Reduction Bak

estb 1 25 capt

mebbe belated 519

promote primary 3/20 covid corona, stress test on rx, economy, insts

see aha 4

aha: ~ buffer

AHA: REDUCTIONISM KILLS/ ENSLAVES/ EXTRACTS

VS SYSTEMS HEAL, CONNECT, FREE

triggered by un rept 1 mill species at risk

sorta disambiguation externality

opposite is critical thinking, systemic

AHA CONSPIR IS REDUCTION TO ONE FACTOR / BOGEYMAN TIKTOK DISINFO HYPE FEAR GRIFT

recall supply demand invis hand BS

bak

aha dark side inverse of transaction is retaliation

tariffs are reductionism; also punishment of enemy ppl we do not like/fear POC foreigner xeno; now alo apparently way to extort/extract bribes; bonus explains why am mfger rust belt gutted b/c they cheated [like they are sending fentanyl that we have no interest in]; trumpista fine with being collateral damage as longas their fighter is seen to be hurting enemy more.// empty pool syndrome

===

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aha DEI is useful BS reductionistic explanation for a various more comlpex and various and inconvenient ideologically problems?

mma 1 25 deflection?

Fox News' Jeanine Pirro responds to New Orleans attack by calling the police chief “a DEI hire”

01/03/25

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an 1 25

In Los Angeles County, at least 10 people have died as the result of wildfires that have been inflicting destruction everywhere from Pacific Palisades to the San Gabriel Valley to the Hollywood Hills. Countless homes and businesses have been destroyed, including the home of veteran actor Eric Braeden.

Now 83, Braeden has been on CBS' long-running daytime soap opera "The Young and the Restless" since 1980.

During a January 9 appearance on CNN, Braeden lambasted President-elect Donald Trump for his comments about the wildfires. Trump has been blaming California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the disaster, but Braeden vehemently disagrees.

The veteran soap star told CNN's Laura Coates, "Everyone is really trying to do their damn best, OK? And some idiot — the orange idiot— went on television…. And claimed all kind of things about Newsom and California and the water distribution. All nonsense. Disinformation, period. "

Braeden continued, "There's a guy on your show who does fact-checking. I like him a lot…. What some of these characters are now disseminating on one particular network and some podcast is outrageous and very damaging to our nation."

Braeden was born in 1941 in the former Prussia in what is now part of Germany. And he referenced Europe's history with fascism.

"This is a great nation, trust me," Braeden said of the United States. "I know of what I speak. I come from a nation that believed in fascist ideology for a while, OK? And we certainly would not want to go into that again, but we're close to it. Because people want to simplify complex problems. The essence of fascism is to simplify complex problems and feed people who don't have time to read some bu-----t."

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AHA YIKES 11 24 TRUMP BUILD WALL, MIGRANT VIOLENT CRIME TARIFFS, DRILL BABY, NO TAX TIPS HYPE FEAR GRIFT

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:{ANDREW KLAVAN (DAILY WIRE HOST): Now, I don't believe in making great generalities about things — what they call totalizing principles, like life is about this or society is about this. But sometimes, it's kinda like being the blind man with the elephant, you're only seeing one side of it. But sometimes that helps. Sometimes you're just taking a look at one side of things, and that's what I'm gonna do now. There is a sense in which the central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women because women are valuable. They're valuable not just for their company and for their way of looking at things and for sex, which is a lot of fun, but also because they are the only path there is to continuing your genetic inheritance.

That is the way it is. When men want women on this kind of basic animalistic, just life level, to reproduce. Right? So the most obvious way to distribute women is to give all the women to the strongest man. Right? So you get — reproduce from the strongest person. That's the way gorillas — many gorillas, silverbacks live. The one guy gets all the girls. And the problem with that is it sounds like a good idea, but it's unstable because, obviously, all the other guys finally get think to themselves, oh, I know what we'll do. We'll get together and we'll kill the main guy, the alpha guy, and we'll steal the woman. And that's why those governments are unstable. That's how you get Magna Carta where the aristocrats, the most powerful people, go to the king and say, we want power too. That is, kind of, the human way of acting out that gorilla system. Ultimately, other men want women.}:

When you have a democracy, the best system is monogamy. Right? One per customer. Everybody gets a woman. And it sounds like that means that weak people will be allowed to breed, but it turns out it's actually a pretty good system because it favors diversity. Because a lot of times, the smartest guy in the room and the strongest guy in the room are two entirely different people. So you want the strongest guy to reproduce, but you also want the smartest guy to reproduce, and that is how humanity advances. In fact, monogamy, one per customer, is a really good basis for a society. However, it goes against the gorilla code, and the gorilla code is written into our DNA. We're somehow related. I'm not saying we evolved from gorillas, but we're related to them. We're not that far away from them. The men want lots of women, so the strongest man wants all the women, and the women want the strongest man. That is the way evolution has designed us.

So the strong have to take back the women. They want to take back the women from a system that is free. A system that is free is going to be a monogamous system. That's the way that works because it is the best system for freedom. It means everybody gets something. Right? All the women get a man. All the men get a woman — as close as we can come to that. The strong want to take women back, and they have to do it through — because it's a free system, they can't do it by force. They might want to, but they can't. They have to do it by lies. And there are two big lies they want to tell them. One is your husband is a no goodnik. He's a pain in the ass, and he's bossing you around. That's the first lie. And that lie is probably not a lie. It's probably true on some days at least. But the big lie that the government wants to tell you, that the people who want the power concentrated all in one place to get all the women, they want to tell you is that women can take care of themselves. And women hate the idea that they can't take care of themselves, but women cannot take care of themselves. They're smaller, weaker. Men are stronger. Men are mean. They're more aggressive. They will take them over. They'll do it anytime they can, anywhere they can. They will abuse them. They will hurt them. Women have to come up with different strategies for survival than men do. Right? Men buff up, they get tough, they study karate, they learn how to fight. Women can do all those things, and they still there still is going to be a man who can take them down. Women have to find different ways of being safe, and one of those ways is finding a man to protect them.

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nuance is fatal?

12 23 an

america’s prestigious universities play a big role in determining who gets into America’s wealthy elite.

A degree from Harvard, Penn, or M.I.T., to take three examples, is a meal ticket to a lucrative job on Wall Street or a corporate law firm and to the richest and most influential people in the land.

But as America becomes increasingly stratified by wealth, those tickets are easily abused.

Universities that give preference in admissions to the children or grandchildren of major donors serve to widen inequality even further.

Universities that allow major donors to influence what is taught or expressed on campus could be seen to suppress ideas that threaten the wealthy — which could chill freedom of expression and fuel social resentment.

Which brings us to the latest imbroglio.

Last Tuesday, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and M.I.T. tried to give precise answers to questions from members of Congress about whether their university cultures had encouraged hostility towards Jews — hostility that has surged since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s attack on Gaza in response.

In their opening remarks, all three denied it, and repeatedly condemned antisemitism.

Then Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York (and herself a Harvard graduate) asked a yes or no question: would calls for genocide of Jews on campus violate their codes of conduct or harassment policies?

The presidents hedged. “If the speech turns into conduct, yes, it can be harassment,” Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, a former dean of Stanford Law School, replied in lawyer-like fashion.

“I’m asking if specifically calling for the genocide of Jews — does that constitute bullying or harassment?” Stefanik pressed her point.

“If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment,” said Magill.

“So the answer is yes?”

“It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman,” Magill said.

Faced with the same question, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, also temporized. “It can be,” she said, “depending on the context.”

The university presidents should have answered unambiguously and unequivocally that calls for genocide of any group are intolerable.

Their failure to do so has fueled a firestorm.

Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager, said he would withdraw a $100 million gift to Penn. Other wealthy Penn donors called for Magill to resign.

Even prior to the hearing, a campaign had been launched by some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures to oust all three university presidents for failing to adequately condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

The influential board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton School’s, chaired by Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, called on alumni to withhold donations to Penn.

The billionaire investor Bill Ackman, Harvard alumnus and head of New York hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, called for the three university presidents to be fired.

The day after their testimony, Magill and Gay issued statements in efforts to contain the damage.

But on Saturday evening, after an emergency meeting of Penn’s board of trustees, Magill resigned under pressure.

Over the weekend, calls from donors for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to resign grew louder, as prominent donors demanded her ouster, too.

I can well understand the anger and frustration of these donors. In their congressional testimony, the university presidents should have been clearer that their institutions do not tolerate calls for genocide. Period.

But to use their power as major donors to force or seek the ouster of these presidents is almost as repugnant as the failures of these presidents to unambiguously condemn calls for genocide. It endangers the autonomy of America’s universities.

Who’s kidding whom? Those of us who have spent our lifetimes teaching in prestigious universities are well aware of the influence of big donors. The major job of today’s university presidents is to solicit money, and their largest targets are typically denizens of Wall Street.

For the same reason, boards of trustees are packed with wealthy alumni, often from the Street, who routinely veto candidates for university presidentships harboring views they find offensive.

But not until now have major donors so brazenly used their financial influence to hound presidents out of office for failing to come out as clearly as the donors would like on an issue of campus speech or expression.

As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose — based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world.

*Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.*

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11 23 mma

Third Republican presidential debate illustrated that Fox News' relentless misinformation about the Green New Deal and Keystone Pipeline is still paying dividends

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

PUBLISHED 11/09/23

During the third Republican presidential debate, candidates invoked the “Green New Deal” and the “Keystone pipeline” — both staples of Fox News’ misleading coverage of climate and energy issues — in response to the moderators' questions around the Venezuelan regime and the rising cost of living in the U.S.

Through Fox’s relentless coverage of the Green New Dealbeginning in 2019, the proposal has become synonymous on the right with socialism and often misapplied to any climate policy.

Similarly, Fox has made the canceled Keystone pipeline a symbol of Biden’s energy policy, which the network has blamed for rising gas prices, and falsely claimed constructing the pipeline would make the U.S. energy-independent or less vulnerable to the global crude oil market.

The moderators' handling of these right-wing media canards was mixed – and it suggests legacy media need to be better prepared to counter these false right-wing media narratives as the election season moves into full swing.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mischaracterized Biden’s climate agenda as the Green New Deal

After regularly attacking the Green New Deal since its introduction in 2019, Fox News spread the bad will it had engendered against the proposal to other climate policies, using the name to label and attack any and all climate action. This included a failed Senate coronavirus relief vote in March of 2020, the modest climate plan President Joe Biden announced in July 2020, the American Jobs Plan introduced in April 2021, and, more recently, the Inflation Reduction Act.

During the November 8 debate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed suit:

KRISTEN WELKER (MODERATOR): Many Venezuelan immigrants are settling right here in Florida. Former President Trump and President Biden have taken different approaches to Nicolas Maduro's regime with little result. Former President Trump put economic pressure on Venezuela and backed one of Maduro's rivals. President Biden temporarily eased sanctions to encourage electoral reforms. Gov. Desantis, do you see the political situation in Venezuela as a threat to the United States? And what would your approach be?

GOV. RON DESANTIS: We should never rely on Venezuela for oil like Biden has had to go beg. I am going to unleash all of America's energy potential. On day one I'm taking all the Biden regulations, the Green New Deal, ripping it up, and throwing it in the trash can where it belongs. We're going to lower your gas prices. We're going to create jobs. We’re going to lower energy costs. But we're also going to be more energy independent and secure. … That is good for America's national security. Biden's Green New Deal, that's good for Venezuela. It's good for Russia, it's good for Iran, and it's good for China.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the Republican Presidential Debate aired on NBC on November 8, 2023

Welker failed to challenge DeSantis on his inaccurate characterization of Biden’s climate plan. That plan is mostly encapsulated in the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated a historic $369 billion in climate and energy provisions. Since its passage, 272 clean energy projects have been announced in the United States, representing $278 billion in new investment and creating 170,606 new jobs, according to Climate Power. (Notably, the majority of IRA credits and loans are benefiting red congressional districts, per an analysis by Politico.)

