isolation alienation

disambiguation

see anomie, bowling alone

covid soc media disinfo swamp algorithm bad combo

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an 8 25

CNN data analyst Harry Enten crunched the numbers and discovered a large swathe of U.S. residents no longer believe in the American dream.

“America, we have a problem,” said Enten, describing a growing nation of economic pessimists.

“If you work hard, you'll get ahead: that is the American dream,” said Enten. “[Respondents answering] ‘Never/Not true now’, in 2010 to 2011, 15 years ago, it was 51 percent who said it wasn't true. Now look at this number! Whooo! Through the roof: 70 percent.”

Conversely, Enten discovered the percentage of Americans who still believed the American dream to be true “falling through the floor.”

IFrame Content

“It was 47 percent 15 years ago. Now it is just 29 percent, so we basically had a 50/50 nation on whether the American dream was still true 15 years ago, but now it's over two thirds of Americans who say it's never or no longer true,” Enten said.

Enten reported the group experiencing the most pessimism or loss in faith of the American dream was younger Americans between the age of 18 and 29, with optimism dropping from 56 percent in 2010 to just 21 percent in 2024.

“Look at where that number has absolutely tumbled to. It has dropped … 35 points to just 21 percent,” said Enten, adding that faith in the American dream also appeared to have dropped with some senior citizens, with those 65 or older experiencing a drop from 53 percent to 41 percent.

“What is essentially going on here is the American youth have lost faith pretty much completely in the idea of an American dream,” Enten said. “And that, of course, goes back to the idea of why there's poll after poll after poll that shows that younger people, more so than any other part of our nation at this point, have seen deepening pessimism in their personal lives as well.”

Another “scary” percentage that came up in polling was the falling number of friends that Americans appear to have, said Enten, with the percentage of Americans reporting “no close friends” jumping up from just 3 percent in 1990 to 17 percent now.

“No wonder pessimism is really taking a hold in the American public” Enten said.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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edit bd

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Authoritarians who want to repeal democracy and pluralism can only do so through manipulating people. For decades, people on the center-to-left have generally outsourced educating the population to K-12 schools and public universities. But learning is something that takes place throughout our lifetimes, whether we realize it or not.

And so people who want to have economic and social justice need to educate the public about our viewpoints through all kinds of media (websites, podcasts, videos, memes, etc) and also through local organizations like service clubs and unions.

Our society has lost "third spaces" where we can come together and learn from each other, and more especially to partake in our community's collective memory. Without real progressive infrastructure, we are leaving people to be manipulated by authoritarian religion and deceptive media outlets like Fox.

Research has shown that people who are most likely to get sucked into authoritarian cults like QAnon and hardcore Trumpism are alone and isolated. Many of them gravitate toward the only people who are there. The same thing often happens with young people and gangs.

JS: What are the Democrats doing wrong? It seems to me they have no answer. Just hope that Trump, now that he has power, will implode.

MS: As of this moment, there are no funded political ecosystem projects. This absolutely must change as soon as possible.

As someone who has seen both sides of the political spectrum from the inside, it was a complete shock to me when I moved leftward that there was nothing to offset the massive rightwing media machine, which I helped build (for more about why I left the right, see this link....

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social isolation gym story hedges

https://www.alternet.org/social-isolation/

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https://www.alternet.org/disarm-weapons-of-mass-disinformation/

Andy Kroll: Weapons of Mass Disinformation

Only the other day, the Internet got even darker or perhaps I mean dizzier. And I’m sure you know just what I’m thinking about. Elon Musk, not long ago the richest, and now the second-richest plutocrat on this planet — if only they lived on Pluto — and Mr. Free Speech (unless he doesn’t like it!) got into an imbroglio with various reporters on Twitter.

Of course, in a world where a set of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of our former president as a superhero, astronaut, and Top Gun-style pilot (“amazing ART of my Life & Career”) sold out in a day for $4.5 million, nothing is too strange. And hey, what can possibly go wrong when purchasing those fabulous non-funges (??) for $99 puts you in a lottery to win a dinner at Mar-a-Lago? Travel expenses on you, of course! (Maybe it’s time for me to figure out how to make some NFTs of my life & career, thrilling superhero shots of an old man in a cluttered room sitting in front of a computer screen.)

