Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Technology of Propaganda

Well, this is pretty terrifying.

My oldest son recently sent me a link to an article from an online magazine called Paste. I had never heard of the publication; it seems, after a cursory investigation, to be credible. The title was “How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans.” The author identified himself as a former member of an online marketing team.

I’m not going to get into the weeds of SEO (search engine optimization). But I am going to say something that sounds completely insane, and warn you that we’re in the middle of something we’ve never experienced in America: a full-on psychological war. And Google, of all places, is a main battlefield…

There are other information weapons, such as bots and fake news sites, but other stories have those pretty well covered. But before we get started, though, two things to keep in mind:

First, most of us don’t even know we’re in this war yet. You don’t know when you’ve been wounded, when you’ve been killed. And that’s the whole point: You’re not supposed to.

Second, the attacks in this war aren’t aimed at your enemies. You attack your own side.

The author says that highly selective information is being presented in ways that encourage “selective reading” and offer “psychological and social rewards.” We are being rewarded, essentially, for being stupid and for spreading stupid to others. Where this lesson in the uses and misuses of search engines got really chilling was in the following example.

A couple weeks ago I saw an insane person on my Facebook feed screaming about how Obama had leaked classified information about the Bin Laden raid that got people killed. What the fuck? I’d never heard anything about this, and the raid was six years ago, and this guy was a total right-wing crackpot, which is the trifecta for guaranteeing at least fifteen full minutes of batshit conspiracy theory misinfotainment. So I duly Googled “obama classified information bin laden.” If you do that right now, here’s what you get.

If you click through, he has reproduced a large number of links to sites offering variations of the same “Obama gives classified information” story. Several of them were clearly products of a political fringe, others looked reputable. But as the author pointed out

Look … at the dates on those articles. May 16 and 17 of this year. This year. The Bin Laden raid, again, was six fucking years ago. What’s happening here? Why are all these different white nationalist news sites suddenly writing about this together? Why did they start doing it on May 16? Why do those articles even exist?

Well, on May 15, you might remember, The Washington Post broke this little gem: President Trump shared top secret intel with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador. In the Oval Office. In front of Russian state media.

The author suggests another experiment:

Together, we’re going to Google the phrase “trump no evidence collusion.” (And because Google searches change over time, I’ll drop screenshots of my results here.) What will emerge is a picture of an invisible hand writing a specific argument, over and over and over. That hand belongs to Robert Mercer, Trump’s data man, who gamed Google and fake news during the campaign and whose return to the scene is heralded by Trump’s war room and bot boom. If you want, you can read more…

And here’s where the optimization comes into play: pages one and two of the Google search results do not include any reputable sources. Not until page three!

There, buried under InfoWars and National Review and The Blaze and not one, not two, but three pieces from The Free Beacon, we finally find good old Reuters! And, lo: the good old Washington Post! And what about The Failing New York Times? Truly failing.

The article is lengthy, and it takes the reader through the strategy of optimization, step by step. It is eye-opening.

I strongly suggest you read the entire article. It’s illuminating–and very, very depressing…..

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California Dreaming…

Yesterday’s post, and a number of the comments that followed, acknowledged the importance of health insurance to the social safety net, and lamented the resistance of Congressional Republicans to maintenance–let alone extension– of current coverage.

Fortunately, Washington isn’t the only game in town.

With the collapse of anything remotely resembling governance coming from Washington, D.C., California has become the de facto adult in the room. Those of us appalled at Trump’s retreat from environmental protections, for example, take comfort in the fact that California, with its huge and important markets, is insisting upon fuel-efficient cars and other environmentally-sensitive measures.

In healthcare, apparently, California is also proposing to go where Congress won’t.

In the face of the GOP assault on the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, California is preparing to vote on a statewide single-payer plan. Californians currently spend about $370 billion annually in a typical, insurance-dominated system that leaves 40 percent of the state’s  population uninsured or underinsured. The single-payer measure is working its way through the legislature, and a fiscal analysis was presented to lawmakers and the public last week by the bill’s sponsor and the California Nurses Association.

The analysis was done by a team led by Robert Pollin, the co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts and a former UC Riverside faculty member. At a Sacramento press conference, he explained how a single-payer system would enable all Californians to be completely covered. That includes 3.7 million currently uninsured residents and another 12 million who are underinsured, meaning they cannot afford their policy’s co-pays and deductibles.

The universal coverage would be paid for by combining all government healthcare subsidies, which accounts for about 70 percent of California’s current spending, and by two proposed tax increases: a 2.3 percent gross receipt taxes on businesses (which kicks in after the first $2 million in earnings and which exempts small businesses); and a 2.3 percent increase in the sales tax, with exemptions for necessities such as food, housing, utilities, and other services.

Those combined revenue streams would raise an estimated $400 billion annually to pay for universal coverage under a single-payer system.

Assuming the law passes, California will actually spend less than it currently does on healthcare, and the average middle-class family will see out-of-pocket costs fall by 9 percent.