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said he’d “sign the XL Keystone Pipeline”

For years, Fox News hosts, anchors, and guests have touted the Keystone XL pipeline as a solution to domestic high gas prices and global energy insecurity, despite multiple fact checks to the contrary.

LESTER HOLT (MODERATOR): This is a question that will go to all of you. An Iowa voter recently told NBC News, ‘How I am going to make sure my pantry's stocked without breaking the bank?’ You've all said the best way to deal with rising prices is to cut government spending, but that would take time to play out, and Americans are struggling right now. Sen. Scott, I'll start with you. What would you do the moment you take office to help Americans manage the cost of living? So we're talking about short-term here.

SEN. TIM SCOTT: My mother was a single mother who raised me and my brother in a very challenging economic situation. The first thing I can tell you is that when your gas prices are 40% higher right now than they were just a little over two years ago, that's not a problem for my momma — that was a crisis. The first thing I would do as president of the United States is I would sign the XL Keystone pipeline and start seeing resources flow. Second thing I would do is make sure there is certainty and predictability so that those folks who have the leases in our country would have the certainty and predictability to go ahead and become energy independent.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the Republican Presidential Debate aired on NBC on November 8, 2023

Moderator Lester Holt did follow up and challenged Scott on the idea that the pipeline would have any impact on current gas prices, noting, “Your time is up. But let me follow up. The idea of pumping gas, of turning on pipelines, that doesn't make gas cheaper that day.”

Indeed, not only was the pipeline only 8% complete when Biden revoked its permits, but the company building the pipeline officially abandoned the project in June of 2021, so there’s no project to “sign.” And even if the project weren’t dead, as proposed it would have threatened thedrinking waterof indigenous communities whose land the pipeline would cross, and it would have had enormous implications for the climate; renowned climate scientists James Hansen called the project “game over”for the climate.

Both DeSantis and Scott made misleading claims about gas prices and energy independence that reflect Fox News coverage

DeSantis suggested his plan would lower gas prices and make the U.S. more energy independent while Scott, in addition to falsely suggesting that the Keystone XL pipeline would lower gas prices, also claimed that more drilling was needed to make the U.S. energy independent.

None of the moderators challenged candidates' claims around energy independence or the idea that U.S. gas prices can be decoupled from the global market (another staple of Fox News’ energy coverage). The price consumers pay at the pump is determined by the cost of oil, which is tied to the global market and therefore inherently vulnerable to global disruptions, so the idea of achieving energy independence through fossil fuels is a fallacy.

Further, one definition of “energy independence” is exporting more energy than a country imports, and the U.S. has been a total net exporter of energy since 2019. According to the U.S. Energy Information Association, in 2022, U.S. total energy exports were the highest on record, and domestic oil production hit an all-time high last month.

Four years after Fox started pushing its misleading “Green New Deal” and “Keystone XL Pipeline” narratives, the misinformation persists, illustrating the network’s role in shaping the debate around energy and climate issues and the necessity of its media counterparts challenging Fox’s misinformation.

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aha-let best defense from fascism, note henry is systemic, connects dots ~ reduction

an ah 12 22

The MAGA movement suffered a long list of disappointments in the 2022 midterms, which found Donald Trump-backed candidates losing statewide gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and other swing states. But one MAGA candidate who performed extremely well in the midterms was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and he did it without Trump campaigning for him.

DeSantis ran a far-right reelection campaign, defeating Democratic nominee Charlie Crist (a former Republican and ex-Florida governor) by 19 percent. Florida, in fact, is the one place where Republicans really did enjoy a major red wave in the 2022 midterms. And some right-wing pundits, including author Ann Coulter, are urging the GOP to nominate DeSantis, not Trump, in the 2024 presidential election — assuming that DeSantis decides to run.

DeSantis doesn’t pretend to be moderate; being a far-right culture warrior is his brand. Journalist/author and scholar Henry A. Giroux analyzes DeSantis’ appeal in a scathing article published by Truthout on December 16, and he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. DeSantis, Giroux warns, is “fueling the emergence of fascist politics in the United States.”

“While some pundits have connected DeSantis’ politics to an emerging authoritarianism,” Giroux explains, “they still fail both to name the ongoing development of fascism in the U.S. and to recognize that it takes different forms in different societies and historical formations. They dismiss any talk of fascism by suggesting that its unique historical attributes, such as the genocidal use of concentration camps, have to be repeated precisely in order to assign the term fascism to present events. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past; it is a dangerous ideology that may go into remission but never disappears.”

Giroux continues, “Fascism is a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon and often takes on the cultural and political attributes of the societies in which it appears. The refusal to acknowledge that fascism can appear in many forms, often lying dormant in a society until the emergence of certain forces unleash it, reinforces the willingness of many to retreat into silence or ignore the seriousness of the emerging fascist threat. Expressing ourselves in words, learning from history and making connections among disparate events all matter in the age of fascism.”

Giroux stresses that when one is analyzing fascism, it’s important to recognize patterns and understand how individual events fit into the big picture — events like DeSantis sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts or Trump having dinner with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

“Fascist politics saturate U.S. society,” Giroux warns. “Ultranationalism, the calls for racial purity, voter suppression, hyper-militarism, required loyalty oaths from higher education faculty, rampant censorship, a ubiquitous anti-intellectualism, and a full-fledged attack on social provisions and public goods make clear that democracy is in crisis. Yet, in too many cases, the larger significance of these incendiary calamities is missed because they are treated as separate from each other…. DeSantis’ publicity stunt of using migrants as political pawns was also disconnected in the mainstream and liberal media from his attempt to erase the history of the Jim Crow era as part of his larger project of a politics of disposability.”

Giroux continues, “For instance, little was said connecting this racist policy to DeSantis’ passing laws banning books about Black history and racial narratives from schools and libraries, along with limiting what teachers can teach about racism — a policy that clearly indicates how DeSantis is following in the footsteps of the Nazification of education in Hitler’s Germany.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right authoritarian, has drawn a great deal of admiration among MAGA Republicans — including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.And Giroux outlines some parallels between DeSantis and Orbán.

“Following in the footsteps of Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian leader who has turned Hungary into a fascist country, DeSantis has waged a war on immigrants, targeted gay and transgender youth, purged voters, banned books in Florida schools, limited what teachers can say about racism and other critical elements of American history, and used state power to punish businesses, evident in his ruthless and vindictive attack on Disney,” Giroux observes. “He has also used policing to punish Black voters who disagree with his policies, courted Christian nationalists, supported a white nationalist agenda and waged a war on higher education. There is little doubt that DeSantis has turned Florida into a laboratory of fascist politics.”

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aha-let: // conspiracy theory all gop BS commentary/ "analysis" reduces human actions/motivations to desire for greed [rubber-glue inverse kochs] or fame (or now power/control pop psych truism]

morano control BS?

Fox News is returning to its pro-COVID-19 stance by attacking Los Angeles, California, for considering an indoor mask mandate as infections in the county skyrocket. The right-wing propaganda channel, which has long spewed pandemic-related misinformation, is again lying about the efficacy of masks for slowing the spread of the disease.

The Los Angeles Times reported that LA County’s case rate “has been increasing since late October and is now triple what it was in the autumn low,” and is currently 188 weekly cases per 100,000 residents, with a case rate of 100 or more being considered high. The LA Times also reported that the county is suffering about 60 deaths from COVID-19 each week. According to City News Service, the county’s COVID-19 hospitalization rate already exceeds one of the two thresholds that County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said would trigger a universal indoor masking mandate.

Fox’s response to this news is to return to its history of killing its viewers by spreading medical misinformation that has contributed to the staggering national COVID-19 death toll exceeding 1 million people. In particular, Fox has spread lies about the usefulness of face masks in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Some Fox personalities have bizarrely claimed that wearing masks makes people crazy, while others simply told lies about their effectiveness. Fox as a whole worked very hard to incorporate masking into their deranged culture war, even though at least one Fox prime time host early in the pandemic repeatedly gushed about their potential in keeping people safe. (Fox also for a time required staffers to wear masks at the workplace.) Besides attacking face masks during a respiratory disease pandemic, Fox has also urged its viewers to distrust public health officials.

And with the possibility of a mask mandate coming back to LA, Fox personalities reacted with incredulity, pretending that masking is ineffective and attacking the county public health director as “power hungry.”

Fox & Friends First co-host Todd Piro asked, “Have we learned no lessons from the … failure of masks?” He added, “These people, Barbara Ferrer, that you saw there, the entireestablishmentthat is pushing more masking, more lockdowns, they are power hungry. And they refuse to acknowledge that COVID is something we cannot prevent at this point, but something we have to deal with.”
Fox & Friends co-host:{ Brian Kilmeade said: “Masks don’t work. … What is wrong with these people?”}:
Later in the program, Kilmeade portrayed a masking mandate as intentional sabotage on people’s lives and children’s schooling, saying: “The problem is too many people enjoying their lives going back to normal. Let's try to screw them up again.”
Fox’s America’s Newsroom interviewed **Fox contributor Caitlyn Jenner for her inexpert opinion on the efficacy of face masks. During the interview, Jenner said: “I don’t think they work very well.” She later added: “I think our public health director is kind of like a little mini [NIAID Director Dr. Anthony] Fauci, wanting the controlthat they have.”
Fox Business host Steve Hilton claimed that masks “make practically no differencein the preventing of the transmission of this virus,” then ranted: “Can you believe we're back here again, yet again? You have these lunatics, these bureaucrats, totally unaccountable – Barbara Ferrer, the half a million dollar a year woman who runs public health in Los Angeles – not a medical doctor, parading these totally bogus metrics, right, about cases and whatever. How does she know what the cases are? People are testing on their own at home privately. It's not reported. It's complete BS. The whole thing is total BS, and I hope nobody pays any attention to it at all.”
On Twitter, Hilton also urged LA residents to “rise up and say enough is enough.”

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a kind of reductionsm/ rhet attack:

note // trump always low motive

thugswarm 180 pretty fast

tom b raw an 12 22

According to a report from Vice's Tess Owen, the romance between Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and followers of notorious Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes is irreparably on the rocks after she put some distance between herself and him following his dinner with Donald Trump.

While the former president has been circumspect in attacking the young far-right anti-semitic demagogue, the equally controversial Taylor Greene fired off a tweet stating, "Of course I denounce Nick Fuentes and his racists anti-semitic ideology. I can’t comprehend why the media is obsessed with him."

That, in turn, led Fuentes to lash back out at her, and his followers have since piled on the one-time darling of the Christian nationalist movement.

As Vice's Owen reported, Fuentes told his supporters, "She’s just weak. She goes and says something edgy to get attention, and then when the pressure comes, she buckles. You know, she’s gonna be a MAGA-mom and QAnon and all that, and then the second Kevin McCarthy reprimands her and she loses her committee, she goes and apologizes.”

Noting that Fuentes has taken to referring to her as "Large Marge" in his diatribes, Owen writes that she has become a central topic among the "groypers" tied to Fuentes' extremist movement.

According to fringe conservative Laura Loomer, "MTG is no longer an ally to America First. She may have claimed to be so that she could climb the political ladder, but she has shown she is all talk and zero action, unless of course the action is selling t-shirts and wine glasses.”

Holocaust denier Vince James added, "You are their slave Marjorie, a slave to the Democrats and the Media that you constantly talk about. By that statement [disavowing Fuentes] it just got to show you're living according to the rules of their game, that they've completely rigged against us."