Anyway, I’m sure you noticed how Elon Musk advanced his free-speech platform by suspending the accounts of technology journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The Intercept, and other places for violating “Twitter rules” by “doxxing” him — that is, treating him in a way he didn’t like. At least in part, it had to do with a website run, as the Timeswrote, by “a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast who had used Twitter to post updates about the location of Mr. Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.” All of this led to — you guessed it! — controversy and ever more publicity for that billionaire, including criticism from the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, which he probably loved. (He reinstated most but not all of the accounts only a day later.)

It seems all too appropriate to me to leave the last word on this incident not to some reporter, but to the New Yorker‘s brilliant satirist Andy Borowitz who began his piece on the subject this way:

Shortly after Twitter suspended accounts that were tracking billionaires’ private planes, including Elon Musk’s, a new poll shows that most people who seek Musk’s precise location are doing so to avoid him. The poll, from the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, reveals that a visceral fear of encountering Elon Musk is what drives eighty-nine per cent of those who follow his movements.

Now, as the end of this strange year approaches, I’d like to turn you over to Andy Kroll, whose new book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, offers a dazzling and dizzying journey into the darkest, most conspiratorial corners of the Internet. Let him leave Elon Musk in the dust (or do I mean “dox”?) of our world and take you to a planet where darkness truly does reign supreme. Tom

Lessons Learned in the Internet’s Darkest Corners:A Plea for Real Connection in a “Connected” Era

We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second’s thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living? Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or she one of them?

By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee. In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich’s killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year’s presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades’ worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality). For my book, I set out to understand how a senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.

To do so, I traced the arc of those Rich conspiracy theories back to their origins. In practical terms, that meant hundreds of late nights spent huddled over my desk, eyes fixed on my computer screen, clicking and scrolling my way through a seemingly endless trail of tweets, memes, posts, and videos. The Internet is, in some ways, like an ancient city, its latest incarnation resting atop the ruins of so many civilizations past. I came to think of myself then as an online archeologist digging my way through the digital eons, sifting through archived websites and seeking out long-vanished posts in search of clues and answers.

Or maybe I was a waste handler, holding my nose as I picked through piles (or do I mean miles?) of toxic detritus that littered old versions of social media sites you’d know like Twitter and Reddit, and others you probably don’t, like 4chan, 8kun, and Telegram. It was there that I encountered so many of them, those faceless users, the ones I might have passed on the street, who, with the promise of anonymity, had felt unburdened to voice their unfiltered, often deeply disturbing selves. It was all id, all the time.

Who were these people? I couldn’t help but wonder whether they actually believed the stuff they wrote. Or was it all about the thrill of saying it? In an unnervingly boundless online world, were they testing the boundaries of the acceptable by one-upping each other with brazen displays of racism, misogyny, or antisemitism (just to start down the list)?

Firing up my laptop and venturing into those noxious places was like entering an inside-out world impervious to logic and critical thinking. They had their own language — losers were “cucks,” loyal foot soldiers “pedes,” and Hillary Clinton was Hillary “Klanton” — and they operated with their own sets of elaborate but twisted rules and hierarchies. After a few hours of studying such “conversations,” a form of vertigo would set in, a spinning sensation that made me get up from my desk and clear my head with a walk or a conversation with a real human being.

Now that the book is published, I don’t spend much time in those disturbing online worlds. Still, every once in a while, I can’t help checking in — old habits die hard — despite the horrors I saw there while gathering material for my book. What nags at me even now — in fact, it haunts me in some way — is the knowledge that there were real people behind those toxic accounts. The same people you might sit next to on a bus without having the slightest suspicion of just how disturbed they were and what a disturbing world they were helping create or elaborate. That knowledge still weighs on me.

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading. Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable. When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.

Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I have is pure and utter embarrassment. I’m an investigative reporter. I make a living dealing in facts, data, and vetted information. Heck, my first job in journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?

The correct answer is indeed: right. And yet…

I realize now that, on those disturbing long nights at the computer, I was more than an avid journalistic explorer of online content. I had immersed myself — and immersion is what the Internet does best. It’s the gateway point to a seemingly infinite number of rabbit holes. Who hasn’t clicked on a Wikipedia entry about, say, the making of the atomic bomb only to check the time, realize that two hours had slipped by, and you’re now watching a YouTube video about the greatest comebacks in baseball history with no memory of how you got here in the first place?

