amplify accelerate

7/20 sparked by Qanon, an instant religion b/c crowdsourced, building on pre-existing conspiracies eg 80's satanic panic, also a hub which give greater ranger of BS to call upon/ re-mix and bigger pool of ppl to draw on, also cross-fertilization makes (old BS?) new

MERRI OK

//LOIO? DOOM Tip Pt?

see algorithm RADICALIZ TWT MUSK POLAR

yikes see fascism 3 23 soc med

see AI

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amp algo, polarization

engagement // enragement

Fmr. Google CEO Eric Schmidt on theAI Revolution

Clip: 03/23/2023 | 17m 52s

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. How it is being applied—and, perhaps more importantly, regulated—are now the crucial questions to ask. Walter Isaacson speaks with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about A.I.’s impact on life, politics, and warfare, as well as what can be done to keep it under control.

Aired: 03/23/23

https://www.pbs.org/video/fmr-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-ai-revolution-2mknqb/

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AN 2 26 TCONV

A new study published today in Nature has found that X’s algorithm – the hidden system or “recipe” that governs which posts appear in your feed and in which order – shifts users’ political opinions in a more conservative direction.

Led by Germain Gauthier from Bocconi University in Italy, it is a rare, real-world randomised experimental study on a major social media platform. And it builds on a growing body of research that shows how these platforms can shape people’s political attitudes.

Two different algorithms

The researchers randomly assigned 4,965 active US-based X users to one of two groups.

The first group used X’s default “For You” feed. This features an algorithm that selects and ranks posts it thinks users will be more likely to engage with, including posts from accounts that they don’t necessarily follow.

The second group used a chronological feed. This only shows posts from accounts users follow, displayed in the order they were posted. The experiment ran for seven weeks during 2023.

Users who switched from the chronological feed to the “For You” feed were 4.7 percentage points more likely to prioritise policy issues favoured by US Republicans (for example, crime, inflation and immigration). They were also more likely to view the criminal investigation into US President Donald Trump as unacceptable.

They also shifted in a more pro-Russia direction in regards to the war in Ukraine. For example, these users became 7.4 percentage points less likely to view Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy positively, and scored slightly higher on a pro-Russian attitude index overall.

The researchers also examined how the algorithm produced these effects.

They found evidence that the algorithm increased the share of right-leaning content by 2.9 percentage points overall (and 2.5 points among political posts), compared with the chronological feed.

It also significantly demoted the share of posts from traditional news organisations’ accounts while promoting or boosting posts from political activists.

One of the most concerning findings of the study is the longer-term effects of X’s algorithmic feed. The study showed the algorithm nudged users towards following more right-leaning accounts, and that the new following patterns endured even after switching back to the chronological feed.

In other words, turning the algorithm off didn’t simply “reset” what people see. It had a longer-lasting impact beyond its day-to-day effects.

One piece of a much bigger picture

This new study supports findings of similar studies.

For example, a study in 2022, before Elon Musk had bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, found the platform’s algorithmic systems amplified content from the mainstream political right more than the left in six out of the seven countries.

An experimental study from 2025 re-ranked X feeds to reduce exposure to content that expresses antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. They found this shifted feelings towards their political opponents by more than two points on a 0–100 “feeling thermometer”. This is a shift the authors argued would have normally taken about three years to occur organically in the general population.

My own research offers another piece of evidence to this picture of algorithmic bias on X. Along with my colleague Mark Andrejevic, I analysed engagement data (such as likes and reposts) from prominent political accounts during the final stages of the 2024 US election.

Our findings unearthed a sudden and unusual spike in engagement with Musk’s account after his endorsement of Trump on July 13 – the day of the assassination attempt on Trump. Views on Musk’s posts surged by 138%, retweets by 238%, and likes by 186%. This far outstripped increases on other accounts.

After July 13, right-leaning accounts on X gained significantly greater visibility than progressive ones. The “playing field” for attention and engagement on the platform was tilted thereafter towards right-leaning accounts – a trend that continued for the remainder of the time period we analysed in that study.

Not a niche product

This matters because we are not talking about a niche product.

X has more than 400 million users globally. It has become embedded as infrastructure – a key source of political and social communication. And once technical systems become infrastructure, they can become invisible – like background objects that we barely think about, but which shape society at its foundations and can be exploited under our noses.

Think of the overpass bridges Robert Moses designed in New York in the 1930s. These seemed like inert objects. But they were designed to be very low, to exclude people of colour from taking buses to recreation areas in Long Island.

Similar to this, the design and governance of social media platforms also has real consequences.

The point is that X’s algorithms are not neutral tools. They are an editorial force, shaping what people know, whom they pay attention to, who the outgroup is and what “we” should do about or to them – and, as this new study shows, what people come to believe.

The age of taking platform companies at their word about the design and effects of their own algorithms must come to an end. Governments around the world – including in Australia where the eSafety Commissioner has powers to drive “algorithmic transparency and accountability” and require that platforms report on how their algorithms contribute to or reduce harms – need to mandate genuine transparency over how these systems work.

When infrastructure become harmful or unsafe, nobody bats an eye when governments do something to protect us. The same needs to happen urgently for social media infrastructures.

Timothy Graham, Associate Professor in Digital Media, *Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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aha social media thus amp ?! , but trump rally is call and response? dream logic // magical thinking?

https://www.alternet.org/gop-voters-2659695517/

an 3 23

no lnx

author Jeff Sharlet has spent years interviewing conservatives and found many unassuming Americans are ready and eager for violence against their political enemies.

Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the result of more than a dozen years of reporting on the religious right, compiling numerous interviews conducted throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and he's more worried than ever about the possibility of civil war, reported The Guardian.

"I’ve been writing about the right for a long time," he told the newspaper. "I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is."

He cited a "nice-looking" family he met near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who seemed like "ordinary" conservatives, as the newspaper described them, but harbored bloodthirsty fantasies rooted in extreme conservative politics.

"[The father said] he had a 'Let’s go Brandon' sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son," Sharlet said. "They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions."

The current political moment was rooted in a decades-old struggle against fascism, and Sharlet said Donald Trump, intentionally or instinctively, used its "dream logic" to spellbind his followers, who fill in the unfinished thoughts in his pronouncements with their own beliefs -- and that creates the illusion that he's speaking their truth into existence.

"The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic," Sharlet said. "One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife, and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, 'Lock her up.'"

