WaPo |The
world is wretched with weak men. Slouchers, slackers, chumps,
low-status dudes who have amassed a crumpled pile of inferior habits and
made the world a messier place.
Or so Jordan
Peterson will tell you. But fear not, the doctor is here to help,
preaching his thoroughly footnoted gospel of order and discipline, one
rule at a time — in a popular book, in lectures far from his ivory tower
roost and, most potently, on YouTube.
The man
of the moment, the self-proclaimed “professor against political
correctness,” sits in his Manhattan hotel aerie before another sold-out
talk based on his best-selling “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.”
The University of Toronto clinical psychologist also sold out his date
at Washington’s Warner Theatre on Friday, so he’ll return next month to
lecture there again. Plenty of men are listening. Even Kanye West, who
amid his still-unspooling existential crisis on Twitter, shared an image
of his computer screen, on which a tab for a Peterson video was
visible.
Peterson elicits nearly every opinion except
indifference. “The most influential public intellectual in the Western
world right now,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times, calling him “a young William F. Buckley.” Critics, and there are plenty, raise serious doubts.
“He
takes a really simplistic approach toward gender inequality. It feels
like a dressed-up version of misogyny,” says Gary Barker, a
developmental psychologist who has studied ways to promote gender
equality and violence prevention. “The scary part is it doesn’t provoke
men to be better but to live with this inequality and get what you can
out of it.”
Peterson rails against victimhood
and “radical left-wing identity politics.” He’s an opponent of regulated
equality and a skeptic of the notion of male or white “privilege.” Like
many thought leaders who flirted with socialism in their youth,
Peterson crusades against anything that he thinks smacks of Marxist
tendencies and groupthink, which means a lot of inveighing against
“postmodernist” scholars, who are probably a bigger nuisance at faculty
confabs than in the lives of his fans.
A White House official said Monday that Trump will attend the group's annual meeting. Trump has been a strong supporter of the NRA and enjoyed their backing in his 2016 campaign. Pence had already been scheduled to address the group.
After a deadly shooting in February at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Trump suggested he was open to new gun control measures. He held a meeting with senators, declaring that he would stand up to the gun lobby and calling for a "comprehensive" bill.
But Trump later backpedaled from those sweeping statements, offering a more limited plan. After he advocated increasing the minimum age to purchase an assault weapon to 21, Trump tweeted there was "not much political support" for the idea.
LATimes | Last
year, John Tooby, a founder of evolutionary psychology, was asked by
the website Edge.org what scientific concept should be more widely
known. He argued for something called the "coalition instinct."
In
our natural environment, humans form coalitions. Coalitions are
slightly different from tribes, families or nations, in that those are
all groups we are involuntarily born into. Coalitions are the teams we
join.
"Coalitions,"
Tooby explained, "are sets of individuals interpreted by their members
and/or by others as sharing a common abstract identity." The coalition
instinct is a bundle of "programs" that "enable us and induce us to
form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from,
factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose,
and attack coalitions." Most animals don't have this instinct, and none
has it as finely honed as humans do.
Because
coalitions are formed to protect the interests of their members, we
have a remarkable ability to forgive behavior when it is done by our
teammates and condemn the behavior when it is done by members of a rival
coalition. "This," Tooby said, "is why group beliefs are free to be so
weird."
ChicagoTribune | Here’s some advice for conservatives who are jumping to Kanye West’s defense. Don’t get caught up in the Kardashians’ mess.
There’s a good chance the recent Twitter fest between West and Donald Trump has nothing to do with politics. Most likely, it’s about television ratings.
Conservatives had to pinch themselves to make sure this was really
happening. West appeared to be telling African-Americans that Republicans are really cool, and that they should give Trump — and the party — a chance. That’s what the GOP has been saying for years.
Fox News commentator Jesse Watters declared that West had “loosened the grip the Democratic Party holds on the black vote.”
Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Instagram, “Kind of a big deal. Seems like a cultural turning point.”
Liberal A-listers weren’t hearing it, though. Rihanna, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and Kendrick Lamar were among those who unfollowed West on Twitter. Chance the Rapper
tried to rein West in and got caught up in his own word battle with
Trump. John Legend also urged his friend to rethink his tweets.
It
was useless. Over the weekend, West went a step further and met with
conservative commentators Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens. Trump Jr.
tweeted a photo.
Look, everyone knows how hard it is for
right-wingers to find celebrities who are willing to pose for a picture
with Trump, much less one who will tweet that he “loves” him. We get why
they’d get all excited that West called Trump his “brother.”
