#but outright a Free Platform for Right Wing Politics | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ruminantminds · 3 years

Text

me, my dream, my desire, how it's killing me, like i laugh at it.

SIOBHAN BLAKE ( SHE / THEY ) is a NON-BINARY FORTY * year old TOWN MAYOR who has been living in Moorbrooke for THEIR ENTIRE LIFE. Right now, they are currently residing in ELMSETT GREEN. It has been said that they look suspiciously like ROSAMUND PIKE and if they had to choose a song to describe themselves, they would choose VOILA by BARBARA PRAVI.

* they were originally forty-one on the app but after working out the birth chart i have decided their forty-first birthday is the fourth of june ! just in case you want to plan birthday things for her <3

mun introduction ;

hi everyone ! i’m shannon, i’m a non-binary autistic lesbian, i’m twenty-one && i never fucking learned how to sleep !

BASICS —

NAME: siobhan adrienne louisa blake.

AGE: forty.

GENDER: non-binary.

BIRTH DATE: fourth of june, nineteen-eighty.

BIRTH PLACE: moorbrooke, maine, usa.

SEXUALITY: lesbian.

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: married to alante patterson.

ZODIAC: gemini sun, aquarius moon, libra rising.

MBTI: enfp-a.

ENNEAGRAM: four, with a three wing.

HOGWARTS HOUSE: hufflepuff.

THEME SONG: voila by barbara pravi.

FAVOURITE SONG: no plan by hozier.

OCCUPATION: mayor of moorbrooke ( 2020 - present. )

PAST CAREERS: english teacher at moorbrooke high school ( 2004 - 2020. )

EDUCATION: bachelor’s degree in literature at yale university, the only period of time they’ve spent not living in moorbrooke.

DREAM JOB: senator for maine.

PARENTS: ciara & severin blake ( deceased. )

SIBLINGS: none.

SPOUSE: alante patterson ( m. 2015 ; together since )

PETS: two cats, vita && virginia.

PREDOMINANT TRAITS: wholesome, compassionate, ambitious, unconventional, humanitarian, self-critical, discerning, sociable, curious.

BACKSTORY —

apart from a few years at yale, siobhan has never lived away from moorbrooke. it’s where she was born, it’s where they were raised, it’s the place where she feels most at home. it’s filled with the people who watched them evolve into the who they now confidently are. but growing up with parents with massive expectations was never easy.

because while they moved from new york, severin blake’s old money attitude never left him behind.

( tw: fertility struggles ) and with old money, conservativism often follows. this is no exception. siobhan spent most of their childhood trying to be the golden child their parents wanted, even when it felt wrong. hopeful that some other sibling would come to take some of the weight off their shoulders, it never came to fruition, and she was their only child. severin blake — french-american businessman’s — only legacy.

siobhan was always more compassionate than their parents. when new people came to the town, she would always try to offer them a leg-up, no matter who they were, why they had come, or how long they were planning to stay. they had no issue playing chameleon to make others comfortable: wasn’t that what she’d always done, regardless?

this rang true when alante patterson came to town. a few years younger than her, split from her siblings in the foster system, it just made sense for siobhan to try to be the other girl’s constant. the beginning of a close relationship that still runs stronger than ever, thirty years later.

alante was always refreshingly honest, and always made siobhan feel safe to be . . . themselves, even if they were pretending to everyone else.

siobhan’s chameleonic tendencies made them highly popular as a teenager, her parents’ pride and joy, but the latter half began to fail when siobhan began to understand — began being operative, as it was a process that took them many years — their curiosity about their sexuality and gender. this relationship, and her parents’ desire for them to hide this evolving part of themselves, was a behind-closed-doors battle which led to anxiety & depression.

a vicious cycle, because the attitude to mental health on severin’s part was also quite . . . medieval, and ciara certainly never intervened to stop him.

( the blakes had always been protestant, though siobhan was reluctant to take part in any acknowledgement of such. siobhan has considered themselves agnostic since the age of thirteen, though she supports her wife in her faith as much as she can. )

siobhan came out when she went to yale at the age of eighteen, and her experience had been mixed. college took her away from her friends, estranging them from their high school friends and temporarily moving away from alante. when they returned from college studies and took up a job as an english teacher at the local highschool, her best friend was . . . married.

which made feelings that began to blossom particularly problematic. especially when over the years that followed, no matter how hard they tried to let it go, those feelings persisted. and — eventually — became an affair so passionate that alante left her husband for siobhan some thirteen years ago.

their relationship with alante is what made them truly decide to — and make them able to — exist fully as themselves. who they wanted to be. so now, they’re not quite as chameleonic, but she’s endearing to the people who are truly interested in her and that’s all that matters, isn’t it? ( isn’t it? they’re still learning, though they pretend the self-doubt is entirely gone. )

this part of their town-iconic relationship is not public knowledge, and thankfully never came to siobhan’s parents’ knowledge before their deaths five and seven years ago.

siobhan and alante married as soon as possible in 2015, but siobhan always had a dream of washington politics, buried for many years because the political climate of their youth would never take them. now... it’s possible, but alante likes this life, this town, their two cats, and wants to have children.

as a compromise, siobhan ran for mayor of moorbrooke this recent cycle, and won. but here’s the kicker: will it be enough for them?

CONNECTIONS —

family: while she has no siblings, she does have cousins on ciara’s side, so if you’re interested in that then feel free to let me know & we’ll explore it! i love a good family tree, especially in town rps where i imagine it a bit more interconnected like broadchurch !

family-esque: if your muse has been living in moorbrooke a while, it’s likely siobhan knows them quite or very well. you know those people you call your aunt/uncle out of respect because they’ve been friends with your family as long as you can remember? a bit like that! it’s also a habit because siobhan has been . . . distant from her own family since she was a teenager. they never outright disowned them for what they were calling their ‘ ideas ’ — i.e. being non-gender conforming & lesbian — but their disapproval was... clear enough. she doesn’t want anyone else to feel like they’re without support.

therapist friend: the thing about siobhan is that they are the ceo of telling other people to look after their mental health while letting their own degrade. ( see: she can’t help taking on other people’s problems & wanting to solve them. )

high school it squad: yes, this is my not-so-subtle way of pleading for more older muses here. these people were siobhan’s friends when they were trying to be who everyone wanted them to be, not who she herself wanted to be ; they were the popular clique, and she adjusted herself as necessary to ‘ ringlead ’ them. i’m thinking they split up when they all went to college, and the rest of them have only just come back to town. the siobhan blake they’re going to meet is . . . very different than the one they once knew. someone who is now comfortable ( at last ) unapologetically in their own skin.

ex-student: if your muse was in high school in moorbrooke anywhere during their tenure it’s likely that siobhan could have taught them! she was the emotional support english teacher. sapphics, you know what i am talking about.

ingenue: someone interested in politics who siobhan is sharing their passion with !

neighbours: anyone who lives in elmsett court, who wants to live next to moorbrooke’s favourite sapphic it couple? it comes with invitations to dinner and two adventuring cats called vita & virginia that they might have to retrieve from your house.

TAKEN CONNECTIONS

confidante: the only person, aside from alante, who knows the truth. that siobhan and alante’s relationship first ignited in a blazing, letter-ridden extramarital affair, eventually resulting in alante leaving her husband all those years ago. the person siobhan confides her worries in, sometimes. [ alec barlowe. ]

OTHER TRIVIA

owns a motorbike.

they can still write in anne lister code from letters to alante.

of course, she is a democrat. we do not fuck with republicans here.

watches vita and virginia three times in your average week.

has an eclectic music taste, but frequents the record store because there’s nothing like vinyl.

( yes, they have hozier on vinyl. )

will only drink white wine. don’t ask them why. they don’t know.

would have zero wardrobe sense if it wasn’t for alante. money just doesn’t equal style.

the only social network she knows how to use is twitter. please, someone, teach them how to use instagram. bestie needs a social media guru because the people who run the rest of her platforms don’t get it, either.

allergic to banana. but eats it anyway for the mouth tingles.

has kept a diary religiously since the age of twelve.

#mbintro

3 notes · View notes

fivestarglam · 3 years

Link

The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.

Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of the historical evolution of capitalism to show how the Washington consensus ended up metastasized into the Silicon Valley consensus. In a delightful twist, he brands the new grove as the “Californian ideology”.

We’re far away from Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys; it’s more like Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on steroids, complete with IMF-style “structural reforms” emphasizing “flexibilization” of work and outright marketization/financialization of everyday life.

The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

In 1994, PFF held a ground-breaking conference in Atlanta that eventually led to a seminal Magna Carta: literally, Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, published in 1996, during the first Clinton term.

Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.

Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.

Those Randian heroes

Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.

When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.

That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.

Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.

On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.

The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.

So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.

Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable, online real estate empire is built.

The key point is that whatever the original business – Google, Amazon, Uber – strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of “spaces of observation and capture” of data.

About the Chinese credit system…

Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system – a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3rd plenum of the 18thCongress of the CCP, under the motto “to value sincerity and punish insincerity”.

For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It’s all about trust. Beijing defines it as “a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance”.

The Chinese term – shehui xinyong – is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than “social credit”, it’s more about “trustworthiness”, in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.

Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of “mass lines”, as in “start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas”.

Durand’s analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become “fiefdoms”: they live out of, and profit from, their vast “digital territory” peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.

And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.

It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, “Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers.”

So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:

a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the “techno-feudal” option, as defined by Durand.

Blake meets Burroughs

Durand’s book is extremely relevant to show how the theoretical and political critique of the Digital Age is still rarified. There is no precise cartography of all those dodgy circuits of revenue extraction. No analysis of how do they profit from the financial casino – especially mega investment funds that facilitate hyper-concentration. Or how do they profit from the hardcore exploitation of workers in the gig economy.

The total concentration of the digital glebe is leading to a scenario, as Durand recalls, already dreamed up by Stuart Mill, where every land in a country belonged to a single master. Our generalized dependency on the digital masters seems to be “the cannibal future of liberalism in the age of algorithms”.

Is there a possible way out? The temptation is to go radical – a Blake/Burroughs crossover. We have to expand our scope of comprehension – and stop confusing the map (as shown in the Magna Carta) with the territory (our perception).