"Here’s my take: grifters are gonna grift, and it’s just sad that we have to go through that kind of betrayal,” far-right podcaster Dalton Clodfelter proclaimed.

According to Owen, Taylor Greene isn't taking the backlash against her lying down, calling Fuentes "immature" and then adding, "What has he ever done in his life? He knows nothing more than anyone else.”

You can read more here.

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an 11 22

This recent New York Times headline offers a perfect prospective epitaph for America's ailing democracy and its potential imminent demise: "Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn't a Priority."

The details are grim. Voters "overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger," with relatively few calling it "the nation's most pressing problem," according to a new poll conducted for the Times by Siena College. More than one-third of independent voters in the poll "said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election," because economic concerns were more urgent. While 71 percent of voters agreed that "democracy was at risk," only 7 percent said that was the country's most important problem.

The Times' analysis conformed to a depressing current of conventional wisdom, concluding that "for many Americans, this year's midterm elections will be largely defined by rising inflation and other economic woes," reflecting a deeply rooted "cynicism" about government. This particular portrait reinforces what political scientists and other experts have long known about voting and other political behavior in this country.

Most Americans are relatively unsophisticated in their understanding of politics and public policy, and tend to be disengaged on issues beyond the few that appear to be of immediate concern to them, their families or their communities, barring a national emergency or crisis that demands collective attention. But even that kind of increased salience does not necessarily translate into an accurate or factual understanding of the policies in question. For example, the COVID pandemic certainly became a major national issue, but also fueled widespread disinformation about vaccines and public health measures. The 2020 election transfixed the nation for weeks, but Donald Trump's Big Lie narrative about that election has not faded away.

There are exceptions. Because of their experience navigating the color line, the contradictions of American democracy and the country's long history of white supremacy and racism, Black Americans, as a group, often tend to be more sophisticated than white Americans in terms of political decision-making.

Most Americans are not ideological, meaning that they do not possess a coherent and consistent worldview that drives voting and other political behavior. In the aggregate, the American people tend to take their cues from trusted elites about how they should think about politics and what they should do about it. Partisanship and voting are proxies for other social identities, not independent of them.

It is often said that the American people are increasingly polarized on politics. That's true enough, but it fundamentally reflects how the political elites, opinion leaders, and a small percentage of highly politically engaged individuals drive mass behavior.

As the New York Times/Siena College poll and accompanying analysis reinforces, immediate financial concerns and judgments about the economy (aka "pocketbook issues") appear to influence political behavior for many Americans. But even this commonplace observation is more complicated than it appears. "The economy," as a political decision tool, is fraught with pitfalls and inconsistencies. In the aggregate, it may not even matter nearly as much in determining political decision-making as many experts and other observers have long assumed. Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels make this intervention in their book "Democracy for Realists":

[I]t is by no means obvious that voters can ascertain how incumbents have performed simply by assessing changes in their own welfare. If jobs have been lost in a recession, something is wrong, but is that the president's fault? If it is not, then voting on the basis of good or bad economic conditions may be no more efficacious than killing the pharaoh when the Nile fails to flood or voting against Woodrow Wilson when sharks attack the Jersey shore…. Or, as Theodore Roosevelt put it while he coped with the Panic of 1907, "When the average man loses his money he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right or left at anything, innocent or the reverse, that presents itself as conspicuous in his mind."

An even more fundamental problem is that voters may have great difficulty accurately assessing changes in their welfare — even with respect to national economic conditions, which are highly salient and carefully monitored by professional economists in and out of government.

Many Americans do not think systematically about politics, society or the economy and are not likely to make connections between an apparently abstract concept like "democracy" and the specific issues they care about. But it's also true that political elites, media commentators and other opinion leaders who claim to believe in democracy have failed to explain to a broad public audience how and why democracy has a substantive impact on the average person's daily life.

There is an even more cynical explanation: As a group, America's elites do not particularly want a well-informed and highly engaged public. Such a public might pose an effective challenge to the outsized power of those elites, and by doing so expose how far they have imposed their narrow set of interests on public policy. Here is Chris Hedges,in a recent essay republished at Salon:

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full-blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation's infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world's largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions.

In a recent interview with me for Salon, social psychologist Shawn Rosenberg offered similar observations, saying that "the Achilles heel of democracy is that the people, meaning the citizenry, do not understand the larger political and governmental systemand its values," and are therefore "susceptible to a populist message." He mainly attributes this to America's dysfunctional educational system, which has "failed to educate the public to understand complex questions of society and politics":

It's not that large parts of the American public are inherently evil or bad. It's just that when they look around at the world, they don't understand what's going on. They don't understand why it's so hard to solve some of these problems we're facing, why it's so hard to govern and why they're supposed to respect people who they believe are obviously wrong. ... Right-wing populism offers simple answers and simple solutions and simple characterizations of what the world is like. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and other such Republican leaders are offering that vision and those answers.

Meanwhile, members of the media and political classes often make the error of generalizing from their own experience and knowledge to the public as a whole, leading to a whole range of incorrect assumptions, misguided conclusions and overall misunderstandings. Thus we get the perpetual of real or feigned shock and surprise from pundits, commentators and mainstream political leaders when faced with the Republican Party's fascist campaign against American democracy. Political scientist Jonathan Renshon addressed this in an interview with Politico last June:

Absolutely nothing is stopping elites from using the same public opinion data that academics or the public has access to, and yet we still see compelling evidence that elites misread public opinion, either because of stereotypes they hold about the public, over-weighting their own preferences, or unequal exposure to particular constituencies or special interests. As we saw in the 2020 presidential election campaign, it's also not unusual for politicians to discount or dismiss public opinion polls when they don't like the results. In a larger sense, this is not surprising: There are many domains in which access to more or more accurate information doesn't necessarily reduce the tendency for bias to creep into our judgments.

In total, the recent New York Times poll just offers further evidence that the American people may claim to be concerned about "democracy," but are fundamentally unclear as to the cause of the crisis and have no idea what to do about it. It's actually worse than that, in that many Americans don't even pretend to care about democracy and are more concerned about lower prices for gas and groceries — and have no problem trading away their rights and freedoms for the promise of ending inflation.

In a similarly dark vein, a new CBS News poll finds that 63 percent of likely Democratic voters believe that a functioning democracy is more important than a strong economy, but that those numbers are more than reversed among Republicans, 70 percent of whom rank a "strong economy" (whatever that means) above a functioning democracy.

It's not hyperbolic or metaphorical to describe those numbers as a textbook example of how democracy gradually, and then more swiftly, rots away and succumbs to fascism. The naive faith that "it can't happen here" is severely misplaced: It's happening here right now.

---

aha earth2 facts do not matter, reductionism; a kind of leverage for gop in that inordinate effect for tiny effort [gop legacy as good on biz?]

an ah 10 22

YIKES 2nd strategy res weeks before midterms

With the United States seeing its worst inflation since the early 1980s, Republicans are blaming President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party — and failing to mention that inflation isn’t just a problem in the U.S., but is a global problem. Some European countries have higher inflation rates than the U.S.; the EU’s inflation rate was 10.9 percent in September compared to 8.2 percent in the U.S.

Americans are especially resentful of high gas prices — an issue that, according to various polls, is a higher priority for some Americans than protecting democracy. Liberal economist andNew York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman, in his October 20 column, argues that it is “ludicrous and terrifying” that gas prices could determine whether or not the U.S. continues to be a democracy.

:{:{}:

“Will the price of gasoline — a price that has very little to do with which party controls the government — nonetheless determine the outcome of the midterm elections, and quite possibly the fate of American democracy?” Krugman writes. “I wish that were a silly question, but it isn’t. This year, there has been a strong correlation between the price of gasoline and political polls.”}:

Krugman continues, “Earlier this year, when gas reached an average of $5 a gallon, everything seemed to point to a Republican blowout. By mid-September, with gas prices down almost $1.50, the election looked much more competitive.And some apparent recent deterioration in Democrats’ prospects coincided with an upward tick in prices in late September and early October.”

The economist goes on to make some “important points about gasoline prices.”

“First,” Krugman writes, “the most important determinant of prices at the pump is the world price of crude oil, over which the United States has little influence…. Second, smaller fluctuations are usually driven by technical issues at the refineries that turn crude oil into gasoline and other products. The mini-surge in gas prices that began in September, and now seems to be over, was caused by shutdowns of several refineries for maintenance and a fire at one refinery in Ohio. Again, this has nothing to do with policy.”

:{:{}:

Krugman adds that in 2022, gas “isn’t expensive compared with the fairly recent past.”

“It’s hard to think of a worse metric for judging a president and his party than a price determined mainly by events abroad and technical production issues here at home, a price that isn’t even high compared with, say, a decade ago,” Krugman argues. “Yet gas prices may sway a crucial election — a fact that is both ludicrous and terrifying.”}:

---

good analysis: atomization of ppl 2022

sil vly libtards:

the Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and the Experimental Movement

By Adam Fejerskov

https://books.google.com/books?id=v591EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA78

Global Lab maps out the political, institutional, and ethical coordinates of a new experimental movement operating across the Global South. It tells the story of how a group of organizations, foundations, and corporations are increasingly using developing countries, local communities, and refugee camps as live laboratories to experiment with untested technologies, biometric humanitarian solutions, new drugs, and radical methodologies for social change. The book asks where and how this movement works, laying bare the human, ethical, philosophical, and political consequences of its practices.

The Global Lab takes the reader through Silicon Valley, Africa, and Asia to understand the tangible and transformative implications of experimentation, following a set of main protagonists, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to experimental economists known as the randomistas, to humanitarian organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Deeply entrenched in contemporary experimental practice, these actors form a movement inspired by core logics emanating out of Silicon Valley about the need for fast-paced radical change and societal disruption, technological innovation as progress, and the privatization and commercialization of the human mind and body. Ultimately, the book examines the inequality of experimentation that is found in the erection of imaginary walls between us and them, and the imagined universal and often unquestioned value of scientific and technological progress in the name of development.

---

aha yikes: images/soc med bad combo: amplify reptilian brain emotions anger/fear, but also ups reductionistic/tribal thinking // polarization

will // hedges on literacy

an 8 22

On Wednesday, August 3, the U.S. Senate voted, 95-1, in favor of Sweden and Finland joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). President Joe Biden applauded the vote, declaring, “This historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan U.S. commitment to NATO, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. I look forward to signing the accession protocols and welcoming Sweden and Finland, two strong democracies with highly capable militaries, into the greatest defensive alliance in history.”

The vote was a rare example of everyone from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer being on the same page. The lone “no” vote came from far-right Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who used the vote to boast about how MAGA he is on foreign policy and how devoted he is to former President Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda — and Hawley defended the vote during an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Never Trump conservative and veteran Washington Post opinion writer George Will examines Hawley’s “no” vote in his August 10 column, arguing that these events underscore the “degradation” of both journalism and politics in the United States.

“Like an infant feeling ignored and seeking attention by banging his spoon on his highchair tray, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) last week cast the only vote against admitting Finland and Sweden to NATO,” Will explains. “He said adding the two militarily proficient Russian neighbors to NATO would somehow weaken U.S. deterrence of China…. That evening, Hawley appeared on Fox News to receive Tucker Carlson’s benediction. This umpteenth episode of a senator using the Senate as a stepping stone to a cable television green room illustrates what Chris Stirewalt deplores in his new book, ‘Broken News.’”

Stirewalt served as Fox News’ political editor before being fired for, ironically, doing his job well. And he discusses that controversy in his new book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” which has an August 23 release date on Amazon.

Will says of Stirewalt, “He was washed out of Fox News by a tsunami of viewer rage because on Election Night 2020, he correctly said Donald Trump had lost Arizona. Now, he says today’s journalism has a supply-side problem — that is, supplying synthetic controversies.”

