Politics & Stuff

[robsblubot 3,595]

Nah the process is that slow. It's independently run by each state (some states employ manual counting too), which makes the claims of mass fraud even more laughable -- it's a decentralized system!

The problem with overturning the results this time is that, despite what some of his supporters think, Trump ain't the president.

Results will start to come in tonight, so we may have an idea about the outcome by then, but not much else. Tomorrow will likely provide a clearer picture.

Edited November 5, 2024 by robsblubot

[cosmicway 1,333]

There are many component situations working in favour of Trump.
Biggest crap of them all is in my opinion Biden's failure to nip in the bud the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The rivers of dollars needed now for weapons to Ukraine would n't be needed. All he had to do was send some NATO forces to Ukraine before the invasion of February 2022 started. There is n't a chance in a billion trillion of Putin invading Ukraine if NATO was there.
Trump did n't even deserve to be a serious contender after the J6 events he caused back in 2020.
Dems however made the unjustified decision to support wokism instead of embracing Christianity. Because everything Trump does and says is anti-christian, including his disrespect for human rights of course, the guns, the opposition to a universal health care system. Roman emperor Diocletian the persecutor might have been a little less antichristian than that.

[robsblubot 3,595]

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

There are many component situations working in favour of Trump.
Biggest crap of them all is in my opinion Biden's failure to nip in the bud the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The rivers of dollars needed now for weapons to Ukraine would n't be needed. All he had to do was send some NATO forces to Ukraine before the invasion of February 2022 started. There is n't a chance in a billion trillion of Putin invading Ukraine if NATO was there.
Trump did n't even deserve to be a serious contender after the J6 events he caused back in 2020.
Dems however made the unjustified decision to support wokism instead of embracing Christianity. Because everything Trump does and says is anti-christian, including his disrespect for human rights of course, the guns, the opposition to a universal health care system. Roman emperor Diocletian the persecutor might have been a little less antichristian than that.

I strongly disagree. Americans in general care little about the rest of the world. That's the least important aspect IMO.

"Wokism" however you may define it, along with white man victimhood are the main Trump cards. This is very ironic of course, given that much of it is fabricated -- the per-capita GDP is pretty impressive even in "poor" states (where billionaires don't live).

bear in mind we are talking about small percentages here; US elections are always close because of the party divide.

Edited November 5, 2024 by robsblubot

[cosmicway 1,333]

8 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

I strongly disagree. Americans in general care little about the rest of the world. That's the least important aspect IMO.

"Wokism" however you may define it, along with white man victimhood are the main Trump cards. This is very ironic of course, given that much of it is fabricated -- the per-capita GDP is pretty impressive even in "poor" states (where billionaires don't live).

bear in mind we are talking about small percentages here; US elections are always close because of the party divide.

I don't know how much they care about world events.
They cared about the spread of communism, only that was perceived as a political threat as well as a military threat.
But re. Ukraine they do care about the money spent and it is real money.
The differences are usually small but Trump is a fun figure like Barry Goldwater.

[robsblubot 3,595]

Just now, cosmicway said:

I don't know how much they care about world events.
They cared about the spread of communism, only that was perceived as a political threat as well as a military threat.
But re. Ukraine they do care about the money spent and it is real money.
The differences are usually small but Trump is a fun figure like Barry Goldwater.

Yeah maybe, but then again they care about the money spent there because Trump tells them they should.

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, robsblubot said:

Yeah maybe, but then again they care about the money spent there because Trump tells them they should.

Factored, but it is real money and prices have gone up because of it.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

Musk is a HUGE national security threat (and a global threat, both go far beyond just X)

He has open backdoor channels to fucking Putin (and dog knows who else), whilst having billions of dollars of US government contracts and also his controlling huge swathes of the US space, security, and military programmes.

insanity he is not under multiple investigations (that we know of)

my risk analysis team at my job is just gobsmacked

Are they really shocked a rich white guy isnt facing any consequences in America?😂

[robsblubot 3,595]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Factored, but it is real money and prices have gone up because of it.

Nope... COVID.

Quote

The estimated cumulative financial costs of the COVID-19 pandemic related to the lost output and health reduction is shown in Table 1. The total cost is estimated at more than $16 trillion, or roughly 90% of annual GDP of the United States.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7604733/#:~:text=The estimated cumulative financial costs,GDP of the United States.

