Random Blogging – Page 70

Grievance, Trust And Conspiracy

A long essay in The Washington Post a few weeks ago made an effort to demystify America’s current embrace of conspiracy theories.

The author acknowledged that Americans have always been susceptible to these theories, and that mass delusions, disinformation and conspiracy mongering are hardly unique to America. Granted, the internet has made dissemination of these beliefs far simpler, and more visible to those of us that don’t engage with them, but that isn’t a measure of how prevalent they are.

I read the essay with considerable interest, because–really! What sorts of people believe the most prominent versions going around these days? The essay described a couple of them:

QAnon followers believe that former president Donald Trump spent his time as president battling a cabal of Satan-worshiping “deep state” Democrats who traffic children for sex, a paranoia that has often led to valuable resources being diverted away from real missing children cases. Since the 2020 election, they have also come to believe that Trump’s loss was the result of massive fraud, a disproved conspiracy theory that has in turn created a real threat to our democracy and elections. Going further than the 7 in 10 Republican voters who believe the same election conspiracy, Q followers also assure with prophetic zeal that Trump will be reinstated imminently. Mass arrests of the country’s corrupt elite and a “Great Awakening” will follow, they say.

This one is even more bizarre (if possible):

This one — bordering on messianic and based in part on numerology — involved the slain president’s son, who himself died in a plane crash in 1999. Here on the grassy knoll, they believed, John F. Kennedy Jr. would soon reemerge more than two decades after having faked his own death, or would perhaps be reincarnated outright. The resurrected son of the assassinated father, they assured, would become Trump’s vice president.

The author assured readers that–looney-tunes as these seem–they emerge from a long history of similarly outlandish beliefs. He traced a variety of these irrational stories through the nation’s history–remember all those witches in Salem? The “alternative” theories about the assassination of JFK? The insistence that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya?

Why do such theories thrive here–and under what circumstances? I’m not a psychiatrist and I don’t play one on TV, but think the following paragraphs explain a lot. (It always comes back to racism…)

Here in the United States, conspiracy theories have always been exacerbated by our unique racial, ethnic and religious pluralism, according to Goldberg and other historians.

As populist myths, conspiracy theories allow their believers to feel part of a “true” American community, as special defenders of it. They thrive, the historical record shows, amid the mistrust that exists between people and communities.
Americans have often embraced conspiratorial stories and lies with particular vigor during moments of pronounced uncertainty wrought by social and technological change. And conspiracy theory opportunists throughout U.S. history have found myriad ways to exploit these particular American fissures.

Students of these theories tell us that they are about certainty, belonging and power. They flourish because they resonate with people who are fearful and/or dissatisfied with their lives–people looking for someone to blame for whatever it is that they fear or whatever has gone wrong. As the author says,

To understand the lure of conspiracy theories and alternate realities, you have to interrogate what people get out of believing such things. You have to understand the human emotions — fear, estrangement, resentment — that underlie them.

The author also explains why we are hearing so much more about these trips into la-la land.

Over the past 20 years, sweeping technological change has dramatically accelerated the speed with which conspiracy theories can spread and has made it easier for people with fringe beliefs to find one another. I have seen in my reporting time and again that conspiracy theory communities online can often become more important to believers than their offline relations, a new kind of self-segregation that can eviscerate even family bonds. In our chaotic and divided moment, the stories we believe say something about the factions we belong to, like the music we listen to or the clothes we wear.

The Internet has not only made it easier for conspiratorial communities to organize, but it has also made conspiracy mongering substantially less arduous. No longer do those trafficking in conspiracy theories have to write books or stitch together grand presentations for maximum effect.

Add in the erosion of trust in American institutions, including government, and the very human tendency to see simple incompetence as something darker and more intentional–the need to identify a culprit who did it (whatever “it” was) on purpose…and the next thing you know, you’ve got Jewish Space Lasers.

We live in weird times.

Comments

Will Propaganda Win?

Did Betty White die because she got a Covid vaccine booster?

Evidently, that’s one of the messages being circulated by the (very busy) purveyors of what we politely call “misinformation” and what is more accurately labeled propaganda.

According to the News Literacy Project,

Propagators of anti-vaccine disinformation previously have seized on celebrity deaths — including baseball great Hank Aaron; boxer Marvin Hagler; Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh; and rapper DMX — to falsely impugn the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Remember: Vaccinated people also die of other causes and a significant portion of the population, including celebrities, are vaccinated. Posts that falsely connect high-profile deaths to vaccines are often attempting to exploit the public’s emotions to generate fear and distrust.