Stirewalt, in his book, describes the state of U.S. journalism in 2022 as, “What did Trump say? What did Nancy Pelosi say about what Trump said? What did Kevin McCarthy say about what Pelosi said about what Trump said? What did Sean Hannity say about what Rachel Maddow said about what McCarthy said about what Pelosi said about what Trump said?”

Will shares Stirewalt’s complaints, writing, “But journalism also has a demand-side problem: Time was, journalists assumed that news consumers demanded ‘more information, faster and better.’ Now, instantaneous communication via passive media — video and television — supplies what indolent consumers demand. More than half of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below the Sixth-Grade level. Video, however, requires only eyes on screens. But such passive media cannot communicate a civilization defined by ideas.”

Will continues, “Our creedal nation, Stirewalt says, ‘requires written words and a common culture in which to understand them’…. Technology — radio, television, the internet — turned journalism from reporting what had happened to reporting what was happening, and now to giving passive news consumers the emotional experience of having their political beliefs ratified.”

Now 81, Will has seen a lot of technological changes over the years. And he shares Stirewalt’s view that technology has made some political journalism a form of lowbrow entertainment.

“Technology has produced a melding of journalism and politics, to the degradation of both, as illustrated by the seamlessness of Hawley’s Senate floor grandstanding and his cable news self-congratulation,” Will observes. “Small wonder, says Stirewalt, that ‘the news business treats politics like sports’ — entertaining, but with no meaning deeper than the score. The fans, consumers of emotional-impact journalism, wear, figuratively speaking, their teams’ colors: red shirts against blue shirts.”

Will continues, “This journalism’s constant attention to politics instead of government — to gaining power instead of its exercise — makes the players on the field, Stirewalt says, ‘want to show off to the fans in the stands instead of trying to win the game.’ Hence Hawley, the quintessential example of the politics that the new journalism encourages. And hence his absurd vote against NATO expansion — spoon clenched in infant fist, banging the highchair tray to say: ‘Pay attention to me!’…. Define news down, and this is the kind of newsmaker you get.”

---

an 7 22

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown thatreligious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.

Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

NEW: [How the 'unprecedented' Supreme Court leak made efforts to lobby conservatives on Roe 'all but impossible': report

Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.

---

7 22

neo-con is // neo-libtard [Gt Recession] Bush 43; BOTH MUY MACHO, REDUCTIONISTIC? adversarial

in case of cold war forced strategic /long term planning invest R&D --> innovation but runaway mode --> paranoia, vast waste of resources.

aha GULF WAR 2 POSTER CHILD FOR CASCADE OF FAILS:

recall WHIG got maps of iraqi oil fields for corps/ cheney secret energy task force

JRNLISM FAIL

set off refugee surge --> brexit [CAMBRIDGE anal ] , alt rt, authoritarian [eu la penn] ; wolfie neo-cons wanted it for decades , cooked the intel, hunted the whistleblowers Plame

SEE WMD BS YELLOWCAKE CHENEY

de-Bathification --? al queda, CNP fail ministry of oil

origin of xian nat'l trumpism?recall his BS about ppl dancing in streets in NJ? birther obama other foreigner secret muslim

televangelist grifters said it was god angry at our sin (loss of white xian am?]

pvtization blackwater halliburton? tigerswan

---

aha systemic reductionism fail; biden approval # low, esp on economy (mid 20's?)

but prez has little control of gas price or inflation; even opening public land has a lag built in, longer than US short term memory; as w conspiracy, ppl want to think do X/silver bullet will get Y result. oil is worldwide commodity, so no guar it will stay in US; other countries have similar inflation, and it started before biden [set up by bad trump policies?)

edit b 6 22 longish

...These polls are a picture of systemic displeasure with a president who isn’t doing enough to bring down the price of gas, food, housing and more. Evidently, Joe Biden should have considered inflation before going off half-cocked in allied defense of Ukraine’s national sovereignty.

Democracy is great and all, but seriously.

Is it more important than cheap gas?

No, said Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan: “Real America [white people] doesn’t care about the January 6 committee. Gas is over $5 per gallon!”

To which we liberals say: no. Real Americans are all Americans, because all Americans have a stake in the continuation of this democratic republic.

---

an 3 22

no lnx

United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats, for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save America's democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. This unresolved "birth defect" at the foundation of the American democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present, American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party's most "moderate" members are far more extreme than the most "conservative" Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trump supporters and Trump-loathers, increasingly do not live in the same neighborhoods or communities. In all, they largely do not socialize with each other, or have other forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships in day-to-day life.

To the degree that "race" is a proxy for political values and beliefs, the color line functions as a practical dividing line of partisan identity and voting. Religion is also a societal space that is divided by politics. For example, public opinion research shows that white right-wing evangelical Christians have increasingly embraced authoritarian views, conspiracy theories and other anti-democratic and antisocial values.

As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person's political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.

Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not consume the same sources of information about news and politics. Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber, which functions as a type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an important attribute of fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed and replaced with fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and his movement.

America's struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brain structures of conservative-authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive thinkers. The former are more fear-centered,emphasizing threats and dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and inclined to simple, binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly attracted to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.

Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, demonstrates that America's democracy crisis may be even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent article "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote," which appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly, Sherkat examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that there are substantial negative differences between the thinking processes and cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or another candidate, or who did not vote at all.

Sherkat observes that Trump support has been linked to religion and level of education, but until now not to "cognitive sophistication," which was found "to have a positive effect on voting, but a negative effect on choosing Trump."He notes that "philosophers and political elites have debated the potential effects of mass political participation" for generations, concerned "about the unsophisticated masses coming under the sway of a demagogue." In effect, this debate was always about the quality he calls cognitive sophistication, since citizens who lack it "may not be able to understand and access reliable and valid information about political issues and may be vulnerable to political propaganda":

Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were amplified by the Trump campaign. Additionally, the simple linguistic style presented by Trump may have appealed to voters with limited education and cognitive sophistication. Beginning with [T.W.]Adorno's classic study of the authoritarian personality, empirical works have linked low levels of cognitive sophistication with right-wing orientations....

Trump's campaign may also have been more attractive to people with low cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information processing because compared to other candidates Trump's speeches were given at a much lower reading level…. While much of the Trump campaign's rhetoric and orientation may have resonated with the poorly educated and cognitively unsophisticated, those overlapping groups are less likely to register to vote or to turn out in an election.

As part of his research, Sherkat evaluated the political decision-making and cognition of Trump's voters, using a10-point vocabulary exam. In a guest essay at the website Down with Tyranny, he explains what this vocabulary test revealed about white Trump voters:

Overall, the model predicts that almost 73% of respondents who missed all 10 questions would vote for Trump (remember, that is controlling for education and the other factors), while about 51% who were average on the exam are expected to vote for Trump. Only 35% of people who had a perfect score on the exam are predicted to be Trump supporters.

Notably, this very strong, significant effect of verbal ability can be identified within educational groups. While non-college whites certainly turned out more heavily for Trump, the smart ones did not — only 38% of those with perfect scores are expected to go for Trump, and only 46% of non-college graduates who scored a standard deviation above the mean. The same is true for college graduates — low cognition college graduates were more likely to vote for Trump. ...

What is really depressing isn't just the poles of the vocabulary exam, it's the average. The mean and median of the scale is 6 — so half of white Americans missed 4 of the easy vocabulary questions.

Sherkat's research also explored how religion impacted support for Donald Trump among white voters: "This study confirms that white Americans with fundamentalist views of the Bible and those who embrace identifications with sectarian Protestant denominations tended to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election."

Belief that the Bible is the literal "word of God" also impacted Trump voting: "Viewing the Bible as a book of fables is also significantly predictive of vote choice, with secular beliefs reducing the odds of a Trump vote by 80 percent when compared to literalists, and reducing the odds of a Trump vote by 52 percent when compared to respondents who view the Bible as inspired by God."

In an email to Salon, Sherkat offered additional context and implication on the relationship between white Christianity, American neofascism and cognition:

The problem of the contemporary American fascist right is rooted in education and information. And this problem is not simply about attainment of some quantity of education, but of the quality and content of education, how that leads generations of white Christian Americans to process information about a wide range of issues. The segregation academies that proliferated in the mid-1960s and accelerated in the 1970s have taught millions of Americans a radically skewed version of American and world history and encouraged a continued segregated society. The homeschooling movement augmented this division, and further denigrated the value of knowledge.

White fundamentalist Christians have always segmented their communities from the rest of America, and even exert considerable control over public educational institutions, particularly in rural areas and in the states which embraced slavery. White fundamentalist Christians distrust mainstream social institutions like education and print media, and they actively seek to eliminate public education and to provide alternative sources of information. As a result, people who identify with and participate in white Christian denominations and who subscribe to fundamentalist beliefs have substantial intellectual deficits that make them easy marks for a wide variety of schemes — from financial fraud to conspiracy theories.

If you can't read the New York Times, you're going to believe whatever you hear on talk radio or on television. It's simply impossible for people with limited vocabularies and low levels of cognitive functioning to make sense of the complex realities of the political world. And we now have a population where for 55 years substantial fractions of white people have gone to private fundamentalist Christian schools that leave them both indoctrinated in Christian nationalism and ill-prepared to process any additional information. Worse, we now have over a million children in a given year who are homeschooled by parents who are uneducated white fundamentalists — and that total has been pretty constant for three decades since the homeschooling movement blossomed.

What does this mean for the present and future of American democracy in this time of crisis? Sherkat cited the "disturbing ... influence of anti-intellectualism on American public life," which lends "performative power to ignorant elites":

Spouting off obvious untruths is no longer a mark of shame, because even basic historical and contemporary truths are not recognized. We seem to have a stable set of about 30% of Americans, 35% of white Americans, who are oblivious to political realities and incapable and unwilling to come to terms with any of our key social problems. The increasing control over public education by right-wing fanatics is entrenching ignorance and intellectual laziness in future generations. It does not bode well for the future of American democracy.

Donald Trump and his movement did not create all these American authoritarians and aspiring fascists. Such people have long been a feature of American society. What Trump and have accomplished in recent years is to empower and normalize a dangerous set of antisocial, anti-human, retrograde and anti-democratic values and beliefs.

Saving America's democracy will require a moral and political reckoning and acts of critical self-reflection on a nationwide scale about the American people's character and values, and about how their leaders and governing institutions have failed them.

Changes in laws and institutions are necessary. But on their own, such interventions will not stop the spread of fascism. A lasting remedy will demand that the country's political, cultural, and educational institutions be renewed, re-energized, and reimagined. The questions Americans must ask themselves are simple yet enormous: Who are we? What are we to become? How can we unite in defense of democracy, the common good and the general welfare? Without real answers to those questions, there will be no democratic renewal in the 21st century -- and fascism wins.

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aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

bot line chaotic makes him weak/played

president of the United States takes the following oath at his or her inauguration: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly betrayed this promise, and should long since have been removed from office for doing so.

The Constitution deems that the president is commander in chief of the military. As revealed in famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage”, Donald Trump believes that members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed in battle are “suckers” and “losers” for not being as selfish and cowardly as he is. Trump also believes that disabled veterans should not be seen in public because they somehow shame or embarrass the country.

Trump also has no respect for the United States military’s role as defender of the country’s democracy from threats both foreign and domestic. To that end, he attempted to order military commanders to attack Americans who were (and are) exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights by protesting against his regime in response to the police killing of George Floyd, as well as in support of social justice more generally.

Fortunately, military commanders put the institutional legitimacy of the armed forces ahead of the president’s whims by deflecting his orders. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also apologized for appearing alongside Trump on the streets of Washington.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is likely ignore the results of the 2020 election, and may seek to use the military to quell protests or other acts of resistance, perhaps by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Trump has also pardoned accused or convicted war criminals because he idolizes cruelty and lawlessness. Trump and his regime, in fact, views war criminals as useful tools in his authoritarian campaign against American democracy.

