Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

Johnny Marr: "People should refer to Boris as That Wanker Boris Johnson" (nme.com)

[cosmicway 1,333]

8 hours ago, 11Drogba said:

greece: send nudes

british museum: no

greece: cmon those are ours

It's a caprice of the lord of Wellington in 1829 the real story of the nudes.

[Vesper 30,226]

IDEAS

'If You Didn’t Vote for Trump, Your Vote Is Fraudulent'

The president’s supporters believe that the votes of rival constituencies should not count—even though they understand, on some level, that they do.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/voter-fraud/617354/

Armed protesters gathered outside the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson Saturday night, demanding that she overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in her state.

“We will not stand down, we will not stop, we will continue to rise up, we will continue to take this election back for the president that actually won it by a landslide,” one protester at the scene declared, NPR reported. Benson told the outlet that “their threats and their attacks are aimed at the heart of democracy itself, trying to erode the public’s confidence in the democratic process, trying to sow seeds of doubt among everyone that their votes counted, that their voices were heard, that the results of the election are accurate.”

Armed protesters showing up at the homes of elected officials to force them to overturn the outcome of the presidential election, especially in a state where Trump-supporting militants were caught plotting to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is obviously disturbing. Protesting government officials, even for grievances you or I might find absurd, is a fundamental constitutional right. The presence of firearms among the protesters, however, as well as the decision to protest at her residence instead of her workplace, add elements of coercion.

But what’s really surprising is not that some people who believe that the will of the people has been subverted, and that the election results are fraudulent, have resorted to armed protests and intimidation—it’s that so few have.

After all, President Donald Trump has been contesting the election results ever since it became clear that he would not be inaugurated again in January. Ignoring the backdrop of the daily death tolls that now exceed the lives lost in the September 11th attacks, the president concentrates his efforts not on containing the coronavirus pandemic but on a buffoonish but sincere scheme to annihilate American democracy, as most Republican elected officials cower quietly or cheer him on, while a vital few incur the wrath of the conservative faithful by doing their duty.

Trump has claimed that the outcome reflects a “rigged election,” publicly indulging nonsense conspiracy theories. He has pressured officials in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victories in those states. His attorneys have filed baseless, tendentious lawsuits in those three states as well as in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin, only to be rebuffed in every case but one. From the beginning, the only acceptable or legitimate outcome for Trump and his hard-core supporters was a victory—with the description “landslide” appended no matter how narrow or wide it happened to be.

“Judges ruled decisively that Trump’s side has not proved the election was fraudulent,” The Washington Post reported, “with some offering painstaking analyses of why such claims lack merit and pointed opinions about the risks the legal claims pose to American democracy.”

Yet the rubbish claims of fraud continue. Trumpism demands the profession of beliefs that are neither strictly literal nor exactly figurative, but instead statements of ideological values that don’t fit neatly in either category. These statements are not amenable to journalistic fact-checking, because they are not factual claims; they are assertions of identity and political legitimacy that are incontestable on their own terms. To announce loudly that you accept the proclamations of the Church of Trump, no matter how false, contradictory, or exaggerated, is to identify yourself as a member of that faith community; to deny them is to risk excommunication. As long as devotion to the Trumpian creed remains a central tenet of membership in the Republican Party, precious few elected officials will risk the brand of the heretic.

The Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, Kim Ward, told The New York Times that if she had not signed a letter urging the state’s congressional delegation to toss out Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state for Georgia, and his wife have both faced violent threats since the state certified Biden’s victory and Raffensperger reiterated that there was no evidence of fraud. Among the Trump faithful, acknowledging the actual outcome of the presidential election is apostasy.

Questioning election results is a staple of partisan rhetoric, of course. Democratic voters and pundits, and occasionally elected officials, have advanced their own baseless conspiracy theories to explain political losses. The distinction is that the Democratic Party’s leadership, understanding that the peaceful transfer of power is crucial to a functional democracy—or fearing the political cost of failing to honor it—has typically dismissed those conspiracy theories rather than embracing them, denying them needed oxygen. Some Democrats fumed about voting machines in Ohio in 2004, but that did not stop John Kerry from quickly conceding; furious liberals indulged fantasies that Russian interference in 2016 included manipulation of vote tallies, but Hillary Clinton conceded the morning after the election.

