinely does. What corresponding evil is the far and/or center left advocating? Collecting taxes owed from tax cheats? Supporting abortion rights? Accepting actual facts, e.g., climate change, for what they are?

The MSM still fails to understand what it is dealing with, is silently complicit or subverted and/or is unacceptably incompetent. 

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Culture wars -- bible banning: The BBC writes:

A school district in the US state of Utah has removed the Bible from elementary and middle schools for containing "vulgarity and violence".

The move follows a complaint from a parent that the King James Bible has material unsuitable for children.

Utah's Republican government passed a law in 2022 banning "pornographic or indecent" books from schools.

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Culture wars 2 -- defending gender crackpottery: ars Technica writes:

Twitter VP of Product Trust and Safety Ella Irwin resigned from the company yesterday, she confirmed to Reuters and other news outlets. Irwin's departure came on the same day that Twitter owner Elon Musk criticized his staff for restricting What Is a Woman?, a Daily Wire documentary on transgender issues.

Irwin took over as head of Twitter's trust and safety team after the November 2022 resignation of Yoel Roth. Twitter has massively reduced its staff under Musk's leadership and is facing scrutiny from regulators, particularly in the European Union, over its content moderation practices. Twitter executive A.J. Brown, the head of brand safety and ad quality, also left this week.

Twitter recently pulled out of the EU's voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation but must comply with the mandatory Digital Services Act rules taking effect on August 25. As European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton tweeted, "obligations remain. You can run but you can't hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be [a] legal obligation under DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement."

Musk supports lies, slanders and disinformation. That's why his Twitter toy is a hellscape. The Daily Wire is a radical right propaganda site. It doesn't produce serious documentaries. It produces serious radical right propaganda, like the stuff that spin dictators like to spew on their people and the world. 

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A clean energy advance: Beaming solar power from space to Earth has a useful advantage. Power can be beamed 24 hours/day. Gizmodo writes:

Scientists Successfully Transmit Space-Based Solar Power 

to Earth for the First Time

The California Institute of Technology has big news for space-based power. Researchers at the university have reportedly beamed solar power from space to Earth without a single wire—and they say it’s a first.

The researchers conducted the power transfer experiment using the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment, or MAPLE, which is a small prototype aboard the in-orbit Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) that launched this past January.

The researchers say that, in a first, MAPLE’s array of transmitters successfully beamed solar power collected in space using microwaves to a receiver on the rooftop of Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering on Caltech’s campus in Pasadena.  

The ability to wirelessly transmit solar power from space has huge implications for renewable energy, so much so that Japan plans to start using it by the mid-2030's. A Japanese research team is looking to pilot the technology in 2025 with a public-private partnership.

As humanity’s growing need for energy continues, a powerful solution like space-based solar power collection and transmission could be a huge step in the right direction.

The inside of the space-based Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit 

Experiment (MAPLE) which emits collected energy across empty space

Microwave radiation beamed to Earth of a satellite penetrates through clouds. The energy collected from sunlight is converted to microwaves that the satellite transmits down to Earth. The open questions are how much can this be scaled up and at what cost? Apparently it can be economically scaled enough to lead Japan to at least try to develop it for use by the mid 2030s. Time will tell how this plays out. 

Book review: Spin Dictators

The 2023 book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 12st Century, was written by Russian economist Sergei Guriev (professor, Paris, France) and American political scientist Daniel Treisman (professor, UCLA). Putin ran professor Guriev out of Russia for writing an unflattering account of how Putin manhandled a political opponent. 

The book is easy to read and written for a general audience, not academics. It's reasoning and conclusions are heavily sourced and easily fact checkable. I highly recommend this book. In particular, one gets a solid understanding of what the authors are arguing by reading chapters 1, 7 and the last chapter 8. Chapters 2-6 are heavy with facts and accounts of dictators and their playful (brutal, actually) exploits. These authors really understand dictators and tyranny. 

Since this book was written after earlier experts like Hannah Arendt had published their works, e.g., Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book relies on the authors' insights from the perspective of later and current history. That informs the research and analyses that underly the author's central argument. And, the book comes from two relevant points of view, economics and political science. 

The author's central argument boils down to this: At the extremes, there are two kinds of dictators, fear dictators and spin dictators. Fear dictators operate mostly by brute force, often in public displays of violence and murder. Fear and violent repression, and control of mass communications are their main tools of control. Those tyrannies are usually wrapped in military regalia and uniforms. Think of Hitler and Stalin as examples. 