"This is dream logic, and there’s vanity in it, right?" Sharlet added. “'I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.'It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough."

:{:{}:

The illusion that's created for Trump and his followers feels interactive and very real to them, Sharlet said, and that's where the twice-impeached former president gains his power.

"This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left," he said. "The intellectual rightwingers are like, 'F*ck democracy, we don’t need it.' But the everyday people, they’re like, 'This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.'"}:

:{:{Sharlet sees a similar dynamic at work within the anti-abortion movement, which the left sees as an effort to control women's bodies, but the right sees as a cause so righteous that violence is necessary.}:

"Yes, the project is misogynist to the core," he said. "But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children, what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?"}:

"It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence," Sharlet added. "I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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mebbe, hope not

note aha sys: no filter/brake, amp accel? // trump wd not rein in, as gop wd not cross trump; to call them out means acknow a relationship?

an 9 22 raw tom b

According to two different experts on the rising tide of domestic terrorists since the election of Donald Trump, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better as long as the former president remainsfree to incite violencein much the way he did on Jan 6, 2020.

Speaking with the New York Times' Blake Hounshell, authors Luke Mogelson and Andy Campbell, both of whom have new books on right-wing extremists, waved the red flag about what they see coming as Trump continues to egg his followers on -- which is setting the stage for more violence.

As Hounshell summed up their warning: "The worst is yet to come."

Getting right to the point, Campbell, who has a new book out on the Proud Boys, told the Times, "I really do believe that, going forward, it’s not just going to be MAGA rallies. It’s not just going to be political violence at Proud Boys rallies or leftist rallies or B.L.M. events. It’s going to be political violence at any civic event that happens to fall in the cross hairs of Donald Trump and company.”

According to Hounshell, "In the United States, it is not illegal to be a part of a domestic extremist group. To go after specific threats, the government has limited tools, meaning that federal officials often must find links to groups overseas in order to crack down on homegrown extremists or prosecute them under other provisions of law," adding, "Complicating matters, Republican politicians like Trump — who instructed the Proud Boys to 'stand back and stand by' during a presidential debate in 2020 — often provide rhetorical cover."

Mogelson claims the violence he saw on Jan 6, when supporters of the former president stormed the Capitol, reminded him of covering armed conflicts around the world for the past decade.

"He witnessed a mob killing of someone in Iraq, which gave him an understanding of what he called the 'intoxicating' feeling that can whip a crowd of seemingly ordinary people into a frenzy," the Times reports before noting, "he began reporting on anti-lockdown groups that mobilized against the pandemic measures put in place by governors like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, he immediately saw that the story was much larger."

He told the Times, "I soon realized that these groups and this movement was rapidly mutating.”

Campbell chimed in to add the Republican Party appears unable -- or unwilling -- to rein the far-right extremists in.

“The Republican Party seems to not know what to do,” he claimed before warning, “It seems like their inability to rebut the Proud Boys and other extremists is pushing this machine forward so much faster and really making it hard for law enforcement to keep up.”

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inequality productions: many vids

left vs rt shift clinton triangulate: polar

ineq expl 12 min rr primer; dynastic wealth // royal, ~ meritocracy estate and capital gains tax --> amplifying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0

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omg/doh

barbara walter ucsd:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/expert-second-american-civil-war/

If you had 15 minutes to brief President Biden or Attorney General Garland, what would you highlight as the first steps they should take to contain this threat?

Regulate social media. It's the easiest thing that the U.S. government can do. The five biggest tech companies are all American companies.Don't engage in censorship. Let people put whatever they want on social media, but regulate what tech companies are allowed to do in terms of their recommendation engines. Don't allow them to take the most incendiary material andpush it out to the widest possible audience,because that is causing a range of really negative societal effects. These include helping to accelerate the decline of democracy, helping to grow the rise of ethnic nationalism and hate crimes and helping to make it easier to organize militias. Regulating social media would be the quickest and easiest way to reverse these negative effects.

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aha: echo is isolation from Earth1, legit press info (ie ideas/info you do not want b/c does not fit your POV) and escalator= AMPLIFY/ BOOST/ PROPAGATE TO MORE PPL AND MORE INFLUENTIAL/INFECTIOUS PPL/ SOURCES;boost is boostedby algorithm and hype hate anger fear is monetized which is both an incentive and an extra further boost --> runaway mode

an 2 22 edit bd

On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.

On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”

Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.

His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.

Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.

Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”

Then there is this part:

Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.

“Yes, that's absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett.

Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.

He's trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a "consensual dictatorship" -- which is a pretty good description.

Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?

His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He's reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:

They become isolated(or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a "grander" purpose (in the Nazi mindset).

A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded -- Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn't agree with it.

What you're describing is collectivism, no?

The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the "Fuhrer.” That's a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the "true" will of "the people."

But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.

Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it's a moral failing, wouldn't a defense be private and public morality?

Ideally, yes.

Bonhoeffer's essay is an exploration of why that didn't happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.

The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he's pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.

That didn't happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.

That's why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that "only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity."

The trucker above says he's seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?

One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we're also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.

In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers' protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).

I've studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.

For Bonhoeffer personally -- he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith -- that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.

I'm reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:

Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success,you’re going to sacrifice things along the way.There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.

A society focused on "success" (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won't do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.

He's making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual's ethics and sense of responsibility.

I've been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population -- children under the age of 6 -- can't yet be vaccinated).

But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we've dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.

A society is measured in part by what we are willing to live with and by whether we are willing to change to make life better. Bonhoeffer, in his text, addresses this when he writes about the responsibility we are willing to take upon ourselves for the sake of a different future.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be doing what Bonhoeffer wished more Germans had done. He called out conservatives in the Parliament for standing with the Swastika and the Confederate flag.

I interviewed a number of Germans back in the 1980s when I was working on my first book (a collection of oral histories from people who had been in the Confessing Church) and I recall Kurt Scharf (a very brave pastor, who would later became a bishop) saying thatif Germans had held mass demonstrations and marched in 1933 in solidarity with German Jews, they might have changed things.

Impossible to know in retrospect, that’s what’s important here (and for understanding Bonhoeffer as well) -- taking a public position not only draws a line for what can be tolerated, but it also serves as a model to others that it is possible to speak out. That's what he was writing about in the section on the lack of civil courage among Germans.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/

no lnx

Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.

Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."

Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.

On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.

In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people,"socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:

It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...

Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.

According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.

It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.

Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...

So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...

Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.

And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.

In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:

:{:{}:

It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.

During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."

Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.

During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:

I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….

"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptomscan spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia andpropensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.

As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."

Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.

Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.

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https://theconversation.com/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testified-that-the-companys-algorithms-are-dangerous-heres-how-they-can-manipulate-you-169420

Fo:{rmer Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate on Oct. 5, 2021, that the company’s social media platforms “} harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy :{.”:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.”}:

Haugen was the primary source for a Wall Street Journal exposé on the company. She called Facebook’s algorithms dangerous, said Facebook executives were aware of the threat but put profits before people, and called on Congress to regulate the company.

Social media platforms rely heavily on people’s behavior to decide on the content that you see. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting and sharing. Troll farms, organizations that spread provocative content, exploit this by copying high-engagement content and posting it as their own, which helps them reach a wide audience.

As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social media companies do so in practice.

From lions on the savanna to likes on Facebook

The concept of the wisdom of crowds assumes that using signals from others’ actions, opinions and preferences as a guide will lead to sound decisions. For example, collective predictions are normally more accurate than individual ones. Collective intelligence is used to predict financial markets, sports, elections and even disease outbreaks.

Throughout millions of years of evolution, these principles have been coded into the human brain in the form of cognitive biases that come with names like familiarity, mere exposure and bandwagon effect. If everyone starts running, you should also start running; maybe someone saw a lion coming and running could save your life. You may not know why, but it’s wiser to ask questions later.

Your brain picks up clues from the environment – including your peers – and uses simple rules to quickly translate those signals into decisions: Go with the winner, follow the majority, copy your neighbor. These rules work remarkably well in typical situations because they are based on sound assumptions. For example, they assume that people often act rationally, it is unlikely that many are wrong, the past predicts the future, and so on.

Technology allows people to access signals from much larger numbers of other people, most of whom they do not know. Artificial intelligence applications make heavy use of these popularity or “engagement” signals, from selecting search engine results to recommending music and videos, and from suggesting friends to ranking posts on news feeds.

Not everything viral deserves to be

Our research shows that virtually all web technology platforms, such as social media and news recommendation systems, have a strong popularity bias. When applications are driven by cues like engagement rather than explicit search engine queries, popularity bias can lead to harmful unintended consequences.

Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok rely heavily on AI algorithms to rank and recommend content. These algorithms take as input what you like, comment on and share – in other words, content you engage with. The goal of the algorithms is to maximize engagement by finding out what people like and ranking it at the top of their feeds.

A primer on the Facebook algorithm.[vid?]

On the surface this seems reasonable. If people like credible news, expert opinions and fun videos, these algorithms should identify such high-quality content. But the wisdom of the crowds makes a key assumption here: that recommending what is popular will help high-quality content “bubble up.”

We tested this assumption by studying an algorithm that ranks items using a mix of quality and popularity. We found that in general, popularity bias is more likely to lower the overall quality of content. The reason is that engagement is not a reliable indicator of quality when few people have been exposed to an item. In these cases, engagement generates a noisy signal, and the algorithm is likely to amplify this initial noise. Once the popularity of a low-quality item is large enough, it will keep getting amplified.

Algorithms aren’t the only thing affected by engagement bias – it can affect people too. Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times people are exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it.

Not-so-wise crowds

We recently ran an experiment using a news literacy app called Fakey. It is a game developed by our lab that simulates a news feed like those of Facebook and Twitter. Players see a mix of current articles from fake news, junk science, hyperpartisan and conspiratorial sources, as well as mainstream sources. They get points for sharing or liking news from reliable sources and for flagging low-credibility articles for fact-checking.

We found that players are more likely to like or share and less likely to flag articles from low-credibility sources when players can see that many other users have engaged with those articles. Exposure to the engagement metrics thus creates a vulnerability.

The wisdom of the crowds fails because it is built on the false assumption that the crowd is made up of diverse, independent sources. There may be several reasons this is not the case.

First, because of people’s tendency to associate with similar people, their online neighborhoods are not very diverse. The ease with which social media users can unfriend those with whom they disagree pushes people into homogeneous communities, often referred to as echo chambers.

Second, because many people’s friends are friends of one another, they influence one another. A famous experiment demonstrated that knowing what music your friends like affects your own stated preferences. Your social desire to conform distorts your independent judgment.

Third, popularity signals can be gamed. Over the years, search engines have developed sophisticated techniques to counter so-called “link farms” and other schemes to manipulate search algorithms. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are just beginning to learn about their own vulnerabilities.

People aiming to manipulate the information market have created fake accounts, like trolls and social bots, and organized fake networks. They have flooded the network to create the appearance that a conspiracy theory or a political candidate is popular, tricking both platform algorithms and people’s cognitive biases at once. They have even altered the structure of social networks to create illusions about majority opinions.

Dialing down engagement

What to do? Technology platforms are currently on the defensive. They are becoming more aggressive during elections in taking down fake accounts and harmful misinformation. But these efforts can be akin to a game of whack-a-mole.

A different, preventive approach would be to add friction. In other words, to slow down the process of spreading information. High-frequency behaviors such as automated liking and sharing could be inhibited by CAPTCHA tests, which require a human to respond, or fees. Not only would this decrease opportunities for manipulation, but with less information people would be able to pay more attention to what they see. It would leave less room for engagement bias to affect people’s decisions.

It would also help if social media companies adjusted their algorithms to rely less on engagement signals and more on quality signals to determine the content they serve you. Perhaps the whistleblower revelations will provide the necessary impetus.

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aha/hmnn slide to fascism means kicking out props/norms, but it gets easier?!

comm dr

Liz Cheney's removal from House GOP leadership over her rejection of Trump's election lies and Republican senators' blocking of a bipartisan proposal to create an independent panel that would investigate the Capitol siege reveal in stark terms at least two things: (a) that Republicans have built a cult of personality around Trump, and (b) that they are now at the mercy of the proto-fascist mob that their Dear Leader energized and nurtured during his four-year tenure in the White House.

Either way, the fact of the matter is that, for purposes of political expediency, the GOP has opted to become a dark political force, relying almost entirely on lies and deception—while at the same time waging a coordinated onslaught on voting rights—as its governing techniques. As such, it represents a real threat to the stability of the republic.