[Vesper 30,224]

From Left to Right and Beyond: The Strange Migration of Political Mavericks

Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Sahra Wagenknecht are crossing political lines—are they chasing headlines or revealing deeper political divides?

https://www.socialeurope.eu/from-left-to-right-and-beyond-the-strange-migration-of-political-mavericks

Sahra Wagenknecht at a BSW election event for the European elections in Kiel (photo: penofoto/shutterstock.com)

 

What do Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the German politician Sahra Wagenknecht have in common? They all appear to have migrated across the political spectrum. Gabbard and Kennedy are both former Democrats who now vocally support Donald Trump, and Wagenknecht has gone from the far left of Germany’s Left Party to strident nationalism. Earlier this year, she founded a new party modestly named after herself. After faring well in elections in three East German states this fall, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance seems likely to enter the Bundestag in the 2025 federal election. 

Do these political migrations reflect a mere opportunistic betrayal of principles, or is something more complicated going on? An obvious explanation is psychological: moves across the political spectrum earn the precious currency of attention. People accustomed to a high profile in the media sometimes need a dramatic gesture to get themselves back in the news. But the limits of such a reductionist explanation are obvious: most – if not all – politicians are after the limelight, but very few switch parties and positions. 

A more interesting explanation draws on twentieth-century history. When communists and fascists seemed to join forces in opposing liberalism, the world was introduced to “les extrêmes se touchent” (the extremes meet), or what has come to be known as the horseshoe theory of political extremism. Peculiar red-brown mixtures were prominent during the Weimar Republic, when political entrepreneurs combined pro-worker positions and radical nationalism to advocate a Querfront – an alliance cutting across the political spectrum. That said, proponents of “Prussian socialism” or Gregor Strasser’s leftist version of Nazism always remained in the minority (Strasser himself was murdered by Hitler’s henchmen in 1934). 

The horseshoe theory relies on the assumption that anti-liberalism must lead, sooner or later, to adopting positions shared by one’s official political adversaries. But this might be true only at a very abstract level. Socialists and a certain type of conservative can both find fault with capitalism, but the nature of their critiques will differ. The conservative might lament the destruction of traditional ways of life, whereas the socialist will complain about workers’ lack of freedom. Likewise, policy prescriptions can look similar at an abstract level – both conservatives and socialists might advocate smaller cooperative communities – but their details will differ dramatically. 

The horseshoe theory also is easily abused by liberals, because it allows for a double punch against criticisms from the left. These can be labelled as not only extremist, but even the stuff of Nazism. Few polemical moves are more effective. 

In any case, Wagenknecht’s political journey is the only one that seems to be based on a comprehensive anti-liberalism. Kennedy and Gabbard’s moves, by contrast, appear to be animated by the idea that one issue is of such overriding importance that it justifies switching camps. 

For his part, Kennedy is obsessed with vaccines, which he insists are unsafe, even though all such claims have been comprehensively debunked. For Gabbard, the issue is America’s “forever wars.” She apparently has concluded that Trump would be a peacemaker-in-chief; and Kennedy embraced Trump as a potential healer-in-chief, because he supposedly wants more policies addressing “chronic disease” (he also reportedly sought a meeting with Kamala Harris’s campaign, which showed no interest in his overture). 

Coat-switching politicians face an obvious question: Why did you ever ally with people who fail to see the overriding importance of your pet issue, or who drew fundamentally different conclusions about it? Not everyone will respond with a conspiracy theory, but claiming that your former political allies have all been corrupted certainly is the easiest answer. Not surprisingly, Kennedy is notorious for spewing dangerous conspiracy theories, and Gabbard has spent years concocting stories about Hillary Clinton, whom she portrays as an evil warmonger. 

So, this is how the shift from the “far out” to the far right can happen. It starts with an issue that is much more important than all others, but which your allies do not regard with the same urgency. When you no longer have their ear, you turn to whomever will have you. But the only party that will have you is the one that has its own reasons for wanting to make your former team look corrupt. 