At the other extreme are spin dictators. They operate mostly by guile, deceit, spinning false realities, co-option of opposition, and also, control of mass communications. Those tyrants wear snappy business suits, and usually speak of the virtues of democracy, while rigging elections and subverting political opposition and democratic institutions and norms. Spin dictators usually tolerate a limited amount of political opposition. However, that opposition is carefully limited and controlled so that there is just enough to give an appearance of democracy and tolerance to the public at home and governments abroad. This kind of faux democracy deception usually works extremely well and home and abroad, at least for some period of time. Unlike fear dictators, spin dictators do care about public opinion. They tend to have a lot of public support. They work hard to gain it. They create false narratives about how they are valiantly fighting against dark forces internally** and externally to help both the little people and the great, but beleaguered nation. Think of Putin and Viktor Orban in Hungary as examples.

** The LGBQT community is a popular target for evil internal enemy propaganda.

Although those are the extremes, there are times when spin dictators will resort to killing when needed. There can be a lot of overlap in the operations of the two kinds of tyrant, e.g., both tend to create scapegoat groups for the public to hate on. But spin tyrant murders are usually committed quietly and accompanied by denials by the tyrant who falsely claims innocence. Spinner tyrants prefer to silence domestic critics by subverting them on false legal charges, e.g., by jailing them for tax evasion, or for being foreign spies or pedophiles. 

Some definitions and data

Spin dictatorships are defined as:

1. a non-democracy country; and

2. national elections with at least one opposition party running; and

3. tolerance of at least several media outlets that criticize the government each year; and

4. less than 10 political state killings per year; and 

5. less than 1,000 jailed political prisoners in any year.

That is a rule of thumb definition. There are variants, exceptions, complexities and hybrid fear and spin dictatorships. A spin tyranny can and sometimes does degenerate into a fear tyranny and vice versa as circumstances change. For example, some spin dictators have become more fear dictator-like when China steps in with needed loans for the country. Unlike Western financial donors, China does not criticize dictators for murdering people or brutally oppressing them. Western loans sometimes come with good dictator behavior strings attached. China never attaches pro-democracy strings like that to its loans.

For contrast, the rule of thumb definition for fear dictatorships is:

1. a non-democracy country; and

2. at least one year where there no or few media outlets criticize the government; and

3. at least 10 state political killings per year; and

4.  at least1,000 jailed political prisoners in at least one year.

The author's analysis of dictators in power at least 5 years for fear vs spin dictatorships from 1946 to 2015 indicate that fear dominated spin until the 1990s when spin dominated. In 1946-1949, it was about 47% fear, 8% spin and 45% hybrid. By 2015, spin was about 53% of dictatorships, fear 7% and hybrid 40%.

Other observations

A couple of other points merit mention. Technology has changed and is relevant but the concept of spin dictatorship with rule by deceit and guile is not completely new. Aristotle wrote aspects of about it in ~400 BC. Machiavelli's 1532 book, The Prince, was a guidebook for spin dictators of that time, not fear tyrants. The authors write and quote Machiavelli:

Machiavelli advised princes (dictators) to use "simulation and dissimulation." Since most people are influenced by appearances rather than by reality, an ambitious ruler should create illusions. He "need not have all the good qualities . . . . but he must be seen to have them." How to fool the public depends on context: "The prince can gain favor in many ways." But obtaining public support is crucial. "I will only say in conclusion that prince must have the people on his side."

Consider this. The people of Turkey have just re-elected spin dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, despite his authoritarianism and his significant flaws and failures. Euronews writes:

Turkish election 'free but not fair', say international observers

"Media bias and ongoing restrictions to freedom of expression created an unlevel playing field, and contributed to an unjustified advantage of the incumbent," the OSCE said on Monday.

Free but not fair is an oxymoron for elections. If an election is not fair, it's not free. That's just reasonable, rational thinking. This reflects the amazing effectiveness of dictators holding sham elections. The democratic West is mostly fooled or confused and the dictator stays in power and continues to pretend to be supporting democracy. However, the dictator non-West is not fooled. Those tyrants watch and learn the art of killing democracy while claiming to defend it.

Future prospects

What the authors think the future of democracy will be was not quite clear to me. They seem to be torn between not being alarmist and not being naïve or too optimistic. My confusion aside, maybe the overall thrust of history and current events is mildly positive for democracy. Based mostly on dictatorships since the 1980s, the authors do an in-depth analysis of what they call the modernization cocktail. It has three ingredients, (i) the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society**, (ii) economic and information globalization, and (iii) the rise of a liberal international order. Together, those developments tend to push nations from fear dictatorships to spin dictatorships and finally to democracies. The modernization cocktail is an international social and political force or phenomenon that is emergent from all three ingredients acting together on post-industrial societies and the rest of the world. 