That frictionless glide from one post to the next, video after video, tweet upon tweet, plays tricks on the mind. Spend enough time in that realm and even the most absurd theories and narratives start to acquire the patina of logic, the ring of reason. How else to explain the sheer number of QAnon adherents — one in five Americans, according to an analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute — who believe that a secret cabal of pedophile elites, including Tom Hanks and Oprah, run the world, or that the Earth is indeed flat, or that the moon landing more than half a century ago was faked, no matter what news broadcaster Walter Cronkite might have said at the time?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that conspiracy theories weren’t a fixture of American life before the Internet came along. Quite the opposite: for as long as we humans have existed, we’ve dreamt up elaborate theories and fables to explain the inexplicable or, increasingly in our time, the otherwise all too explicable that we refuse to believe. Some of the founders of this country were unashamedconspiracy mongers. What those delirious late nights at the computer led me to believe, however, is that tools for spreading such fantastical theories have never been more powerful than they are today and they’ve entered our politics in an unnerving fashion (as anyone paying attention to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol knows).

Put simply, we don’t stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize “engagement” at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of them don’t simply entertain, inform, or “connect” us. As New York Timesreporter Max Fisher writes in his book The Chaos Machine, “This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”

Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there’s no path out of our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives.

The Lost Art of Saying Hello

Still, I’m under no illusion that Tweets and memes can adequately explain the schisms in American life and this country’s descent into a more embittered, polarized, us-versus-them cultural moment. Nor can Donald Trump, who is as much a product of the strange Internet world of conspiracies as a cause of it. They are, in fact, the ever-more-virulent symptoms of a country in which it’s not enough to disagree with your opponents. You also have to demonize them as subhuman, criminal, and alien, while, in the process, doing genuine harm to yourself.

In what still passes for the real world, how else to explain the prominence of conspiracy theories like QAnon or the current far-right trend of accusing someone, especially anyone who disagrees with you, of being a “groomer”? Or how do you account for the existence of a seemingly inextinguishable belief now lurking in our world that one of the country’s prominent political families, the Clintons, are also prolific serial killers who have slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds of people? Or the explosion of those baseless claims I spent all that time exploring about the murdered Seth Rich, claims that would haunt his family for years, denying them even the space to grieve for their own son?

No amount of late-night online sleuthing was going to provide an answer to the larger social ills afflicting this country. Indeed, the more time I spent online, the greater the chasm appeared — so vast, in fact, that I began to wonder whether it could ever be bridged. Nor is this a malady that can be dealt with by politicians or governments, important as they are. It runs even deeper than that.

When I think about the root causes of such societal drift, I return to a phrase I read in a 2021 study that described a “national friendship decline.” According to that survey, “Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.” The data wasn’t all grim. More than four in ten respondents said that they had made a new friend during the pandemic. Still, the lockdowns and self-isolation of these Covid years had exacerbated what the survey’s authors called a “loneliness epidemic.”

When I think about those endless Twitter rants and Reddit screeds I encountered, I envision lonely people hunched over their computers in empty apartments, posting and scrolling madly (sometimes in the most literal sense) deep into the night. Loneliness and social isolation, of course, can’t explain away all the mad conspiratorial rants you find on the Internet, nor are they the sole cause of the brittle, increasingly dangerous state of American politics. But it’s so much easier to resent and rage against a perceived enemy if you’ve never met them or anyone like them, so much easier to cast the other side as the out-group or the villain if you’ve never shared a meal or a coffee or a phone call with them.

I mention that “loneliness epidemic” only to underscore my belief that healing the schism in our culture and politics will require something more difficult and yet simpler than major policy reforms or electing a new generation of officials. Don’t get me wrong: both of those are needed, on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Today’s politics too often resemble a race to the bottom, as politicians rush to outflank their rivals and whip up their constituencies (often using social media to do it). All the while, powerful interest groups, their lobbyists, and a growing billionaire class shape (or sink) the kinds of wholesale changes needed to reboot our political system.

Yet our problems run deeper than that — and the solutions can’t be found in Washington, D.C.