We
understand why conservatives have tried to claim West as one of their
own since he admitted that he would have cast his ballot for Trump in
the presidential election — if he had bothered to vote. Unfortunately,
voting isn’t on his agenda.
When it comes to Trump, West clearly
is an anomaly that America may never fully understand. His wife’s
family, on the other hand, is an open book.
If there is one thing
you can be sure of, it’s that the tweet fest that roped in Chance the
Rapper, Legend and a sitting U.S. president would make great fodder for
“Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
Well, for one thing, conservatives conveniently abandoned Bush years ago.
For another, it all makes more sense when you consider their historic
lack of popularity with black people and their weird jealousy over it.
Thanks to gerrymanders and white rage,
Republicans have so far been able to hold their majorities just fine
without black support, so it’s fair to assume they feel about black
votes the way James Baker felt about the votes of Jews. But the conservatives who use the GOP as a host body are more conflicted.
On the other hand, conservatives seem genuinely hurt and confused when black people call them names like “white supremacist.”
You can see this most clearly in their annual aggrieved Martin Luther
King Jr. Day essays in which they either try to claim MLK as one of
their own (“King’s Orthodox Christianity is one of those inconvenient
truths that a lot of people on the left tend to ignore” — Da Tech Guy) or tell black people to stop persecuting them with their contempt (“MLK Day proposal: Give the race card a rest” — Michelle Malkin).
Yet despite this helpful hectoring, most blacks keep voting
Democratic, so conservatives sulk and brood, only occasionally
brightening when a black celebrity says something that can be charitably
interpreted as right-wing. Bill Cosby, with his pull-up-your-pants
shtick, was their go-to for years, but for obvious reasons you see much less of that now. Chris Rock is their usual backup; here’s National Review’s Kyle Smith
kvelling, “When he speaks about the destructiveness of porn he sounds
like Ross Douthat.” (And I thought I was the only one who found Douthat
hilarious!)
So when West busted out his pro-Trump tweets last week, notwithstanding that he also said,
“I haven’t done enough research on conservatives to call myself or be
called one,” the brethren were juiced. Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell
are all well and good, but here was a black guy ordinary people had
actually heard of and could stand to listen to!
Also, West wasn’t just saying things that could be read, if one
squinted and had had a few drinks, as conservative policy statements. In
fact, West didn’t stipulate any conservative policies that he
approved of. (I’m not sure he knows what they are.) Yeezy was just
saying out loud, in a variety of peculiar ways, that he loved Trump and his dragon energy.
BostonGlobe | “She is the most unpopular politician in every single competitive
district in the country,” said Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the National
Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm. A
March NBC poll found her approval rating in the low 20s. (House Speaker
Paul Ryan, a Republican, is also unpopular, with an approval rating just
three points higher than hers in the NBC poll.)
Pelosi said the GOP strategy shows the “bankruptcy” of the
opposition’s ideas and the negative ads only help her cause. “The more
they do it, the more money I raise,” Pelosi said. “Because I have a
following.”
She says Democrats are running on an economic message of raising
the minimum wage, boosting education, and strengthening the health care
system. But Democrats are mostly counting on a Trump backlash to provide
big gains in midterm elections.
Pelosi is a master fund-raiser,
pulling in tens of millions of dollars that Democrats will use to help
House candidates across the country, even those who are skeptical of her
leadership. In a show of force, she raised more than $16 million for
Democrats in the first quarter of this year.
Even Pelosi’s fiercest critics admit she is a whiz at raking in money
and at counting votes. She’s managed to keep her fractious caucus
together in the Trump era, increasing her clout in spending talks and
wresting key concessions from Republicans even while in the minority.
But some in the party are questioning the message it sends to the
grass roots that the top three House Democrats are all in their late
70s and have been in power for years, despite running on a message of
change in the midterms.
“I think there’s a strong desire out there in America for new
leadership in Washington, not just getting rid of Republicans but
getting new leadership in the Democratic Party,” said Massachusetts
Representative Seth Moulton, one of the loudest voices in the party
calling for Pelosi to go.
NYTimes | Democrats venerate diversity as they do
no other value. Yet the party’s Senate leader is a white man, Charles
Schumer. Many will wonder whether a party that now gets nearly half of
its votes from nonwhite people — 46 percent of Hillary Clinton’s 2016
vote was from nonwhites — should be led nationally by two white people.
The
full picture is actually even a little weirder. Mr. Crowley would not
be a shoo-in should Ms. Pelosi not be able to get the votes. There are
two others who want the job: Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the current No. 2
and Ms. Pelosi’s rival of 50 years; and Tim Ryan of Ohio, who challenged
Ms. Pelosi two years ago for the minority leader job and lost, 134 votes to 63.