With respect to a phony Betty White quote used in that particular effort, the Project noted

This particular rumor has another red flag: The fake quote has been added to a screenshot of a social media preview for an actual article in which the quote never appeared. This lends the fabricated quote an air of authenticity without providing a clickable link, making it less likely that people will check the alleged source to confirm that the quote is authentic.

I subscribe to a couple of newsletters devoted to news literacy. There are some valiant efforts “out there” to combat the “choose your own reality” media environment we currently inhabit–efforts to provide people with mechanisms for evaluating the credibility of social media posts.

In addition to debunking the suggestion that 99-year-old Betty White died from a vaccine booster, the most recent newsletter from the News Literacy Project highlighted the continued, determined campaign to peddle the “Big Lie.”

A year after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the role of misinformation in fueling the historic attack continues to come into clearer focus, as does the extent to which falsehoods still shape Americans’ divided views of the deadly riot. Misinformation swept across podcasts, Facebook — as documented in this new investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post — and other social media platforms ahead of the attack, allowing false narratives to take root and spread. Some news organizations recently published fact-checking roundups that debunk persistent falsehoods and underscore the ongoing threat misinformation poses to democracy.

The problem, of course, is that the folks most susceptible to these falsehoods, and most likely to disseminate them further, don’t read or trust outlets like ProPublica and The Washington Post. Instead, they look for more ideologically compatible sources when they engage in what we used to call “cherry picking”–what psychologists call “confirmation bias”–in their search for information.

No matter how off-the-wall any particular belief might be, there’s a website out there confirming it. (As I used to tell my Media and Public Policy students, if you really believe that aliens once landed in Roswell, New Mexico, I can find you several websites with pictures of the aliens…)

Right now, credible media outlets are focused on very real threats to American democratic institutions. And although it is absolutely true that the country has previously faced and overcome significant challenges to our unity and constitutional system, I can’t help thinking about what is different this time. I think about that quote attributed to Mark Twain to the effect that “that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.”

What is different about the stanza of that rhyme that we currently occupy is an unprecedented media environment–the extent of disinformation and propaganda, the ease of accessing false “evidence” proving that this or that conspiracy theory is correct, and the consequential, damaging absence of a widely shared reality.

It has never been easier to believe nonsense. It has never been easier to attribute the inevitable disappointments in life to nefarious (albeit non-existent) machinations of “others”– those people who look, think or pray differently.

Political scientists and (some) politicians have long emphasized the critical importance of a free press to a free society. That’s why the First Amendment prohibited government suppression–i.e.,censorship. But censorship–like so much else–has evolved. Thanks to new communication technologies, contemporary autocrats have discovered that controlling the flow of information no longer requires suppression: censorship can be achieved simply by sowing confusion and/or drowning out disfavored news.

We are about to see what happens when credible journalism is buried in bullshit– swamped by outlets purveying partisan propaganda and lunatic conspiracy theories–and citizens at that media smorgasbord are invited to pick and choose from the copious selection.

I’m very much afraid this “rhyme” is uncharted territory.

Comments

There Really Is Good News Out There

One of my New Year’s resolutions (okay, my only New Year’s resolution–I’m old and I’ve learned from past failures…) is to scan the media-verse for positive news, for evidence that not everything in the world is swirling the porcelain bowl.

And guess what? If you look closely, it’s out there, hiding among the predictions of doom, gloom and civil war.

For example, I found “The World in Cheer: 192 Ways the World Got Better in 2021.”

Obviously, I’m not going to list all 192, but I do want to highlight some items from the list, many of them focused on ameliorating climate change. For example, a 5,000 mile line of trees is being planted across the African continent to prevent the spread of the Sahara desert. A California law giving cash to non-car commuters helped increase transit ridership by 50%. The French have enacted a ban on single use plastics for many fruits and vegetables that is projected to reduce plastic packaging by one billion units each year.

And a company in Vancouver has “upcycled” 33 million chopsticks into everything from cutting boards and shelves to dominos and furniture.

There are all sorts of other “good news” items that had escaped my notice (and probably the notice of most others in a year dominated by coverage of things like the pandemic and Manchin’s intransigence on the filibuster…). A smattering:

The total number of incarcerated people in the U.S. fell by 13% between 2010 and 2020.

Up to 400 Spanish companies will reduce their employees’ working week to 32 hours while keeping salaries the same.