One answer is finding ways to knit back together an unbearably frayed nation. Neighborhood groups, book clubs, sports leagues, civic associations, labor unions, religious groups, whatever it is, the surest way out of this stubborn conflict must come through the simplest of gestures — human connection. The lost art of saying hello.

Tech executives love to talk about the value of “connection” and their goals of “connecting” the world. Almost two decades into the social media era, we should know better than to believe thoseempty paeans used as cover for the relentless pursuit of profits.Now more than ever, it’s time to step away from those weapons of mass disinformation.

I don’t care much for New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, I would say: let’s make 2023 the year of logging off. Get to know your neighbors and colleagues. For my part, I’ll work on not thinking of those everyday strangers, or even those tiny avatars on the Internet, as them. Instead of fearing them, I’ll think I say hello.

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homicide (vs crime) spike b/c of covid lockdown?

no lnx twt an 4 22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ny-times/

NY Times pummeled over piece on 8 conservative men who don’t feel 'free to be themselves in the culture'

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement April 13, 2022

Some might say The New York Times is the king of normalizing views from the right, even views that could be considered disturbing or, in some cases, even dangerous to their fellow citizens, the nation, or the world. The Times’ pre-World War II profiles of a young Adolf Hitler are a legendary example.

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In 2015 The Times republished what it calls “1922: Hitler in Bavaria,” patting itself on the back for getting “a lot of things right,” like its “description of his ability to work a crowd into a fever pitch, ready then and there to stage a coup.”

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The Times that year also reported that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea thatHitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”

History knows how that turned out.

Fast forward to 2017, when The Times published a profile commonly referred to as “The Nazi Next Door,” originally titled, “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door,” which was written by Richard Fausset.

Salon’s Matthew Smith described the piece, bemoaning the “creepy trend of media outlets attempting to humanize Nazis and white supremacists.”

“Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall,” Fausset’s story begins. “They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.”

“Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.”

A caption of a photo reads: “Mr. Hovater and others in the loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make their ideas less than shocking, even normal.”

Some felt The Times, intentionally or not, certainly appeared as if it were trying to lend a hand. And in fact, after massive outrage, which forced a headline change (along with removing a link it included to “a webpage that sells swastika armbands,”) the Times’ editors defended publishing the piece by saying they thought “it was important to do so.”

Between 1922, and 2017, and after, no doubt the Times has published other works that normalize the radical right, extremism, and fascism.

Earlier this year a Twitter user posted his take on how the Times in 1935 covered a “large anti-Hitler protest in front of a Nazi ocean liner.”

And oh yes, 1924:

“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in [Madison Square] Garden; Police Check Foes,” was a front-page headline in the Times about a stunningly disturbing NYC event in 1939.

Meanwhile, fast forward to today.

“These 8 Conservative Men Are Making No Apologies” is the headline in Tuesday’s Times Opinion section. The piece is by the Times’ deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy and the Opinion section’s editorial assistant Adrian J. Rivera. And while no one should make a comparison to Hitler or Nazis, the question some are asking is why did The Times think it important to profile a group of conservative men, since conservative men have pretty much been in charge for decades?

“There was no talk of a stolen election, no conspiracy theories about voter fraud or rants about President Biden’s legitimacy. Yet listening to our 90-minute focus group with eight conservative men, you couldn’t help but worry for our democracy a bit,” it begins.

“The men didn’t see themselves fitting into American society today. They didn’t feel free to be themselves in the culture,” the piece claims. “Seven of them said they felt like a stranger in their own country. At a time when democratic institutions are under pressure — and even under attack — and the United States feels so ununited, what causes these Americans to feel so alienated from America?”

The Times, to my knowledge, has never done a focus group of, say, eight LGBTQ men over 50. Or eight LGBTQ people of any age. What about doing a focus group of eight Northeast Democrats? How about visiting a diner and listening to supporters of President Joe Biden? Or Senator Elizabeth Warren? Or Reps. Jamie Raskin or Val Demmings?

When does the paper of record start highlighting views of people from the left, rather than a Nazi from 1922 or conservatives from 2022?

Again, The Times defends its piece, claiming these are “Americans whose voices are often not heard in opinion journalism.”

The Times apparently has never heard of Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, or Facebook.

The Times piece includes one hour and 22 minutes of audio it titled, “8 Conservative Men On Being a Man in America Today.”