So,
should Ms. Pelosi decide not to seek the speakership again, the main
contenders to replace her, at least as of now, would be three white men.
For a Democratic Party leadership post in 2018! That sounds more like a
race for Queens borough president in 1961.
To me, though, the diversity issue isn’t
even the main problem. Even if two white men ended up leading the
Democrats, no one would doubt that the Democratic Party is the
multiracial party. That much is well established, and presumably Mr.
Crowley (or whoever) would name a Rainbow Coalition-ish leadership team
and surely have a woman as his No. 2.
The
bigger problem is geographic. If Mr. Crowley became the House
Democrats’ leader, the Democrats would be led by two legislators from
New York City. And that is deeply weird.
The Democrats are coming off an election in which their presidential candidate won only 487 of the nation’s 3,141 counties. Four years before, Barack Obama won just 689 against Mitt Romney. The party is in severe geographic retreat, and it has happened with alarming speed.
If
I told you that Democrats once controlled the governors’ mansions in
the unlikely states of Tennessee, Wyoming, Arkansas, Kansas and
Oklahoma, what year would you think I was referring to? Maybe 1987?
Nope. Up through the 2010 elections, Democrats governed all these states.
Likewise, the Democrats had a House majority until those elections.
They controlled seats in large swaths of North Carolina, Tennessee,
Georgia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, both Dakotas, Indiana, West Virginia and
Appalachian Ohio.
They held up to 257
seats in those days. They got decimated in 2010 and 2014, and maybe
there just wasn’t that much they could have done about it. But they
could have identified some young comers from swing and heartland states
and elevated them to positions of greater prominence than they did. For
example, in the 114th Congress (2015-2016), the Democrats had nine
leadership positions — and only one was held by a representative from a state that didn’t have a coastline.
WaPo | On Saturday night, Washington journalists
hobnobbed with politicians and celebrities at the black-tie White House
Correspondents’ Association dinner — and then spent Sunday arguing about
whether comedian Michelle Wolf was too harsh toward President Trump,
who uses his presidential pulpit to mock the journalists.
Late Sunday night, Washington time, nine journalists in Kabul
were among at least 29 people killed in suicide bombing attacks. That
brings to 24 the number of journalists killed worldwide so far this
year, following 46 last year — a year that also saw a record high of
262 journalists jailed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
This
ugly juxtaposition ought to shame Washington media. It isn’t just about
the dinner, though that spectacle needs to be replaced with something
appropriate for this grim time in our profession. What’s needed is a
change in the way we think of ourselves as journalists.
Journalists
are, with good reason, resistant to the role of advocate. But at a time
when Trump is leading a successful movement to discredit the free press
at home, advocating the First Amendment isn’t a conflict of interest.
And at a time when the Trump administration is helping autocrats
undermine journalists around the world, campaigning for our jailed and
murdered brethren doesn’t compromise our journalistic independence.
On May 3 of last year — World Press Freedom Day — the U.S. secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, gave a speech
announcing that freedom and human rights may be “our values” but they
are “not our policies.” He continued: “If we condition too heavily that
others must adopt this value . . . it really creates obstacles to our
ability to advance our national security interests, our economic
interests.” (Just last week, Trump described North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, leader of the most repressive regime on Earth, as “open” and “honorable.”)
As the president attacks the press as the “fake news media” and the “enemy of the American people,” so far this year
, two journalists in the United States have been arrested, eight have
been attacked and nine have received subpoenas. The Trump administration
has charged two people for leaking under the 1917 Espionage Act.
theatlantic | Roughly two weeks ago, a Twitter user with fewer than 1,700 followers began publishing screen grabs of anti-gay posts from a defunct blog once written by Joy Reid, who hosts a weekend morning show on a cable-news network. Like the vast majority of Americans, I’d never watched the show AM Joy on MSNBC—I do not typically enjoy cable-news channels, or for that matter, the morning.
But despite having zero interest in what the host wrote years ago; or whether she was hacked, as she claimed, or lying, or deluding herself; or whether her show would stay on or be suspended or get canceled, I couldn’t escape the story.
I tried, reader.
No matter how it turned out, I could see no greater purpose that it would serve, no insight it would clarify, no ill it would vanquish, no good it would advance. So I ignored two articles and two stories in New York Times, least items in. Then, 12 days in, national news stories were still being published! Defeated, I decided to probe the why of it all. Was any larger purpose served by all the coverage? If not, is there an identifiable way in which the press should change its approach?