** A post-industrial society is one where services and information processing is a more important aspect of the economy than old-fashioned manufacturing. The US completed the transition to a post-industrial country in the years after WWII. We're not going back, despite what politicians say about it.

There is a lot of historical fact and analysis to support that argument. Their argument is well documented and plausible in my opinion. For example, America's radical right relentlessly attacks globalization claiming it hurts people and the status quo, and undermines freedoms and traditions. The radicals largely appeal to a time when America was industrialized. That cannot happen. It has been tried and it fails. 

It is likely that in post-industrialized countries like the US that globalization defends people and their freedoms and traditions more than it undermines them. The US just has not adapted very well to post-industrialization. The authors cite Singapore's pioneering spin dictator of the 1990s Lee Kuan Yew as fully understanding the implications of the modernization cocktail:

With today's high technology, you just can't squeeze the maximum productivity out of advanced machinery without a self-motivated and self-governing work force. . . . . One simply cannot ask a highly educated work force to stop thinking when it leaves the factory. 

There was the problem in a nutshell. Too many people in post-industrialized countries have college degrees. You cannot control their thinking. Stalin had the same problem. The authors commented on the dictator's dilemma using Stalin as the example: 

Despite the inefficient organization of Stalinist industry, labor was still more productive in the factories than on peasant farms. But once progress required imagination [in the post-industrial society], Stalin-style coercion no longer worked. You could not order people to have ideas. Bureaucratic disciplined stifled innovation, which almost by definition requires breaking rules. Ideology was even more deadly. . . . . Dictators had to contend with a third, related challenge. The spread of higher education and creative works catalyzed another disruptive development. This one had to do with the beliefs and values of citizens.

The authors go on to point out that global survey data is clear on this point, which applies in all ~100 countries surveyed: As countries develop economically, their citizens undergo dramatic shifts in values and beliefs. Those values and beliefs tend to be pro-democratic. That, coupled with the rise of mass internet communications makes it hard for dictatorships in post-industrial countries to fight against sliding into democracy. 

[A spin dictator] can even hire the creative types to design an alternative reality for the masses. [it does not work against informed people, but they are rare and can be neutered] . . . . Co-opting the informed takes resources. When those run low, spin dictators turn to censorship, which is often cheaper. They need not censor everything. All that really matters is to stop opposition media reaching a mass audience. . . . . The less educated are alienated from the creative types by resentment, economic anxiety, and attachment to tradition. Spin dictators can exploit these sentiments, rallying the remaining [industrial?] workers against the "counterculture" while branding the intellectuals as disloyal, sacrilegious or sexually deviant.

Does any of that sound familiar? It should. That reflects mainstream rhetoric and tactics by America's authoritarian radical right, including alternative reality and independent thinker bashing.

The book concludes with these thoughts:

Internationally, Western societies are now linked to the dictatorships of the world by multiple capillaries [information, and economic and trade ties?]. There is no safe way to opt out of the global system. . . . . Spin dictators would like their citizens to trust them and distrust the West. They thrive in a world of cynicism and relativism. But the West has something they do not: a powerful idea around which it can unite, the idea of liberal democracy. This idea -- although some today see it as tarnished -- is, in fact, the West's strongest weapon. . . . . But the only way to defeat an idea is with a better idea, and they do not have one. That spin dictators pretend to be democrats proves they have no vision to offer. They can only delay and discourage us for a while -- if we let them.

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To a large extent Guriev and Treisman see the situation with democracy about the same as reflected in many of the politics posts here. I take my own assessment as mostly reinforced by the analysis and reasoning that Spin Dictators lays out. What the Republican Party and its leader Trump have done and are still doing looks a lot like spin dictatorship to me. Too much like it. 

Maybe my assessment of authoritarian threat in the US has been significantly overstated. A reassessment after the 2024 elections are over will be in order. Until then, erring on the side of alarmism seems prudent.

What remains unclear and unpredictable is the ultimate fate of democracy. Despite clear historical evidence that the human situation was slowly moving toward democracy, the ultimate power of the dark internet, global overpopulation, climate change and other pressures could tip mankind back to tyranny as the norm everywhere. Maybe countervailing historical forces like the modernization cocktail will prevent that. Maybe not.