William Blake, in his proto-psychedelic visions, was all about liberation and subordination – depicting an authoritarian deity imposing conformity via a sort of source code of mass influence. Looks like a proto-analysis of the Digital Age.

William Burroughs conceptualized Control – an array of manipulations including mass media (he would be horrified by social media). To break down Control, we must be able to hack into and disrupt its core programs. Burroughs showed how all forms of Control must be rejected – and defeated: “Authority figures are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers”.

Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.

(Republished from

Asia Times

by permission of author or representative)SHARE THIS ARTICLE...

5 notes · View notes

boy-and-girl-crazy123456 · 4 years

Note

saw you mentioned being bored and wanting to discourse. curious for your opinion v mine on american politics. voting is a completely rigged system. it is intended to create an illusion of choice. people who cant register should not be ashamed or hated. it’s not their fault it’s systematically bullshit. but if you can register, you should, and vote for war criminal biden, because he’s *at least* not trump, just

(second ask from same person) “okay i sneezed and sent the first ask too early and then sneezed again writing another and i can’t tell if i sent the second ask or cancelled it. i’m sorry. i have allergies lmao. anyway i have no faith that voting isnt pointless and the results dont matter, but why avoid it if its an option for you. what do you got to lose. that being said if you only vote and nothing else you’re literally doing nothing” I’m actually really glad I got this ask because I’d been considering putting down my thoughts on voting in a post or something for a bit now and this seems like a good opportunity to do so. This is basically all off the cuff and it’s very rambly and long so I apologize if this sucks to read lol

So yeah I think I more agree with you than don’t, I think voting in the US is...if not “rigged” at least systemically ineffectual, it’s controlled by the interests of capital and is set up in a fundamentally undemocratic way; on top of that the US is itself an illegitimate settler-colony and empire and you’re essentially choosing the executor of settler-colonialism and empire (i made a post a while back pushing back against the concept of a “left wing president” for this reason). So I definitely am sympathetic to people who don’t vote or simply choose not to, either for well defined ideological reasons against US empire or just a more general sense of it not mattering or having more important day to day activities living under a harsh dictatorship of capital. I also think you’re right in saying that for many people it’s not going to end up being much of a hassle; for my own part, I was able to apply entirely online and my state currently allows absentee ballots with no justification, so voting for me mostly consists of filling out a piece of paper I’ll get in the mail and be able to send back for free. So if you’re in that situation, then yeah, might as well.

As for voting for Biden, I’m not AS against it as some of the people on here are but I wouldn’t go so far as you do and say people who can get registered should vote for him. I think that voting for him solely out of desire to get Trump out is genuinely a perfectly fine reason to do so. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves about what the presidency is or what the US itself is; again, ultimately you’re just voting for the executor of the interests of capital and empire, and those interests shape the presidency more than the other way around. I think this is most evident in the bellicose attitude displayed by both candidates towards China; during the trade war I think a lot of people attributed this to some kind of pet issue of Trump’s, which isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s clear that great power competition with China has become the general focus of the American bourgeoisie and thus Biden has adopted this position as well.

There’s also third parties, which seem to be popular among the left on here, but honestly I’m pretty pessimistic about them. Many take the position of voting for the Green Party in the hopes it’ll reach the 5% threshold, but I really really doubt this’ll be met and I don’t like the GPUS enough in general to vote for them non-pragmatically. To put it bluntly I think most of the GPUS supporters on here are people who supported Bernie in the primaries and got in the mindset of compromising being a communist/socialist with voting for a social democrat. Where this gets problematic is that with Bernie he actually could’ve won AND he had a large movement to try and radicalize people out of, so the decision to compromise was a lot more understandable (I personally supported him in the primaries for this reason- the larger his share of votes before having the primary stolen from him, which was inevitable, the easier it is to divorce people from the Democratic Party); with an uninspiring candidate like Howie Hawkins and a party with essentially no path to victory, I don’t know why we’re even bothering instead of just going all out and voting for a communist. Speaking of, I also know some people (not really on here but definitely on other platforms) who are voting for the PSL ticket which I think is fine, but PSL does a lot of work besides electioneering (unlike the GPUS, who essentially show up every presidential election and neglect to do any other kind of work), so voting for them or not won’t really affect their overall status as a revolutionary party; they’re not really going for the 5% threshold because running candidates isn’t really what they focus on anyway.

But yeah at the end of the day electoralism at the present time is, I think, not an effective strategy for the left to take because the only viable option most of the time is trying to carve out a space within the Democratic Party, which is just. Not a good idea and hasn’t worked, really. So I agree with your point about just voting and nothing else being useless because I think we need to build a popular movement that doesn’t compromise on issues like settler-colonialism and empire first, and once it’s large enough and has a base we can talk about MAYBE running candidates (although I also think the structure of American government is fundamentally flawed in this respect and it might take some sort of great change first before we can do that; this could be a minor revolution changing the structures, a major one where we take power outright, or a strategy of dual power where we create a separate structure first [my suggestion])

I hope this makes any sense at all and isn’t just unreadable garbage lol I tried to respond to as many points as possible but feel free to send me more asks if any of this needs elaboration or if you have other questions etc. Also take a zyrtec or something

5 notes · View notes

cybersecopossum · 3 years

Text

Parler: Less Free Speech, More Analytics

The free speech social media platform that disallows dissenting opinions and promises to farm your data

In the summer of 2020, Youtubers started bring up the social media platform Parler as a new alternative to Twitter and Facebook, after many of the same creaters also promoted Minds, Gab.io, and Candid (the platform that was allegedly a front to run analytics on users that were likely to be troubling). The appeal: free speech. Free to say anything you want and defend your ideas.

Truth be told, I've been to these sites, and I've been disappointed by every one of them. I support free speech, but I have no patience for a platform with the majority of their users are explicitly trolls or seemingly crazy people. These platforms have a habit of rapidly devlolving into holocost and world order conspiracy theories. It's a fine thing to offer everyone to say their piece, but I think apealling to the people that normally can't stay civil on major platforms is a recipe for disaster. Parler, however, has moderation, which seems a bit counter intuitive to free-speech, but it offers a clean image for new members. It's going into it a bit further that reveals that there's a lot more going on than a bunch of conservatives and Trumpettes getting a platform to say their tagline of the week.

My Views on the Relationship between Privacy and Free Speech

This is important, as I am often seen as trying to get away with saying my own crazy spew and not answering for it. That is not my intention. Today the public forum is used by special interest groups for unethical studies on users and as targeting platforms for retaliation. All I want is to seperate speech from identity and livelihood. The express purpose for doing so is to allow people to know what is being said and argue with the ideas while avoiding violence and the distraction of ad hominem. I do not support the use of social media bots at all, and I appreciate removing harassing content, spam, and obvious trolling from a forum. I do not appreciate removing one's sincere opinion while of sound mind or tracking them across platforms and this does a disservice to everyone to either have things hidden from them about a person and their beliefs or reading too far into their behavior and even predicting their real-life behaviors which puts many individuals at risk of violence.

Their Problems with Privacy

When you sign up for Parler, just like Twitter, you have to provide a phone number. This phone number is attached to your account, and by extension, your activity. While this is a way to ensure that people are not easily making replacement, spam, or bot accounts, it's also a bit of you that they get to market. You likely use your cell phone for other social media, it's used for a lot services like shopping rewards programs as well.

Who's interested in your phone number and why? Well, we can take a look at Parler's own Privacy Policy. For them they want to market things to you, identify you along with more personal details if you want to be a part of their influencer network, and to sell as part of their company to whomever that may be. They also allow for 3rd party analytics just like Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to view users on their platform.

Now, depending on how you connect to the platform, either by their webpage or their app, you can expect more information to be taken about your device. If you're using their app, their Privacy Policy specifically states that they will collect your contacts if you permit them. It's already required when you install the app, so by installing it, you already permitted them. More on the app store, on Android, they request to read, modify, and delete the contents of your SD card and take pictures and video from your camera. While these can be used implemented selectively in the code for uploading videos and pictures to your post, it's concerning given their other behaviors, such as requesting other applications that you have installed.

Regardless of whether you're using the web or app, you can expect that 3rd party cookies like those from Google, Amazon, and Facebook will be used to track you while you use the website. This along with information about what posts you view, searches you make on the site, times that you're online and active, and the people you follow make a nice package for people interested in your data, such as Google and Facebook, meaning the same exact companies may still be able to track you and affect your experience browsing online through ad services.

Overall this Privacy Policy leaves a lot to the imagination but still emphasizes enough that they will collect data on you to monetize it as an asset and with 3rd party research and advertising analytics. It is the same problems as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but now with a neat controlled group of a mostly conservative user base. This, in the wrong hands, might be an interesting petri dish for highly-targeted political research.

Just My Privacy? Is that so bad?

Their ToS is a garbage fire, and I highly encourage everyone to read it just for the audacity of what it says outright, and what it carefully leaves out.

The Censorship-Free Twitter Alternative: Now with Censorship!

Probably the goofies thing to come out of Parler is all of the stories of people's accounts getting deleted for sharing their opinions. To add to this, I was having trouble getting my account removed (more on that later, so I opted instead to use the trending hashtags and tag a few popular users in a post where I stated that the website had all of the hallmarks of being shady. I waited over two days to have my account deleted the normal way, but within ten minutes of posting that Parley, I was banned. Amazing. But don't take our words for it, they explicitly tell you that if they don't like you, they'll ban you in section 9 of their ToS!

Coming soon: Worthless Microtransactions!

Section 6 of their ToS describe their virtual items. Interestingly, they outright deny you the right to trade or sell any of the items on the site without their permission. This is interesting not only because they are explictly enforcing the worthlessness of their virtual items, but this also precludes anyone from exchanging their account, and thus all the associated virtual items for money, goods, or services. This means if you grew an engaging account on the platform and a company is interested in buying access to it, you have to ask Parler's permission, and then they may only allow it contingent upon you giving more personal information such as, in their own example of them buying items back from you, your social security number.

Old Issues: The Deleted Sections

Very recently, the ToS have been changed. As you can see in this reddit post from the time of Parler's launch, any user of their platform was legally bound to be ready to defend and idemnify Parler in court for actions you take on the platform, and you are already bound to pay their fees in court if you are defending yourself against them or anyone responsible for Parler. You also were not allowed to sue them or be a beneficiary of a class-action lawsuit against them.