On reading the coverage, I gleaned insights from a few stories. I grant that few were indefensible. And I understand how structural features of the news ecosystem fueled the story. For example, coverage by one news outlet spawns coverage by others that don’t want to get beat; once any outlet covers a story, it is more likely to publish more stories, in part to update its audience on new information; and while commentators have a responsibility to direct people to what is important, part of the job is also conceding that one often cannot control what’s in the news, or what folks seize upon and cause to trend on social-media sites—but that even too-popular stories can offer opportunities to make tangential points of importance that readers will be unusually primed to ponder.
So it isn’t that I find fault with all the journalists who published on Joy Reid.
What’s more, I share many of the underlying concerns that sparked some of the coverage. I oppose homophobic stereotypes. I agree people should not claim hackers are responsible for their words and that public dishonesty is a transgression in journalism. I think there is a role for journalists to hold members of their own profession accountable. And I agree with those who insist that if a conservative were in Reid’s place, there would be furious calls on the left for her termination. (I am a consistent critic of such calls regardless of is involved.)
But even grasping many of the factors that fueled coverage and sympathizing with folks who reacted to some of them does not change my overall assessment.
TheIntercept |Jeremy Scahill: Ralph Nader, welcome to this extended episode of Intercepted.
Ralph Nader: Thank you, Jeremy.
JS: Let’s start with Gina Haspel. This campaign that
the CIA is publicly waging to support her nomination, leaking or
publicizing memos that seem to exonerate her of any direct role in the
destruction of torture tapes. First question is just: Have you ever seen
anything like the CIA social media campaign that’s being waged right
now in an effort to get Gina Haspel confirmed as CIA director?
RN: No, and the reason why, one is that the CIA
desperately wants someone from their own ranks, they don’t want an
outsider. They’ve been battered at times by Trump and others, which is
pretty unheard of for a president to do that. So they’re hunkering down,
and they don’t want to lose this one.
JS: Right, but, at the same time, isn’t the CIA
supposed to be prohibited from engaging in domestic propaganda? I mean,
it does seem like they’re utilizing their social media platforms to
campaign for someone that there’s very serious questions about her role
in torture, black sites and other issues.
RN: Well, who has ever found a boundary for the CIA?
I mean they’re not supposed to deal with overt armed action abroad,
according to their original charter, they’re just supposed to collect
intelligence, and we know where that’s gone — that’s out of the window.
The CIA does what it wants, under the cloak of secrecy and national
security, does whatever it wants, and who’s going to stop it? It has so
many feelers all over the country and the world, and they really want
her in because they think that Trump is perfectly capable of nominating
an outsider who would give them a lot of trouble. And they’ve been
jolted more than usual, publicly, as an agency, and they want stability,
as they define it. And it doesn’t matter what she did in Asia in terms
of the Thailand episode and torture. I mean, that’s what they do. That’s
what the CIA does all over the world.
JS: You know it’s interesting, as I watch Trump
supporters who are railing against the deep state and saying that, you
know, you have all of these powerful people within the CIA/NSA/FBI
bureaucracy that are plotting against Trump, the thing that comes to my
mind is that if I were a really dark character within the CIA, right
now, I’d be very content with Trump being the commander-in-chief because
he doesn’t seem to understand the full range of powers that the CIA
has. And it seems to me like they’re able to do basically whatever they
want right now without much questioning from the White House.
RN: Well that’s been true of prior presidents. They
want deniability. They don’t really want to know what the NSA and CIA
do. President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton — they don’t want
to know that the NSA was dragnet snooping on virtually all Americans, a
clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, as well as the FISA Act.
And President Trump is no different in that way. What they are really
upset about is: When was the last time we ever heard a president attack
“the deep state”? He’s not attacking some rogue outfit in Afghanistan
that’s an offshoot and maybe under contract. He’s attacking the military
industrial complex’s core secrecy operations and that is freaking out
people at the CIA, especially career people who have never been fingered
that way from the White House. That’s why they want the stability of
this present nominee.
NYTimes | Over
time it has become clear to me that security decisions in the Trump
administration follow a certain pattern. Discussion seems to start with a
presidential statement or tweet. Then follows a large-scale effort to
inform the president, to impress upon him the complexity of an issue, to
review the relevant history, to surface more factors bearing on the
problem, to raise second- and third-order consequences and to explore
subsequent moves.
It’s not easy. The
president by all accounts is not a patient man. According to The
Washington Post, one Trump confidant called him “the two-minute man”
with “patience for a half page.” He insists on five-page or shorter
intelligence briefs, rather than the 60 pages we typically gave previous
presidents. There is something inherently disturbing in that. There are
some problems that cannot be simplified.