To give a taste, here are some of the men and their top concerns about America or American society:

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Tony (white, 72, retired, Massachusetts): Government spending.

Derrick (Black, 63, software engineer, Georgia): Inflation.

Michael (white, 67, retired, Florida): Economy.

Christopher (Black, 51, small-business loan broker, Maryland): Elitism.

Danny (Middle Eastern, 47, Realtor, Florida): Disgraceful.

Joe (white, 37, apparel manufacturing, New York): Weak.

Joe says: “This is not the America I remember growing up in, and it’s just sad to see what’s going on.”

Robert says: “You’re not free to be yourself anymore because of crime. You’ve got to be concerned about ‘If I go out, am I going to be a victim of crime?'”

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(Most crime is actually at historic lows, but you won’t hear that on TV or social media. The Brennan Center reports the “violent crime rate in the United States has decreased sharply over the past 25 years.”)

Later in the piece, Robert reveals, “I voted for Trump. I like Trump from when he was with ‘The Apprentice.’ I knew him as a businessperson. That’s why I voted for him. And then — oh, Lord — from church to every place, people just had a problem with it. You can’t have a different viewpoint.”

One interviewer asked questions like “What does it mean to be a man?” “Is masculinity important to you?” “Who would you all think of as good examples of masculinity or manliness these days? Who’s a good example?”

Responses to The Times’ piece were strong and appropriately unforgiving:

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see civil virtue/ responsibility

aha2 bowling alone (globalization/ outsourcing, corporatization walmarting of rural rust belt] led to kids leaving, all sorts of other problems, rw talk radio proposed enemy/scapegoat solution ol time religion --> echo/escalator polarization that just made problems worse which called for trump i lone can fix it --> nazis on florida overpass /cda truckers....

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

an 2 22 edit bd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there is this part:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you're describing is collectivism, no?

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

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

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

Ideally, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/noam-chomsky-republican-party/

alexh

The United States has had 17 different presidents during Noam Chomsky's lifetime, from Calvin Coolidge to Joe Biden — and the left-wing author, now 92, has lived through major historical events including the Great Depression, Watergate, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Chomsky discussed the challenges of the Biden era during a recent interview with author/journalist David Masciotra for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Chomsky discussed his most recent book, "Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance," in the interview with Masciotra, warning that people who are hurting economically can be manipulated by far-right extremists. Chomsky has been a blistering critic of neoliberal economics, which he said continues to fail millions of people in the United States.

"I've seen it over and over," Chomsky told Masciotra. "During the Kennedy and Johnson years, the technocratic and meritocratic elite, my colleagues from Harvard and MIT, were flocking down to Washington to show how the world should be run. Well, in Vietnam, we saw what came of that. It was not unpredictable. Those of us in the streets were warning of it all along. Now, it is the same. Neoliberalism, whatever is in the minds of people who advocate for it — maybe they don't even think about it — is an explicit effort…. to hand power to private institutions, which are dedicated to self-enrichment."

Neoliberalism, Chomsky added, only worsens the divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.

"The majority of the population gets by paycheck to paycheck," Chomsky told Masciotra. "Real wages have stagnated for 40 years. The gains of productivity growth concentrate in very few pockets. This leads to…. unfocused anger. Is it surprising? People aren't told what is really robbing them. Instead, they are told that it is immigrants, Blacks, some pedophiles from outer space, if you believe QAnon — anything but what is actually happening."

When economic conditions are unfavorable to the working class, Chomsky noted, Republicans try to distract their voters with "cultural issues."

"The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich, understood in the 1970s that you can't get votes by coming to people and saying, 'I want to rob you, and hand everything you have over to the rich and corporate sector,'" Chomsky explained. "Somehow, that doesn't work. You have to turn to what are called 'cultural issues,' meaning everything but what matters for your life. So, Paul Weyrich, one of the main Republican strategists, by the mid-1970s got a flash of insight and realized that if the Republicans pretend — stress 'pretend'— to be opposed to abortion, they'll pick up the evangelical vote and the northern Catholic vote."

Noting that the Republican Party is becoming "increasingly dangerous and brazenly antidemocratic," Masciotra asked Chomsky to discuss the political climate of 2021. And Chomsky agreed with his description of the modern GOP.