El Paso Community College used its pandemic relief aid to forgive $3 million in student debt.

Forty-one women topped the new Fortune 500 list, more than at any other time in the six decades that the list has been published.

A town in Arizona converted a juvenile detention center into a youth hangout, and juvenile arrests in the county dropped by 55%.

In the past eight years, the number of worker-owned co-ops in the U.S. has increased 36%. The business model offers employees, on average, more than $7 more per hour than standard businesses.

There are valuable policy lessons to be learned from most of the items on the list–and there are many more such items. I encourage you to visit the site and review the list when the daily headlines make you want to hide under the bed.

The encouraging economic news isn’t confined to such lists. One of the thorniest problems of the American economy has been the substitution of “gig work” for the steady jobs that offered past generations of workers predictability and benefits. Start-ups like Uber and Lyft seemed likely to accelerate the trend.

But maybe not. Axios reports that

Startups like Alto, Revel and Kaptyn are positioning themselves as Rideshare 2.0. — alternatives to Uber and Lyft that use employees rather than gig workers as drivers and put fleets of company-owned cars on the road.

Why it matters: These companies’ vertically integrated business models mean they can roll out electric fleets more quickly than the current market leaders, whose pledges to go electric depend on persuading gig drivers to upgrade their personal cars to EVs.

These services will be good for the environment and fair to the drivers.

By employing their own drivers and maintaining their own fleets, these companies aim to provide more consistent, reliable, safe transportation, while ensuring that drivers can earn a decent living — and the companies can make a profit…

Drivers can earn from $15.50 to $18.75 per hour, depending on demand, plus company-paid health insurance.

That we are in an era of massive social and technological change is probably the one thing everyone agrees on. So much of the anger and nastiness we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction from frightened people rejecting the reality and implications of those changes.

Humanity has been here before.

My search for “good news” isn’t just an effort to keep me from experiencing suicidal episodes. It is a search for evidence supporting an alternative explanation of our tumultuous times–an explanation that history suggests is as likely as the social disintegration that too many members of the Chattering Classes are predicting.

Yes, it’s possible that the sheer strength of denial–refusal to see “others” as fully human, rejection of science that calls into question some supposedly “eternal” verities, insistence on the superiority of one’s tribal identity–will plunge the world into another dark age. But it is equally possible that we are experiencing “birth pangs”–that the millions of people doggedly pursuing social progress and environmental health will ultimately emerge triumphant.

Our job is to facilitate the trip down the birth canal and help midwife that brave new world….

Comments

A Problem? Or A Solution?

A columnist from Yahoo News has pinpointed what he describes as a “big problem” for Democrats. My reaction to the headline was along the lines of, “so what else is new”…every time I turn to an opinion page, someone is outlining yet another reason that Democrats are headed down the toilet, and taking the country with them.

When I read the essay, however, I was struck by the irony. Here’s the basic argument:

New Census data analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute shows that eight of the 10 states losing the most residents from April 2020 through June 2021 have Democratic leadership, while nine of the 10 states gaining the most new residents have Republican governors. The numbers measure net domestic migration, which is the net change in the number of people moving in or out of one state, from or to another. That isolates people choosing to move, whereas population growth alone would also include births and deaths….

This is a big problem, according to the author, because…

Population determines the size of each state’s delegation in the House of Representatives, and red states are gaining while blue states are losing. Following the 2020 Census, three seats moved from blue states that went for Biden in 2020, on net, to red states that voted for Trump. That shift might seem small, except Democrats have only a five-seat majority in the House now. The next reapportionment won’t take place until after the 2030 census, but it could bring an even bigger tilt in favor of Republicans.

Or not.

What if the people moving from blue to red states are mostly moderates or liberals? (Granted, there’s no way to estimate their politics). Isn’t it possible that an influx of more moderate and/or liberal folks will change the social dynamics of their new environments? I still remember an article urging Democrats to move to places where their votes might make a difference, rather than staying in deep-blue states like New York or California where they simply add to already massive Democratic majorities.)

One might also point out that the addition of a sufficient number of non-Rightwing voters to the electorate of a red state makes it harder for the Republicans of that state to gerrymander districts. We are seeing a related phenomenon in Indiana–where the emptying-out of rural areas has complicated GOP line-drawing–and the problem isn’t limited to the Hoosier state.

If you can believe some good news on the gerrymandering front, Greg Sargent recently delivered some via the Washington Post.