Final Thoughts

Parler is yet another alternative social media site which is has attracted the worst users from other sites right away. This makes the platform less attractive to "normal" users. Interestingly, their banning practices seem to indicate that they only want the conservative, but not too edgy crowd, the kind that is of really big importance socially and politically right now; the middle of the road, fly-over state blue collar family type that got excited about Trump because of the chants and rallies without really understaning the greater policies.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and outright describe Parler's intentions like I know them, because I don't. But I know that if I wanted to do market and polling research on the group of people in Europe and America that fit this general trend of hyper politics, I would curate similarly to Parler, protect myself from litigation from the users, collect as much information as I could on them and share that information with other websites to get a holistic picture of the users. I would make their usage of the platform unempowering and worthless to see what they were willing to do for minimal incentive. I would attract A and B-list figures within the different movements thant have supported the shift in politics and have them promote it for me, as well as get the alternative media sites to do gushing admiration articles on it over and over while more generally well regarded sites scoff and criticize it to get this particular subset of users into this one place where I can observe them.

Bottom line: this website's policies and behaviors are antithetical to free speech. You cannot advocate for free speech and be so anti-privacy in my view. You cannot claim to be a legitimate alternative to other sites when you are curating an environment for a specific group. You cannot be against censorship and then censor users for the most mundane posts that go against your image. This website is DOA, worst than the ones that came before it, because where as the others had hope of being normal that just ran out, this place squashes it right away. Parler is an exclusive right-wing platform and my personal opinion is that it is also a petri dish for analytics for this political persuasion

#conservatism #trump #parler #social media #why are people so into this site #i was on it for two days and it was just like wow we have ted cruz #ted cruz #is a wax golem #politics #privacy #digital rights #free speech #long post #very long post #news #tech #technology

6 notes · View notes

robert-c · 4 years

Text

Thoughts on How to Get Away From Extreme Partisanship

I would really like others to post ideas about this as well. The last time the country was this divided over issues without any apparent compromise available we engaged in a civil war that took roughly 750,000 lives (about 2.4% of the US population at that time). Comparable figures today would be over 8,300,000.

The good news is I don’t think the majority are in irreconcilable camps, but have been misled into believing that they need to pick between two. I think there are several elements to undoing this false choice.

Social Media - When this was little more than sharing your vacation pictures and swapping fashion tips and opinions about music and movies it was a harmless indulgence. Now it has become a major source of misinformation. True, people should do their own fact checking, but despite distrust of our institutions, most everyone’s life experience includes the period when major news outlets checked their facts and had two or more independent sources etc. for what they published. In addition, algorithms that were perhaps intended to send you suggestions for more gardening posts based on your own posts and interests have become vehicles for directing users to more and more extreme and fringe posts.

1. Without stifling opinion, it is still possible to flag demonstrably false statements, and these platforms should do so.

2. Disable or redesign the algorithms to restrict suggestions to non-political issues, leaving people free to conduct their own searches instead of having progressively more narrow and unique posters served up to them.

Mainstream Media – In order to return this to the level of respect it once enjoyed there are several steps it must take.

Emphasize the source of the facts in the reporting and the importance of getting the right facts so as to make clear that all stories are not of equal value.

While embracing new forums and formats to attract and retain younger readers, emphasizing facts must still be paramount.

Abandon “infotainment” completely. Making news out of “anything” in order to fill a predetermined time slot makes it easier to assume the rest of the news is just as frivolous and “made up”.

And perhaps most important, eliminate or make quite clear that the commentary and opinion pieces are not news, and not facts. Crawlers on the bottom of the screen continually announcing that this is just opinion and not fact might be a good start.

The next most important step has to be either a third political party composed principally of moderates and “center of the road” or some redefining of the current parties. Ever since 1980 when Ronald Reagan essentially sold out the Republican party to the religious right, it has been on a course toward this shameful state of racist, white, evangelical fascism, i.e. “Trumpism”. The hardest core support for this agenda is at most a third of the electorate. The rest of Republicans have gone along, I think, largely due to habitual party loyalties and/or an (unfounded) fear of the so called “left” due to lies etc. [Just a fact check, the “left” hasn’t been close to an organized, single philosophy movement since the 60’s.] For the Democrats the “open tent” allows it to give some voice to a broader section of the populace, but at the price of being easily labeled “extreme”.

Let’s assume that each part basically commands the principal loyalty of about 50% of the voters. There’s a middle ground of independents, possibly no more than 5% who may truly switch between parties (47.5%, 47.5% and 5%). Now let’s imagine what would happen if the GOP kicked out the “Trumpites” [I started to go with “trumpets” since they make so loud and brassy a sound, but then decided not to insult a fine musical instrument]. So now we have the Party of American White Nationalists (the PAWNs) or perhaps simply the Trump Party commanding unquestioning and unreasoning loyalty of about 33% of the electorate. Now according to the math above that would leave the GOP with about 14.5% of the electorate, which is no doubt why they have been reluctant do so.

But consider this; that would leave the GOP with the following core principles: fiscal responsibility, minimal but sensible regulation of business (principally to ensure competition), and a desire to effect social change through example rather than fiat (e.g. as Barry Goldwater wanted to do with civil rights – the government and its contractors would not discriminate in hiring etc. based on race, religion, gender, creed or national origin, believing that private businesses would follow.) That nominal 14.5% potentially grows to as large as the Trumpites, since moderate Democrats might vote for them as well. But even if they are not outright winners in sheer numbers, their willingness to work with others to craft real solutions makes them and the rest of the Democrats a clear coalition winner since the Trumpites don’t compromise their rigid positions.

Remember that the radical right is opposed to all change in the status quo, while the “left” or progressives consists of many different causes and issues not all universally shared among themselves. However, there is a case to be made that cooperating with moderates gives their ideas and agendas a chance to be heard, and eventually attracting more supporters, whereas letting the right wing have control shuts down all chance of progress.

So, part one – let’s get back to the facts; the real, verifiable facts. Part two – let’s consider letting the extremists have their own minority party that will never garner a majority as long as cooler, moderate heads prevail without giving in to them.

1 note · View note

crimethinc · 5 years

Text

Why the Turkish Invasion Matters: Addressing the Hard Questions about Imperialism and Solidarity

In the following overview, we address some common questions about why it is important to oppose the Turkish invasion of Rojava and suggest an analysis of what it means for world politics.

For those who have not followed the intricacies of the situation in Syria, Turkey, and throughout Kurdistan, it can be difficult to understand what’s at stake here. We are fortunate that some of us have spent time in Rojava, Turkey, and the surrounding regions. We are writing from relative comfort, far from the massacres the Turkish military is enacting, but with our loved ones in Rojava at the forefront of our thoughts—along with everyone else who has suffered grievously throughout the Syrian civil war.

War doesn’t just involve bombs and bullets. It is also a contest of narrative involving propaganda and information control. The Turkish government has been censoring news reporting, cutting off internet access, and forcing social media corporations to silence its victims; it has even succeeded in tricking some ostensible leftists into legitimizing its agenda. All that we have to counter this is our own lived experiences, our international connections with other ordinary people like ourselves, and volunteer-driven projects like this publishing platform that reject all state and corporate agendas.

The timing of Turkey’s invasion has likely been determined in part by Donald Trump’s response to the impeachment inquiry. US Presidents have a longstanding tradition of initiating military interventions to distract from domestic issues. The Trump version of this tradition is to intentionally reignite a civil war by pretending to “end” it. Worldwide, the far right seems to be trying to co-opt “anti-war” rhetoric the same way they appropriated “anti-globalization” slogans, while actually intensifying military aggression and capitalism. This is the same looking-glass-world right-wing “isolationism” that we saw when Hitler was annexing territory in Europe. We seem to have progressed very rapidly from repeating the early 1930s to re-enacting the later 1930s.

The betrayal of the people of Rojava is so shocking that it has even humiliated many otherwise shameless US politicians. Unless we create significant pressure via disruptive direct action, we expect that the US government will wait until the ethnic cleansing of Rojava is a fait accompli before doing anything to respond. Whatever happens, the Turkish invasion has reignited a civil war that was drawing to a close, ensuring many more years of bloodshed throughout the Middle East. No compassionate human being could support this.

Graffiti in front of the courthouse in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 12, 2019.

“Shouldn’t anti-imperialists want the US to withdraw from Syria?”

Supporting Trump’s apparent troop withdrawal from Syria in the name of anti-imperialism is foolish, if not downright disingenuous.

US involvement in Syria looks much different than it has in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well over 100,000 US soldiers occupied Iraq for over half a decade. By contrast, at the very most, there have only been a couple thousand US troops in Syria—less than 2% the number deployed to Iraq. US soldiers in Syria serve an advisory role, carrying out airstrikes but never taking on frontline combat duty.

Even after Trump’s announcement that he is pulling the US military out of Syria, 1000 US soldiers will remain in the country. Opening the way for the Turkish invasion apparently required moving only 50 special forces personnel—it was just a question of shuffling them out of the way of Turkish bombs. In fact, the US military has sent 14,000 more troops to the Middle East since May, specifically bolstering deployments in Saudi Arabia. We are not seeing a troop withdrawal—we are seeing a policy shift towards permitting the extermination of comparatively egalitarian projects while supporting more authoritarian regimes with a troop buildup.

So anti-imperialists who see this as a win against US militarism are suckers, plain and simple. Trump has done nothing to downsize the US empire. He’s simply given Erdoğan go-ahead to build the Turkish empire, to carry out ethnic cleansing while US troops look on. This is hardly unprecedented in the history of US imperialism.

On another occasion, it would be worthwhile to examine the word “anti-imperialist” in greater detail. We frequently see this word employed by the partisans of some rival empire—typically Russia or China, but not only those. We may need to use a different word for those who are consistent in opposing all empires, state interventions, and forms of hierarchical power. Anti-colonial, for example. Or, clearer still, anarchist.