Sometimes, almost magically, he gets it right. The president’s speech
last August on Afghanistan was worth listening to, clearly the product
of the traditional deliberative process where intelligence sets the
picture based on the best available information, and then security
agencies weigh in with views that are adjudicated by the National
Security Council.
But the Afghan
experience has been the exception. The president continues to attack the
Iranian nuclear deal and is likely to end it even in the face of
intelligence that Iran has not committed a material breach of the
compact, that the deal makes it more difficult for Iran to build a
weapon and that it gives us visibility into its nuclear program.
Then there is Russia. The president only recently and grudgingly agreed to impose sanctions
on Russians believed to have interfered in the American election, and
he continues to characterize the investigation as a “witch hunt” while
relentlessly attacking agencies of his own administration.
He
humiliated the attorney general, undercut his national security adviser
and engaged in personal vendettas against senior F.B.I. officials.
A
few months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, I got a call from a
colleague who thought he might be on a very short list for a very senior
position. He asked my opinion. I told him that three months earlier I
would have talked to him about his duty to serve. Now I was telling him
to say no. “You’re a young man,” I said. “Don’t put yourself at risk for
the future. You have a lot to offer. Someday.”
When
asked for counsel these days by officers who are already in government,
especially more junior ones, I remind them of their duty to help the
president succeed. But then I add: “Protect yourself. Take notes and
save them. And above all, protect the institution. America still needs
it.”
That
creates a deeper dilemma. Intelligence becomes a feeble academic
exercise if it is not relevant and useful. It always has to adapt to the
idiosyncrasies, learning style, policies and priorities of any
president to preserve its relevance and utility. But there have to be
limits. History — and the next president — will judge American
intelligence, and if it is found to have been too accommodating to this
or any other president, it will be disastrous for the community.
These
are truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued
over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over
what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or
relevance of objective reality itself.
In
this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with
some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement
and science — all of which, like intelligence gathering, are
evidence-based. Intelligence shares a broader duty with these other
truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to
base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes
objective reality.
The historian
Timothy Snyder stresses the importance of reality and truth in his
cautionary pamphlet, “On Tyranny.” “To abandon facts,” he writes, “is to
abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power
because there is no basis upon which to do so.” He then chillingly
observes, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
Counterpunch | Beals isn’t the only candidate for NY-19’s Democratic nomination with
ties to the Iraq War and the intelligence establishment. Patrick Ryan,
who served two tours in Iraq as an intelligence officer after graduating
from West Point, is also running in the primary against Beals.
“Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called
Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance
operation of left-wing groups and labor unions… The pitch, a joint
venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter
Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011
after it was exposed in a series of news reports.
Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data
analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for
law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from
the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about
activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents
obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and
reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track
social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.”
Interestingly, Ryan has gone the traditional fundraising route, and
is orders of magnitude more flush with cash than Beals ($900,000 as of
the end of 2017 versus Beals’ $174,000). In a sense, these are two very
similar, odious candidates following two divergent campaign models
utilizing different elements of the Democratic Party machine.
Ryan is backed by right-wing elements of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by his receiving support from the New Democrat Coalition PAC,
a conservative, pro-business element of the party. In contrast, Beals
doesn’t have such overt institutional support, and is instead handled by
a Clinton surrogate who actively discourages large-scale fundraising as
part of his strategy to build up his candidate as the true voice of the
grassroots.
As such, Beals is attempting to craft an image as a progressive who
stands in contrast to the Blue Dog conservatism of Ryan. What can you
call this farce? It is the primary equivalent of professional wrestling.
A rigged game.
Beals and Ryan represent a disturbing trend taking place across the
country: intelligence insiders and military officers running as
Democrats in an election year that expects to see triumphs for Democrats
in reaction to the Trump shit show.
The World Socialist Website’s Patrick Martin has compiled a rather exhaustive list of other candidates who fall into this trend as well, including, but not limited to:
NYTimes | The California police had the Golden State Killer’s DNA and recently found an unusually well-preserved sample from one of the crime scenes. The problem was finding a match.
But these days DNA is stored in many places, and a near-match ultimately was found in a genealogy website beloved by hobbyists called GEDmatch, created by two volunteers in 2011.
Anyone can set up a free profile on GEDmatch. Many customers upload to the site DNA profiles they have already generated on larger commercial sites like 23andMe.
The detectives in the Golden State Killer case uploaded the suspect’s DNA sample. But they would have had to check a box online certifying that the DNA was their own or belonged to someone for whom they were legal guardians, or that they had “obtained authorization” to upload the sample.