That is not the case today. Insisting that the election was stolen by fraud, or that the outcome is somehow in doubt, remains the majority position among Republican elected officials. Only 27 of the 249 Republicans in Congress are willing to publicly acknowledge Biden’s victory. Several House Republicans have urged the Supreme Court to toss out the results in Pennsylvania, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, an experienced litigator, offering his services should the justices take the case. (The Court turned down one appeal from Pennsylvania, 9–0, on Tuesday.)

The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton—who is under federal investigation for securities fraud—filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding that the Supreme Court invalidate the election results in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia.* It’s fair to wonder what standing or jurisdiction the attorney general of Texas has in these matters. But Paxton has a strong incentive to flatter a president with a proclivity for handing out pardons to his political allies. Seventeen other Republican state attorneys general have joined the suit, calculating not only that GOP voters won’t penalize them for attempting to subvert American democracy, but that they would punish them if they failed to try.

The refusal to acknowledge Trump’s loss would seem to complicate the Republicans’ pitch in Georgia, where control of the Senate hangs on the results of two runoff elections set for January. They can’t run on the need to hold those seats in order to block Biden’s agenda if they can’t acknowledge Biden’s victory. Why should Republicans vote in an election if, as Trump and his toadies claim, the vote is rigged? But Democrats hoping that the irreconcilable logic of such assertions will prevent Republicans from swarming the ballot box in January are mistaken.

The Trump era began with one such assertion: birtherism. Trump’s emergence as a Republican champion coincided with his embrace, in 2011, of the slander that the first Black president, Barack Obama, was not born in America. This was not a belief that could be disproved by Obama showing his papers, because it was an expression of the ideological conviction that neither Obama, nor the coalition that elected him, was politically legitimate, and that the categories assigned to him by the conspiracy theory—African, Muslim, immigrant, foreigner—were at the root of his illegitimacy.

Similarly, when Trump told the four Democratic lawmakers of the Squad—Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—to “go back” to the countries “from which they came,” he was not literally questioning their American citizenship. He was expressing the ideological conviction, shared by his base, that their identity as Americans is made contingent by the combination of their racial backgrounds, national origins, and political beliefs, in ways that those of conservative white Republicans are not.

From the June 2019 issue: An oral history of Trump’s bigotry

The Michigan protester’s declaration that Trump won the election (by a landslide, no less) falls into the same category. The majority of people who make such declarations understand that in fact, Trump did not win, that he received fewer votes than his opponent, and that the Electoral College result reflects that loss. But they support Trump’s claims that the vote was fraudulent, and his efforts to pressure Republican officials in key states to overturn the result. To Trump’s strongest supporters, Biden’s win is a fraud because his voters should not count to begin with, and because the Democratic Party is not a legitimate political institution that should be allowed to wield power even if they did.

This is why the authoritarian remedies festering in the Trump fever swamps—martial law, the usurpation of state electors, Supreme Court fiat—are so openly contemplated. Because the true will of the people is that Trump remain president, forcing that outcome, even in the face of defeat, is a fulfillment of democracy rather than its betrayal.

The Republican base’s fundamental belief, the one that Trump used to win them over in the first place, the one that ties the election conspiracy theory to birtherism and to Trump’s sneering attack on the Squad’s citizenship, is that Democratic victories do not count, because Democratic voters are not truly American. It’s no accident that the Trump campaign’s claims have focused almost entirely on jurisdictions with high Black populations.

“Detroit and Philadelphia—known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily—cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race,” Trump said on November 5. Since then, Trump’s legal challenges have targeted cities with large Black populations—not just Philadelphia and Detroit, but also Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. Trump improved his vote margin slightly in these places, while getting destroyed in nearby suburbs. But because the outdated popular perception of suburbs is that they are white, they lack the assumption of illegitimacy that Trumpists attach to cities.