Wagenknecht’s story is more complicated. A talented rhetorician and regular guest on TV programs, she is effective in repeating dubious claims about Russia’s war against Ukraine. But, unlike Kennedy and Gabbard, she is a real political strategist. Her party is designed to fill what she sees as an unoccupied political space – nationalism combined with socialism – in Germany’s multiparty landscape, and she has seized on wedge issues to split other parties apart. 

For example, Wagenknecht sees the war in Ukraine as a way to divide both Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. After this year’s elections in eastern Germany, Christian Democrats agreed to coalition talks with her alliance, in order to keep the far-right Alternative für Deutschland out of power in those states. But now, Wagenknecht insists that any coalition agreement contain language about the war that she knows CDU leaders cannot support (never mind that state governments do not conduct foreign policy). 

Prominent figures in her own party are willing to compromise, but Wagenknecht, who seems to want an iron grip on her “Alliance,” seeks to discredit any such position. Like Lenin, she appears willing to split her own party rather than lose control and tolerate deviations from ideological purity. 

Of course, the political system in a democracy should be open. There is nothing wrong with political innovators drawing new lines of conflict; that is what enables political realignments. But there is a problem when such innovators rely on conspiracy theories and seek to delegitimise their adversaries and the political system in general. 

Quinn Slobodian and Will Callison refer to the latter phenomenon as “diagonalism,” writing: “At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.” Slobodian and Callison first identified “thinking diagonally” – a translation of the German concept of Querdenken – during the pandemic, when prominent anti-vaxxers fomented protests against public health policies that often united far-left New Age types and hard-right agitators. 

Now, diagonalism appears to be spreading in a world of parallel media universes. There, one finds plenty of pent-up political discontent about singular, overriding issues – whatever they may be.

Edited November 5, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,224]

Why social investment holds the key to delivering on the Draghi report

A vast untapped potential for improving economic progress and social well-being across the EU needs to be unlocked through social investment.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/why-social-investment-holds-the-key-to-delivering-on-the-draghi-report

Press Conference on the Report on the Future of EU Competitiveness in Brussels (photo: Alexandros Michailidis/shutterstock.com)

 

The report by Mario Draghi on the future of competitiveness (together with Enrico Letta’s report on the Single Market) is a landmark publication poised to shape the agenda of the incoming European Commission. According to Draghi, the foundations of the European economic growth model are under strain. World trade expansion is in decline, the era of cheap Russian gas has ended, and new security concerns call for a fundamental policy overhaul. To meet the challenge, 800 billion in public and private investment must be mobilised. Simply put, European policymakers must shift paradigmatic gears in governing the economy if the EU wants to remain relevant amidst intensified economic and political competition between China and the USA. 

From a welfare state perspective, the report represents a significant step forward in considering the relationship between economic growth and social policy in positive terms. The strong emphasis on productivity through knowledge and skills, moving away from the narrow focus on (gross unit labour) cost-competitiveness that dominated the early years of the Great Recession, brings back into view the notion of social policy as a productive factor. However, we believe that Draghi’s plea to ‘preserve’ the European Social Model is unnecessarily defensive, as if competitiveness and productivity fall outside the purview of European welfare states in times of accelerating ageing and increased geopolitical competition. They do not: economic prosperity is a function of productivity and employment, which is precisely what a robust welfare state supports.

The Draghi report would have benefited from a more engaged reading of the 2023 high-level group report The Future of Social Protection and the Welfare State, commissioned by the European Commission (hereafter HLG-Report). Draghi may be concrete on the ‘money question’ of billions of private and public investments, but the report is somewhat imprecise on the ‘people question’ of those who need to be mobilised and how. In addition, the report is relatively narrow regarding questions of governance. Draghi recognises that Europe’s working-age population is set to decline by 25 – 30 million workers in the coming years but falls short of offering a comprehensive solution. Demography is not destiny. In this contribution, we argue that an effective welfare state to support Europe’s untapped labour potential through inclusive employment with greater autonomy for dual-earner households and better work-life balance is critical to delivering a more competitive and prosperous European Union. We also question Draghi’s proposal to trim down EU economic governance.