Following Trump's defeat, the strategic objective of the Republican Party is not simply to engage in obstructionism, but to continue dividing the nation and radicalizing the American public against the democratic system. This is the only way that the Republican Party can hope to stay in the game in the political, economic, social, and cultural landscape that defines 21st century America.

Always the party of Big Business and the rich, the Republican Party has oscillated from conservatism to reactionism pretty much throughout the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first centuries, but today's GOP has gone so far toward abandoning basic democratic norms that it now belongs firmly in the political universe of parties and movements that make up the far-right. In fact, it is considered to be more extreme that Le Pen's National Rally, according to findings based on data collected from the Manifesto Project.

The political identity of today's GOP reflects a decades-long transformation. It begins to take form sometimes during the early 2010s, a decade that historian Andrew Bacevich characterized as an era of "venomous division." Driven primarily by fear of losing power in an increasingly diverse United States, the GOP made a dramatic shift towards extremism as a way of mobilizing white working-class voters, who experienced income stagnation and felt deep economic insecurity thanks to 40 years of brutal neoliberal capitalist policies, and scaring the hell out of the petty bourgeoisie with visions of chaos and disorder brought about by radical forces bent on destroying America and its traditional values and way of life.

Indeed, well before Trump threw his hat in the ring for Presidency, a 2013 survey of local party leaders found that, in contrast to Democrats who preferred more extreme candidates to more moderate candidates by a 2-to-1 margin, Republicans did so by 10-to-1.

Of course, it is Trump himself who solidifies the shift towards extremism. Fully cognizant of the mood both inside the Republican Party and the country as a whole, especially with a large segment of disenchanted and angry white voters seeing equal opportunity as a zero-sum game for them, Trump embarks on the complete transformation of the GOP into an extremist political party by lurching towards reactionary nationalism and diving deeply into nativism with his MAGA campaign slogan and inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, and African-Americans, respectively.

Trump also breaks with elite bipartisan consensus on a broad range of other issues, including trade and foreign policy, in order to secure his image as a unique figure in American politics, while falsehoods and outright lies become indispensable weapons on his performative proto-fascist march towards power.

To be sure, this was a bid for power with a strong resemblance to the political strategy that authoritarian parties have long adopted in many parts of the world, including that of the Nazi Party between 1919-1933. An unmistakable sign of Trump's"performative proto-fascism" was also his dalliance with armed militias—undoubtedly as grave a threat to democracy as were Hitler's brown shirts.

Trump's tenure in office ended on the same note as his rise to power—namely, with another act of "performative proto-fascism." His rejection of the 2020 election as "the big lie" was intended to cement in the minds of his fanatical base the idea of a "deep state" conspiracy and, subsequently, undermine democratic procedures. A movement built on lies, deception, and sheer propaganda can only be maintained by the very same tactics that energized it. There is no other way around it.

The reason that Republicans have opted to continue down the path charted by Trump is because this is now the only way to maintain the support of the proto-fascist base. Without that support, the GOP will have to reinvent its political identity—no small task for a party that has made a remarkable transition from conservatism to reactionism and finally to neoliberal proto-fascism—or cease to exist.

However, the paradox that Republicans face in the post-Trump era is that they cannot sustain a movement built around the cult of personality without the presence of a charismatic leader in its midst. In this sense, the Republicans can continue with Trumpist shenanigans as long as Trump is still around and politically active, but sooner or later they would have to look for an appropriate replacement—and perhaps an authentic fascist—otherwise the proto-fascist base may gradually begin to wither away.

What the future holds for the American republic is impossible to predict. However, what is abundantly clear right now is that with its delusional attachment to Trump, the GOP is methodically dragging the country into the abyss of instability, chaos, and proto-fascism.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. He has published scores of books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers, and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout and collected by Haymarket Books; Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout_{ and collected by Haymarket Books (scheduled for publication in June 2021).}_

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aha: each outrage has to be topped by next, builds a pattern of demon them, which can then be ratcheted up, escalation not just up the news food chain, but of outrage which drives clicks algorith feeds it back to user, who gets used.

The fires that follow

During heat waves surface temperatures soar, often triggering a chain of fire-promoting weather conditions including extreme thunderstorms. These thunderstorms have hundreds of lightning strikes that can ignite the dry soils and vegetation that serve as fuel for fire.

In northern regions like the boreal biome, these fire-promoting conditions can cause large-scale wildfires that burn millions of hectares of forest in a single summer.

Historically, humanity has considered wildfire a true disaster and spent considerable resources to suppress them. We now understand that despite the initial loss of established trees and soils, wildfires are a natural and integral part of the boreal biome.

Modern wildfires, however, are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity, covering a larger area due weather events like severe heat waves. In extreme fire years, these modern wildfires can burn deep into the organic soils that characterize boreal forests. These carbon-rich soils have been built up over thousands of years and hold approximately 30 per cent of the world's terrestrial carbon stocks.

When fires burn deep into soils or return too quickly to a forest, they lose their “ancient carbon" stocks. Instead of being held in the ground these ancient carbon reserves are combusted and released back into the atmosphere, increasing the carbon levels. The higher carbon dioxide levels generated by wildfires intensify climate change impacts like heat waves, which can lead to further wildfires, forming a powerful “positive feedback" loop with climate change.

While these trends alone are alarming, northern researchers warn that the fallout from heat waves won't stop when the fires burn out. In northern regions where the soils historically stay frozen year-round, a whole new set of changes are beginning to take form.

When permafrost perishes

Permafrost forms on the landscape when soil materials remain below freezing for two or more consecutive years. In some areas permafrost forms in direct response to a cold climate.

As one moves further south, however, permafrost becomes increasingly dependent on the presence of thick organic soils, surface vegetation and a shady overstorey to survive the warm summer months. In those cases, the ecosystem acts like a giant protective blanket, limiting the sun's heat that is able to reach the frozen permafrost materials below.

Carbon-rich peat burns readily, making it good fuel for lightning-caused fires.

(U.S. National Parks Service, Western Arctic National Parklands)]

When permafrost ecosystems burn, the wildfire consumes these protective layers, often triggering permafrost thaw.This can occur gradually, with the thawed layer expanding slowly over decades, or abruptly, with the thawed layer expanding dramatically over years. The land may cave in or sink, plant communities may change completely and local water flows may be rerouted.