The absence of not only evidence of any systemic fraud, but even compelling anecdotes that might be misleadingly trumpeted throughout right-wing media, has not deterred the president or his supporters. Republican legislators are already scheming to put new restrictions on the franchise, justified by claims of fraud so baseless that not even their handpicked judges can find a foothold to sustain them. The necessary ingredient is not actual voter fraud, but Democratic victory at the ballot box, real or potential.

According to a 2020 survey by the political scientist Larry Bartels, three-quarters of Republican voters believe that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.” Because Republicans believe, as Mitt Romney put it after his defeat in 2012, that Black people vote for Democrats only because they are offered “free stuff,” Black votes are considered illegitimate even if they are legally cast. Those votes could be legitimate if more of them were cast for Republicans, the party of true Americans, but as long as they are cast for Democrats, they can be dismissed as the result of Democratic brainwashing. Demanding that Black votes be tossed out is not antidemocratic, because they should not have counted in the first place.

That this racist belief has a partisan valence makes it no less racist. If one’s fundamental rights are contingent on adhering to the political beliefs of the ruling clique, they are not rights at all.

In the early days of Reconstruction, Democrats hoped that Black men, if enfranchised, would vote for those who had fought to keep them enslaved, understanding that their subordinate position in southern society was in the best interests of both races. Some northern Republicans similarly feared that Black men would vote as their former masters demanded. But when the emancipated chose their own path based on their own interests, Democrats concluded that they had to be excised from the polity, by force.

From the October 2020 issue: The new Reconstruction

In that era, Democrats and their paramilitary allies used their claims of fraud and conviction that Black participation had fatally corrupted democracy to justify a campaign of murder and terrorism. They overthrew their local governments on behalf of white men, who were the only ones capable of granting a government legitimacy. The fact that armed crowds menacing elected officials in swing states today are thankfully rare indicates that Republicans professing their belief that the election was stolen are aware, on some level, that Trump simply lost.

The conviction that the rival political constituency cannot, under any circumstances, legitimately hold power has not yet resulted in widespread violence. But it remains incompatible with democracy, which requires the assent of its losers and the peaceful transfer of power between factions. Enough local Republican officials in 2020 have recognized that their civic obligations outweigh their partisan identities. But if Republicans continue to believe, and assert as a matter of their partisan identity, that the rival party’s victories are fraudulent, their claim to power illegitimate, and their holding office an existential threat, at some point, the tension between partisan identity and democratic function will become irreconcilable. Next time a president seeks to stay in power after losing an election, there may not be enough Republicans who place duty above party to make a difference.

When they say the 2020 election was stolen, Trumpists are expressing their view that the votes of rival constituencies should not count, even though they understand, on some level, that they do. They are declaring that the nation belongs to them and them alone, whether or not they actually comprise a majority, because they are the only real Americans to begin with.

[Vesper 30,226]

IDEAS

The GOP Abandons Democracy

One hundred and six Republican members of Congress, and 18 state attorneys general, are asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/republican-party-abandoning-democracy/617359/

When Donald Trump was granted a coat of arms for his Scottish golf courses in 2012 (after a lengthy court battle, of course), he chose as its motto “Numquam concedere”: Never concede. He has not, even as it has become clear that he lost the presidential election by a wide margin.

In the first few weeks after the election, anonymous Republicans and White House officials insisted that Trump’s lack of a concession was no reason for alarm. They assured reporters that Trump knew he’d lost and just needed time to process his defeat—and to put up enough of a fight that he could maintain his image. Perhaps that was true, and perhaps it remains true now, but Trump isn’t acting like someone working through the stages of grief. He’s acting like someone working through a slow-motion (and probably doomed) autogolpe.

Instead of Republican officeholders waiting out Trump’s postelection tantrum, he is waiting them out, and slowly bringing the party around to his side. In this way, Trump is ending his presidency just the way he won it: by correctly recognizing what Republican voters want and giving it to them, and gradually forcing the party’s purported leaders to follow along.