Recasting the narrative on welfare spending and economic growth 

To demonstrate what kind of welfare state is needed to support a more competitive economy, it is first essential to counter popular misconceptions about the relationship between welfare spending and economic growth. Population ageing – rising life expectancy and falling fertility – indeed puts additional fiscal pressures on public expenditure. For far too long, the debate on ageing populations has focused heavily on savings to bring down unit labour costs, fiscal deficits, and old-age dependency ratios. One of the clear policy lessons of the Great Recession is that fiscal consolidation – especially in Southern Europe – effectively deepened the recession. The misguided assumption of a supposed trade-off between welfare spending and economic growth precluded social investment reforms needed to update welfare models to support productivity and labour force participation. It is imperative to acknowledge that there is no negative relation between social spending and economic growth or competitiveness; quite the opposite. As shown in Figures 1 and 2 below (we are grateful for the support of Daniel Alves Fernandes of Leiden University in compiling all figures), Europe’s big welfare spenders do better on growth per capita and score better on competitiveness indicators precisely because they support productivity and employment.

What matters for a better understanding of the relationship between social spending and economic growth is not the size of the expenditure but its composition. In this respect, as we will show in our forthcoming book, EU Member States differ enormously. Those with high employment and high competitiveness, like Denmark or the Netherlands, spend roughly equal shares of their social spending on the young (e.g. education and childcare), the working class (e.g. social protection) and the elderly (e.g. pension spending and long-term care). For Greece or Italy, roughly two-thirds of all social spending is for the elderly, leaving little space to invest in children, support dual-earner families or support the unemployed.

High employment and high productivity go hand in hand with a welfare model based on investing in the young and supporting dual- and single-earner families. This strategy effectively sustains current commitments to the elderly regarding pensions and care. In other words, there is a vast untapped potential for improving economic progress and social well-being across the EU. 

The challenge for European labour markets to adjust to demographic ageing is momentous yet manageable. In demographic projections, it is commonly predicted that ‘old age dependency’ (the ratio of working-age people to those younger and older) will deteriorate in the decades ahead. Invoking a thought experiment, the HLG-report conjectures that this ratio would remain unchanged if the employment rate would trend up to about 85% and if, at the same time, the average retirement age were to rise to 70 years. It is important to underline that these conjectures are not unrealistic, given that today, some member states reach levels of employment close to 80% and voluntary late retirement above the official pension age is common. While labour shortages are becoming more pronounced, roughly 21 per cent of Europe’s workforce remains inactive. European Commission services estimate that bringing all Member States on par with Europe’s top performers would support 17 million women, 13 million elderly or 11 million low-skilled into the labour market (categories overlap). However, to achieve this, welfare states will require transformative change. This is where the policy paradigm of social investment, the core policy recommendation of the HLG, gains purchase.

The social investment-oriented welfare state

In ageing societies, the long-term strength of the knowledge economy is ever more contingent on the contribution that social policy can make to the productive economy. This is best understood by taking a life-course perspective. Secure retirement critically depends on how people fared during their working lives, which, in turn, is strongly correlated with the quality of their childhood years. Effectively, there is a ‘life course multiplier’ logic at work, whereby cumulative social policy returns, reaped over the life course, generate a cycle of well-being in terms of higher employment, gender equality, lower intergenerational poverty, higher productivity and growth, and improved fiscal sustainability.

The cycle initiates with early investments in children through good-quality early childhood education and care, which translates into better educational attainment. This, in turn, spills over into higher and more productive employment in the medium term. To the extent that employment participation is supported by work-life balance policies, including affordable childcare and generous parental leaves, this narrows gender gaps in wages and employment, as dual-earner households offer better protection against child poverty. Investing in active and healthy lifestyles, greater access to training and more flexible retirement options make it possible for older people to work longer. Altogether, these policies reinforce higher and more stable and productive employment over the life course, thus supporting a more extensive tax base to sustain overall welfare commitments. In short, the basic logic of ‘the social investment welfare state’ is that to maintain pensions, it is a prerequisite to invest in children!

The logic of the social investment welfare state moves away from the classic conception of the welfare state as primarily serving redistribution. It starts from the basic truism that we all rely on welfare support at different stages in our lives for reasons of health, education, childcare, spells of unemployment, retirement, and old-age care. With welfare beneficiaries being mostly transitory categories, it is more fruitful to analyse how welfare provision dynamically interacts with family demography (gender, fertility), education, and skill formation (effective labour supply and productivity) in relation to the future tax base, especially in times of adverse demography.