For years, we have heard statists from various corners of the left accusing anarchists of being tools for neoliberalism on account of the fact that we oppose the Russian, Chinese, and Nicaraguan governments as well as the United States government. This is bad-faith name-calling from people who may have a guilty conscience about their own outright support for authoritarian governments—the same way that Trump supporters like to allege that George Soros, a Jewish billionaire, is behind anti-Trump activity while they toady to a billionaire for free. It is absurd to accuse anarchists of being tools of neoliberalism for identifying the ways that China and Russia participate in neoliberalism; it is doubly absurd to accuse anarchists of being tools of imperialism for criticizing the US giving Erdoğan permission to invade Rojava.

The fact that some people who oppose US interventionism can be suckered into cheerleading when the US government gives another authoritarian government the green light to kill thousands of people illustrates the consequences of founding one’s politics opportunistically on incidental factors, such as opposition to a particular prevailing empire, rather than on ethical principles such as opposition to all forms of domination.

Heartbreaking naiveté from supposed anti-war activist Medea Benjamin—a tweet now soaked in blood.

“Are the Kurds just shills for the US?”

The fact that the US government so readily betrayed the people of Rojava undercuts the allegation that they are just pawns in a US strategy. Organizers in the region were pursuing the same agenda of multi-ethnic self-determination for many years before the US found it convenient to support their struggle against the Islamic State.

Should we blame groups like the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Rojava for coordinating with the US? Anarchists in Rojava have argued that the people there were forced to choose between being slaughtered by the Islamic State and working with the US government. Considering that they were nearly conquered by the Islamic State in 2014, it’s hard to argue with this.

When we look at the issue on an individual scale, we’re hesitant to blame a woman who, not being connected to a supportive community, calls the police when she is attacked. The police are unlikely to help her, of course—and relying on them only reproduces the structural factors that cause poverty and violence. But if we want people to adopt our total opposition to policing, we have to give them better options.

Similarly, if we want to live in a world in which people in places like Rojava will not welcome the support of the US government, we will have to offer credible alternatives via social movements and international solidarity campaigns. Anarchists have been seeking ways to do this for years. Right now, that means doing everything we can to impose consequences on Turkey and the US for this invasion.

“Do the Kurds support Zionism and Islamophobia?”

One of the chief hallmarks of the social experiment that has emerged in Rojava over the past several years is that, in contrast to the various forms of ethnic and religious nationalism so prevalent in the region, it is multi-ethnic and inclusive. A significant part of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Rojava is Muslim. It may have been attractive for some Islamophobes in the US to support Kurdish resistance to the Islamic State while the US was endorsing it, but we should not blame the people in Rojava for this.

The Barzani Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq has historically maintained good relations with both Turkey and Israel, but different Kurdish parties have very different agendas. There are many fair criticisms to be made of the PYD, SDF, and other structures in Rojava, but it’s a real stretch to accuse them of being Zionists. On the contrary, by and large, they deserve credit for being neither pro-Zionist nor anti-Jewish in a region where so many actors are one or the other.

“Did the Kurds betray the Syrian Revolution?”

As anarchists, we consider apologists for Assad beneath contempt. Those who explain away the original uprising against the Assad regime as a CIA operation are conspiracy theorists who deny the agency of the grassroots participants. Blessing tyranny with the name “socialism” and legitimizing state violence on the grounds of sovereignty is bootlicking, pure and simple. The original revolt in Syria was a response to state oppression, just like the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. We affirm the right of the oppressed to revolt even when there seems to be no hope of success. If not for this sort of courage, humanity would still be living under hereditary monarchs. For want of more such courage, our societies are descending deeper into tyranny once again.

Guided by the experiences of those who participated in the original uprising in Syria, we can learn a lot about the hazards of militarism in revolutionary struggle. Once the conflict with Assad’s government shifted from strikes and subversion to militarized violence, those who were backed by state or institutional actors were able to centralize themselves; power collected in the hands of Islamists and other reactionaries. As the Italian insurrectionist anarchists argued, “the force of insurrection is social, not military.” The uprising didn’t spread far enough fast enough to become a revolution. Instead, it turned into a gruesome civil war, bringing the so-called “Arab Spring” to a close and with it the worldwide wave of revolts.

The fact that the uprising in Syria ended in an ugly civil war is not the fault of those who dared everything to resist the Assad regime. Rather, once again, it shows that we were not courageous or organized enough to support them properly. The unfortunate outcome of the Syrian uprising illustrates the disastrous consequences of relying on state governments like the US to support those who stand up for themselves against oppressors and aggressors. The current Turkish invasion confirms the same thing.

Some people outside Syria also blame the Kurds for this failure. It strikes us as hypocritical that anyone who did not go to Syria to participate in the struggle would accuse the Kurds of sitting out the first phase of fighting. The only people from whom this charge carries any weight are the ones who participated in the first phase of the Syrian uprising themselves.

We are sympathetic to this frustration we have heard from Syrian refugees. We have learned a great deal from Syrians who took courageous risks in the revolution only to be forced to flee along the Balkan Route, ending up trapped in places like Greece and Slovenia. Many Syrian refugees have contributed admirably to social struggles in these countries—despite not being there by choice, despite the daily xenophobia and oppression they have confronted. Many of them have since been incarcerated or deported by racist border regimes.

From where we are situated, it is not easy to judge the decisions of the members of an oppressed minority in Syria, far from most of the fighting at the onset of the revolt, that has historically been betrayed again and again by other groups in the region. Perhaps, had Kurds and others in Rojava immediately joined in the struggle against Assad, it could have turned out differently. If that is true, then the lesson of this tragedy is that it is crucial to build trust and solidarity across ethnic and religious lines before revolt breaks out. This is yet another reason to concern ourselves with the fate of the various ethnic groups on the receiving end of the Turkish invasion.

Sadly, it is possible that even if the uprising had toppled Assad, Syria would be little better off today—look at Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Rather than simply replacing one government with another, the most important thing we can hope to accomplish in struggle is to open up autonomous spaces of solidarity and self-determination in which people can explore different ways of relating. To some extent, the experiment in Rojava accomplished this.

But even if the people in Rojava today were somehow responsible for the failure of the Syrian uprising, would they deserve to be slaughtered for this?

No, they would not.

The invasion has just begun.

“But I saw somewhere on the Internet that ‘the Kurds’ are involved in ethnic cleansing? Aren’t they holding people in detainment camps?”

Anywhere there are prisons—anywhere there is a penal system—there is oppression. We are prison abolitionists; we don’t endorse incarceration of any kind. At the same time, there are thousands of mass murderers among the ISIS captives who are determined to resume killing as soon as they are free. This presents a difficult situation for everyone who hopes to see multi-ethnic reconciliation and peaceful co-existence in the region.

In any case, there were jails in Iraq in 2003—and that didn’t keep us from trying to stop Bush’s invasion of Iraq. We don’t have to endorse everything the SDF or PYD is doing to oppose the military aggression of Turkey—a more carceral state.

Likewise, we have seen reports of violence in Rojava under the current “self-administration.” We don’t consider Rojava a utopia; as anarchists, we have criticisms to make about the political structures there, as well. But we have to see things in proper proportion. Relative to the brutality carried out by most of the other actors in the region, the SDF and related groups in Rojava have been comparatively restrained.

The detainment of ISIS fighters along with women and children from the Islamic State is hardly the worst thing that could have happened. From what some of us heard in Rojava during the final phase of the struggle against Islamic State territory, the only people anywhere in the world who wanted to take ISIS prisoners off the hands of the SDF were Iraqi Shia militias. Around the time of the capture of Baghouz, they were reportedly offering the SDF money and weapons in exchange for captured Iraqi ISIS fighters in hopes of taking violent revenge on them. To their credit, SDF declined to turn the captives over.

This is not to legitimize detainment, but to emphasize the intensity of strife and hatred in Syria and Iraq after so much war. Many of these captives would probably have been executed in short order by the Syrian or Iraqi governments, or tortured slowly and methodically by the Shia militias, rather than given food and medical care as they are in Rojava. Indeed, some in the region have criticized the SDF for being too soft on these prisoners. If Turkey or its Syrian mercenary proxies enable the ISIS detainees to escape and resume their former activities, everyone who argued in favor of executing the captives will claim to have been vindicated.

Click on the image to download a printable PDF of the poster.

“But Turkey says the organizations in Rojava are terrorists and claims to be threatened by them.”

It is absurd to argue that ordinary people in Turkey were really threatened by the experiment in Rojava. The US military had already agreed to oversee patrols all along the border—and many of those on the other side of that border are Kurdish people who have a lot in common with the people in Rojava. A free Rojava doesn’t threaten the Turkish people; it threatens Erdoğan’s regime and the oppression that Kurdish people face in Turkey. This is an ethno-nationalist war, pure and simple.

There has been violent struggle in Turkey between the Turkish state and Kurdish movements and armed groups for decades. Erdoğan believes that he can keep maintaining supremacy by force of arms, both inside Turkey and against the surrounding countries, continuing a legacy that includes the systematic genocide of over one million Armenians just a century ago.

Surely, now that Turkey has reignited the Syrian civil war, far more Turkish civilians are going to be killed than would have died otherwise. Hopefully, that will clarify for some people in Turkey that state militarism does not make them safer, but endangers them as well as those on the other side of the shells and bombs.

“But Turkey says it has to seize Rojava to resettle Syrian refugees there.”

It’s not clear exactly what Turkey’s plans are for the region, nor whom they hope to settle there; the majority of the Syrian refugees in Turkey are not from Rojava. Chiefly, Turkey would like to get defiant Kurdish people away from its borders in order to stifle Kurdish independence movements.

In any case, for Turkey to use military force to murder or displace millions of people and replace them with an entirely different population is the very definition of ethnic cleansing. The fact that they are announcing ahead of time that they intend to commit war crimes is shocking.

“Does opposing the Turkish invasion legitimize the US military?”

As anarchists, we don’t believe the US military can do any good in the world. But no one has to legitimize the US military to oppose a Turkish invasion. We are not calling for the US military to resolve the situation; we are calling out the parties responsible for this tragedy—the US and Turkish governments and all the corporations that help set their agendas—and pressuring them to put a stop to it.

When Hitler seized Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, no one had to affirm or legitimize any state government or agency to oppose those invasions. Rather, by making it as inconvenient as possible for anyone to stand by while such tragedies take place, we show our principled opposition to injustice.