This embrace of the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election is both shocking and horrifying. As Trump’s fraud claims and legal cases have steadily failed, the arguments he has pursued have become more outlandish and absurd, and they have also become more disturbing. Many Republican voters agree, and in refusing to stand up to him and them, Republican officials have gone from coddling a sore loser to effectively abandoning democracy.

Yesterday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court asking the justices to toss out the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (The Court has “original jurisdiction” over cases between states, acting like a trial court.) Trump announced that he would intervene in the case on his own behalf. “This is the big one,” he tweeted.

Legal experts have heaped disdain on the case. Rick Hasen labels it “dangerous garbage, but garbage.” The case complains that the states changed their election rules late in the process, but that is true of many states that sought to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. These states just happen to have been called late and to have voted for Joe Biden.

The case is the apotheosis of Trump’s shifting legal strategies. Initially, he had sought to have some ballots disqualified, alleging fraud. These claims were dangerous; there is no evidence of widespread fraud, disenfranchising legal voters is unjust, and such attacks can undermine faith in future elections. As this strategy failed, undone by the lack of evidence, Trump and his allies began seeking to toss wholesale the results that don’t help him. First, the president tried to pressure Republican elected officials, including legislative leaders in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Georgia’s governor and secretary of state, to throw out results. When they refused, the effort moved on to the Supreme Court’s nine unelected justices.

That Paxton would file such a lawsuit isn’t a huge surprise. He is a hard conservative who has often used the court system to dubious ends. Perhaps more to the point (as Senator Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican, notes), Paxton is also facing some serious legal problems, and would benefit from a pardon before Trump leaves offices.

Read: Republicans are going down a dangerous road

More surprising is that 17 Republican state attorneys general filed a brief in support of Paxton’s suit, a sizable majority of the top Republican law-enforcement officials in the country. Then 106 Republican members of the U.S. House did the same. When Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, called the suit “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong,” he received a threatening phone call from Trump. Meanwhile, the state’s two GOP U.S. senators, both of whom are competing in a January runoff, endorsed the lawsuit that seeks to throw out the vote in Georgia. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has reportedly agreed to Trump’s request that he argue the case if the justices take it up.

Many of these people may be going along not in spite of the fact that the suit is preposterous, but because it is: The stakes appear lower if they don’t have to worry about the Court actually taking them seriously. That is a dangerous calculation. The case seems to face very, very long odds, though it takes only five members of the Court to turn the preposterous into precedent. Even if the case fails, though, these Republicans have set a course of being willing to oppose the results of elections simply because they don’t like them. That is by definition antidemocratic.

The attorneys general, Cruz, and the Georgia senators are in ample (though not good) company. One might have expected that as more time passed since the election, and more of Trump’s lawsuits were tossed out of court, more Republican officeholders would start to acknowledge reality. Some GOP members of Congress have done so, but not many. State and local elections officials, especially in Georgia, have pushed back bravely against Trump. But in Washington, D.C., Sasse and his Senate colleague Mitt Romney, who have been critical of Trump’s antidemocratic actions, remain lonely outliers.

Other Republican officials have offered a range of cop-outs. Some acknowledge that Biden will be the next president but don’t condemn the current president’s actions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has referred to a Biden administration but won’t call Biden the president-elect. When South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem seemed to acknowledge reality, her spokesperson contacted a local outlet to insist that, no, Noem was still living in a fantasyland, a remarkable act even in this golden age of self-debasement.

GOP leaders will have another chance to do the right thing when the Electoral College meets and elects Biden on December 14, and some are supposedly ready, but the past few years don’t offer much reason for hope. During the 2016 GOP primary, Republican elders fretted over Trump’s coarseness, his open bigotry, and some of his policies, especially his skepticism of free trade. But they mostly decided to humor him, assuming that he wouldn’t win the nomination (or the presidency) but that he was good for ginning up the base. Instead, he ended up owning the party. Over and over, from Access Hollywood to extorting Ukraine, Republican officeholders have first criticized Trump’s actions, then sought to ignore them, and finally ended up defending them.