From the redistribution angle, a common criticism is that social investment reform would redirect spending away from classic social protection programmes and/or dis-proportionately benefit the already well-off middle classes (so-called Matthew effects). However, as we have shown in a recent report, this is another misconception; countries that do better on social investment also do better on most equity indicators. Adequate and inclusive safety nets are part and parcel of the social investment welfare state and even a precondition for its success. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a stark reminder that safety nets are crucial to preserve demand and employment to allow countries to bounce back swiftly.

Furthermore, as we show in Figure 3, there is no trade-off between spending on capacitating services (including childcare, education and training, active labour market policy, active ageing, and long-term care) and classic social protection spending (on unemployment benefits, social assistance, family benefits, and pensions). Countries that spend more on capacitating social services also commit more resources to social protection.

Finally, social investments, like all investments, bear their fruits in the medium term while needing immediate resources to finance them. This brings us to our second reservation with the Draghi report concerning governance.

Embedding social investment in Europe’s economic governance

While we agree with Draghi’s diagnosis regarding challenges and opportunities, the governance analysis is less convincing. Draghi argues that the European Semester for policy coordination has proven too bureaucratic and largely ineffective and should, therefore, be replaced by a new Competitiveness Coordination Framework focusing on EU-level strategic priorities, with only budgetary rules remaining. We beg to disagree. Over the years, the European Semester has gained intellectual authority in welfare reform guidance in the direction of social investment. The Semester has become a social learning vehicle to foster political ownership with feedback monitoring on reform priorities. While national politics holds primacy in getting reforms over the finish line, Semester’s reform recommendations and reports have, in important ways, shaped and codified the social investment policy turn across Europe. Particularly since the introduction of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), recommendations have been backed up by even stronger domestic commitments conditioned by EU financial resources to deliver. 

Stripping down the Semester to bare fiscal rules would interrupt the social learning process that has been activated in recent years by explicitly linking fiscal rules to public investment and structural reform to achieve medium-term budgetary sustainability. Last March, for the first time, a joint ECOFIN-EPSCO Council meeting met to discuss the potential of social investments to boost economic growth and productivity, much to the merit of the Belgian (and Spanish) Presidency, which – as shown by Vandenbroucke et al. – acted as important agenda-setters. However, there is a need to go further in integrating social investment priorities in the EU fiscal framework.

Hawkish Member States legitimately fear that by labelling (some) social policies as investments, the spending floodgates would come down. On the other hand, if budgets allocated to capacitating social policy continue to be treated purely as a cost, fiscal policy will ignore the positive employment effects of life-course sensitive social investment reform critical for European prosperity and well-being. What is more, the time bomb of adverse demography is ticking. Without social investment now, budgetary strains will only intensify in the medium term. As a first step, the Council has decided on a coordinated effort to measure the returns on social investment. Still, the social investment transition – guided by Semester recommendations – will eventually have to become part and parcel of fiscal-structural plans and debt sustainability analyses. If not, Draghi’s extra billions may go unspent as no qualified personnel can do the work.

Edited November 5, 2024 by Vesper

[KEVINAA 129]

 

[Vesper 30,224]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/11/x-white-supremacist-site/680538/

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield beoame a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

• Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG.
• Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people.
• Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.)
• Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.)
• Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.)
• Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are wthat make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

[Vesper 30,224]

[robsblubot 3,595]

7 minutes ago, KEVINAA said:

 

I hope you don't take them seriously... 😆

Remember it is the *other* side that never loses and does not concede. 

[KEVINAA 129]

4 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

I hope you don't take them seriously... 😆

Remember it is the *other* side that never loses and does not concede. 

I Really know what's going on. I'm just putting this here just for awarenesses purposes. 

California also has a planned power outage for republican counties in California.

I know the deep down conspiracies of what's going on. I can't type stuff here due to internet surveillance through ISP.