Many of the United States’ most senior retired military personnel, members of the intelligence community and diplomats, as well as other elites in the national defense community, have publicly condemned Donald Trump as an extreme threat to the country’s safety, security and democracy.

Overall, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe, less respected, less powerful, less influential, and less respected as a world power. In the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has become a pariah nation, shamed before the world.

Is there any strategic logic to Trump’s decision-making about the United States and its role in the world? How do Trump’s ignorance, selfishness and authoritarian beliefs, combined with his conviction that his own personal interests are identical to the nation’s, imperil our safety and security? Does the Trump regime’s contempt for the truth and empirical reality endanger the long-term future of our nation?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom.” Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent and during his extensive career has reported from more than 50 countries, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.”

At the end of this conversation Sciutto warns that the consensus among many of the country’s senior defense and intelligence professionals is that Donald Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, and is somehow personally bound to him. If this is true, Trump’s fealty to a foreign leader has fatally compromised his ability to make decisions in the best interests of the United States and the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jim Sciutto on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening and has happened with Donald Trump and his administration?

I’m feeling stress for my country. That is not a political sentiment. I love my country. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it for professional reasons. As a foreign correspondent, you end up loving America more because you live in places where they do not have our freedoms or institutions, many of which we take for granted. When I see those institutions being undermined here in the United States and people losing confidence in their own country, I am very concerned. I am still an optimist, but there is much to be concerned about here in the United States because of Donald Trump and all that has happened.

How does America look from abroad?

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There is not a lot of respect right now for the United States. I do not want to overstate that because, frankly, there are many countries in the world with much bigger problems than this country right now.

For example, the COVID outbreak. The U.S. has certainly been one of the worst in terms of responding to it. That is not a political statement. It is based on the data. Europe is doing much better for example than the United States with the pandemic and its deadly consequences and other problems.

The state of the country’s political discourse is also not good. Is the United States able to solve problems in the way it did not too long ago? Pew polling shows that the world’s opinion of the United States has greatly diminished. The world is viewed much worse than it was during another low point, which was during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

How are career diplomats and other public servants reacting to the Trump regime and its assaults on norms and values? These are government professionals who have served in multiple administrations. How are they making sense of this tumult?

Here is what is different. There have always been disagreements about policy and how best to accomplish those goals. What is different now is that there is an assault on the truth. There is not an agreed-upon set of facts. At first, I thought that maybe having to confront a pandemic would do that. Another example would be Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. There was a bipartisan judgment that Russia interfered, and that the Russians did so to help Trump win.

It came out of committees, as well as the intelligence agencies. Trump attacked those findings and took them personally. That was a consensus not just of a bipartisan committee but the country’s intelligence community as well. Intelligence findings can be attacked more easily because it is still a matter of interpretation.

But in the middle of a pandemic, there are hard facts. People are dying. You can count the number of people dying. You can count and document the positive infection rates.

You can count the number of infections. One can easily disprove Donald Trump’s claims that cases are only rising because there is more testing, because the percentage of people testing positive is also going up. But not in this environment where even the facts are disputed. Conspiracy theories existed well before Donald Trump, but he has super-turbocharged them to the point where they are leaking more and more into mainstream conversation. Democracy cannot operate without an agreed-upon set of facts and the country is miles down that rabbit hole right now.

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Does Donald Trump have an ideology? Is his administration guided by some overriding principle that orients its approach to the world?

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He has an approach and a view of the world. It is an open question as to whether he has a strategy — and that is a question raised by people who worked for him. For my new book, I spoke only to people who worked for Trump and were appointed by him at the highest levels.

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When I asked those officials to describe Trump’s view of the world it was described as transactional: “What can you do for me? I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” Trump has done that equally with adversaries and allies. Trump has no worldview beyond that. There is no understanding of the ancillary benefit of friendships and alliances.

[Former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster told me how much trouble he had convincing Trump that there was more to alliances than just some sort of quid pro quo bottom line. These include shared history, shared values, a shared interest in the rule of law, sharing of intelligence to fight terrorism and other understandings. Trump does not see the world and alliances in that way. As such, Donald Trump will just as easily upend a friendship as he will antagonize a competitor. The United States is on a path of confrontation with China. But the United States also has highly antagonistic relationships now with our closest allies in Europe. With South Korea, the president is demanding they quintuple their contribution to the deployment of U.S. forces there and is threatening to take those forces away in the midst of the worsening standoff with North Korea.

Or even consider Canada, arguably one of our closest allies. Trump has used national security powers to impose economic sanctions on them including tariffs. In essence, Donald Trump has labeled Canada a national security threat.

Donald Trump does not read. He is proudly ignorant. He is a malignant narcissist. How is it even possible to have a coherent foreign policy with such a president?

Trump’s national security advisers knew and realized that he was not reading any of the briefing notes. So early on, McMaster’s team came up with the idea of boiling the briefings down to note cards with just three bullet points, thinking that would get through to Trump....

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aha stories are reductionistic, not necessarily bad, sometime good/accurate enough: unpack bizman schema? logical, rational, clear-eyed manly # based

Do you have any theory of why Trump still polls relatively well on the economy?

First off, his numbers have slipped on the economy. They used to be his strongest suit — I think they still are his strongest, but I’ve seen several polls this summer where he had fallen even or fallen behind Biden on economic questions.

I think the president is a very good economic storyteller. And a lot of people who support him — not just his white working-class base, but a lot of his Republican donor class — still really buys this idea of his approach of low taxes, low regulations. And there’s perhaps varying degrees of buy-in to his trade policies. But there’s this idea that he had a business acumen that could get the country back going.

And I think a lot of people underrated that narrative in its ability to capture voters in 2016, and I think it’s very sticky for people. And he’s also just relentlessly selling the idea that the economy is doing well. The vice president the other day was on television the other day bragging that they had created more jobs in two months than Obama had created in his presidency. That is chutzpah! But it is relentless messaging. I don’t think there’s any sorcery behind why the president’s popular on the economy — I think he’s relentlessly selling the idea that he’s good on the economy, and for a long time he had the levels on low unemployment to sell that.

And even now — there’s been no reshoring of jobs from China — [but] you still see people telling pollsters that they think he brought back a lot of jobs. And I just think that’s really effective political messaging.

So I wanted to get to the core idea of the book, as I interpreted it, that the president and much of the media push this false idea that there’s a zero-sum competition between white, male working-class workers and a lot of other groups. Can you summarize what you think is the best evidence against that idea?

I think there’s a lot of evidence against that idea...

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libtard reductionism:

north Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis — viewed as one of the most vulnerable GOP senators in 2020 — has found himself in an uncomfortable situation after a staffer’s excessively honest comments to a constituent were caught on tape.

As first reported by WRAL, Bev Veals of Carolina Beach, a three-time cancer survivor, called her senator out of fear that her health insurance was at risk. She has previously faced medical bankruptcy and difficulty accessing care, WRAL said, andher husband was furloughed because of the pandemic. She wanted assurance that she’d have coverage if she lost her health insurance.

But Tillis’s office wasn’t helpful. While speaking to a dismissive staffer, Veals began to record their conversation, which was provided to WRAL and can be viewed above.

“You’re saying that, if you can’t afford it, you don’t get to have it?” she asked. “That includes health care?'

"Yeah, just like if I want to go to the store and buy a new dress shirt. If I can’t afford that dress shirt, I don’t get to get it,” the staffer explained.

“But health care is something that people need!” Veals said, clearly alarmed. “Especially if they have cancer.”

“Well, you got to find a way to get it,” the staffer said.

“So what do I do in the meantime, sir?” she asked, not hiding the irritation in her voice.

The response was snide: “Sounds like something you’re going to have to figure it out.”

Tillis’s office has apologized after Veals came forward about the exchange: “The way Mrs. Veals was talked to by a staff assistant in our Washington office was completely inappropriate and violates the code of conduct Senator Tillis has for his staff, which is why immediate disciplinary action has been taken.”

But the truth is that, insensitive and rude as the staffer’s comments to Veals were, they were simply a much more honest reflection of the Republican Party’s policies on health care than officials typically admit. But the truth isn’t hard to see. The Trump administration is currently arguing that the Supreme Court should overturn all of Obamacare, throwing millions of people off their insurance and invalidating protections for pre-existing conditions, along with other provisions that protect patients.

The unofficial Republican Party policy, though, is to lie about this fact. Trump is constantly telling voters that he protected pre-existing conditions — even though he has done nothing to ensure they’re covered — and that he’ll continue to keep these protections in place, even though he’s trying to destroy them.

The Tillis staffer, apparently, didn’t get the message. He has imbibed the attitude at the heart of the GOP’s policy preferences. His mistake was being honest with a member of the public about the policy.

Veals, for one, doesn’t seem deceived by the office’s apology. And that’s because she still hasn’t gotten the original answer to the question she called about.

“We need our legislators to listen to us and help us solve this problem because it’s not just my problem – not being able to afford health care,” she told WRAL. “It’s the problem of hundreds and thousands of North Carolinians.”

North Carolina is one of 12 states in the U.S. that has not adopted Medicaid expansion, a policy that would help cover people like Veals if they lost their insurance. Tillis opposes Medicaid expansion.

In a statement to WRAL, Tillis dishonestly defended his position:

“When he was Speaker of the House [in North Carolina],” the statement continues, “Senator Tillis inherited a Medicaid program that was mismanaged and plagued with overspending and inefficiency. Expanding Medicaid at the time would have been a promise that the state wouldn’t have been able to keep, requiring cuts to the program that would have harmed patients that states like New York and California have already been forced to make. Instead, Senator Tillis worked to strengthen the state’s Medicaid program to deliver quality health care to patients, and the reason the North Carolina is in a position to discuss expansion is because of Senator Tillis’ leadership.”

These claims are in spectacularly bad faith. Medicaid expansion has been wildly successful across the United States — it can even save states money. And claiming to be concerned about “cuts to the program” that harm patients is absurd when patients like Veals can be left with no coverage at all. It’s even more pernicious, though, because the recent stressed on state budgets in the wake of the pandemic come from the Senate Republicans’ refusal to provide recovery funds to state and local governments, as Democrats have sought to do.

It’s these comments — far more than a staffer’s rudeness — that should be the real scandal.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/economist-paul-krugman-gops-cult-of-selfishness-informed-its-destructive-response-to-coronavirus-pandemic/

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has reported a COVID-19 death count of more than 148,000 for the United States, which has become the world’s coronavirus hotspot. Liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, argues that the United States’ high number of coronavirus-related deaths and infections underscores the failures of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.But Krugman also stresses that the problem goes way beyond Trump’s ineptness and exemplifies “America’s cult of selfishness.”

“Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from COVID-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada,” Krugman laments. “Yet the ‘rocket ship’ recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.”

Krugman notes that “Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy.” But he goes on to say that “there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: they were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.”

The economist explains, “You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society."

Republicans who are consumed with selfishness, according to Krugman, have a hard time looking at the big picture.

“I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for lightbulbs,” Krugman writes. “It’s the principle of the thing: many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.”

According to Krugman, far-right Republicans equate irresponsibility with “freedom.”

“This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom,” Krugman observes. “But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents teargassing peaceful protesters. What they call ‘freedom’ is actually absence of responsibility.”

Krugman concludes his column by warning that during the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans have “sacralized selfishness” with deadly results.

“What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness,” Krugman argues. “And this cult is killing us.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-coronavirus-next-victim-could-be-capitalism/

salon

The pandemic has deftly illustrated two lessons that we, as a civilization, must learn in order to survive:

Science does not care about your political ideology.