The customary explanation for Republican timidity is that officeholders are afraid of Trump. Though sometimes intended as apology, this does not say much for GOP leaders. It may miss what is really happening, though. Trump shapes but also reflects the views of Republican voters. A new Quinnipiac poll finds that 70 percent of Republican voters believe Biden’s win was illegitimate. When The New York Times asked Kim Ward, the Republican leader in the Pennsylvania Senate, whether she would have signed a letter declaring there was fraud in the state’s election, she replied, “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” referring to signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

Elected officials ought to be responsive to constituents—within reason. But the disposition of the election has long since passed the bounds of reason. Republican officials aren’t afraid of Trump so much as they are afraid of Republican voters. And Republican voters appear to be afraid of democracy.

[11Drogba 2,000]

GOP: the Supreme Court that we built to a 6-3 majority by blocking Democrat appointments and then reversing and fast-tracking our own appointments is a deep state conspiracy to steal from us.

[Fernando 6,585]

Iranian teenager who posted distorted pictures of herself is jailed for 10 years

Instagram star Sahar Tabar says she is still hoping for a pardon after conviction for corrupting young people

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/11/iranian-teenager-jailed-10-years-distorted-pictures-instagram-sahar-tabar

 

 

[Atomiswave 6,118]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

Iranian teenager who posted distorted pictures of herself is jailed for 10 years

Instagram star Sahar Tabar says she is still hoping for a pardon after conviction for corrupting young people

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/11/iranian-teenager-jailed-10-years-distorted-pictures-instagram-sahar-tabar

 

 

Fucking regime man, I hate their guts with passion. I promise soon enough a revolution will happen there, 40 years under this regime is way too much.

[11Drogba 2,000]

Proud Boys leader visits White House ahead of DC rally.

Now we know what telling the Proud Boys to "stand by" meant.

Exactly what we all said it meant.

He told his base not to vote by mail, tried to slow USPS, planned to try to throw out mail vote, and now wants to incite violence.

 

[manpe 10,861]

27 minutes ago, 11Drogba said:

Proud Boys leader visits White House ahead of DC rally.

Now we know what telling the Proud Boys to "stand by" meant.

Exactly what we all said it meant.

He told his base not to vote by mail, tried to slow USPS, planned to try to throw out mail vote, and now wants to incite violence.

 

And now there are more casualties than 9/11 every day in the USA. It's all on him. But according to some users on here, the stock market is more important and they keep voting for him.

[Vesper 30,226]

She seems nice.

 

[Magic Lamps 11,692]

GOP has long stopped representing people or trying to improve the US.Their only goal is to maintain power. They do it by corruption and gerrymanderung but most of all they know that the majority of their voters are white, low wage, uneducated white people. So their focus on destroying highschools, colleges and making everyone poorer, while blocking minorities from casting their vote. There are theories that Mitch Mcconnell and his goons are assets of Russian or Chinese inelligence agencies but I honestly believe they are simply useful idiots.

[Vesper 30,226]

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

No Gods, no masters....

[Magic Lamps 11,692]

14 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

That’s actually amazing. A rift within the right wing between more moderate gop and alt right trumpists is what can weaken them for decades

[Vesper 30,226]

Judge Jeanine Suggests Bill Barr Is Secretly a Biden Supporter (Video)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/judge-jeanine-suggests-bill-barr-is-secretly-a-biden-supporter-video/ar-BB1bSMk0?li=BBnbfcL

 

[Vesper 30,226]

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/facebook-doomsday-machine/617384/

The doomsday machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States.

The sensors are designed to sniff out signs of the impending apocalypse—not to prevent the end of the world, but to complete it. If radiation levels suggest nuclear explosions in, say, three American cities simultaneously, the sensors notify the Doomsday Machine, which is programmed to detonate several nuclear warheads in response. At that point, there is no going back. The fission chain reaction that produces an atomic explosion is initiated enough times over to extinguish all life on Earth. There is a terrible flash of light, a great booming sound, then a sustained roar. We have a word for the scale of destruction that the Doomsday Machine would unleash: megadeath.

Nobody is pining for megadeath. But megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.