Most businesses will also save money, Pollin explained, because they will no longer be paying for their employees’ health care. Even with the proposed gross receipts tax exempting the first $2 million, typical California businesses employing 10 to 19 people would see costs fall by 13.8 percent, he said. Businesses employing 20 to 99 people would see costs fall by 6.8 percent, he said. Businesses employing up to 500 would see costs fall by 5.7 percent, and the 500-plus businesses would see costs fall by 0.6 percent.

The law would establish a system paying hospitals and providers what they are currently paid under the federal Medicare program. That’s about 22 percent less than what private insurers pay. The new system would also negotiate bulk purchases of drugs, and it would achieve the same sort of administrative efficiencies of scale that Medicare has achieved. Medicare’s overhead, as I’ve indicated previously, runs around 3%, while overhead for private insurers (who must market their policies and pay their top management competitive private sector salaries) runs between 22-25%.

As I write this, the measure is not a “done deal.” But a similar bill passed a few years ago, only to be vetoed by then-Governor Schwarzenegger. Assuming passage of the pending measure, it is likely that Governor Jerry Brown will sign it.

California has a bit over 12% of the U.S. population. If it passes single-payer, it will be a game-changer. (Already, New York’s legislature has begun discussing a similar approach.)

This could get very interesting. I’m gaining a new appreciation for federalism.

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The Puzzle of Trump Support

Americans have spent the past four plus months watching a profoundly unfit and erratic man do significant damage to America’s interests while debasing the highest office in the land, and they are increasingly asking each other how this could have happened. How could anyone have voted for a man who flaunted his ignorance of  government and the world, who demonstrated emotional instability virtually every day, and who repeatedly and publicly violated the most basic norms of civility?

For that matter, given his performance to date, how is it possible that a majority of those who voted for Trump still support him?

A number of columnists and social scientists have attributed Trump’s support to economic distress. I’m not buying it. Economic concerns, Hillary hatred and similar motives may have coexisted with other characteristics of Trump voters, but on closer look, they lack explanatory power.

Two paragraphs from a recent article in Politico come much closer to the mark:

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement was not really about the climate. And despite his overheated rhetoric about the “tremendous” and “draconian” burdens the deal would impose on the U.S. economy, Trump’s decision wasn’t really about that, either. America’s commitments under the Paris deal, like those of the other 194 cooperating nations, were voluntary. So those burdens were imaginary.

No, Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: It was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal. (Emphasis mine.)

I’m well aware that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but the few people I know who voted for Donald Trump fit this analysis perfectly. They harbor profound racial and (especially) cultural resentments. Support for a buffoon despised by knowledgable, thoughtful people was their way of sticking it to the “elitists,” those snobs who read books and newspapers, support the arts, drive hybrids and recycle their trash.

Post-election research tells us that Trump voters weren’t poor, but they were disproportionately uneducated, white and rural, and deeply resentful of urban Americans, African-Americans and brown immigrants. (Pale Brits and Canadians are okay.) They share a conviction that the “smarty pants” are looking down on them, and if we are honest, there’s a fair amount of evidence supporting that conviction: today’s America is extremely economically segregated, and just as racial segregation fosters racial distrust and stereotyping, economic segregation reinforces tribalism and disdain for the “Other.” That disdain goes both ways.

This is not to deny the economic contribution to those resentments. If economic policy could help rural communities flourish again, the cultural hostility (although probably not the racial animus) would abate somewhat. Right now, however, the more evidence of Trump’s incompetence and volatility that emerges, the more his core supporters deny administration wrongdoing and buy into improbable apologetics and wild conspiracy theories.

They’re adult versions of the kids on the playground who stuck their fingers in their ears and said nah nah I can’t hear you.

When this bizarre episode in our country’s history has run its course, and government has (hopefully) returned the policy-making apparatus to mature adults who respect data and evidence, who understand cause and effect and the scientific method, we will need to address the concerns of people left behind by social change, people who feel adrift in a brave new world that they find utterly inhospitable.

We need to do something, because “I’ll show you!” is a really bad reason to hand the nuclear codes over to a dangerously incompetent clown.

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Worldviews Black and White

On Sunday, the Washington Post had an article tracing the influence of what it called “shadow charities” on shaping the political climate that led to the election of Donald Trump. It focused upon the career of

David Horowitz, a former ’60s radical who became an intellectual godfather to the far right through his writings and his work at a charity, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser Miller and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

The article raised several issues, including the blurred line between actual charities and the current IRS definition of not-for-profit organizations entitled to tax exempt status. That issue is important; taxpayers are subsidizing nonprofit “educational” activities that are more accurately described as promoting political propaganda.

That said, absent a wholesale revision of the tax code and a considerable reduction in the categories we deem eligible for tax-exempt status, this will not be an easy problem to fix. My version of propaganda is likely to be very different from, say, Mike Pence’s.

What was particularly interesting to me was the description of Horowitz, and his trajectory from far left to the even farther right.