Chomsky said of the Republican Party, "They can mobilize the people they've turned into raging monsters, and get them to attack these communist rats who want the country flooded with rapists and murderers so that the White race suffers genocide. You know the whole story. That's the Republican Party. It's not a political party anymore. It's very dangerous."

The 92-year-old author added that scapegoating is an effective tool of the far right in 2021 just as it was when he was a kid during the 1930s and Jews were targeted by Nazis. He explained:

There are other parts of it that are just as dangerous. For example, just recently, Pew Research Center came out with one of its regular polls on major issues facing the country. They had a choice of 15 major issues, and people were asked to rank them. It was divided between Republicans and Democrats. Take a look at Republicans. At the very bottom — 13 percent — the most important question that has ever arisen in human history:global warming. They don't call it that. They call it "climate change," which is more neutral. But only 13 percent think that is a major problem.It is only the most important problem that's ever arisen — the question of survival. Then you go to the problems they are most concerned about — illegal immigration, the deficit. This is the result of very effective propaganda. Imposing common sense, manufacturing consent, year after year — turning people into the kind of people that supported the Nazis. Going back to my childhood, I remember them right here in the United States. These were the people who wanted to get rid of the Jews, because "the Jews are destroying civilization."

"If people are isolated, atomized, with no support groups, no involvement in constructive activities, they are prey to this attack on their moral and intellectual integrity," Chomsky continued. "Go back to what I said, the Republican leadership is overjoyed at the moves toward some humane behavior on the part of Democrats. They know, especially with (former President Donald) Trump — who is a genius at this —that they can organize and mobilize crazed groups who really believe they need their guns to save the White race from genocide. You can drive people to that."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/qanon-cult/

kos

As mainstream media digs into the deeply concerning QAnon conspiracy theory—including coverage of the reality that we now have a QAnon congresswoman—we're also seeing more people who formerly identified with the movement come forward. In an interview with CNN, Melissa Rein Lively described how she fell into the conspiracy tunnel, and why she wants to help people experiencing the same thing now. "I really became all consumed in the QAnon conspiracy theories because of a mix of fear, anxiety, depression," she told host Alisyn Camerota on Monday. "You know, uncertainty. Inconsistency about information coming out about the pandemic." She talked about feeling terrified seeing people around her lose their businesses. So what did she do? She went online. And that's when, according to Lively, the algorithm took hold and brought her into an "echo chamber."

Lively says she began looking at a number of wellness, spirituality, and New Age pages, and within a "matter of weeks," the algorithm hooked her into a "terrifying echo chamber" that "completely changed the way that I think and that I process information." Lively notes that the Save the Children messaging, in particular, spoke to her. Lively went on to describe how her husband gave her an ultimatum between her family and the QAnon movement, including even calling the police out of concern for her well-being.

Lively says she ultimately broke the QAnon spell by seeking mental health treatment with a specific focus on PTSD and trauma. "I really believe that it's a cult," she said. "It operates like a cult in every single way. And people don't realize that they're being consumed by QAnon until it's too late."

If Lively sounds familiar to you, it might be because she went viral back in the fall yelling and throwing face masks on the ground in a Target. "I've been looking forward to this," her voice says in one video. "Target … I'm not playing any more of their games."

In a video later filmed at her garage, she is seen describing herself to police (summoned by her husband) as a "QAnon spokesperson" and claiming that she was on the phone with Donald Trump "all the time."

In an interview with The Washington Post, Lively described falling into QAnon as happening "gradually, and you don't realize you're getting more and more deep in it."

And if this language sounds familiar, it's likely because you heard about another former QAnon believer, Ashley Vanderbilt. As Daily Kos covered, Vanderbilt recently gave an interview to CNN talking about her fall into the QAnon rabbit hole. Vanderbilt, the mother to a four-year-old daughter, lifelong Republican, and employee of a construction company, told the network she fell deep down the conspiracy well when she became very "isolated." She also describes trusting Trump-supporting friends who sent her deeper down the conspiracy rabbit hole via conspiracy YouTube videos.

A big similarity to Lively's journey? Algorithms. Vanderbilt described using social media (TikTok, specifically) and "liking" pro-Trump and anti-Biden posts, and then, lo and behold, the algorithm did the rest.

You can watch the full CNN interview with Lively below, courtesy of YouTube.