The economic status quo — namely, free market capitalism — is fatally flawed, in ways that the coronavirus pandemic has brought to light.

The first lesson was evident in President Donald Trump’s initial response to the coronavirus. Despite being warned as early as January that it was an existential threat, he dismissed his advisers’ concerns as “alarmist” and did everything he could to ignore and downplay the problem so that the stock market wouldn’t be negatively impacted. It took him more than ten weeks to declare a state of national emergency and, even then, America’s ability to respond to the pandemic was weakened by the various budget-cutting policies he implemented prior to the pandemic that ignored expert advice and made it more difficult for the Centers for Disease Control to do its job.

a similar point could be made about man-made climate change. Even though the scientific consensus is clear — global climate change is real, caused by humans and poses an existential threat to our planet — Trump continues to deny it solely because fossil fuel companies and other special interest groups don’t want to lose money.

There in an additional factor in both the coronavirus and climate change denialism, of course: A distrust of intellectuals who use pesky, inconvenient facts in disciplines like epidemiology and climatology to make arguments that go against conservative, free market doctrine. After all, a strong centralized government is needed to regulate the economy in ways that will protect the planet from climate change and to save lives as the pandemic worsens. Because right-wingers don’t want to believe that the federal government should have this power, they cannot acknowledge that it is necessary on these occasions — and certainly not when doing so would seemingly concede a point to the left.

Yet scientific realities don’t change simply because right-wing egos would be wounded if the left is proved correct about pandemics and ecological apocalypses. That is why the pandemic reveals that science must always take precedence over ideological whinging when it comes to shaping key policy decisions.

“Ultimately, of course, the science is a key part of any decision, but the science alone does not determine what that decision should be,” Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Salon. “And the politicians are supposed to be the ones who assimilate all of the information and time it and including the science, but also all of the possible consequences in all ways, shapes and forms including health, economics and society. And so on.”

He added, “The problem is I don’t think most politicians actually recognize their role, and it’s much worse in the United States than it is in many other countries. And the reason it’s much worse is because of advocacy, because of money in particular, because of Citizens United and the nasty politics that gets involved with using so-called dark money, television and all sorts of things like that.”

This brings us to the other fundamental truth that has been illustrated by the pandemic — namely, that our free market capitalist system is inherently unsustainable.

Part of that unsustainability is rooted in ecology.

“I think that there are larger lessons and messages here about the sustainability of a global population of nearly 8 billion and growing people on a planet with finite resources,” Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon. “And what COVID-19 has laid bare is the fragility of this massive infrastructure which we’ve created to artificially maintain consumption far beyond the natural carrying capacity of the planet. And continued exploitation of fossil fuels, obviously, is inconsistent with a sustainable human society.” [calling dr ehrlich]

One of the chief problems with free market capitalism — or, for that matter, the global economic system in general — is that it depends on constant consumption in order to sustain itself. If that consumption is disrupted even for a brief period, the entire system grinds to a halt, with people losing their employment and poverty skyrocketing. As the coronavirus pandemic has revealed, this is not always because people needto be poor. It isn’t as if we experienced a famine or the sudden depletion of a vital natural resource. The fundamentals of our economy remain as strong as they ever were; the problem is that, because people are not able to continue consuming, the edifice built on top of that foundation has begun to crumble.

“Going with the structural metaphor concept, there always huge cracks underneath the facades of capitalism, and the huge weight of this pandemic has widened those cracks,” Norman Solomon, co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, told Salon. “For the most part, the people who are the most vulnerable anyway to corporate capitalism, they’re suffering the most, they’re dying the most.”

He added, “The entire political economy is geared to overproduction and over-consumption tomaximize corporate profits. And at the same time, the access to consumable goods and services is so unequal. And I think these are coexisting problems. But if you look at it from 30,000 feet — I guess you can’t look at it from 30,000 feet now because nobody is flying — but if you look at it from a macro- view, the extended consumption is insane.”

The pandemic has also highlighted race and class differences in our society. Members of the African American and Latinx communities have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, with African Americans making up almost half of the coronavirus cases in Philadelphia and the African American and Latinx communities making up more than three out of every five coronavirus deaths in New York City. In terms of economic inequality, as the Brookings Institution writes, “people living paycheck to paycheck in service sector jobs are in a very different position to those working in salaried jobs they can do from home. Stark gaps in wealth, health and work have gone from being chronic problems to acute ones.” The authors noted that even amenities that don’t always seem essential, such as a fast internet connection, have become vital for psychological health during the pandemic — and this, too, underscores the income gap.

The one glimmer of hope here is that the pandemic may push Americans toward a more just economic and social system. J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told Salon on Thursday that “we’re already intensely polarized as a country — people’s partisan preferences can influence everything from their shopping habits to dating life — but if the economic situation worsens, it certainly opens the door for radicalization.”

He added, “When the economy suffers, voters tend to be more open to anti-establishment or populist candidates: during the Great Depression, Huey Long with his ‘Every Man a King’ slogan tapped into that sentiment, and was seen as a threat to Franklin Roosevelt.”

Certainly those changes would not come a moment too soon. We may pull through from this crisis, but global warming is just one of many future existential threats that lurk around the corner. Humanity is not going to survive — at least, not in any sense worth looking forward to — if it doesn’t start paying attention to scientific fact and using that knowledge for the betterment of all of us, not just the privileged.

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useful cognitive short-cut: for anything i do not like/want to do:

see free freedom, liberty etc god term ~ tyranny

aha: recall that magical invis hand converts all my selfish act into the common good = $ = prosperity= life = up good=god

ainsly earh F&F [something sensible ] =a plot to take away our freedom

gadsen presumably big in TP ~ stay at home covid protest eg gadsen flags

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aha: typically gop does exactly what they accuse dems of, wishlist:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-the-coronavirus-crisis-revealed-the-danger-of-the-decades-long-conservative-movement/

no lnx

How the coronavirus crisis revealed the danger of the decades-long conservative movement

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 13, 2020

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell smelled an evil liberal conspiracy on Thursday, one designed to steal away his decades of tireless work to kneecap the federal government. The Democratic-majority House had passed a large emergency bill, designed to combat the coronavirus pandemic, and McConnell was absolutely certain Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were trying to pull one over on him.

“Unfortunately, it appears at this hour that the speaker and House Democrats instead chose to produce an ideological wish list that was not tailored closely to the circumstances,” McConnell said. He accused Democrats of exploiting this situation, saying the bill addresses “various areas of policy that are barely related, if at all, to the issue before us.”

There’s a lot at stake here, but apparently the big sticking point for McConnell was a provision requiring employers to offer paid sick leave to employees, which McConnell claims would “put thousands of small businesses at risk.”

In reality, of course, this is just common sense. As the New York Times editorial board noted, companies that don’t offer paid sick leave “are endangering their workers and customers.” A lot of workers with public-facing jobs — such as food service workers and retail employees — come into close contact with dozens or hundreds of people a day. But they are the people least likely to be allowed to stay home without losing their jobs, or at least losing a paycheck.

McConnell is so poisoned by his right-wing ideology that he can’t see this, or chooses not to. Instead, he’s standing firm on the long-standing Republican tendency to view employers as feudal lords who should be allowed to treat employees however they wish — even, apparently, if that means allowing a deadly disease to rip through the population, potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people if it is not checked.

So far, most of the panic over the coronavirus outbreak has been driven by the undeniable incompetence of Donald Trump. At every turn, Trump has made this situation worse — even going so far as to try to discourage testing to bamboozle the public and, I suspect, tanking the markets by screwing up an Oval Office address because he’s too vain to wear glasses so he can see well enough to read a teleprompter.

That’s all true. But it’s also important to understand that the larger Republican Party, even without Trump, is also to blame for what looks to be a serious public health crisis. Right-wing ideology, often marketed as “rugged individualism” but perhaps better understood as an aversion to the very concept of a common good, is one major reason why the U.S. government, hamstrung for decades by Republican power, isn’t better equipped to handle a crisis.

This isn’t just a Trump problem. This is a widespread Republican problem. For decades, GOP strategy has been consistent: Whenever they get power, they slash regulations and gut spending, with the goal of making government less effective. This is a deliberate strategy to make the public broadly distrustful of government, and therefore increasingly open to shifting more and more power to the wealthy individuals who control the private sector.

This ideological commitment to an every-man-for-himself ideology, which is terrible in any circumstances, is exposed as particularly dreadful in the face of a pandemic. Disease is a reminder that humans are a herd species, wholly dependent on each other for survival, and that government must be a way to formally organize that joint survival pattern. It’s not some villain in a racism-inflected right-wing morality fable about the importance of “personal responsibility.”

Simply put, we need our government to be able to protect us from disease. Republicans have spent years tearing it down, and even in a crisis are incapable of accepting that “small government” is not always a good thing.

As Max Moran at Talking Points Memo argued, the fact that Vice President Mike Pence — deemed a “normal” Republican — is in charge of the coronavirus comforts some people, because they believe he is more adult and responsible than Trump. Pence’s track record suggests otherwise. As governor of Indiana, he oversaw an HIV outbreak that led to 10% of the population people in a single county becoming infected because Pence thought preaching the value of personal responsibility was better than following the recommendations of public health experts.

“[A] Pence-led response is dangerous, not in spite of, but precisely because he is a typical Republican,” Moran writes, because normal Republicans “apply their competence and considerable resources” to the task of “protection for the powerful, callousness for the afflicted, and a special disdain for the ‘other.'”

The right-wing idiocy that is going to get people killed is all over the Republican response to this situation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined McConnell in denouncing the Democratic bill, even though everything in it — including expanding food-stamp spending — will either help slow the spread of the disease or stimulate the American economy to offset the inevitable slowdown caused by this epidemic.

Instead, McCarthy is resorting to racism instead of sensible public health measures, calling the coronavirus the “Chinese coronavirus” for no apparent purpose except to feed the assumptions of the Fox News base than their whiteness and their racist attitudes will somehow protect them. (This assumption, by the way, is leading many older Americans to take serious and completely unnecessary risks with their health.)

The right-wing ideology poisoning is so bad that the coronavirus bill was held up in part because Republicans wanted to inject some anti-abortion language into it. There is absolutely no reason to believe that helping people protect themselves against a viral epidemic will lead to more abortions, but that’s the modern GOP for you: They’re always worried that somehow or other the Democrats have a sneaky agenda to “let” women have sex. (Which women will undoubtedly do, whether the Democrats authorize it or not.)

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https://www.salon.com/2020/03/12/gop-delays-coronavirus-bill-in-part-over-complaints-that-it-doesnt-bar-federal-funds-for-abortion/

Even the so-called Republican “moderates” are to blame for this situation. For instance, Politico reporter Michael Grunwald uncovered this little tidbit about Sen. Susan Collins of Maine from his book about the Obama era.

Michael Grunwald

@MikeGrunwald

I had forgotten my own reporting that @SenatorCollins stripped $870M for pandemic preparations out of the 2009 stimulus.

Zooming out, it’s easy to see how decades of damage to our government are likely to make this epidemic worse. Republicans have been stingy about health care spending and have blocked Democratic efforts to increase access, especially when it comes to the Medicaid expansion under the Obama administration. The result is that we have fewer doctors and hospitals ready to handle what we know is coming, and we will probably have a lot of infected people who won’t get tested, either because they can’t afford it or don’t even know where to go for testing and treatment.

By all means, blame Trump for the current crisis. His incompetence is especially central to the panicked reaction of the financial markets. Even a slightly steadier president, whatever his or her party or ideology, would bolster investor confidence a whole lot more.