In both cases, the loss of permafrost makes the massive Arctic carbon reserves more vulnerable to loss. With gradual thaw microbes are able to break down and release the previously frozen carbon back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In contrast, abrupt thaw commonly occurs in ice-rich permafrost resulting in warmer but also wetter soils. Under these conditions decomposition still occurs but carbon is commonly returned to the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas approximately 30 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

All this lost carbon may make the positive feedback with climate change even stronger. While scientists are working to understand if the vegetation that grows after permafrost thaw is able to offset all the carbon released during decomposition, most current models indicate that permafrost thaw will ultimately be a source of atmospheric carbon.

Researchers are coming to understand just how tightly linked these disturbances caused by climate change really are. What appears as an individual event — heat wave, forest fire or permafrost thaw — has cascading ramifications through time and space in the Arctic, potentially serving as the seed crystal for the next disturbance in the coming months, years or even decades that follow.

Heat waves, wildfires and permafrost thaw represent an environmental trifecta that are inherently linked and drive change in the occurrence and intensity of one another.

Catherine Dieleman, Research associate, Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph

This article is republished from The Conversation

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14082020/greenland-ice-sheet-melt-climate-change

8/20

Going, Going ... Gone: Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet Passed a Point of No Return in the Early 2000s

A new study finds that the accelerating retreat and thinning of Greenland’s glaciers that began 20 year ago is speeding the ice sheet toward total meltdown.

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amplifying (accelerating) eg soc med qanon

aha 820 covid accelerate and amplify inequality, oligarchy (hedge and pvt equity) rent-seeking disaster capitalism housing // gt recession; presumably big spender dark $ in 2020 election, but who?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/elizabeth-warren-sounds-the-alarm-on-a-mounting-housing-crisis-and-the-profiteers-who-will-take-advantage/

During her 2020 presidential primary campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a lot to say about the United States’ housing crisis — and after suspending her campaign and endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden (now the presumptive Democratic nominee), the Massachusetts senator continued to address the subject. Warren, in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post with Carroll Fife (director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), stresses that the coronavirus pandemic has made a brutal housing crisis even worse. And private equity firms, according to Warren and Fife, are hoping to cash in on the misery by gobbling up “distressed real estate.”

“The nation is facing an acceleratinghousing crisis,” Warren and Fife warn. “Too many people had no stable housing before the pandemic hit, and COVID-19 has made the problem even worse. Renters who were already facing an affordable housing shortage — with many spending more than half of their income on rent — now have no federal rental assistance or federal protection from eviction. Homeowners have less than a month left of foreclosure protection. And more than 30 million people receiving unemployment insurance just saw their benefits cut by $600 a week, raising the threat of a wave of defaults that could trigger a double-dip recession.”

But while “families” see as a “looming catastrophe,” they add, “private equityfirms just see dollar signs.” And Warren and Fife cite a Wall Street Journal report that investors are hoping to buy “distressed real-estate assets at bargain prices.”

According to Warren and Fife, such “profiteering” is “straight out of private equity’s playbook during the 2008 financial crisis."

"Following the 2008 crash,” they explain, “corporations that grabbed up properties on the cheap, converted those homes into rentals and turned into the worst kind of slumlords — jacking up rents, neglecting maintenance requests and health and safety concerns, and eagerly assessing fines, fees and eviction notices. Other corporate-owned homes were left vacant in a hoarding of housing stock. We cannot stand by while this history repeats itself.”

Warren and Fife’s recommendations range from “strong federal legislation to guard against the coming wave of evictions and foreclosures, including emergency rental assistance” to preventing “predatory companies from further destabilizing neighborhoods and profiting off the displacement of families.”

“If we fail to prevent another private equity real estate grab,” Warren and Fife warn, “we risk allowing another massive upheaval in the housing market that could wreak more havoc on low-income Americans — especially black and brown families still recovering from losing their homes a decade ago. Against a decades-long backdrop of racist federal policies that have impeded black homeownership, lawmakers’ refusal to proactively address this problem would be an indefensible oversight that would again give Wall Street carte blanche to use a national crisis to enact a massive, generational transfer of wealth from vulnerable Americans to corporations."

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aha doh:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/massive-super-spreader-19-event-now-underway-in-south-dakota/

[pix Sturgis, South Dakota motorcycle rally in 2015. This year’s rally, now underway, is expected to attract 250,000 people.]

:{:{}:

It would be too much to expect the millions of Americans who choose to celebrate their personal identity with intentionally loudand purposely obnoxious, high-polluting machines, operated at speeds in excess of 70 mph on our nation’s highways, with zero protection between themselves and the roadway, all to care equally about potentially infecting other people with an invisible virus.

Still, for at least a discrete subgroup of those folks who claim the “individual freedom” to face a fatality risk 26times the rate of other motorists, attendance at the annualSturgis motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota this year in the midst of the deadliest global pandemic in over a century, signifies a quantum leap of sorts in both irresponsibility and crass disregard not only for their own lives, but for the rest of the people in this country as well.

As reported by Michael Daly, special correspondent to the Daily Beast, starting on Friday, and for the next nine days, nearly a quarter million motorcycle aficionados, many driving thousands of miles from states all across the country, will congregate, backslapping, hugging, drinking, smoking, spitting, shouting, and expelling varied forms of bodily fluids from their orifices in a tiny South Dakota town, before returning home to spread whatever it is they might catch there to those who they interact with—stopping to sleep, eat, and urinate along the way for good measure.

Daly writes:

“Nobody is social distancing and none of them are wearing masks,” local psychologist Michael Fellner told The Daily Beast. “None.

The attendees for this event have come to Sturgis with the encouragement of South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem,an acolyte of Donald Trump who has taken a highly visible, negative view towards any means of self-protection during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Noem has encouraged parents to send their small children back into public schools without masks,which she claims will increase, rather than decrease, the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Following Trump’s lead, Noem has also advocated and commissioned her state to engage in trials ofthe anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 infections, despite guidance from the FDA warning against its use.

The rally is proceeding in large part to boost the South Dakota economy, as it normally generates several hundred millions of dollars in revenue. As reported by Daly, it is also proceeding despite the opposition of the majority of actual Sturgis residents. According to the The New York Times*, over 60% of the town’s 7,000 citizens supported postponing the event.But the same residents believed they could do little to stop it, since the rally itself occurs on state-licensed property and the state, through Noem, has already sanctioned it. A phalanx of businesses, advertisers and “people outside the city,” according to the The Times,* pressured the town to proceed, and the town’s City Council on June 15th voted 8-1 to go ahead with the rally, although city-sponsored events related to it were canceled.