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// above edit bd

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/leaving-qanon/

I don't believe Ashley Vanderbilt escaped QAnon. Yes, I know that's what she told CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, and that's what Donie O'Sullivan told the rest of us on Wednesday. But trust me when I say there's no way someone indoctrinated into believing up is down, left is right, and wrong is right snaps out of it in a matter of weeks. People like Vanderbilt are primed to believe anything, and will keep being primed to believe anything. O'Sullivan's reporting suggests the danger is fading. The danger is not, and O'Sullivan's reporting goes a way toward obscuring that reality.

Who is Ashley Vanderbilt? She's a married white 27-year-old mother of a young child living in South Carolina. She lost her job last April as a result of the covid pandemic. Though neither she nor O'Sullivan say what kind of Christian she is, the fact she does not say suggests she's with a nondenominational evangelical congregation, I'd guess a megachurch, which would put her squarely among Donald Trump's loyalest of loyal supporters, the people most likely to believe the former president was sent by God. As such, she's probably gotten very adept at envisioning her life not as one she has control over, but one she must suffer through as the price for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

When she said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar religious backgrounds in which morality is obedience.

O'Sullivan said that after Joe Biden won the election, Vanderbilt "spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube becoming indoctrinated into the world of QAnon." (That's the conspiracy theory holding that the Democrats are in league with a global—read: Jewish—cabal of satanists who fornicate with children before eating them.) "By inauguration day," O'Sullivan said, Vanderbilt "was convinced that if then President-elect Joe Biden took office the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter."

Vanderbilt said she was spending a lot of time by herself after losing her job. She was depressed. She was cranky. She too often snapped at her daughter. As a result, she said, she probably lost touch with reality. "I wasn't one hundred percent there like I should have been," she said. Folks, I'm here to tell you someone who believed that the "deep state" was having sex with children before eating them, that the former president would declare martial law, and that the military would round up his enemies before publicly executing them in cold blood is not someone who needs to lose her job, go into a depression or snap at her child to be not quite "one hundred percent there."

She was already there. How do I know? From experience. I've mentioned before I grew up on the margins of a closed protestant sect called the Christians Gathered Unto the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. (They are better known as the Plymouth Brethren.) Strict obedience to authority, which is to say, strict obedience to the father of the family, which is to say strict obedience to God, was morality. When Vanderbilt said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar backgrounds. We were taught Hell is really real, and God really will send you there if you do not do what He tells you to. We were taught a God who threatens eternal pain and suffering is a lovingGod. We were taught to believe up is down, left is right, wrong is right, but especially don't think just do as you're told.

So I know she was already there. She didn't need TikTok to fall down "the QAnon rabbit hole." If it wasn't TikTok, Facebook or whatever, it would have been something else, most likely ordinary word of mouth. QAnon does not demand of believers any more than Vanderbilt's white evangelical church does. She seems to have sensed the connection between them. O'Sullivan said, "while she was deep in the conspiracy theory, she said Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no wrong. She recalls once asking herself, 'Am I putting even Trump above God?'" She doesn't read, she said, and she doesn't pay attention to the legitimate press. All she needs to do is what she's told to do, which is follow the leader don't ask questions.

Which is why her explanation of how she "escaped" doesn't hold up. "Some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory in the hours after inauguration," O'Sullivan said. "Biden's inauguration itself was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as President in the coming few weeks. Then, certainly, all the deep-state arrests would happen. That was a step too far for Vanderbilt."Wut!

She was convinced Joe Biden's inauguration would transform the country into a Communist state. She believed she'd have to go into hiding with her daughter. She believed the Democrats and the Jews and "the Globalists" are cannibals. And she was disappointedwhen the military did not publicly execute Der Führer's enemies in cold blood. But wait whoa—a conspiracy theory adapting to reality? That's a step too far!?

Look, I don't understand why Vanderbilt thinks she escaped QAnon. I do know, using my intuition, that she does not understand why either. In not understanding why, she's vulnerable to the influence of a CNN journalist reporting a national story about a QAnon believer who escaped. Vanderbilt, in being someone who always did what was asked of her, continued being someone who did what was asked of her, in this case, giving O'Sullivan a story he was asking for, however tacitly. And in the process of telling that story, he obscured a terrible conclusion about Vanderbilt. That she felt fooled into believing there would be blood does not change the fact she wanted blood.

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