“The purpose was to make these connections and to find these relatives,” said Blaine Bettinger, a lawyer affiliated with GEDmatch. “It was not intended to be used by law enforcement to identify suspects of crimes.”
But joining for that purpose does not technically violate site policy, he added.
Erin Murphy, a law professor at New York University and expert on DNA searches, said that using a fake identity might raise questions about the legality of the evidence.
The matches found in GEDmatch were to relatives of the suspect, not the suspect himself.
Since the site provides family trees, detectives also were able to look for relatives who might not have uploaded genetic data to the site themselves.
ROTFLMBAO..., Broke, busted. and cain't be trusted Joy Reed has now been cast as the face of progressive "evolution". Lil'Pookie and the whole and entire MSDNC rainbow coalition was out in force this morning in mock indignation to very mildly toast the ultimate hypocrisy and flagrant lying of Comcast's star #NeverTrump interrogator.
(scared to death of what's past that signpost up ahead under President Mike Pence - so - good, old fashioned Guyanese disgust with degeneracy doesn't hold a candle to the formalized de jure clampdown to come if the Deep State prevails in its attempted coup on Trump)
Mr. Rodger, who killed six people
in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, recorded YouTube videos raging against
“spoiled, stuck-up” women he called “sluts” who sexually rejected him.
And before Mr. Rodger, there was George Sodini, who killed three women
in a Pennsylvania gym in 2009. He left behind an online diary complaining that women ignored him and that he hadn’t had sex in years.
Despite
a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass
killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the
attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way
these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.
Here’s
the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we
grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and
the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet,
there will be no stopping future tragedies.
Over
the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from
“men’s rights” forums and incels to “pickup artists” — have grown
exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they
have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so
pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.
The
other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief
that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual
attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for
example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.
Elle | Now Reid’s show, AM Joy, regularly pulls in viewers, and 2017
marks the first time in 16 years that MSNBC beat out CNN in the
Saturday-morning time slot. Twitter swells with real-time reactions from
#Reiders, especially when Reid schools a guest in her trademark
patient, no-nonsense fashion. (After Shonda Rhimes retweeted a clip of
Reid calmly demolishing a guest who was spouting Clinton Foundation
conspiracy theories—appending the comment “Just in case you’re wondering
how to dismiss foolishness”—Reid confesses, “I died. Oh, I died!”)
Given the cacophony of cable news, where the loudest panelist often
wins, Reid’s approach has few antecedents on the right or the left, but
perhaps that’s why she has so many newly minted fans: In a
sensationalist climate, she refuses to let facts wriggle out of her
grasp.
“As a woman of color,” Cross notes, “there’s often this unspoken pressure to dot your i’s
with hearts to avert the presumed angry Black woman stereotype. But Joy
skirts past that and gets right to the business of unapologetic truth
telling.”
Reid also looks for what she calls
“ideological diversity,” although that can backfire in cases like the
dustup that earned her Rhimes’s attention. “I’m not trying to do Barnum
& Bailey’s circus. If you’re coming on to do a circus act and say
that Hillary Clinton murdered 40 people, we can’t have a conversation,”
she says. When she appears on Meet the Press, she’s been known
to run upstairs, in heels, to her own studio between breaks to check a
fact. “You have to act fast, because once something’s said on TV, people
think it’s true. So that’s one of the reasons I will interrupt people.”
Notes Hayes, “She has this deep centeredness I have come to really
value and appreciate. She doesn’t really raise her voice. She’s not a
ranter; she’s not a yeller.”
Still, every viral
clip earns cries of approval from the rah-rah arm of the left-wing
media—and ire from the far right. Reid tells me the harassment has
spread beyond Twitter; she recently had to inform NBC of a rape threat.
Her
philosophy, she tells me, is just to keep on keeping on. “We’re trying
to fill the show with as many fact-vitamins as we can, to inoculate our
audience against the fact-free nonsense they’ll deal with the rest of
the week. We’re trying to load you up with nutritious facts, so when you
go into the world and are arguing with your argle-bargle uncle who’s
trying to tell you Seth Rich was murdered [referring to the conspiracy theory that the Clintons were somehow involved],
you’ve got some facts; or they tell you that Uranium One was a scandal,
you’ve got something. We’re delivering people some ammunition to be
able to fight in a fact-free world.”
mediaite | The author also repeatedly advocated against gay marriage on the site by
criticizing liberals deemed too far left on the issue. Cable news host Rachel Maddow, who is openly gay and now works with Reid at MSNBC, was a recurring target in these Reid Report posts.