Likewise, the betrayal of the Kurds should make it clear to anyone who still puts their faith in the US government—or any government—that we will only get as much peace in the world as we are able to establish by our own efforts, doing all we can to resolve conflicts horizontally while defending ourselves against the vertical power structures of those who aspire to rule.

Fallacies such as “If you’re against the Turkish invasion, you must be in favor of US imperialism” illustrate the pitfalls of binary thinking. It’s easier to understand what is at stake in this situation if we recognize that there are at least three basic sides to today’s global conflicts, each representing a different visions of the future:

Neoliberals of all stripes, from Lindsay Graham and Hillary Clinton to supposedly leftist parties like SYRIZA in Greece and the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil. Though they disagree about the details, they share a common aim of using networked global state governance to stabilize the world for capitalism.

Nationalists like Trump, Erdogan, and ISIS, who have made their complicity clear enough in the course of this affair. This category also includes Assad, Putin, and other demagogues who—like the neoliberals—are often at odds with each other, but all pursue the same vision of a post-neoliberal world of competing ethno-states.

Social movements for liberation that actually seeking to foster egalitarian self-determination based in autonomy and solidarity. Much of what we have seen in Rojava fits this category, though hardly all of it does.

When nationalists collaborate against a social experiment like the one in Rojava, calling for resistance should not mean endorsing the neoliberals who previously administered peace and war. On the contrary, we have to build up our social movements while breaking with both nationalist/militarist and neoliberal/reformist agendas. Otherwise, we will forever be manipulated by one or the other, either directly or out of fear of the other group achieving supremacy.

“How can we hope to stop Turkey, one of the world’s most powerful militaries?”

We may not succeed in forcing the US and Turkish governments to halt the invasion of Rojava. But even if we don’t, there are important things we can accomplish by taking action and valuable opportunities we will miss if we do not.

The invasion of Rojava is taking place against a global backdrop of intensifying nationalism, strife, and authoritarianism. We have to understand it as a single battle in a much larger conflict. Situating it in the context of the larger worldwide struggles taking place right now, we can identify several objectives that are absolutely within our reach right now:

We can show the complicity between nationalists like Trump and Erdogan and ISIS, and delegitimize them in the public eye by association with each other.

We can advance an anti-state position as the only reliable form of solidarity with targeted peoples against state oppression and colonialism—not just US imperialism, but also Turkish, Russian, and Chinese imperialism, among others.

We can legitimize and popularize forms of direct action as the only way to effectively pressure the authorities. When electoral politics has failed to offer any meaningful progress towards social change, we have to accustom people to other approaches.

If ISIS is able to escalate its activity again—if there is no peace or positive prospect in the Middle East for another decade—we want everyone in the world to know whose fault it is and that we did everything we possibly could to stop it.

The stakes are high, but if we fight hard, we can come out of this nightmare one step closer to a world without wars. Or, failing that, a world in which we are at least fighting in conflicts of our own choosing, not senseless tragedies like this.

A solidarity action in Flensburg, Germany opposing the Turkish invasion.

31 notes · View notes

guyveranimefan87-blog · 5 years

Text

About Hate Speech...

As You all know Tumblr is not a place for the faint of the heart, as every opinion You share can, and probably would get some kind of hateful, harmful comment. And as many of us here, I accepted it as a price for freedom of speech, since everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, regardless of how dumb, angry or hate-filled it may be.

At least until I saw how hate speech can spill over to the real life.

But, some context is needed, since I doubt people outside of Poland would know about this.

Not to mention the fact, that political situation in Poland is now such a cluster#uck, that even living here I sometimes have problems with grasping what the hell is happening.

So, prepare for a very uncoordinated, and fragmented rant...

For the last few years political climate in Poland had been slowly becoming more and more toxic, to a degree that leader of the ruling party is calling people not supporting him "worse sort of Poles" as well as "traitors", "communists and thieves" and other nice things like that.

Sure it could get nasty before, with members of two biggest political parties in Poland, right-wing Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law & Justice) and centre-right Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform) were taking verbal shots at each other, but not to such a degree, and not with such venom.

It all went downhill in 2010 with Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash in Smolensk, which took the lives of 96 people, including President of Poland Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria, as well as the former President of Poland in exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, high-ranked military officers, president of the National Bank of Poland, and prominent politicians from Law & Justice Party.

Which was a huge tragedy for everyone in Poland, regardless of their political sympathies, but since Chairman of the Law and Justice Party, Jarosław Kaczyński was president's twin brother, and took it very personally, supporting multiple conspiracy theories claiming that the crash was a political assassination ordered by Russia and / or his chief political adversary former prime minister of Poland and the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk.

Since 2015, when Law & Justice had won parliamentary elections "assassination theory" had became an official explanation of the Smolensk Crash, with special Parliamentary Committee of Investigation being created with the sole goal of proving it, even though despite their huge funds, and broad prerogatives they hadn't been able to find a shred of evidence pointing to the assassination.

Some political scientists even call it "Smolensk Religion" since it has markings of a cult, with deifying the "martyred" president, and vilifying Donald Tusk and his supporters as pure evil, with instances verbal and physical violence against "heretics", and promotion of an idea that if a person does not believe in assassination, then he or she is automatically a traitor and/or Russian agent.

Banner reads: “Before President was murdered in Smolensk, he was betrayed in Poland”

Thus, we got to the situation, where hate speech and outright death threats to the members of the opposition were dismissed as being of "no consequence", while any form of criticism against Our Glorious Righteous and Catholic Government is a serious offence that can end with person being prosecuted and dumped into jail.

Above: Right-wing activists “hanging” portraits of liberal politicians as “traitors”, and “fake Poles”.

I know it sounds dramatic and kinda dystopian, but let me give You an example.

Ever since Law & Justice gained power, they had been trying to overturn judicial system and make it subservient to the government, by claiming that judges are "elite class" that should be purged and replaced with "proper patriots" that would understand that "national interest" is more important than "some laws".

Their actions include government sponsored hate campaigns against judges (!), and creating bills that make removing them a lot easier, even if said bills are non-constitutional.

This led to many protests from the people, and wearing t-shirts with the words "Constitution" printed on them became a rather popular way of reminding the government, that they are breaking the laws.

So, what Infallible Polish Government had done with that fact?

Well, they deemed such t-shirts and other accessories bearing the word "Constitution" to be a... hate speech, and wearing them in public can lead to being accused of... public disturbance. Yes, it is real...

And now, let’s get into crux of the matter.

In my country we have a something called Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy a.k.a WOŚP, roughly translated into "The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity", which is the biggest, and most recognizable non-governmental, non-profit, charity organization in Poland.

It was created in 1993 by a journalist, musician, tv-personality and a radio host Jerzy Owsiak, with a goal of "Protecting Health and Saving Children's Lives by Providing Medical Equipment to Public Hospitals", as during that time public hospitals were dramatically underfunded, and many of them lacked the funds to buy, or repair their basic, life-saving equipment, following the fall of communism.

The first "Grand Finale" or a day-long public fundraiser accompanied by various events such as concerts, sporting competitions etc, turned out to be a great success, enabling the GOCC to fund equipment for several pediatric hospitals, so it was continued every year for the last 24 years, earning 297,214,654.37 USD, becoming a cherished national tradition, and expanding to every place in the world that has even the tiniest polish community.

Along with the GOCC's Grand Finales Owsiak also created Pol'and'Rock Festival (Formerly known as "Woodstock Festival Poland"), a free rock festival dubbed "the biggest open-air festival in Europe", as a way of thanking all the volunteers for all their hard work in making their fundraiser work, which also grew to become a cherished annual tradition.

Unfortunately, when there's success, there's jealousy and hatred. And The Great Orchestra is not an exception.

You see, despite being an icon of charity Jerzy Owsiak had always been quite controversial, as he has very liberal worldview, for example endorsing religious tolerance, LGBT rights, or bringing up controversial topics like abortion, or immigration in public media, making him Public Enemy #01 for the Far Right as a whole.

Additionally since Owsiak is a loud supporter for the separation of Church and State, quite a few influential clergymen in Poland try to paint him as a hedonistic, amoral heretic, who "steals money that should've been donated for The Church".

Which wouldn't be that much of a problem, even if Poland is predominantly a Catholic country... if not for the fact that our government is a Far Right nightmare I mentioned above, and they had done everything in their power to bring him down, for example pretending that GOCC does not exist on public TV, painting Owsiak as a greedy fraud, and creating laws deliberately targeting his initiatives.

Still, despite all that obstacles, and outright hatred from government's supporters, this year we had another Grand Finale in several big cities, raising over 90,000,000 PLN for hospitals, beating the last year's record, which should be the cause for celebration, and it was... until something happened that destroyed it all.

In Gdansk, The Great Orchestra was openly endorsed by it's long-time mayor, Paweł Adamowicz (Who had been re-elected for the last 21 years), so during the official finale of the fundraiser he was on the stage with several of his closest people, giving a impassioned speech about how people once again has shown that love and mercy win over hatred and spite...

And then he was attacked by a man with a knife, who managed to stab him several times in the chest and stomach, also being able to grab a microphone about him being "Agent of Justice", claiming that he was "A victim of previous government" and "made them pay" by killing the mayor.

He was quickly captured, but wounds he gave Adamowicz proven to be fatal, as he died in a hospital a day later, despite efforts by doctors, making him first victim of politically motivated murder in Poland since 1922.

And yet, despite that ruling party and it's supporters immediately rushed to blame... the opposition, for "creating the atmosphere of hate", blaming them in general, and Owsiak in particular for the crime, with some people even calling Adamowicz's murderer... a hero, and gathering money to "buy him the best lawyer".

[Andrzej X] Fundraiser for a lawyer for the man with the knife is in progress.

[Rafał X] I’ll give my money for that.

[Andreas X] I wonder whom he (Mayor Adamowicz) would call for his last rites. Priest or an imam? (Adamowicz wanted refugees from Syria to be allowed to come to Poland, which led to much hate from Alt-Right)

[Wielki] I wonder if there is a GOCC logo on any doctor or equipment in place he is now???

[Józef X] As they say... Karma always returns.