Kahn concluded that automating the extinction of all life on Earth would be immoral. Even an infinitesimal risk of error is too great to justify the Doomsday Machine’s existence. “And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by decision makers,” Kahn wrote, “it is still not controllable enough.” No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.

The Soviets really did make a version of the Doomsday Machine during the Cold War. They nicknamed it “Dead Hand.” But so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.

People tend to complain about Facebook as if something recently curdled. There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view. Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.

I’ve been thinking for years about what it would take to make the social web magical in all the right ways—less extreme, less toxic, more true—and I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem. I’ve long wanted Mark Zuckerberg to admit that Facebook is a media company, to take responsibility for the informational environment he created in the same way that the editor of a magazine would. (I pressed him on this once and he laughed.) In recent years, as Facebook’s mistakes have compounded and its reputation has tanked, it has become clear that negligence is only part of the problem. No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Read: Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough

The social web is doing exactly what it was built for. Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.

The giants of the social web—Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram; Google and its subsidiary YouTube; and, to a lesser extent, Twitter—have achieved success by being dogmatically value-neutral in their pursuit of what I’ll call megascale. Somewhere along the way, Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.  

Limitations to the Doomsday Machine comparison are obvious: Facebook cannot in an instant reduce a city to ruins the way a nuclear bomb can. And whereas the Doomsday Machine was conceived of as a world-ending device so as to forestall the end of the world, Facebook started because a semi-inebriated Harvard undergrad was bored one night. But the stakes are still life-and-death. Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

The cycle of harm perpetuated by Facebook’s scale-at-any-cost business model is plain to see. Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response. Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are. The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site. Facebook has enlisted a corps of approximately 15,000 moderators, people paid to watch unspeakable things—murder, gang rape, and other depictions of graphic violence that wind up on the platform. Even as Facebook has insisted that it is a value-neutral vessel for the material its users choose to publish, moderation is a lever the company has tried to pull again and again. But there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person. At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.

These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people. Facebook has conducted social-contagion experiments on its users without telling them. Facebook has acted as a force for digital colonialism, attempting to become the de facto (and only) experience of the internet for people all over the world. Facebook has bragged about its ability to influence the outcome of elections. Unlawful militant groups use Facebook to organize. Government officials use Facebook to mislead their own citizens, and to tamper with elections. Military officials have exploited Facebook’s complacency to carry out genocide. Facebook inadvertently auto-generated jaunty recruitment videos for the Islamic State featuring anti-Semitic messages and burning American flags.

Read: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand journalism

Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site. Neo-Nazis stayed active on Facebook by taking out ads even after they were formally banned. And it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust. (Previously Zuckerberg had defended Facebook’s decision not to remove disinformation about the Holocaust, saying of Holocaust deniers, “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” He later clarified that he didn’t mean to defend Holocaust deniers.) Even so, Facebook routinely sends emails to users recommending the newest QAnon groups. White supremacists and deplatformed MAGA trolls may flock to smaller social platforms such as Gab and Parler, but these platforms offer little aside from a narrative of martyrdom without megascale.

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.

The decision to touch the dial was highly unusual for Facebook. Think about it this way: The Doomsday Machine’s sensors detected something harmful in the environment and chose not to let its algorithms automatically blow it up across the web as usual. This time a human intervened to mitigate harm. The only problem is that reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst. After all, today’s empires are born on the web. Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms. Hillary Clinton told me earlier this year that talking to Zuckerberg feels like negotiating with the authoritarian head of a foreign state. “This is a global company that has huge influence in ways that we’re only beginning to understand,” she said.

I recalled Clinton’s warning a few weeks ago, when Zuckerberg defended the decision not to suspend Steve Bannon from Facebook after he argued, in essence, for the beheading of two senior U.S. officials, the infectious-disease doctor Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The episode got me thinking about a question that’s unanswerable but that I keep asking people anyway: How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.