Other comments include making gay jokes about dozens of figures in
politics, media, and entertainment. The following list includes the
names of people the author either accused of being gay — satirically or
not — or made a gay joke about, aside from the previously mentioned
Aiken and Cooper:
The author even lobbed a gay joke at Reid’s now-MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews, who was accused of “loving” Bush in the same sexual way Saudi Prince Abdullah was accused of loving the former president.
nydailynews | “In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and
manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to
include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run
counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” she said in a statement to
Mediaite.
“I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the
unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials
of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort
to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that
ended a decade ago.
“Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that
it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever
corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me,
but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ,
immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.”
The Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine, denied that the blog had been tampered with in any way.
Late Tuesday, Reid’s cybersecurity expert, Jonathan Nichols, said in a
statement provided to the Daily News that login information to The Reid
Report “was available on the Dark Web” five months ago. He also said
that the screenshots of the blog had been manipulated “with the intent
to tarnish Ms. Reid's character.”
Nichols locked his Twitter profile shortly after the statements went
out, but the Wayback Machine showed tweets in which he bragged about his
relationship with Andrew Auernheimer, the webmaster for Nazi website
The Daily Stormer, who is frequently known as weev online.
Reid’s lawyer, John H. Reichman, said the FBI has been brought into the matter.
“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into
potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts,
including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid,”
he said in a statement through MSNBC.
“Our own investigation and monitoring of the situation will continue in
parallel, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as their
investigation proceeds.”
Daily Beast exec editor @NoahShachtman sent this note out to staff today regarding the @JoyAnnReid situation. He says reporters @kpoulsen and @maxwelltani are investigating her claims and examining her history: “In the meantime, we’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns...” pic.twitter.com/eJwwFeHSCn
theatlantic | A strange story about MSNBC host Joy
Reid has been unfolding for a week. It began when a Twitter user with
about 1,000 followers, @Jamie_Maz, dug up what appeared to be homophobic posts on Reid’s defunct blog, the Reid Report. They were similar in nature to posts that Reid apologized for as “insensitive” back in December, after @Jamie_Maz brought those to light.
The
new round of posts contain a lot of cliche gay jokes about Charlie
Crist and others, concerns that “adult gay men tend to be attracted to
very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle,’”
and commentary like “part of the intrinsic nature of ‘straightness’ is
that the idea of homosexual sex is ... well ... gross ... even if you
think that gay people are perfectly lovely individuals.”
The
triumph of the gay-rights movement has been so complete and fast that
it’s easy to forget that 10 years ago—in the same election that swept
Barack Obama to the White House—California voters passed a state constitutional amendment
banning same-sex marriage. Attitudes changed, the moral arc bent, and
now, a lot fewer people disparage gay people like this than did in 2006.
A liberal talk-show host would and should be embarrassed and ashamed by
these posts popping up, but Reid apologized once, and could have done
so again.
Instead, Reid released a statement to Mediaite
saying that she’d been hacked and was not responsible for the posts.
“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and
manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to
include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run
counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said.
The posts
had been dug up on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which
maintains copies of many pages on the web. When Reid said she’d been
hacked, many jumped to the conclusion that it was the Wayback Machine
that had been hacked. On its blog, the Internet Archive said that Reid’s
lawyers had contacted them about a possible hack, but that they had no
indication that one had occurred.
“This past December, Reid’s
lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog
(blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that ‘fraudulent’ posts were
‘inserted into legitimate content’ in our archives of the blog,” they
wrote. “Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged
insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point
at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is
still unclear to us).”
On review, the Internet Archive “found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions.”
truthdig | Exactly 200 days before the crucial midterm election that will
determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress, the
Democratic National Committee filed a 66-page lawsuit that surely cost
lots of money and energy to assemble.
Does the lawsuit target
purveyors of racist barriers to voting that block and deflect so many
people of color from casting their ballots?
No.
Well,
perhaps this ballyhooed lawsuit aims to ensure the rights of people who
don’t mainly speak English to get full access to voting information?
Unfortunately, no.
Maybe it’s a legal action to challenge the ridiculously sparse voting booths provided in college precincts?
Not that either.
Announced with a flourish by DNC Chair Tom Perez, the civil lawsuit—which
reads like a partisan polemic wrapped in legalisms—sues the Russian
government, the Trump campaign and operatives, as well as WikiLeaks and
its founding editor, Julian Assange.
It’s hard to imagine that
many voters in swing districts—who’ll determine whether the GOP runs the
House through the end of 2020—will be swayed by the Russia-related
accusations contained in the lawsuit. People are far more concerned
about economic insecurity for themselves and their families, underscored
by such matters as the skyrocketing costs of health care and college
education.