Horowitz was a “red diaper baby” of communist parents in New York City. After attending Columbia University in the 1950s, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, an anchor of leftist thinking.

Over the next two decades, he took on prominent roles in the New Left. He served as an editor of Ramparts, an influential muckraking magazine in San Francisco.

But by the late 1970s, he had decided that the left represented a profound threat to the United States. On March 17, 1985, he and a writing partner came out as conservatives in a surprising Washington Post Magazine article headlined “Lefties for Reagan.”

In August 1988, Horowitz launched the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that would become the Freedom Center.

We all know literary and political figures who have made the journey from Left to Right, or Right to Left. Horowitz reminds me of a relative of mine who was a pontificating “Young Socialist” in college, to the great consternation of his much more conservative family; when I ran into him many years later, he was an equally rabid and doctrinaire right-winger.

I have come to realize that most of these “conversions” have very little to do with the content of the political philosophies involved. These are not people who have mellowed with age and softened formerly rigid worldviews. For whatever reason, they have “swapped” Certainty A for Certainty B. We live in a complicated world, where “right” and “wrong” are often ambiguous, and bright lines are hard to come by. For many people, that moral ambiguity is intolerable. They need certainty. They need to be able to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.

And they desperately need to believe that they are with the “good guys.”

We see much of the same phenomenon in our churches, synagogues and mosques: there are members who value their congregations for the warmth of community, who listen to sermons for illumination into life’s “big questions” and for the insights and guidance offered by their particular doctrines. There are other members who see those doctrines as literal commands from On High, as blackletter law removed from any historical context or nuanced interpretation.

Some people have a psychological need to hold tight to dogma–whether Left or Right, political or religious–in order to function. They need a world that is reliably black and white, where  rules are clear and unambiguous, and where good guys and bad guys are easily identified.

The messy uncertainties and complexities of modern life are challenging to all of us. Accepting a doctrine that purports to explain what is otherwise confusing and threatening–a doctrine that identifies friends and enemies– is a huge temptation.

It’s a temptation we need to resist.

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Blaming the Culture

I recently read yet another overheated article suggesting that huge numbers of people in Western democratic countries are either depressed or demoralized, and blaming this “psycho-spiritual crisis” on our consumerist culture.

Our descent into the Age of Depression seems unstoppable. Three decades ago, the average age for the first onset of depression was 30. Today it is 14. Researchers such as Stephen Izard at Duke University point out that the rate of depression in Western industrialized societies is doubling with each successive generational cohort. At this pace, over 50 per cent of our younger generation, aged 18-29, will succumb to it by middle age. Extrapolating one generation further, we arrive at the dire conclusion that virtually everyone will fall prey to depression.

The article does concede use of a rather over-inclusive definition of “depression;” evidently, when people who have been diagnosed as depressed are examined more closely, the majority don’t actually meet the clinical criteria for that diagnosis. The rest are merely despondent, or as the article labels them, “demoralized.”

[D]emoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. It is an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfilment….

In a paragraph that certainly demoralizes me, the article describes the attributes of this social angst, and ascribes them to consumer culture:

As it is absorbed, consumer culture imposes numerous influences that weaken personality structures, undermine coping and lay the groundwork for eventual demoralization. Its driving features – individualism, materialism, hyper-competition, greed, over-complication, overwork, hurriedness and debt – all correlate negatively with psychological health and/or social wellbeing. The level of intimacy, trust and true friendship in people’s lives has plummeted. Sources of wisdom, social and community support, spiritual comfort, intellectual growth and life education have dried up. Passivity and choice have displaced creativity and mastery. Resilience traits such as patience, restraint and fortitude have given way to short attention spans, over-indulgence and a masturbatory approach to life.

I’m not sure what constitutes a “masturbatory approach to life,” but it’s an interesting term…

The article continues at some length, condemning the “void” in which contemporary citizens find ourselves. You can click through and evaluate the argument for yourselves. In my case, although I found several points persuasive, taken as a whole, I would classify this as one of a growing and unhelpful number of  “pox on modernity” diatribes that assumes a rosy and ahistorical past of human connection and satisfaction, and simplifies a complicated issue that philosophers have wrestled with for a very long time: what gives our lives meaning?

How do we create a culture that provides everyone with a sense of purpose while avoiding a coercive imposition of collective norms and the “uniformity of the graveyard.”  

There is much to criticize in consumer culture. There was also much to criticize in the cultures that preceded it. Singling out consumerism writ large as the sole driver of contemporary angst, however, misses the point.

Our problem is larger: how do humans create a society that respects our differences and facilitates individual moral autonomy, while still providing the social infrastructure necessary for meaningful community? How do we create a society in which we can be fully realized “I’s” within a co-operative and nurturing (but not stifling) “we”?

Somewhere between a stultifying communitarianism and a dog-eat-dog libertarianism there’s a (non-masturbatory) “sweet spot.” We need to locate it.

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