[Radosław X] Was it the same Adamowicz, who sold himself to Germans??...

[Henryka X] They (The opposition) would tell EU that PIS is at fault.

[Rafał X] It was fight between gangs controlling the city.

[Jarek X] The guy who had attacked him is a True Polish Hero.

[Klara X] Nothing to grieve here, neither him, not PO as a whole.

Apparently they hadn't noticed any fault on their own side, and are content with blaming the others, and making everything work as it did before. And I dread to see what would happen next, since we already crossed that one line...

So yeah, now I see that “it’s only words, they don’t hurt anyone” argument is a bullshit.

#hate speech #poland #tragedy #murder #charity #fascism #right wing #politics

14 notes · View notes

berniesrevolution · 6 years

Link

Earlier this month, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and an absent Google representative found themselves before the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC), where they endured an uncomfortable grilling on topics ranging from the manipulation and value of user data to how one might police the “truth.” These lines of questioning inevitably generated vague speculation about regulation, though it’s difficult to imagine the scope of federal action that would be required in a serious effort to confront the crisis unfolding on the backs of privatized platforms.

It’s popular to refer to digital platforms as town squares, but the shopping mall is a more apt metaphor: they are built to approximate the participatory feel of an open market, while their corridors are ruthlessly designed for the purposes of encouraging consumption and maximizing profit. Depression, anxiety, hate-mongering, fear, and conspiratorial untruths are all acceptable outcomes so long as they are expressed, consciously or otherwise, in the service of growth.

Social media’s monarchs are more entrenched than ever. Still, its horizons remain murky.

These platform structures are, more and more, the dominant modes of abstract social organization: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have a combined market capitalization larger than the French GDP, and in an earlier hearing, Mark Zuckerberg struggled to name a single serious competitor when pressed on his company’s monopoly status. It’s clear that platform capitalism thrives at the expense of public discourse, and that its monarchs are more entrenched than ever. Still, its horizons remain murky.

The loudest, most frequent response to the crisis of platform consolidation has arguably been an appeal to better markets, such as the progressive coalition Freedom from Facebook’s effort to push the Federal Trade Commission to spin Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger into competing services. Law professor and New York Times contributor Tim Wu has similarly advanced this line, advocating for an aggressive antitrust campaign against the likes of Google and Amazon—including in his forthcoming book, The Curse of Bigness. If we break up the giants, the thinking goes, their progeny will improve each other in a rush to pan for attention. “We live in America,” he recently told The Vergecast, “which has a strong and proud tradition of breaking up companies that are too big for inefficient reasons.”

It’s hard to justify Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as anything short of stabs at monopoly, but there are hard limits to antitrust—namely, that large platforms appeal to users precisely because of the network effects of intense consolidation. Smaller services routinely compete for attention-time, but typically do so by differentiating themselves and courting niche audiences rather than taking the behemoths head-on. Nobody thinks of Etsy as a replacement for Amazon, and not even Google+ could effectively compete as a direct replacement for Facebook. Unless it’s billed a subcultural phenomenon, people don’t see the point in adapting to a new platform until it reaches a critical mass—even though they’re the exact people it would need to get there.

Mastodon is a perfect example of the limits of platform competition. Optimistically billed as a community-focused Twitter-killer, the fledgling social network rode last month’s controversies into a gauntlet of fawning coverage that dared users to climb out of the Nazi-infested swamp. Mastodon is relatively free of hate speech and malicious bots, but few people made the leap: an unofficial bot currently reports around 230,000 users. This is partially due to individual preference for the familiar, but structural inertia presents a much stronger obstacle. Like any newcomer, Mastodon necessarily lacks the abundance of celebrities, journalists, and unhinged presidential proclamations that give Twitter the feel of a micro-celebritized commons. In a piece hailing the platform’s design strength, Wired editor Brendan Nystedt acknowledged its central deficiency in a bold understatement: “The only thing I truly miss from the old birdsite? My friends!” This isn’t a bug; it’s the exact reason we can’t look to a Mastodon, or an Ello, or a Gab for salvation—any more than libertarian seasteads can expect to cure traffic or gentrification. We need to make our platforms better, not wait for better platforms.

Given that these services often take the form of natural monopolies, others have suggested that, rather than break up the big platforms, we should subject them to stringent federal regulation as public utilities—or, as Platform Capitalism author Nick Srnicek has suggested, outright nationalization. But most digital platforms are transnational entities, meaning that regulatory efforts are narrowly limited to individual protections on the basis of citizenship (as we have seen with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation). Otherwise, there are devastating implications for nationalization beyond our borders. Would a situation where the United States unilaterally dictates the policies of a platform shaping Paraguayan political discourse be any better than one in which Russian oligarchs are free to transmute capital into American speech?

If we’re to imagine a meaningful path for Congress to take, it’s worth considering the context of the recent SIC hearing. The previous month, conspiracy news site Infowars was systematically cut from Apple, Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, and a host of other platforms (Twitter followed suit after Alex Jones went on a Periscope rampage and berated its CEO at the hearing itself). The ensuing conversation was predictably frustrating, but enlightening insofar as it revealed how people conceptualize digital platforms. Ostensibly right-wing Infowars journalist Millie Weaver, for example, argued that Facebook has no right to ban private individuals, on the grounds that it is “public” rather than “privately owned.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #the baffler #capitalism #silicon valley #monopolies #facebook #Twitter #google #nationalization #democratic socialism #progressive #progressive movement

11 notes · View notes

beinglibertarian · 6 years

Text

Rolling Stone Gathers Moss

“Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by “Raoul Duke” first appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in November 1971. The preceding quote from that publication sums up the environment that led to the rise and, eventually, the fall of the great Rolling Stone itself; the shift away from the counterculture that it once represented and the pathological deterioration of principled liberalism.

If these words were to be circulated on the campuses of U.C. Berkley today the same way they were in 1971, you could expect firebombs launched through windows, police cruisers overturned, and any poor fool in a red hat to be viciously assaulted with a bike lock. University students today surmise that musings this offensive, have been manufactured by the primitive IBM computer that once spat out numbers used to help exterminate Jews in the Nazi death camps; a right-wing hate machine. Or maybe Milo Yiannapolous wrote it?

The suffocating media bias of the 1960s was difficult to escape. A lethargic gray specter of middle-class America was distributed with cunning sterility through the generic, bogus smiles of cable news networks and traditional print. Despite the election and assassination of Kennedy and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, if you had turned on a T.V. this was still Eisenhower’s America: regimented, religious, conservative. And the cultural vacuum created by the Eisenhower years had began to suck even harder with Lyndon Banes Johnson at the helm.

American media was out of touch with this new generation. Elitist authoritarians were preaching their moral superiority stamped with stars and stripes to a generation of cynics. These kids didn’t have a fucking clue what they wanted, but they wanted no part of what they were being given. So rose Rolling Stone, a counterculture bible for babyboomers, co-founded by Jann Wenner.

The adjective “cruel,” meaning to willfully cause pain or suffering to others and feeling no concern about it, paired with the noun “faggot,” the antiquated pejorative used to define a homosexual man, is Thompson’s description of the media community of the day. A description evidently endorsed through publication by Jann Wenner in 1971. Because according to Thompson: “…there is no such thing as objective journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

Wenner today lives with his common law partner Matt Nye in, I’m guessing, New York City. He gives big money to Democrat candidates and makes millions off fabricated stories about the gang-rape epidemic at the University of Virginia. Then loses that money and gives more money to Democrat candidates. Wenner’s closet homosexuality in 1971 didn’t have him take any offence to Thompson’s comments, or at least not enough to hinder publishing the “hate speech.” Maybe it was the dollar signs flashing in his eyes, knowing that something as wild as Thompson’s Vegas adventure was a viable revenue stream. Or maybe liberals back then had more important things to bitch about.

Things were different in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were a just cause. The catalyst for a just movement of equal rights for women and gays and minorities was free speech, of which Jann Wenner was a huge proponent. When students at U.C. Berkley marched in the streets in the 1960s, it was an attack on the elitist, authoritarians and an establishment hellbent on keeping opposing viewpoints and the ideas of personal liberty stifled. The gang of “cruel faggots” kept the official narrative running but no one under 30 was listening.

The whole goddamn world had had enough of the travesty of war in Southeast Asia. There was no ignoring the ineptitude of American politics. The only reasonable thing to do in 1969 was to drive out to Altamont for the weekend, load up on heinous chemicals, hunker down and rethink your approach to the political process.

Thompson, the then-young, liberal anti-hero, could often be found gobbling LSD and firing his guns (he was a lifetime member of the NRA) at propane bottles for a crowd of jeering burnouts or Bay area bikers at his fortified compound, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek Colorado.

It was Jann Wenner’s idea to put Hunter, with all of his fear and loathing, on to the campaign trail in 1972. Why not get the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels? Hunter was someone with a penchant for dealing with vicious thugs and sick freaks gone crazy on power, someone who could draw a parallel between Richard Nixon and Sonny Barger.

Thompson’s openly-biased, subjective and wild account of the 1972 presidential election was the red Chevy convertible of campaign coverage. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on repeat and at full volume, barrelling across the country at 110 miles an hour or so and in search of an honest politician. In Hunter’s eyes, the only one that even came close was George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota.

McGovern’s non-interventionist platform focused on a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and a Milton Freidman inspired, negative income-tax meant to replace the bureaucratic burden of social welfare programs and a complicated tax code. Thompson’s version of events is the story of an idealistic underdog fighting against the odds only to be crushed by postmodern Americanism and the establishment incumbent, “Tricky Dick Nixon.” McGovern might have owed a White House win, in part, to Thompson’s and Rolling Stone’s relentless support had he not owed his White House loss to the mental distress of his vice-presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton.

There’s no way to properly explain how great Rolling Stone was in those early years. How well the magazine represented the anti-establishment culture, individual liberty and equality for everyone. It can’t be compared to anything else because there was nothing else, only the traditional mainstream garbage and Rolling Stone.

In the four decades that followed, the magazine continually fell behind market trends in the music industry, clinging nostalgically to some bygone era. They were late to the party covering punk in the 70’s. While they tried to figure out what had happened in 1991 Seattle they had totally dropped the ball on hip-hop. All of a sudden it was three years later, Kurt Cobain was already dead and they had lost so much ground in the L.A. scene that the black community had given up on them.