To emphasize that “this is a patriotic—not
partisan—move,” Perez’s announcement of the lawsuit on April 20 quoted
one politician, Republican Sen. John McCain, reaching for the hyperbolic
sky: “When you attack a country, it’s an act of war. And so we have to
make sure that there is a price to pay, so that we can perhaps persuade
the Russians to stop these kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of
democracy.”
Setting aside the dangerous rhetoric about “an act of
war,” it’s an odd quotation to choose. For Russia, there’s no “price to
pay” from a civil lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of New York. As the DNC well knows, any judgment
against such entities as the Russian Federation and the general staff of
its armed forces would be unenforceable.
The DNC’s lawsuit
amounts to doubling down on its fixation of blaming Russia for the
Democratic Party’s monumental 2016 loss, at a time when it’s essential
to remedy the failed approaches that were major causes of Hillary
Clinton’s defeat in the first place. Instead of confronting its fealty
to Wall Street or overall failure to side with working-class voters
against economic elites, the Democratic National Committee is ramping up
the party leadership’s 18-month fixation on Russia Russia Russia.
After
a humongous political investment in depicting Vladimir Putin as a
pivotal Trump patron and a mortal threat to American democracy,
strategists atop the Democratic Party don’t want to let up on seeking a
big return from that investment. Protecting the investment will continue
to mean opposing the “threat” of détente between the world’s two
nuclear superpowers, while giving the party a political stake in
thwarting any warming of the current ominously frigid relations between
Moscow and Washington.
In truth, the party’s Russia fixation
leaves significantly less messaging space for economic and social issues
that the vast majority of Americans care about far more. Similarly, the
Russia obsession at MSNBC (which routinely seems like “MSDNC”) has left
scant airtime for addressing, or even noting, the economic concerns of
so many Americans. (For instance, see the data in FAIR’s study, “Russia or Corporate Tax Cuts: Which Would Comcast Rather MSNBC Cover?”)
But
even some of the congressional Democrats who’ve been prominent
“Russiagate” enthusiasts have recognized that the lawsuit is off track.
When Wolf Blitzer on CNN
asked a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jackie Speier,
whether she believes that Perez and his DNC team “are making a big
mistake by filing this lawsuit,” the California congresswoman’s reply
was blunt: “Well, I’m not supportive of it. Whether it’s a mistake or
not we’ll soon find out.” Speier called the lawsuit “ill-conceived.”
The
most unprincipled part of the lawsuit has to do with its targeting of
Assange and WikiLeaks. That aspect of the suit shows that the DNC is
being run by people whose attitude toward a free press—ironically
enough—has marked similarities to Donald Trump’s.
techcrunch | A new — and theoretical — system for blockchain-based data storage
could ensure that hackers will not be able to crack cryptocurrencies
once the quantum era starts. The idea, proposed by researchers at the
Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, would secure
cryptocurrency futures for decades using a blockchain technology that is
like a time machine.
To
understand what’s going on here we have to define some terms. A
blockchain stores every transaction in a system on what amounts to an
immutable record of events. The work necessary for maintaining and
confirming this immutable record is what is commonly known as mining.
But this technology — which the paper’s co-author Del Rajan claims will make up “10 percent of global GDP… by 2027” — will become insecure in an era of quantum computers.
Therefore
the solution to store a blockchain in a quantum era requires a quantum
blockchain using a series of entangled photons. Further, Spectrum
writes: “Essentially, current records in a quantum blockchain are not
merely linked to a record of the past, but rather a record in the past,
one that does not exist anymore.”
Yeah, it’s weird.
From the paper intro:
Our
method involves encoding the blockchain into a temporal GHZ
(Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger) state of photons that do not
simultaneously coexist. It is shown that the entanglement in time, as
opposed to an entanglement in space, provides the crucial quantum
advantage. All the subcomponents of this system have already been shown
to be experimentally realized. Perhaps more shockingly, our encoding
procedure can be interpreted as non-classically influencing the past;
hence this decentralized quantum blockchain can be viewed as a quantum
networked time machine.
In short, the quantum
blockchain is immutable because the photons that it contains do not
exist at the current time but are still extant and readable. This means
the entire blockchain is visible but cannot be “touched” and the only
entry you would be able to try to tamper with is the most recent one. In
fact, the researchers write, “In this spatial entanglement case, if an
attacker tries to tamper with any photon, the full blockchain would be
invalidated immediately.”
Is this possible? The researchers note that the technology already exists.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