As Daly reports, many of these attendee bikers have already expressed their disdain for preventive measures as well as the seriousness of the pandemic itself on social media.

“On my way I ain’t scared of the media flue or as we call it round here election fluesee ya soon sd,” J.F. Watson of Ohio said.

“Just call it a big protest !! And it be A-Ok!!” J. Toothman, also of Ohio, suggested.

The Sturgis rally is being reported as the largest public gathering since the COVID-19 pandemic began. But what particularly distinguishes it is the widespread disregard of the participants for preventative health measures to ward off potential infection, and the risk of broader spread of the virus once participants leave Sturgis. Reuters published an article on Friday describing the attendees as they arrive, through the eyes of Meade County Sheriff, Rob Merwin.

The sheriff’s office overlooks Sturgis’ Main Street and from Merwin’s vantage point, he saw few precautions taken as the town began to fill up Thursday evening.

“I’m sitting here and I’m watching people walk up and down the street, watching people ride up and down the street.A few have masks – most don’t,” he said. “There’s not much we can do. Everybody is coming here with their eyes wide open, they know what they’re getting into.”

In fact, it appears that many of them do know “what they’re getting into.” It’s just that they don’t particularly care. Most of these people have been fed six months of science denial and propaganda about the COVID-19 virus, by everyone from Donald Trump to Kristi Noem, down to their enablers on Fox News, all of it geared to stoke their delusions about how their “personal freedom” is being taken away by wearing masks, avoiding large gatherings and practicing social distancing. In Sturgis what we arewitnessing is the apotheosis of all that, a toxic blend of ignorance, insouciance, and arrogance in a small but significant subset population that prides itself on being “set apart” from the rest of society.

The problem is that in the context of an equal-opportunity pandemic, no one is set apart. Just as many of the attendees are likely to arrive already infected, and are likely to infect others while there, once they leave for home and parts unknown, millions of other Americans will be forced to deal with the health consequences of their “choices.”

So much for that “freedom.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/new-methane-leak-found-in-antarctica-raises-alarm-as-planet-edges-closer-to-climate-tipping-points/

Scientists have for the first time identified an active leak of methane gas from the sea floor in Antarctica, increasing the possibility that the planet is close to one of the “tipping points” that would put the impacts of global heating out of humans’ control.

According to The Guardian,GUK researchers led by Andrew Thurber at Oregon State University foundguk the methane leak in a region known as Cinder Cones in McMurdo Sound, within the Ross Sea. The site is 30 feet below the surface of the ocean.

In addition to finding methane dissolved in the water there, the scientists found that microbes which usually consume the gas before it reaches the atmosphere had only formed in small numbers five years after they first began to study the site.

Thurber called the findings “incredibly concerning.”

“It is not good news. It took more than five years for the microbes to begin to show up and even then there was still methane rapidly escaping from the sea floor,” he told The Guardian. “The methane cycle is absolutely something that we as a society need to be concerned about.”

Scientists have warned for years that the climate crisis could lead to the “tipping point” of methane leaks in the sea floor and the thawing of permafrost regions.

“At some point in a warming world, greenhouse gas emissions from nature will go way beyond anything we can control,” tweeted Australian immunologist Peter Doherty.[twt guk]

the Ross Sea has not yet warmed significantly from the climate crisis, so the research did not directly link the methane leak to global heating.

But climate models have not yet accounted for significant delays in the development of microbes, which help to keep methane from leaking into the atmosphere.

“The big question is: how large is the lag [in microbe development] compared with the speed at which new leaks of methane might potentially form in the wake of retreating ice?” Prof. Jemma Wadham of the University of Bristol in the UK, who reviewed the study, told The Guardian.

Thurber called the discovery of the methane leak and the delayed microbe growth “a significant discovery that can help fill a large hole in our understanding of the methane cycle.”

“Methane is the second-most effective gas at warming our atmosphere and the Antarctic has vast reservoirs that are likely to open up as ice sheets retreat due to climate change,” he said in astatement.

Other tipping points identified by climate scientists include the disintegration of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, “dieback” in the Amazon which would transform the rainforest into a dry ecosystem, and the dying off of the coral reefs.

Scientists raised alarm earlier this year aboutunusually warm water beneath a massive glacier in West Antarctica, and researcherswarned in February that the third major bleaching event in five years at the Great Barrier Reef would put the reef “on a knife edge.”

===

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QANON:

ref 1 https://religiondispatches.org/in-the-name-of-the-father-son-and-q-why-its-important-to-see-qanon-as-a-hyper-real-religion/

In a May 13th article published in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance offers her readers a deep dive into the QAnon movement. The article argues that when surveying QAnon, we’re not only examining a conspiracy theory, we’re observing the birth of a new religion. LaFrance underscores this argument by highlighting the apocalypticism found in QAnon; its clear-cut dualism between the forces of good and evil; the study and analysis of Qdrops as sacred texts, and the divine mystery of Q.

Following the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown in 1978, historian Jonathan Z. Smith wrote an essay locating the study and definition of religion within an academic context, where he highlights that “almost no attempt was made to gain any interpretative framework” of what occurred at Jonestown by academics. Adrienne LaFrance’s article on QAnon makes clear that the movement and its believers demand to be taken seriously. Her piece acts as a springboard to ask the question: Can QAnon be considered a religion?

Though many enjoy mocking the QAnon conspiracy theories and those who profit from them, it’s important to note that the movement’s adherents firmly believe in the theories—even to the detriment of their families and communities.

Therefore, in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the past and to better understand the movement as it continues to grow and evolve, I suggest that we view QAnon as a “hyper-real religion.” Sociologist Adam Possamai, who coined the term, defines it as “a simulacrum of a religion created out of, or in symbiosis with, commodified popular culture which provides inspiration at a metaphorical level and/or is a source of beliefs for everyday life.”

Or, to put it more simply, a religion with a strong connection to pop culture. Based on Jean Baudrillard’s work on hyper-reality and simulations, hyper-real religion is based on the premise that pop culture shapes and creates our actual reality, with examples including, but not limited to: Heaven’s Gate, Church of All Worlds, Jediism, etc. As a movement in a constant state of mutation, QAnon clearly blurs the boundaries between popular culture and everyday life. MATRIX 4 IS ABOUT TRUMP PANDEMIC]

What this means is that technology and the marketplace of ideas have inverted the traditional relationship between the purveyors of religion and the consumers of religion. Thus, we see religious doctrinal authority (that is, those who can contribute to the religion’s teaching) being created by popular culture. TELEVANGELISM?