Wenner had pompously brushed off having any type of internet media strategy until around 2009, when he appointed one of his sons in charge of the “digital media” division. The type of position acquired only by a millionaire trust-fund brat of a rich liberal.

For years, Rolling Stone was unable to get a handle on what was happening in music or technology. Incompetence was a bad rash that spread through the entire organization. Getting caught with the University of Virginia gang-rape lies was an obvious black eye on the magazine. Wenner’s ability to make sound decisions was in question. His son should have been sent to North Dakota to learn how to weld. Despite all of that, the magazine was still making money, selling something like 1.5 million copies monthly. Not that anyone would admit to reading it or spending money on it.

On February 20, 2005 Hunter Thompson blew his own brains out in the kitchen of Owl Farm. His chronic alcohol and drug abuse had rendered his writing profitless and that was of no use to Rolling Stone. He had survived the last 10 years by republishing old articles and collections of his work from different outlets. He had already lost faith in the American political process. After Bill Clinton failed to appease his concerns over firearms, marijuana legalization and the American constitution, Hunter simply lost interest and poured himself a stiff drink.

One of the core tenets of Thompson’s “Gonzo journalism” was: total subjectivity; blatant, outright bias. An approach emulated by current Rolling Stone top shelf contributor, Matt Taibbi; a pliable, milquetoast impressionist with a learned sense of Thompson’s wit and scorn. The trick, which Taibbi understands as did Thompson, is that good journalism has a subjective theme, of course, but doesn’t blur the lines that keep public servants accountable. Taibbi likens journalists cozying up to politicians to the separation of church and state. Lacking objectivity, a good journalist should still keep an arms length from politicians and be critical of all of them, especially ones entrenched for decades in unashamed cronyism, a disregard for human life and vicious foreign policy.

“Reporters are supposed to be unpleasant, grumpy people who instantly deface the posters of the powerful whenever they get the chance”

– Matt Taibbi

In 2008, Taibbi had the opportunity to join other journalists on one of Obama’s campaign flights. He liked Obama, but when he noticed all the pictures that lined the walls, pictures of Obama and all the different journalists, all with their arms around then candidate Obama and smiling, he admits that he felt a little dirty.

The real downfall of the magazine was that Jann Wenner had hitched the Rolling Stone wagon to a political party instead of a political principal.

Obama graced the cover of Rolling Stone annually through his presidency. Jann Wenner and him had carved out their friendship and put it on display. Few presidents have had the opportunity to sustain 8 full years of foreign bloodshed without any outrage from Wenner and co.

Now that Obama was out, there was a constant theme in the election for his replacement and the primaries leading up to it. Americans were sick of the status quo. They were sick of being fed lies from mainstream media and “fake news.” People were waiting to revolt in the wake of establishment politics. Just give them a guy who’s going to shit on everything and see what happens.

American media today is out of touch and not only with this new generation. Outlets like Rolling Stone keep the official narrative going, but no one under 30 is listening.

When Rolling Stone endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, that was it. The joke was over. Jann Wenner had finally come out of the closet as an elitist authoritarian and a cruel faggot.

* Darcy Gerow is a family man and tradesman. He is a national board member for the Libertarian Party of Canada and the co-founder of @TheHardTruthsBookClub, an organization committed to causing greatness in working age me through brotherhood and literature.

The post Rolling Stone Gathers Moss appeared first on Being Libertarian.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2oJrdcW via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress #libertarian #beinglibertarian #being libertarian #freedom #free market

2 notes · View notes

innuendostudios · 6 years

Video

youtube

The next video in my series on Alt-Right rhetorical strategies. You can help this series come out regularly, as well as support my other work, by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there's this feminist media critic whose work you respect. Being an internet-savvy human in the information age, you sometimes share your opinions of her work on your various social media platforms. And you've noticed, whenever you speak positively of her, many different people come out to yell the same handful of things at you.

It usually starts with, "How can you support that conwoman after she stole thousands of dollars from people?"

And you say, "No, she didn't steal anything, she ran a crowdfunding campaign that people contributed willingly to, and overwhelmingly those people seem satisfied with their donations."

And they say, "Yeah, she asked for a hundred thousand dollars for a shitty little project."

And you say, "No, she got a hundred thousand, because people got excited about her work and gave her more than she asked for, but the original pitch was only 10k. Also, how many times have you given that number to people without looking it up?"

And they say, "Yeah, she asked for 10k and then never finished anything."

And you say, "No, she finished the project earlier this year. Of course it took longer than it was originally pitched, you get ten times what you ask for you’re kind of obligated to make a bigger project, because, if you didn't, that would be running away with ninety grand..."

Now, by this time you’ve noticed your interlocutor's position has changed from "she stole from people" to "she asked too much to begin with" to "she took too long to deliver" as though these are all the same argument. You also notice the pattern of the conversation: he says something short, quippy, and wrong, you give a detailed correction, he says something else short, quippy, wrong, and only tangentially related to his last point, and the cycle repeats itself. This goes on and on.

And it's not, you've noticed, just this discussion; you find this manner of argument often whenever you express left-of-center beliefs. You talk about the election, someone says you vote Democrat because you must have a conservative father you hate; you talk about polyamory, someone says if you have more than one female partner you must be a sexist; or they just say you're faking a non-regional accent. (I don’t understand that one, either.)

The running theme here is all these people who ostensibly want a frank exchange of ideas spend a lot more time making accusations than asking questions. Because, why ask what you believe when they can tell you what you believe and make you correct them? And if you ever don’t correct them, must be because they’re right.

And you're not naive; you see what's going on here. This isn't about conversation, it's about boxes. When you say something cogent that they don't agree with, and they get the sinking feeling that you might start making sense, they need a reason not to listen to you. So they reach for a box to stick you in: dishonest feminism, fake progressivism, daddy-issue liberalism. No one in those boxes is worth listening to, which means, as long as they've got you in one, they're not at risk of having their minds changed. This isn’t even an argument with you, not really; their presenting themselves with arguments for why they don't have to listen to you.

So your first reflex is to defy their expectations. "Actually, my dad was a draft-dodging hippie who told me he loved me every day." "And I never said what genders my partners are but I promise they're all feminists." "As for my accent- actually, I don't know what to do with the accent thing." But the point is, “I refuse to fit in your box.” And if they can't put you in one, if they can't dismiss you outright, they'll have to engage with your argument.

But if you've spent any time arguing with angry dudes online you know what I'm about to say: They don’t. This accusatory, condescending attitude never falters. Because a technique that has permeated anti-progressivism is to Never Play Defense.

Now don't get me wrong, what I said about the Right fitting the Left into simplified boxes as a way of preserving their own egos, I do think that's a thing, at least for many people much of the time. And I think the reassurance it brings is why the technique stays so popular. But that framing is about how individual people are feeling in isolated moments, and leaves out the larger game that's being played. Because there is a long-term strategic value to never playing defense, and it's less to do with arguments than with attitude.

From your perspective, this debate about the feminist is a joke. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, he comes in hot without confirming any of his assumptions, the whole conversation is you repeatedly schooling an ignorant dipshit. But that's only if you’re the fool who listens to what’s actually being said. Never Play Defense is a strategy that looks past language to posture; the tone, word choice, even the expressions on your faces. If you half-focus your eyes and look not at the words but the flow of the conversation, you can see the dynamic at play:

He says his short, quippy statement, and you give your detailed rebuttal. He then picks a single point from your response and attacks that as the new subject. Now, to an onlooker, the logical brain would register that he's leaving 90% of your argument on the table, and that, by changing positions, he's conceding he lost the first round. But the lizard brain notices that he's always making the accusations, always in the dominant position, that he's always acting and you're always reacting. Regardless of what is said, he displays all the outward signs of winning. So, on a purely emotional level, he leaves the impression of being right.

I have never had an argument look like this that wasn’t in public. This is a technique that means speaking not so much to the other person as to the people watching. Liberals tend to operate as though voters are beings of pure reason, and neglect that rational people still have emotions, and those emotions factor into what they believe. And that long after this argument is over, when people only half-remember what was said, what lingers on is what impressions the speakers made.

Ronald Reagan coined the phrase, "If you're explaining, you're losing." The trick is, if he's always accusing, then you're always explaining.

This technique of winning by looking like you’re winning is not new, and, historically, it's been used by both parties. But modern liberals seem especially susceptible to it because it plays on one of their big weaknesses, which is - and I say this with love - the liberal fantasy of putting someone in their place.

Any time a free speech warrior gets the Bill of Rights quoted to them, when a racist gets "historical accuracy" explained by an actual historian, liberals take screencaps. We put it on Storify. We pass that shit around like theater popcorn. We live for the day an ignorant prick gets dunked on.

I remind you: this was the central conceit of an entire TV show. [West Wing clip.]

But let me ask you: in all these scenarios, who's doing all the explaining?

The reason scenes like this are so satisfying is precisely because they activate the emotions. Everyone wants to be Joseph Welch telling off McCarthy, where an appeal to reason looks like winning. But the Right has learned that, if you never look like you’re losing, you can convince a lot of people that you’re not. And, if you keep your statements short and punchy, people will remember what you said better than they remember the long explanation of why it’s untrue. If done correctly, you might even convince yourself you know what you’re talking about.

Now, again, this is not exclusive to the Right - this is how most teenagers argue regardless of their politics, where it’s less important to be right than it is to be better than someone. But mixed with Control the Conversation - see previous video - the Right has a full-bodied cocktail for manipulating how the Left argues.

But where it gets dangerous is in how the Alt-Right has capitalized on this.

This argument isn’t just about sticking a woman in the Lying Feminism box so she doesn’t have to be listened to, it’s also signaling to anyone watching what box they should stick her in. Even if an onlooker recognizes that she literally did not con anyone out of their money, the idea that how much she asked for and how long she took to deliver are relevant to her credibility is still planted in their heads. It subtly suggests that, the next time they feel threatened by a female media critic, maybe they should look at how much money she makes, how long her work takes to produce; maybe they don’t have to listen to her, because they’ve got this handy box.