But this isn’t just about Trump. Republicans have a profound hostility to good government, and whatever slapdash response they may grudgingly accept in an effort to save their skins at the ballot box this November will be hamstrung by the fact that they refused, for decades, to invest in the infrastructure necessary to weather the big shock that is hitting us right now. Viruses are the ultimate reminder that humans are interconnected and need each other, and that the ideal of “rugged individualism” is childish and often racist nonsense.

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no lnx ref

GOP delays coronavirus bill in part over complaints that it doesn't bar federal funds for abortion

"Very on-brand for pro-lifers to refuse to save a whole bunch of lives," feminist writer Jill Filipovic says

IGOR DERYSH

MARCH 12, 2020

The White House and congressional Republicans refused to support House Democrats' coronavirus relief bill, in part over claims that it does not safeguard against federal funds being used to provide abortions.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced Thursday that the Senate will not go on its scheduled recess next week to continue negotiations on the legislation. The announcement came after McConnell rejected the bill proposed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., calling it an "ideological wish list." President Donald Trump also objected to what he claimed were Democratic "goodies" in the bill.

Among the Republicans' hangups are a provision that would provide paid sick leave to workers,NBC News reported, and a complaint about an unrelated issue: abortion.

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"The White House believes provisions in the Pelosi bill that pertain to the Violence Against Women Act could open the door to federal funds for abortion," the network reported." In response, the White House wants to add Hyde Amendment language to the bill — restricting the use of federal funds for abortion."

:{:{}:

Several senior White House officials told the far-right outlet The Daily Caller that Pelosi lobbied for up to $1 billion in reimbursements for laboratory claims, which the officials claimed "would set a precedent of health spending without protections outlined in the Hyde Amendment."

"A new mandatory funding stream that does not have Hyde protections would be unprecedented," a White House official told the outlet. "Under the guise of protecting people, Speaker Pelosi is working to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent covering abortion — which is not only backwards, but goes against historical norms."

Another White House official not named in the report went a step further, accusing Pelosi of pushing for an abortion "slush fund."

But The Daily Caller acknowledged in its story that Politico had already reported that the "two sides resolved issues over federal funding of abortion in a separate bill."

Ilyse Hogue, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said the White House claims were a "straight up lie."

"The fact that the GOP would use the [coronavirus pandemic] to spread more falsehoods and grind an ideological ax is sickening and perverse," she said.

Planned Parenthood accused Republicans of using the COVID-19 pandemic to score political points.

"Using this very real public health emergency to attack abortion coverage shows a despicable lack of concern about the severity of this crisis," the organization said. "These politicians will do anything to advance their anti-abortion agenda."

"Yet again, Republicans prove they'll do anything to attack abortion – including co-opting a public health crisis to further their agenda," the National Women's Law Center said in a statement. "People need care – not to be used as political bargaining chips."

The Democratic-led House is expected to approve the bill Thursday, but the Republican-led Senate will hold off until Pelosi negotiates an agreement with the White House.

"I am glad talks are ongoing between the administration and Speaker Pelosi," McConnell said. "I hope Congress can pass bipartisan legislation to continue combating the coronavirus and keep our economy strong."

Pelosi said at a news conference that Democrats were "addressing" some Republican concerns as she pushed back on Republican plans to delay the negotiations into next week.

"We need to just make a decision to help families right now," she said. "We are responding to their concerns, we don't want them moving the goalposts and that's it. I'm not sticking around because they don't want to agree to language."

But Republicans' attempts to delay the funding bill over an unrelated issue like abortion left Democrats apoplectic amid the administration's bungled response to the pandemic.

"I'm enraged beyond words right now," Hogue said.

"Very on-brand for pro-lifers to refuse to save a whole bunch of lives," feminist writer Jill Filipovic added, "[and] put millions of people at risk so they can do a little performative politicking that won't actually prevent a single abortion."

IGOR DERYSH

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

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aha: gop voodoo reductionist cut gov't boost economy: but floor needed for innovation/start small biz: se corp coup: trumpistas stick w/ him tho he is clearly hurting them.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/financial-writer-explains-why-trumps-proposed-federal-budget-would-be-an-economic-calamity-possibly-pushing-the-us-to-the-brink-of-a-recession/

no lnx

Financial writer explains why Trump’s proposed federal budget would be an ‘economic calamity’ — possibly pushing the US to ‘the brink of a recession’

Written by Alex Henderson February 20, 2020

Whoever the Democratic Party ends up nominating for the 2020 presidential election — whether it’s Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg or someone else — President Donald Trump will no doubt be campaigning aggressively on the state of the U.S. economy, claiming that a second Trump term would be synonymous with prosperity and economic growth. But liberal/progressive writer Michael Linden, in a February 20 op-ed for CNN Business’ website, offers a long list of reasons why he believes that the federal budget Trump is proposing would be an “economic calamity.”

Trump’s proposed budget, according to Linden, is “full of outdated ideas that would instantly weaken the economy and undermine our ability to grow and prosper over time.” For example, Linden notes, Trump “proposes massive immediate cuts to the kinds of public services, protections and health care that help propel short-term economic growth by supporting demand for goods and services.”

“Just last quarter,” Linden observes, “the government was contributing the most to GDP than at any other point since the end of the Great Recession. President Trump’s budget would reverse that, withdrawing critical support at a time when growth has already slowed. The cuts are so deep, so massive and so poorly targeted that they could be large enough to even push us to the brink of a recession.”

The CNN Business contributor goes on to point out that “overall economic activity grew by only 2.1% over the last year. Well, Trump’s budget includes roughly $958 billion in total cuts in the first four years. That amounts to about 1% shaved off of total gross domestic product right there.”

Deep cuts to social programs, Linden emphasizes, don’t promote economic growth — they harm it.

“Programs like Medicaid, food stamps and tax credits for low-income families tend to permeate throughout local economies most effectively, and those are exactly the resources that President Trump’s budget envisions cutting to the tune of about $335 billion in the next four years,” Linden explains. “These cuts could reduce overall economic activity by another .3% to .4%.Put it all together, and Trump’s plan would slash the overall economic growth rate down to well under 1% over the next few years — putting us right on the edge of outright economic contraction.”

One of the things liberal presidents of the past understood — including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s and President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s — is that when the American middle class prospers and has more money to spend, that money goes into the U.S. economy. 2020 presidential hopefuls Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren clearly understand those principles of New Deal and Great Society economics.

Trump’s proposed federal budget, Linden contends, fails to recognize the vital role that “workers and consumers” play in the economy.

“Workers and consumers are what drive growth and prosperity,” Linden asserts. “When workers have the support and investment they need to do their best work, they innovate, create and do more with less time and fewer resources. When consumers have money in their pockets, they drive demand for goods and services and induce businesses to invest in the future…. Trump’s budget slashes at those very foundations: education, health care, research and development.”

frag node 1/20 experiment

AHA: humans need meaning, coherent story(s) that make sense of the world; in the face of chaos, can fall back on /default to reductionism, it's the jews.

cambr anal micro-targeting

soc med filter bubbles

gab 4chan

twitter:

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an 120 c de v

...How does authoritarianism impact people’s sense of time and history?

Part of the experience is the anxiety of the minute. Twitterfacilitates this because it is not just how many people check the news, but also journalists drip out news stories in the form of small tweets. This is not just one presentation of a story and the facts. It is not like reading the front page of a newspaper and getting the whole narrative at once. Twitter is a filter for information and experience that is constantly changing. People lose perspective on what is important and what is not.

Our capacity for discernment goes down and our anxiety goes up. Everything is made to feel urgent. Yet the more time people spend on Twitter the less time they are doing anything about Donald Trump and the crisis.Twitter is just an example of this problem. But it is the prime example because it is an unhelpful mechanism psychologically, emotionally and politically because it’s like a mass venting session without much real world impact....

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AHA: TALK RADIO + POL-OP + TWITTER = DJT

trump trolls soc med TV etc for odd story, repkg retweet amplify, seeking retweets, constant instant feedback via crude stats

TWITTER is reductionistic, it's "killer app" attraction is 140 character, why?

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aha: trump tweet algorithm

Tucker Carlson guest attacks credibility of E. Jean Carroll: "She’s selling a book” (rw explains actions as manipulation/lying for money and/or fame)

note hegs 101 econ invisible hand cogs cranking:

CECU recently formed Veterans for Career Education, which it claims “supports the right of veterans to use their earned education benefits to gain career skills at the college or institution of their choice.” CECU has also recruited Hegseth, an Army veteran, as a public face of its campaign.

Hegseth gave a June 3 in New Orleans, LA, for CECU, during which he announced that he was working with the organization and attacked critics of the for-profit education industry.

Hegseth that he’s “so excited to be working with” Michael Dakduk, a Marine Corps veteran who is CECU’s executive vice president, director of government relations, and a lobbyist for the organization. Hegseth later: “I’m all-in on this effort. I cannot wait to get even more involved, go to Washington, be with this organization, be with the vets, travel around the country, put pressure on the folks that deserve to have pressure put on them.”

During his speech, Hegseth an unapologetic defense of the for-profit schools industry, stating, “The fact that profit is made only makes these schools better”:

PETE HEGSETH: There’s a condemnation of profit. Since when did profit become a dirty word? There’s a belief that if you’re making money that’s a bad thing. I think the fact that profit is made only makes these schools better because it means you treat your students -- and having talked to a number of you before I came up here, there’s a beloved feeling toward the students you have in your institutions. They’re not just students, they’re also customers and as customers, you want to serve and meet their needs just like you want to meet the needs of the companies that would hire them in the future. And when you treat someone like a customer, it means you want them to come back. Or you want them to refer new customers to you. There’s an incentive. And if you look -- I’m going to talk a little bit about the VA and my fight against the VA and the VA bureaucracy. When bureaucracies and places treat you like a number, that’s when you are treated poorly because there’s no accountability to treat you like a customer. Profit is a good thing when channeled properly, and I’m not talking about the few cases where folks are messing around and not doing the right thing. Everybody knows that can happen. There’s bad actors in any industry, in any place. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Hegseth later that “some of theseextreme leftists, Democrats, unfortunately at this point, they’ll say that these college degrees are mediocre, worthless, that schools prey on vets. These are direct quotes. And you and I both know that is just not true. I can’t get involved in something that I don’t fundamentally believe in.”

He criticized veterans groups,, “There are a lot of veteran organizations in Washington that say they support vets, but they also -- they really just want to get invited to the cocktail parties. They really just want to be loved by both sides. They’re really drunk on the swamp and the power and the access they have there, and they’ve forgotten about all the guys at the VFW post level or the Legion post level who are doing those jobs throughout America. They’re not the ones they serve anymore; it’s the special interestsin Washington that they serve.”

Hegseth spoke about his relationship with Trump, that he thinks “if anything were to ever pass in the House, in the Senate right now that restricted veterans choice it would get the fastest … veto stamp or pen you’ve ever seen. So, right now you've got a president that would veto the bad stuff. And if he ever gave me a call -- and sometimes he does -- I’d tell him that.”

Hegseth also wrote a June 25 FoxNews.com opinion piece defending for-profit colleges, writing: “I’ve met these veterans. I’ve met these college administrators. Nobody is being duped. In fact, to the contrary, these schools are improving the lives of veterans every day!” He additionally attacked Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) for introducing legislation seeking to end the 90/10 loophole and criticized Democratic presidential candidates for allegedly "targeting veterans’ educational choices." The piece did not mention Hegseth’s ties to CECU.