For example, the QAnon cosmology (how the world/universe appears; what it looks like; its characteristics, and types of creatures that populate it) and anthropology (ideas about human beings, their origin and destiny) are rooted in conspiracy theories, historical facts, and mythical history from film and popular culture.

As such, Terry Gilliam’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is recommended by QAnon followers as evidence of the effects of Adrenochrome; The Matrix’s is used to frame the choice to either be a part of the Great Awakening or to remain “asleep”; and the slogan “Where We Go One, We Go All” is from the film White Squall, whose’s comments section is filled with QAnon followers (the top-rated comment, with over 5,000 up-votes, reads “Thumbs up if Q sent you here”). Theprophetic figure of the movement, known only as ‘Q’ , also regularly references movies in their QDrops, as demonstrated from the screenshots below:

[very large doc/graf]

QAnon theology (conceptions of the sacred, gods, spirits, demons, the ancestors, culture heroes and/or other superhuman agents) is rooted in American evangelicalism and neo-charismatic movements developed in the 1970s and 1980s—specifically theology involving a worldwide cabal that controlled governments and aimed to control the freedoms of people through technology, medicine, and liberalism.

For example, QAnon reworked elements of the Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) panic (aka “satanic panic”) that originated in the U.S. in the 80s.SRA was the belief that a global network of elites was breeding and kidnapping children for the purposes of pornography, sex trafficking, and Satanic ritual sacrifice.

Furthermore, QAnon adopts the language of spiritual warfare found in many neo-charismatic movements. Based on some of the data analytics work I’ve done, Ephesians 6:11-18 is the most shared verse among QAnon adherents. Given the verse’s apparent condemnation of governments, the reaction of QAnon to the pandemic is rooted in the language of spiritual warfare, especially when addressing conspiracy theories surrounding 5G, ID2020, Bill Gates and vaccines, HR 6666, etc. Since the start of the pandemic, QAnon have spread a false racist theory that Asians were more susceptible to the coronavirus and that white people were immune to COVID-19; they’ve promoted drinking bleach to cure the virus; that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon and that the virus release was a joint venture between China and the Democrats to stop Trump’s re-election by destroying the economy. If that weren’t enough, they also played a key role in promoting the Plandemic video and the ObamaGate and #FilmYourHospital hashtag; and forced Oprah Winfrey and Hilary Duff to come out with statements declaring that they are not pedophiles.

When taking into account how much neo-charismatics, American evangelicalism, theological conspiracy theories, and spiritual warfare is influenced by the distrust of the everyday reality as being false (with their reality being ‘true’), one could make the argument that QAnon theology is not only influenced by pop culture, but is in fact, deeply rooted in the conception of the sacred within a hyper-real world.

Some might argue that a hyper-real religion isn’t a “real” religion because it’s invented, but scholars of religion don’t validate or discredit claims of what constitutes ‘true’ religion, because it’s true to the people we study. As a scholar of religion I study what people do when dealing with the sacred, rather than try to validate the religious message or experience. What people do when dealing with the sacred is routinized over time as believers construct their religion. All religions, hyper-real ones included, are socially constructed and are thus invented.QAnon is blatantly invented [META-FICTION?!]as it openly uses works of popular culture, media, entertainment, American evangelicalism and conspiracy theories at its basis, that have been organically developed across time and space by a community of believers. Belief in QAnon reflects a created hyper-real world based on such theories.

This is unsurprising, as Travis View stated on PBS’s The Open Mind “we’re living in an age where conspiracy theories are promoted at the highest levels of power, when it wasn’t that long ago conspiracy theories were the pastime of the powerless.” Similarly in 2018, Joseph Uscinski stated that QAnon is different from normal conspiracy theories. “Conspiracy theories are for losers,” he told the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, “you don’t expect the winning party to use them.”

By framing QAnon as a hyper-real religion, it can offer insight into the confusion that people feel when discussing the movement, which is critical for observers, scholars, and decision-makers who need to take QAnon seriously. The past months have highlighted how QAnon is a public health threat, a threat to national security, and a threat to democratic institutions.

The essence of conspiracy beliefs like QAnon lies in the attempts to delineate and explain evil; it’s about theodicy, not secular evidence. QAnon offers comfort in an uncertain—and unprecedented—age as the movement crowdsources answers to the inexplicable. QAnon becomes the master narrative capable of simply explaining various complex events and providing solace for modern problems: a pandemic, economic uncertainty, political polarization, war, child abuse, etc.

The result is a worldview characterized by a sharp distinction between the realms of good and evil.[POLARIZATION/DEMON-IZATION] The movement accomplishes this by purporting to be empiricallyrelevant. That is, they claim that QDrops are testable by the accumulation of evidence about the observable world in fighting evil. Those who subscribe to QDrops are presented with elaborate productions of evidence in order to substantiate QAnon’s claims, including source citation and other academic techniques.

However, their quest for decoding QDrops masks a deeper concern: the more sweeping a conspiracy theory’s claims, the less relevant evidence becomes—notwithstanding the insistence that QAnon is empirically sound. At its heart, QAnon is non-falsifiable. No matter how much evidence journalists, academics, and civil society offer as a counter to the claims promoted by the movement, belief in QAnon as the source of truth is a matter of faith rather than proof.

Therefore, rather than ask questions like, How can people believe in QAnon when so many of its claims fly in the face of facts?, we should instead ask What are QAnonersdoingwith their belief system? QAnon believers have committed acts of violence in response to QAnon conspiracy theories. Elected officials or those campaigning for elected office have campaigned on QAnon. Those studying and combating the movement need to move beyond viewing it as a mere conspiracy theory; QAnon has grown beyond that. We are, as Adrienne LaFrance asserted, witnessing thebirth of a religious movement. QAnon as a belief system only appears to be dependent on Donald Trump’s presidency and his ability to remain in power. Whether we will be speaking of future or former President Trump, the person known as Q will likely fuel the movement for a long time to come. Q will continue to claim special insights, knowledge, and frame things for their followers in terms of their enemies’ alleged ambitions. [AGENDA, HATE AMERICA, GLOBAL ELITE DOMINATION]

If Donald Trump wins in November, QAnon will be vindicated in their beliefs and say this is what God has mandated, reinforcing the belief that they are right. If Trump loses, it will be attributed to the Deep State Luciferian cabal and they will have a role to play in fighting against the fake government that’s replaced Donald Trump.