So what’s most valuable to the Alt-Right is not who wins or loses any individual argument, it’s the mechanics of the argument itself; it’s the boxes. Over the last several years the far Right has pushed hard on a number of reductive categories: the Cultural Marxism box, the Reverse Racism box, even terms like “beta” and “mangina” are just shorthands for the Failed Masculinity box. The Alt-Right is a box factory, putting huge swaths of Leftist rhetoric, most especially that that would rebut their core positions, into categories where they can be summarily ignored.

These myths have power if and only if they are immediately recognizable to a lot of people. One function of this aggressive posturing is that they want to provoke an argument, to be so pompous that you’re itching to publicly take this asshole down, which gives that asshole access to your followers. It’s about them introducing a myth to your audience and reinforcing that myth for theirs. And that myth gets spread even when you feel like you’re winning.

I can’t tell you the best way to deal with this, but I do know one way, which is to keep control of your own story. When someone comes out the gate with accusations, it’s a big red flag that they are not arguing in good faith. You are not required to argue with them. When someone says something untrue, you can just tell your audience what the truth is without acknowledging the lie or the one repeating it. A detailed explanation lands a lot better when it’s not being contrasted with a sound bite. Decide for yourself how your audience gets acquainted with a popular fiction, and never be too proud to delete a comment.

In this political climate, these debates have real impact on real people’s lives. They’re not, in fact, a game of football. So if someone tries to force you to play defense, you don’t have to play.

#video essay #the alt-right playbook #alt-right

259 notes · View notes

nebris · 4 years

Text

“Dangerous misinformation continues to be a staple on Facebook. A majority of the most popular posts on the platform in the U.S. have cast doubt on Joe Biden’s win and undermined the election results — which, for the record, are not in dispute. In the week following the election, six out of the 10 most popular posts without links contained outright lies about the election results, and five out of the 10 most popular posts with links alluded to claims of election fraud or irregularities. Facebook’s flags on the posts warning they contained false information did nothing to slow the spread of the baseless claims.

Banning political ads in the run-up to the election was a laughably insufficient solution to stopping the spread of misinformation on Facebook. And even with that ban and other rules in place, Facebook has allowed right-wing figures and Trump allies to post misinformation free from consequence. With Trump and the GOP spreading outright lies like wildfire and undermining trust in our institutions, cracking down on social media misinformation is more important than ever. But time and again, Mark Zuckerberg has shown he’s unwilling to do the bare minimum to protect free and fair elections. No single individual should have this much power over our democracy.” ~Robert Reich

...yet I was banned [again] for ‘bullying’ a COVID denier.

0 notes

dagwolf · 7 years

Link

Being unabashedly opposed to fascism has become, strangely, a position that requires increasing amounts of justification in modern America. Mainstream voices have used the growth of unapologetic hate movements with codified genocidal platforms to lump groups like antifa and Black Lives Matter in with an ideology whose explicit aims entail mass murder. To assert that the ‘moral weight’ of either side in such clashes is a question of the tactics they employ is to say that White Nationalism is merely another morally subjective political ideology to be given a platform in the marketplace of ideas. Fascism, with all of the violence it necessitates, has emerged from the darkness of intolerable evil into the realm of legitimate discourse. In opposing swift and decisive actions against a growing fascist wing in America, liberals and centrists have granted Nazis and other fascist groups legitimacy as a political movement.

Liberal arguments for fascist sympathy blend together seamlessly with those of the far right. The suggestion that fascists should not be allowed a platform is always met with the same indignant rebuttal.

“But don’t you believe in free speech?”

...

Defending the free speech of fascists is an action which prioritizes the mythology of a state with no regard for such rights in practice over the very real and tangible suffering of those whom fascists seek to destroy. Fascists who kill are violent, as are fascists who celebrate violence committed by their kind, as is a fascist holding a sign minding their own business. Those who quietly advocate ethnic cleansing are admitting outright that the only thing preventing their direct involvement and endorsement of mass murder in the present moment is an insufficient power base. Every single fascist will become a violent fascist when given the numbers and strength to act with impunity. Liberals who ‘play by the rules’ are directly complicit in allowing these devastating consequences to come to fruition. Obsessing over the legality of your own activism is setting yourself up for defeat when facing opponents with no regard for such constructs. We will only win this fight if we are willing to take a page from the playbook of our enemies. Fascists and the state alike are never shy about doing what is necessary to propagate themselves. They will ignore the rule of law, the value of human life, and the cognitive dissonance of their own actions at the drop of a hat so long as doing so allows for their continued existence.

I would argue that our fight is much more important. We are not fighting for the continued existence of a self-serving power structure, but rather for the continued existence of our friends and neighbors. Their lives, and our lives, are at stake, as is the dream of a world in which all people can feel accepted.

408 notes · View notes

xtruss · 4 years

Text

Defund the BBC Now!

— By Jon Gaunt | 07.10.2020 | Sputnik

I’m disgusted with their failure to make real cuts to their bloated budget and as a result to means test pensioners, the most vulnerable members of society, to see who can have a free TV licence.

Meanwhile, Gary Lineker still needs a reinforced wheelbarrow to pick up hundreds of thousands of our hard-earned cash.

Last week the BBC committed to spend £100 MILLION to be "diverse and inclusive" but clearly, in their myopic world view, pensioners do NOT fall into the diverse or inclusive bracket? Well, there's a surprise! Not.

No Taxation Without Representation

Like the American Revolution, I firmly believe in the statement above. And let's be honest the Biased Broadcasting Corporation doesn't represent me or you anymore.

It certainly didn't respect, let alone represent my views on Brexit, Donald Trump, the election of Boris and Black Lives Matter.

I don't want them to pursue my agenda. I just want the equal opportunity to put my point across or someone else to do it for me and for the presenter to drop the sneers, the raised eyebrow and the outright contempt for any opinion to the right of Karl Marx.

I am sick to the back teeth with their bias and metropolitan woke view of the world and so I have come to the decision that they can stick their compulsory poll tax where the sun don't shine.

To be frank they don't need to worry about giving out a few free TV licences to some OAPs because soon no one will be paying it.

Broadcast Revolution

I can live without the BBC as easy as I can live without a hole in the head and so can millions of others, who just like me are cancelling their direct debits and not watching the biased bilge they pump out.

Who watches live TV these days anyway? The word has moved on but the BBC refuses to wake up and smell the real coffee whilst they sip their skinny soya lattes.

Forget the American Revolution, there is a broadcast revolution going on and it is not going to be televised by the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation.

I've got Netflix and Amazon Prime for all my movies and box sets and I've got the internet for my news and radio from around the globe. I just simply do not need the BBC's FAKE news anymore.

I'm not alone either as according to the Times, 860 THOUSAND licences were cancelled in 2017/18 and that figure must be well into the millions by now. Everybody I speak too says that not only is the fee too much, it's also an insult to our intelligence to have pay for something even if we don't watch it.

In the multi-platform digital age, you pay for what you watch, not what Auntie wants to serve up and let's be honest if you’re cute you don't have to pay for anything, not that I would encourage piracy of course.

A Kick in the Teeth

I worked for the BBC on a freelance basis for years and worked with many very talented people but to be frank I don’t recognise this biased anti-British, anti-working class, woke, lefty, politically correct institution anymore.

They've even given up pretending that they are balanced or impartial as their arrogance knows no bounds.

Why has the brilliant political interviewer, Andrew Neil been sent to the "news gulag" whilst biased Emily Maitlis shares her bile and woke anti-Trump agenda with her dwindling number of viewers on Newsnight?

Why did they bin Andrew Neil's and Michael Portillo's brilliant This Week show, how much dosh did they save with that decision?

Why have they decided to cut local radio and regional TV instead of focusing on the middle management pen pushers that infest the BBC?

Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, left, and Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, during a head to head live Election Debate at the BBC TV studios © AP PHOTO / JEFF OVERS

Local radio is the only part of the BBC that should be funded by the public purse the rest could be scrapped, sold off or slashed.

And by that, I mean privatise Radio 2 and Radio 1. Scrap the dreadful Five Live, we've got TalkSport and LBC who can do their job much better and cheaper.

As for the nobs who say they can't live without the Today programme or the Archers well they earn enough to flipping pay for it.

With the advent of Times radio and app-based transmission, there is no excuse to not privatise these services.

Why didn't they cut their diversity programmes instead of giving pensioners a kick in the teeth as Age UK so eloquently put it yesterday?

Diversity – What Diversity?

Talking of real diversity, how come the commentators they get on as guests and newspaper reviewers (who buys a bloody paper now anyway?) are the same goons who got the Brexit result wrong and the Boris landslide spectacularly incorrect?

But these same muppets are back on the same sofas, in the same studios saying the same stuff. Who are they meant to represent because it certainly isn't me?

It's not just the News programmes that are infested with woke lefty bias either; just look at the only dramas that get commissioned or filmed. Thin plots are bulked out with the same biased metropolitan view of the world. Who's the script editor on these shows, Jeremy Corbyn or is it Owen Jones?

Britain's main opposition Labour Party Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, centre, holds up his hand to applause after he delivered a speech on stage, with party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, and General Secretary Jennie Formby, during the Labour Party Conference at the Brighton Centre in Brighton, England, Monday, Sept. 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) © AP PHOTO / KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH

Meanwhile, EastEnders is so busy pushing an agenda it makes the left-wing playwright Bertolt Brecht look like Noel Coward.

Ever since Doctor Who was revived every plot has to have a message and hammer home the woke inclusive agenda. What was wrong with the Cybermen, Daleks, the Brigadier and long flowing scarves and the Doctors assistant screaming as she ran down the same corridor every week?! I'm kind of joking.

Sport? Well the BBC hasn't got any, have they? In fact, they have had more during Covid-19 with the football being free to air!!

Comedy? Have you ever seen a right of centre comedian on one of those formulaic comedy quiz shows, instead of its wall to wall anti-British, left-wing, didactic sub-Marxist trash from the likes of that Nish guy? He's as funny as a dose of the proverbial. But that style of comedy infests and has infected all of the BBC comedy output.

Look, if you like this kind of stuff that is your choice but I just don’t want to have to pay for it and I certainly don’t see why a lonely old pensioner should either.

Defund the BBC now!

— The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

0 notes