The website that’s perhaps best known for encouraging mass violence is the image board 4chan—which was followed by 8chan, which then became 8kun. These boards are infamous for being the sites where multiple mass-shooting suspects have shared manifestos before homicide sprees. The few people who are willing to defend these sites unconditionally do so from a position of free-speech absolutism. That argument is worthy of consideration. But there’s something architectural about the site that merits attention, too: There are no algorithms on 8kun, only a community of users who post what they want. People use 8kun to publish abhorrent ideas, but at least the community isn’t pretending to be something it’s not. The biggest social platforms claim to be similarly neutral and pro–free speech when in fact no two people see the same feed. Algorithmically tweaked environments feed on user data and manipulate user experience, and not ultimately for the purpose of serving the user. Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

Read: How Facebook works for Trump

“What a dreadful set of choices when you frame it that way,” Geltzer told me when I put this question to him in another conversation. “The idea of a free-for-all sounds really bad until you see what the purportedly moderated and curated set of platforms is yielding … It may not be blood onscreen, but it can really do a lot of damage.”

In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.” Another expert in this realm, Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.

Looking back, it can seem like Zuckerberg’s path to world domination was inevitable. There’s the computerized version of Risk he coded in ninth grade; his long-standing interest in the Roman empire; his obsession with information flow and human psychology. There’s the story of his first bona fide internet scandal, when he hacked into Harvard’s directory and lifted photos of students without their permission to make the hot-or-not-style website FaceMash. (“Child’s play” was how Zuckerberg later described the ease with which he broke into Harvard’s system.) There’s the disconnect between his lip service to privacy and the way Facebook actually works. (Here’s Zuckerberg in a private chat with a friend years ago, on the mountain of data he’d obtained from Facebook’s early users: “I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses … People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”) At various points over the years, he’s listed the following interests in his Facebook profile: Eliminating Desire, Minimalism, Making Things, Breaking Things, Revolutions, Openness, Exponential Growth, Social Dynamics, Domination.

Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top. “It’s insane to have that much speechifying, silencing, and permitting power, not to mention being the ultimate holder of algorithms that determine the virality of anything on the internet,” Geltzer told me. “The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”

Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”

In 2005, the year I joined Facebook, the site still billed itself as an online directory to “Look up people at your school. See how people know each other. Find people in your classes and groups.” That summer, in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg gave an interview to a young filmmaker, who later posted the clip to YouTube. In it, you can see Zuckerberg still figuring out what Facebook is destined to be. The conversation is a reminder of the improbability of Zuckerberg’s youth when he launched Facebook. (It starts with him asking, “Should I put the beer down?” He’s holding a red Solo cup.) Yet, at 21 years old, Zuckerberg articulated something about his company that has held true, to dangerous effect: Facebook is not a single place on the web, but rather, “a lot of different individual communities.”

Today that includes QAnon and other extremist groups. Back then, it meant mostly juvenile expressions of identity in groups such as “I Went to a Public School … Bitch” and, at Harvard, referencing the neoclassical main library, “The We Need to Have Sex in Widener Before We Graduate Interest Group.” In that 2005 interview, Zuckerberg is asked about the future of Facebook, and his response feels, in retrospect, like a tragedy: “I mean, there doesn’t necessarily have to be more. Like, a lot of people are focused on taking over the world, or doing the biggest thing, getting the most users. I think, like, part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely … I mean, I really just want to see everyone focus on college and create a really cool college-directory product that just, like, is very relevant for students and has a lot of information that people care about when they’re in college.”

Read: What we wrote about Facebook 12 years ago

The funny thing is: This localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business. In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway. No news organization can compete with the megascale of the social web. It’s just too massive.

The on-again, off-again Facebook executive Chris Cox once talked about the “magic number” for start-ups, and how after a company surpasses 150 employees, things go sideways. “I’ve talked to so many start-up CEOs that after they pass this number, weird stuff starts to happen,” he said at a conference in 2016. This idea comes from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who argued that 148 is the maximum number of stable social connections a person can maintain. If we were to apply that same logic to the stability of a social platform, what number would we find?

“I think the sweet spot is 20 to 20,000 people,” the writer and internet scholar Ethan Zuckerman, who has spent much of his adult life thinking about how to build a better web, told me. “It’s hard to have any degree of real connectivity after that.”