Edited November 5, 2024 by KEVINAA

[Vesper 30,224]

The empathy gap that is imperilling future generations

To protect our descendants from catastrophe, we must overcome the emotional hurdles that make it easy for us to look away

https://psyche.co/ideas/the-empathy-gap-that-is-imperilling-future-generations

A worker disinfects cinema seats in Quezon City in the Philippines, 16 October 2021. Photo by Lisa Marie David/Reuters

Mary is on her daily walk around the neighbourhood. Suddenly, she breaks into a fit of wheezing and coughing. Her chest feels constricted as she tries to regain her breath. She grabs a seat on a nearby bench to gather herself.

Now, I’ll add one last detail to the story: Mary is living in the year 2050. Her suffering is no different because of this fact. But perhaps it now feels a bit harder to empathise with her.

Warnings about the future peril facing humanity – which, of course, will be made up of specific people like Mary – are common these days, and for good reason. The harms of the climate crisis are poised to ramp up, while pandemics worse than COVID-19, threats of nuclear conflict, and safety risks from advancements in AI loom large. Experts estimate the odds of a catastrophe that kills at least one in 10 humans within a five-year span at 20 per cent this century – basically a roll of the dice. Yet most of the world remains insufficiently focused on mitigating the gravest threats to our species’ future wellbeing.

How should we balance our focus on immediate, shorter-term problems versus more gradually developing and future threats? It’s very difficult to say. But in a world where people could more easily empathise with future generations, public pressure to address those catastrophic risks would be greater. This, in turn, might lead to relevant safety policies moving closer to the front of political parties’ agendas. Government agencies that focus on such policies could receive much more funding to establish larger research teams and regulatory capacities for risk mitigation.

Public discourse has been gradually filling up with philosophical arguments and statistical information to marshal action to reduce the risks to our collective future. However, while presenting persuasive logic and convincing data is absolutely critical, it’s just not enough. To win the hearts and minds of policymakers and society at large, we also need to overcome emotional hurdles.

People reported less empathy toward the future sufferer (depending on how far in the future it was)

It’s already difficult for many of us to care about our future selves, let alone future generations. Many of us don’t save enough for retirement or exercise as much as we think we should, in large part because we find it hard to sufficiently empathise with the person we’ll eventually become. Present bias is pervasive. Passing the societal version of the marshmallow test may prove even more challenging, as it involves forms of favouritism that are both temporal (present vs future) and interpersonal (me vs you). In order to set humankind up for a flourishing future, we need to push against the psychological tendency to value our present selves far more than we value future others.

Other scholars have argued that there is no inherent moral distinction between someone’s suffering now or in the future. In a series of studies, David DeSteno and I recently investigated differences in how people actually feel when thinking about future versus present pain – and what, if anything, can be done to make future suffering more emotionally evocative.

We used a simple experimental design in which we randomly assigned participants to imagine a person suffering – from a respiratory disease, a broken ankle, etc – either in the present or at least 25 years in the future. Besides a brief description of the suffering (as in the case of Mary), participants weren’t told much else about this hypothetical person. We found that participants rated the amount of suffering the person experienced as nearly the same whether it was in the present or the future. However, when asked about their level of distress and concern, people reported 8 to 16 per cent less empathy toward the future sufferer (depending on how far in the future it was). That is, there was a mismatch between what people understood at an intellectual level (the amount of pain experienced by someone else) and their felt experience when imagining someone else’s suffering.

In everyday life, people often talk about future generations in a broader, more collective sense than we did in these studies. This introduces another pernicious computation of the mind: people find it easier to empathise with a single individual than with groups, plausibly because individuals are easier to conjure in one’s imagination. Therefore, the difference in empathy toward a present person and future others in general is likely even greater than what we’ve found.

Though empathy guides us to help others, psychologists have warned about how it drives us to preferentially help people we already know or who are similar to us, often at the expense of strangers or dissimilar others. Our findings illustrate that an empathy deficit applies not only across social and geographical distance, but across temporal distance, as well.

Does this empathy deficit matter, in practical terms? Yes, it does. We found that the lower level of empathy toward future others had real-world consequences. In one study, we framed the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit addressing climate change, as either helping people in the present day or helping people who will live 200 years from now. Compared with those who saw the present framing, those responding to the future framing donated 6 per cent less – and this difference was explained by reduced empathy. While this may seem like a small effect, the stakes are large when you consider the hundreds of billions donated to charity annually in the United States alone.