It’s not immediately clear whether the multimillion-dollar lobbying organization is compensating Hegseth for his work. CECU did not respond to a request for comment. But the organization also worked with commentators Newt and Callista Gingrich

aha: application of the wrong/too simple metaphor as diagnosis --> cure

my classic eg urban renewal

another dangerous metaphor is run gov't like a biz, which presumably means rational, metrics, maybe an eye towards boosting economy=prosperity = well-being, Mitt R ran on this [truman dismissed as storekeeper [failed] but accidental prz ~ wallace]

trump and by assoc kushner as rational planner, but also good DEALMAKER [transactional metaphor, maybe realated // invisible hand magic mkt BS?

note related: a story can embed/embody a metaphor

https://www.alternet.org/**2019/06**/palestinians-dismiss-economic-portion-of-kushner-plan-as-dead-on-arrival/

no lnx

Palestinians dismiss economic portion of Kushner plan as dead-on-arrival

written by Jon Queally / Common Dreams June 24, 2019

The economic proposal purportedly designed to help foment Israeli-Palestinian peace and made public over the weekend by Jared Kushner, top advisor and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, fell predictably flat as Palestinians rejected it immediately as not tethered to reality and an insult to those who continue to struggle while living under the U.S.-backed military occupation of the Israelis.

Part of what has become know as Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” proposal to end the Israel-Palestine conflict, it was treated as largely unserious by Palestinians and those who advocate for their liberation.

According to Reuters:

The “peace to prosperity” plan, set to be presented by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner at an international conference in Bahrainnext week, includes 179 infrastructure and business projects, according to details of the plan and interviews with U.S. officials. The approach towards reviving the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process was criticized by the Palestinians on Saturday.

The ambitious economic revival plan, the product of two years of work by Kushner and other aides, would take place only if a political solution to the region’s long-running problems is reached.

More than half of the $50 billion would be spent in the economically troubled Palestinian territories over 10 years while the rest would be split between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Some of the projects would be in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, where investments could benefit Palestinians living in adjacent Gaza, a crowded and impoverished coastal enclave.

The answer from Palestinians — abrupt and dismissive — was emphatic: the proposal is a nonstarter.

“Palestine is not for sale,” said the Hamas government in Gaza in response.

In an interview on Al-Jazeera, Palestinian rights activist Ali Abunimah, co-founder and editor of the Electric Intifada, was incredulous and saidKushner — who has a “real credibility problem” to begin with — “can’t tell us he cares about ending poverty for Palestinians while inflicting more poverty on them.”

As opposed to something that anyone who has seriously studied the issue would dare present as a serious solution, Abunimah characterized it as nothing more than “slick marketing” and the “repackaging of recycled and hollow slogans that fail to address the root problem: Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”

Watch:]

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Executive Committee, echoed others in the Palestine Authority who said that it makes no sense to talk about economic investments until the political crisis at the heart of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands is ended.

“First lift the siege of Gaza,stop the Israeli theft of our land, resources and funds, give us our freedom of movement and control over our borders, airspace, territorial waters etc.,” Ashrawi said on Saturday. “Then watch us build a vibrant prosperous economy as a free and sovereign people.”

Trump’s economic apartheid plan has been met with a resoundingly cold reception on all fronts: Israeli officials dismiss it as irrelevant, neighboring Arab states call it a bribe, and Palestinians say it fails to address any genuine political aspirations. https://t.co/j0Vq72xvD0 pic.twitter.com/67V42p1upf

— The IMEU (@theIMEU) June 23, 2019

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the same as he rejected the proposal on Saturday. “The economic situation should not be discussed before the political one,” Abbas said. “As long as there is no political solution, we do not deal with any economic solution.”

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519 AHA: THE SOLUTION IS REPAIR THE COMMONS (including rhet. langexpertise ~ agnotology

wicked smart henry g

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/

The ghosts of a fascist past are with us once again resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultra-nationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. In addition, right-wing extremist parties are on the move politically in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe.They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.

Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. Chris Hedges is right to argue that both the rule of law and the institutions that make democracy possible are being undermined.He is worth quoting at length:

The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died. We no longer have elections free of corporate control; real legislative debate; an independent press rooted in verifiable fact that lifts up the voices and concerns of the citizens rather than peddling conspiracy theories such as “Russiagate” or cheerleading for disastrous military interventions and occupations; academic institutions that vigorously examine and critique the nature of power; or diplomacy, negotiation, détente and compromise.Puffed up by self-importance, intoxicated by the ability to wield police and military power, despots and their grotesque courtiers are freed with the collapse of the rule of law to carry out endless vendettas against enemies real and imagined until their own paranoia and fear define the lives of those they subjugate. This is where we have come, not because of Trump, who is the grotesque product of our failed democracy, but because the institutions that were designed to prevent tyranny no longer function.

Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, and render invisible important social issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in “No Name in the Street” that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

...

Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and most of the Republican Party in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public is addicted to extreme violence and shock, which allow them to drown in overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Unsurprisingly, education in the larger culture has become a disimagination machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance that now plays a central role in the formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted the ideologies, policies and institutions that are crucial to a substantive and thriving democracy.

I am not talking about the kind of anti-intellectualism that has a long history in the United States. I am pointing to a more lethal form of ignorance fueled by a manufactured type of illiteracy that is often ignored. What I am referring to is a mode of illiteracy that is both a scourge and a political tool power designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right to state that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.” Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest.

Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence. And so it goes. The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.

The writer and social critic Gore Vidal once called America the United States of Amnesia. The title should be extended to the United States of Amnesia and Willful Illiteracy. Illiteracy no longer simply marks populations immersed in poverty with little access to quality education; nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling people to read and write with a degree of understanding and fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is about what it means not to be able to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment and critical agency.

In this instance, manufactured illiteracy has become a form of political repression that discourages a culture of questioning, renders agency inoperable as an act of intervention, and restages power as a mode of domination. Illiteracy serves to depoliticize people because it reproduces conditions that make it difficult for individuals to develop informed judgments, analyze complex relationships and draw upon a range of sources to understand how power works and how they might be able to shape the forces that bear down on their lives.

Think about the defunding of public education or the assault on truth and civic literacy by the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Jair Bolsonaro administration in Brazil. Illiteracy provides the foundation for being governed, not how to govern. It is precisely this mode of illiteracy that now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops, propaganda machines and the need for instant gratification. This mode of manufactured illiteracy and education has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship.

It is important to recognize that the rise of this new mode of illiteracy is not simply about the failure of public and higher education to create critical and active citizens; it is about a society that eliminates those public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished. Literacy is dangerous to tyrants because they recognize that it is not only about learning critical competencies and an essential step towards agency, it is also the precondition for intervening in the world by being able to critique common-sense assumptions that legitimate apparatuses of persuasion and power. In the absence of a culture of literacy, the preconditions disappear for confronting not only the crisis of memory, ethics and agency but also the crisis of democracy itself.

At a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich and major tech companies, the educative force of culture has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn. This can be seen in the rise of new digitally driven systems of production and consumption that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and social relations that contribute to the disintegration of democratic social bonds and promote a form of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of “war of all against all” replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion for others. Think of the power of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as an anti-democratic disimagination machine, especially in its ability to influence the Trump presidency.

The era of post-truth is in reality a period of crisis which, as Antonio Gramsci observed, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and that] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Those morbid symptoms are evident in Trump’s mainstreaming of a fascist politics in which there is an attempt to normalize the language of racial purification, the politics of disposability and social sorting while exaggerating a culture of fear and a militarism reminiscent of past and current dictatorships.

I want to argue that any viable attempt at developing a radical politics must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy and what I have termed public pedagogy, or more precisely the educational force of the wider culture, as central not only to politics but also to the creation of subjects capable of becoming individual and social agents willing to struggle against injustices and fight to reclaim and develop those institutions crucial to the functioning and promises of a substantive democracy. One place to begin to think through such a project is by addressing the meaning and role of pedagogy as part of the broader struggle for economic justice and practice of freedom.

The reach of pedagogy extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media, the expanding digital screen culture, and alternative old and new media outlets. Accordingly, pedagogy is at the heart of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives. Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are using media establishments and public and higher education to reproduce the corporate-driven culture of neoliberalism. In addition, they are waging an assault on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by the welfare state, public schools, unions, feminist organizations and social services, among others, all the while undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.

As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish — from public schools and alternative media to health care centers — there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. This grim reality has been called by Alex Honneth a “failed sociality” — a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice.

...

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aha-ish a variant on zero sum?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/legal-scholar-tracks-down-the-bizarre-origins-of-the-right-wing-phrase-justice-kavanaugh-used-in-a-new-opinion/

no lnx

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was appointed the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump for one clear purpose: to fortify the majority of conservative justices than can protect the right-wing agenda through the judicial branch.

And while there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Kavanaugh will be a dutiful player in this role, there always remains a possibility that a justice will go rogue once appointed and fail to follow the wishes of the party behind his or her nomination. But in a new majority opinion announced on Monday, joined by the other four Republican appointees on the court, Kavanaugh sent a clear signal that he’s a party man to his core.

The decision came in the case of Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, where the court was faced with the question of whether a public access television channel is a state actor and thus bound by the First Amendment. The five conservative justices said the non-profit organization functions as a private actor in its role and is therefore not hampered by the Constitution, while the four liberal justices disagreed.

But legal scholar Michael Dorf of Cornell University, who blogs at Dorf on Law, pointed to one peculiar bit of phrasing Kavanaugh used in authoring the majority opinion that is worth examining:

It is sometimes said that the bigger the government, the smaller the individual. Consistent with the text of the Constitution, the state-action doctrine enforces a critical boundary between the government and the individual, and thereby protects a robust sphere of individual liberty. Expanding the state-action doctrine beyond its traditional boundaries would expand governmental control while restricting individual liberty and private enterprise. We decline to do so in this case. [Emphasis mine]

On Twitter, Dorf noted out that the phrase in bold is not obvious, and its origins were left unclear.

“I never heard anyone say this, and the opinion provides no citation, so I Googled it and found the Twitter feed of the Ayn Randian Atlas Society,” he wrote. “But what is the origin of this saying?”

He continued: “It appears to be an aphorism coined by a libertarian talk show host named Dennis Prager (who originally referred to ‘citizen’ rather than ‘individual’). Various libertarian candidates for office have used the phrase, with or w/o attribution.”

Kavanaugh’s choice to use this phrase with no citation or discussion of its origins suggests two equally troubling possibilities: He was trying to conceal the blatantly right-wing nature of its origins, or he is so steeped in right-wing ideology that he assumes conservative truisms are essentially uncontroversial.

But as Dorf argued, there’s nothing obviously true about this claim; in fact, a little reflection shows that at least a simplistic understanding of the assertion is plainly false.

“The claim is false insofar as it asserts a linear relationship between the size of government and the ability of individuals to flourish. Ask Hobbes how well individuals do when one shrinks government down to nothing,” he explained. “The claim conflates government’s size and its reach. Govt could be large in terms of taxes or spending/GDP ratio but small in its intrusion on people’s lives. Welfare states need not be and generally have not been totalitarian states.”

The incident demonstrates a larger issue that deeply concerns me about the court. While discussion about the ideological divides on the court is common, I think it’s often underestimated the significant role the justices’ information diets — where and how they consume news, in particular — affects their world views and the rulings. To put it bluntly, I fear that the conservative justices, in addition to having ideological biases just like anyone else, consume Fox News disinformation and related propaganda regularly that gives them a distorted view of the world.This one opinion shows how unsophisticated slogans can fester in the mind and potentially influence major decisions. If the right-leaning justices rely on the cesspool that is conservative media to make their judgments about the world, especially at a time when conservative media is increasingly disconnected from reality, we should be deeply concerned about where the court will take the country.

aha see BS climate fallback: not real, too costly to fix

find recent art'l doing nothing costs more

Coral reefs provide flood protection worth $1.8 billion every year – it’s time to protect them

Michael Beck, *University of California, Santa Cruz

A new report shows that coral reefs reduce damage from floods across the United States and its trust territories by more than $1.8 billion every year – and pinpoints that value state by state.