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.

On the precipice of Facebook’s exponential growth, in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”

Of the many things humans are consistently terrible at doing, seeing the future is somewhere near the top of the list. This flaw became a preoccupation among Megadeath Intellectuals such as Herman Kahn and his fellow economists, mathematicians, and former military officers at the Rand Corporation in the 1960s.

Kahn and his colleagues helped invent modern futurism, which was born of the existential dread that the bomb ushered in, and hardened by the understanding that most innovation is horizontal in nature—a copy of what already exists, rather than wholly new. Real invention is extraordinarily rare, and far more disruptive.

The logician and philosopher Olaf Helmer-Hirschberg, who overlapped with Kahn at Rand and would later co-found the Institute for the Future, arrived in California after having fled the Nazis, an experience that gave his desire to peer into the future a particular kind of urgency. He argued that the acceleration of technological change had established the need for a new epistemological approach to fields such as engineering, medicine, the social sciences, and so on. “No longer does it take generations for a new pattern of living conditions to evolve,” he wrote, “but we are going through several major adjustments in our lives, and our children will have to adopt continual adaptation as a way of life.” In 1965, he wrote a book called Social Technology that aimed to create a scientific methodology for predicting the future.

Read: The silence of the never Facebookers

In those same years, Kahn was dreaming up his own hypothetical machine to provide a philosophical framework for the new threats humanity faced. He called it the Doomsday Machine, and also the Doomsday-in-a-Hurry Machine, and also the Homicide Pact Machine. Stanley Kubrick famously borrowed the concept for the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, the cinematic apotheosis of the fatalism that came with living on hair-trigger alert for nuclear annihilation.

Today’s fatalism about the brokenness of the internet feels similar. We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible. The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.

If the age of reason was, in part, a reaction to the existence of the printing press, and 1960s futurism was a reaction to the atomic bomb, we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.

Andrew Bosworth, one of Facebook’s longtime executives, has compared Facebook to sugar—in that it is “delicious” but best enjoyed in moderation. In a memo originally posted to Facebook’s internal network last year, he argued for a philosophy of personal responsibility. “My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it,” Bosworth wrote. “And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.” But viewing Facebook merely as a vehicle for individual consumption ignores the fact of what it is—a network. Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?

Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change. The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

I still believe the internet is good for humanity, but that’s despite the social web, not because of it. We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

We may not be able to predict the future, but we do know how it is made: through flashes of rare and genuine invention, sustained by people’s time and attention. Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

It does not have to be this way.

 

[11Drogba 2,000]

The deepest irony of this whole “I’m a Republican so I only respect doctors who are medical doctors,” thing is that 300,000 Americans are dead because Republicans didn’t respect medical doctors.

[Vesper 30,226]

45 minutes ago, 11Drogba said:

The deepest irony of this whole “I’m a Republican so I only respect doctors who are medical doctors,” thing is that 300,000 Americans are dead because Republicans didn’t respect medical doctors.

and so many of those cunts go by Dr when non medical, plus the average RWer listens to people who go by Dr as well

they are just hypocrical vermin playing hyper-partisan games

[11Drogba 2,000]

Rupert Murdoch got the Covid vaccine the day after Tucker Carlson spent his entire show sowing doubt about the Covid vaccine.

[Vesper 30,226]

Trump is just itching to declare martial law

Legal challenges are one thing, but Trump is clearly desperate to deploy the military to satisfy his own ends.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/trump-martial-law-flynn/

 

Trump Weighed Naming Election Conspiracy Theorist as Special Counsel

In a meeting at the White House on Friday, President Trump weighed appointing Sidney Powell, who promoted conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, to investigate voter fraud.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/us/politics/trump-sidney-powell-voter-fraud.html

 

Heated Oval Office meeting included talk of special counsel, martial law as Trump advisers clash

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/19/politics/trump-oval-office-meeting-special-counsel-martial-law/index.html

 

Trump's former national security advisor says the president should impose martial law to force new elections in battleground states

https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-flynn-trump-military-martial-law-overturn-election-2020-12?r=US&IR=T