QAnon has become a hermeneutical lens through which to interpret the world. Already we’ve seen a formalized QAnon religion at Omega Kingdom Ministries (OKM). OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube. At OKM, QAnon is a hermeneutic by which the Bible is interpreted; and the Bible, in turn, serves as an interpretive lens for QAnon. Furthermore, QAnon is built into their evangelical Christian rituals. OKM may be a sign for what’s to come in terms of QAnon’s proximity to evangelical and neo-charismatic movements in the U.S.

[HUB]

In categorizing QAnon as a hyper-real religion rather than a decentralized grouping of conspiracy theorists, it provides an analytical framework to quantify and qualify QAnon-inspired acts of violence as ideologically motivated violent extremism. Furthermore, there’s an increasing overlap between QAnon and the far-right/Patriot movements on Telegram, a messaging app that has attracted extremists because due to its privacy protections. From the perspective of national security, we need to be prepared for more acts of violence by QAnon believers as it’s proven to be a catalyst for radicalization to violence, terrorism and murder.

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...QAnon’s Coronavirus-Fueled Boom Is A Warning Of What's To

ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES] [sign: Q sent me]

Skyrocketing Online Interest

QAnon’s ostensible leader is “Q,” an anonymous online poster who adherents believe is a top government insider leaking coded intel to the public. [flynn? 3 stars] Q posts cryptic messages to the forum 8kun, which replaced the now-shuttered website 8chan last fall. There’s no clear indication of how many subscribers QAnon has amassed since its origins in 2017, although researchers estimate that its base could comprise hundreds of thousands of people or more — including at least 57 current and former congressional candidates. Some QAnon followers have even been inspired to commit violent crimes.

Rather than getting their supposed intel directly from Q on 8kun, which can be difficult to navigate, many QAnon supporters rely on a network of so-called “decoders,” or proxy figures, [AMPLIFY] who decipher and extrapolate on Q’s posts on their various social media channels. Whenever QAnon content scores a prominent new endorser, a trending hashtag, an affirming feature on Fox News or a presidential retweet, for example, decoders’ Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook pages tend to light up with curious new followers seeking information about the movement.

That’s been happening a lot lately, particularly as people search for answers about a global health emergency that’s unprecedented in most living memories. QAnon has played a major role in amplifying COVID-19 conspiracy theories into virality [TIP POINT = UNSTOPPABLE?!— many stemming from the baseless claim that the virus is a state-engineered bioweapon — while attracting hordes of new adherents in the process.

HuffPost analyzed the growth of dozens of the largest QAnon decoder accounts on social media, using the analytics tools Social Blade and CrowdTangle. The data showed explosive spikes in followers and subscribers starting in mid-March, just as the outbreak reached official pandemic status and as much of the world awoke to its severity. Most accounts’ followings have grown at least threefold since March 11, with one QAnon-centric Facebook group’s membership skyrocketing by more than 5,000%.

This graph charts the growth of four of the largest QAnon

HUFFPOST/DATAWRAPPER]

This graph charts the growth of four of the largest QAnon "decoder" accounts on social media. Each started spiking in followers or subscribers in mid-March — a trend reflected across dozens of other decoder accounts HuffPost analyzed.

Google searches for “QAnon” also began to soar in mid-March, as Mother Jones reported, along with searches for “deep state”; “Fall of the Cabal,” a popular QAnon video explainer series; and “WWG1WGA,” the movement’s slogan, meaning “Where We Go One, We Go All.” The number of visits to qmap.pub, a website that catalogs Q’s posts, has likewise erupted during the pandemic. The page had more than 10.5 million hits in May, compared to 4.1 million in January, according to the analytics tool SimilarWeb.

This surge in traffic appears to represent a staggering wave of new interest in QAnon. Although it may seem like a bizarre, low-level threat given its #PizzaGate-style theories, QAnon has an outsize real-world impact. As it has bubbled up from the paranoiac cesspools, it has shown time and again its insidious ability to disseminate disinformation to the masses — including, recently, anti-vaccine propaganda, the promotion of bleach as a COVID-19 cure, and hoaxes targeting front-line health care workers.

Even before the virus took its toll,QAnon had staked its territory in the political realm. Time magazine listed Q among the most influential people on the internet in 2018. A 2019 Civiqs poll of 1,543 registered U.S. voters found that 17% considered QAnon’s theory “about a conspiracy among deep state elites” to be “mostly true.”

Last spring, following a deadly shooting and other violent incidents involving self-proclaimed QAnon believers, the FBI labeled the movement a potential domestic terrorism threat. Trump has retweeted QAnon-supporting accounts more than 130 times — including three times on Saturday alone. And now, anopen QAnon promoter is expected to make it to Congress.

A 265,000-follower QAnon decoder Instagram account suggests the COVID-19 pandemic is a

INSTAGRAM]

A 265,000-follower QAnon decoder Instagram account suggests the COVID-19 pandemic is a "great awakening" — a common QAnon reference to people "waking up" to the movement. [millenial END DAYS GHOST DANCE TRUMP DEATH CULT?]

The pandemic has provided the ideal conditions for QAnon to gain critical mass. Fear and desperation abound in times of crisis, and rapidly changing information — such as the shifting advice regarding face masks early on — can rattle people’s confidence in authoritative news sources, rendering them especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories.

“People are looking for explanations for what feels like randomness,” Kaplan said. Conspiracy theorists are ready and eager to meet that demand.

The coronavirus has even brought unlikely QAnon enthusiasts out of the woodwork to preach Q’s message to entirely new audiences.Over the past three and half months, a series of lifestyle influencers on Instagram have abruptly pivoted their content from fashion, yoga, filtered selfies and the like to far-right agitprop.

“With everything going on in the world, I’m ready to share some of the things that I have been following for a really long time that I think are going to be exposed to the masses very soon,” one influencer-turned-propagandist announced in March, before posting a series of QAnon-themed Story Highlights to “awaken” her more than 100,000 followers.

Since then, she has repeatedly used her platform to advance the notion that the pandemic is a false flag event orchestrated to distract from “deep state” depravity, to mandate vaccines and, more generally, to exert unbridled control over society....