The long-awaited, long-feared Gerrymandering Apocalypse of 2021 has not materialized for Democrats after all.

Throughout last year, many analysts and panicked Democrats alike concluded that Republicans would win the House in 2022 because of their outsize control over the redrawing of district lines. Some suggested Republicans could take the House on the strength of extreme gerrymanders alone.

But that conventional wisdom just took a big hit with the release of a new analysis by the Cook Political Report. It concludes that the redistricting wars are shaping up as a wash and that the map may be somewhat better for Democrats than during the past decade.

The analysis confirms that Republicans will still retain a significant edge, thanks to their redistricting shenanigans, but that edge will be somewhat less than before.

Why is that? What restrained them? (Hint: it wasn’t a sudden attack of ethics.)

This time around, Republicans have had to shore up their safe seats, and the need to do so has limited their ability to gerrymander as aggressively as they otherwise would have done. (Also, to be fair, in Democratic states, the Democrats gerrymandered too.)

Dave Wasserman of the Cook Report is quoted as explaining that there are several places where demographic shifts benefit Democrats, particularly in suburban areas, forcing Republicans to “play keepaway. A number of their own districts have become more vulnerable over the past 10 years. They’ve had no choice but to focus on shoring those districts up.”

Demographic shifts are the result of more moderate and liberal people moving in, as well as the changing voting patterns of sane people already living there. Those voters are steadily leaving the GOP, recoiling from the Republicans'”out-and-proud” racism, vaccine denial, and other cult-like behaviors.

The bad news, of course, is that when the GOP’s already-safe seats are “shored up,” Republicans representing those deep-red districts have an increased incentive to go full MAGA. We aren’t likely to see fewer members of what has been dubbed “the lunatic caucus.”

Bottom line: It’s always more complicated than the pundits want to make it–but there are more rational Americans than MAGA crazies, so turnout is still the name of the game.

Comments

Star Trek Culture

Popular culture, by definition, is of the moment–movies, television programs, music and other entertainment that reflects contemporary concerns or embraces current social preoccupations. Many examples–probably most–have limited staying power; even fewer can be shown to have influenced the development of the culture rather than simply reflecting it.

Star Trek is one of those; it continues to exert significant influence over the broader culture. (Disclosure: I’m a huge fan.)

The original series has been followed by several others incorporating creator Gene Roddenberry’s humane and very explicit moral themes celebrating the pursuit of knowledge, justice, and mutual understanding. Trek’s various iterations promote diverse, open and welcoming cultures populated by people committed to reason, tolerance and the common good.

An interesting article from the New York Times explored Jewish influences on the social vision that animates the Star Trek universe. it was prompted by an exhibit mounted by The Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish museum in Los Angeles.

Many fans of the show are aware that Spock’s signature “live long and prosper” greeting, with its distinctive hand gesture, originated from a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue as a boy and brought to the role.

The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.

The Times pointed out that Jewish influence didn’t stop with the Vulcan blessing; according to one of the writers quoted in the article, Jewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality.

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”…

Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”

The exhibition explored the outsized influence of the Star Trek vision on American culture. As one of the individuals quoted in the article put it, “‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents,” and especially the moral vision it promotes. Brooks Peck, who helped put the original exhibition together, observed that a Star Trek exhibit at a Jewish museum wasn’t as far-fetched as it first seemed.

“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”

The operative word is values. Star Trek’s influence is a direct result of its coherent and appealing value structure. Those values were influenced by Judaism, but they are also congruent with the message of other non-fundamentalist religions and non-theistic philosophies: commitment to an open and welcoming society, a respect for intellect, science and truth, and a fierce advocacy of social justice and the common good.

The crews that populate the Enterprise and other Star Trek vessels are visual representations of the worst nightmares of the Hoosier culture warriors I wrote about yesterday, and of the retrograde throwbacks who attacked the U.S. Capitol. They are filled not just with diverse humans, but also diverse species, working together with civility and mutual respect in a society that places an especially high value on the ongoing search for knowledge and exploration.

Americans have a choice. We can emulate the ignorance and disordered bigotries of people like Donald Trump, or we can aim for the enlightenment values of Star Trek characters like Jean Luc Picard.

We can join the Neanderthals who are resentful of “others” and terrified of being “replaced”— or we can choose the humane and affirming values that animate Star Trek, humanist philosophy, and many liberal religions.

Values that will help us Live Long and Prosper.

Comments