Of course, supporting present-oriented causes isn’t a bad thing. There’s no lack of suffering from actively occurring problems that are worth addressing. Yet the effect of merely indicating that present (as opposed to future) people will benefit from a donation suggests a potential strategy for future-oriented nonprofits: if they emphasise their organisation’s benefits for people today, prospective donors should feel more empathy towards the beneficiaries and, in turn, be more willing to donate.

Experts on catastrophic risks can complement their data-driven science communication with emotionally engaging rhetoric

Fortunately, empathy is malleable. It can be redirected and expanded to those whom one might not naturally tend to care about very much. In our final study, we deployed a simple intervention that asked participants to imagine another person’s future suffering in vivid, concrete detail. Before reading about the suffering of someone like Mary, they were asked to take 30 seconds to imagine the situation in as much detail as possible, contemplating the expression on her face and any sounds she might make. We found that engaging in this brief exercise ramped up the study participants’ empathy for future others so that it resembled what they felt toward present others. In other words, promoting richer mental simulations of the future eliminated the empathy gap.

Communicators in many different professions could leverage this insight to motivate their audiences to help future generations (such as by donating to nonprofits or supporting political candidates who seriously address long-term global problems). Filmmakers and authors can ‘reel in’ the future, so to speak, by depicting relatable characters facing future problems in clear, vivid detail. Public officials can tell powerful stories to their constituents about the consequences of our present bias for the soon-to-be very real people inheriting the world we’ve left them. Experts on catastrophic risks can complement their data-driven science communication with emotionally engaging rhetoric of this kind.

This is a relatively new area of research, and there are many important unanswered questions. It’s conceivable that parents, for example, might feel more empathy for future people, given that they’re already invested in the future vis-à-vis their child’s wellbeing. Maybe the empathy deficit is less prevalent in cultures that explicitly value the welfare of future generations. Or, perhaps those who think major societal risks are imminent don’t require any more future-orientation, as their empathy for present people is already sufficient to get them to act. Further exploration of the impediments to empathising with future generations could inform other practical strategies for overcoming them.

Improving the quality of humanity’s future requires serious, significant action on the part of governments, businesses and everyday individuals. To inspire such action, we need to align economic incentives and deploy a healthy dose of political pressure. But let’s not neglect the importance of nudging the human mind. Coupled with sound evidence and well-reasoned logic, an enhanced level of feeling for the people of coming generations can give us the motivation we need to steer our collective future in the right direction.

Edited November 5, 2024 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

2 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Experts estimate the odds of a catastrophe that kills at least one in 10 humans within a five-year span at 20 per cent this century – basically a roll of the dice.

Incredible.

Thats a good article. And the one above it. Reading between the lines there is a billionaires club that are desentizing us to lying on one hand, and extreme violence, slaughter on the other. After all they get richer from weapons and dividing the masses. They know the shit will hit the fan big time soon. There's a reason why record numbers of billionaires are building underground citadels in New Zealand and South Pacific

[robsblubot 3,595]

15 minutes ago, KEVINAA said:

I Really know what's going on. I'm just putting this here just for awarenesses purposes. 

California also has a planned power outage for republican counties in California.

I know the deep down conspiracies of what's going on. I can't type stuff here due to internet surveillance through ISP.

lol California is a wash.
OMG conspiracy theorist. Never mind. I'm out. 🙄

[Vesper 30,224]

13 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

lol California is a wash.
OMG conspiracy theorist. Never mind. I'm out. 🙄

yes

Ian Miles-Cheong is a RW crank and hyper troll

massive pusher of fake news and RW CT

he was one of the bigger actors in ramping up the ultra misogynistic #Gamergate harassment campaign 10 years ago, and the POS has only gotten worse since then

Edited November 5, 2024 by Vesper

[robsblubot 3,595]

9 minutes ago, Vesper said:

yes

Ian Miles-Cheong is a RW crank and hyper troll

massive pusher of fake news and RW CT

he was one of the bigger actors in ramping up the ultra misogynistic #Gamergate harassment campaign 10 years ago, and the POS has only gotten worse since then

It's even crazier to me that California is even part of these stupid conspiracy theories--even the dogs are PC there. 😆

And I actually lived there.

Edited November 5, 2024 by robsblubot