Nov 13, 2019
Nov 12, 2019
Joyce Takes 'Em Down
Joyce Vance, Time Magazine:
This is the challenge the Democrats face as they open public impeachment hearings this week. Can they get the country to pay attention? Can they produce a coherent narrative that will help people understand this most serious of Trump Administration debacles?
- snip -
Despite what Trump has claimed repeatedly, anyone who followed the president’s directive to “read the transcript”— actually a memo of the conversation that at least one witness has told Congress excluded some pertinent information — knows that even this sanitized version of the President’s call exposes the scheme to public view. Rudy Giuliani, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Trump appointees Ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland and Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker worked toward the call where Trump would tell Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor”and ask for the announcement of an investigation that everyone now knowswas about Joe Biden and his son. Trump was intent on extracting the favorbefore he would permit the purchase of American military equipment and release over $400 million in aid to Ukraine, which suffered the loss of 13,000 people in five years during the conflict with Russia, and agree to meet with Zelensky. Far from a perfect call, it was a scheme to have a foreign country intervene in our election. It was so far off the mark that when White House officials learned about it, they stashed the record of it on a highly classified server, apparently in hopes it wouldn’t come to light. You don’t have to cover up legitimate government operations.
As boring as I sound even to myself, the only way to get this to stick is to play Cult45's game - the part that has everything to do with repetition.
They keep repeating the same kinda shit, and before you know it, people start to internalize it and it becomes part of the 'norm'.
Propaganda works.
Today's Tweet
I keep thinking this level of depravity has to cause pain. But I guess when a guy has no depth to begin with, there's no depth to which a guy like 45* can't sink.
Hypothesis:
The only way you won't feel the pain of breaking with morality is to abandon that morality, and substitute a kind of Micro-Level Moral Relativism, where your "morality" is relative to your situational needs at any given moment(?)
— Clear Cider (@TheClearCider) November 9, 2019
The Arts
Art Education helps us develop critical thinking skills and a sense of shared experience (empathy).
Brian Kasida & Daniel Bowen, Brookings:
Engaging with art is essential to the human experience. Almost as soon as motor skills are developed, children communicate through artistic expression. The arts challenge us with different points of view, compel us to empathize with “others,” and give us the opportunity to reflect on the human condition. Empirical evidence supports these claims: Among adults, arts participation is related to behaviors that contribute to the health of civil society, such as increased civic engagement, greater social tolerance, and reductions in other-regarding behavior. Yet, while we recognize art’s transformative impacts, its place in K-12 education has become increasingly tenuous.
A critical challenge for arts education has been a lack of empirical evidence that demonstrates its educational value. Though few would deny that the arts confer intrinsic benefits, advocating “art for art’s sake” has been insufficient for preserving the arts in schools—despite national surveys showing an overwhelming majority of the public agrees that the arts are a necessary part of a well-rounded education.
Gee - I wonder why "conservatives" are always trying to cut back on what the arts can do for us.
Maybe it's because the problems we love to bitch about - poverty, crime, ignorance, tribalism, the degeneration of civil discourse, etc - can be at least partly attributed to the erosion of the skills we need, but don't get to learn about anymore, because Republicans keep shitting on the arts by cutting the funding.
And maybe those problems are due to deliberate efforts to cause the problems, blame it all on "the other", and then trade on that disinformation to gain ideological advantage and political power.
The GOP Playbook, Page 1:
Maybe it's because the problems we love to bitch about - poverty, crime, ignorance, tribalism, the degeneration of civil discourse, etc - can be at least partly attributed to the erosion of the skills we need, but don't get to learn about anymore, because Republicans keep shitting on the arts by cutting the funding.
And maybe those problems are due to deliberate efforts to cause the problems, blame it all on "the other", and then trade on that disinformation to gain ideological advantage and political power.
The GOP Playbook, Page 1:
- Fuck something up
- Wait
- Point at it and say, "Whoa, look - it's fucked up."
- Run for office by promising to fix it
- "Fix" it by contracting the solution out to your pals
- Collect "contributions" from those pals
- Get re-elected as a "Problem Solver"
- Start again at #1 above
- and -
When we restrict our analysis to elementary schools, which comprised 86 percent of the sample and were the primary target of the program, we also find that increases in arts learning positively and significantly affect students’ school engagement, college aspirations, and their inclinations to draw upon works of art as a means for empathizing with others. In terms of school engagement, students in the treatment group were more likely to agree that school work is enjoyable, makes them think about things in new ways, and that their school offers programs, classes, and activities that keep them interested in school. We generally did not find evidence to suggest significant impacts on students’ math, reading, or science achievement, attendance, or our other survey outcomes, which we discuss in our full report.
Nov 11, 2019
Divide And Conquer
Turns out the Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie Social Media wasn't the plucky entrepreneurial good guy supernerd after all.
I think maybe the writers and producers had that suspicion all along.
WaPo, Yaël Eisenstat:
I joined Facebook in June 2018 as “head of Global Elections Integrity Ops” in the company’s business integrity organization, focused specifically on political advertising. I had spent much of my career working to strengthen and defend democracy — including freedom of speech — as an intelligence officer, diplomat and White House adviser. Now I had the opportunity to help correct the course of a company that I viewed as playing a major role in one of the biggest threats to our democracy.
In the year leading up to our 2016 election, I began to see the polarization and breakdown of civil discourse, exacerbated by social media, as our biggest national security threat; I had written about that before Facebook called. I didn’t think I was going to change the company by myself. But I wanted to help Facebook think through the role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.
A year and a half later, as the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers aim at us, showing each of us a different version of the truth and manipulating us with hyper-customized ads — ads that as of this fall can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, it can’t avoid damaging democracy.
I'm good with the argument that we don't want a private sector entity deciding questions of free speech - that's not really what we're talking about - but I get the argument.
Coupla things:
- It's everybody's job - everybody's right, and everybody's obligation - to hold as many people as possible to account for telling the truth.
- There's a near-absolute expectation that advertisers don't get to put out false or misleading claims about their own products, or the products of their competitors.
Caveat Emptor applies, but only to a certain extent. So if (eg) your dealership has a car for sale that you advertise as a peach, when it's a lemon - you can expect a visit from the fraud unit.
You can be fined.
You can go to jail.
You can be barred from that industry.
Thing 3: No rights are absolute or unlimited. Speech is not just an expression of ideas - it's also an action. If your actions present a clear and present danger to others - as individuals or as a community - you can be (and should be) smacked down.
We've got to have a taste of a Teddy Roosevelt-style Trust Buster in the White House. Some of these companies have grown too big and too powerful.
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| It's not like we've never been here before |
Today's Tweet
@TheClearCider
🇺🇸 @LindseyGrahamSC— Clear Cider (@TheClearCider) November 11, 2019
What do they have on you, Lindsey?
Set yourself free from whatever it is, and tell us all.
Remember... what would McCain have done?
🦋 pic.twitter.com/jSnzb8lXcn
Today's Today
"We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifice."
And while we're at it, let's all be sure to ask 45* about that little incident from a coupla years ago, when he was so very actively trying to "help our brave beautiful veterans."
NEW YORK (AP) — A judge Thursday ordered President Donald Trump to pay $2 million to an array of charities as a fine for misusing his own charitable foundation to further his political and business interests.
New York state Judge Saliann Scarpulla imposed the penalty after the president admitted to a series of abuses outlined in a lawsuit brought against him last year by the New York attorney general’s office.
Among other things, Trump acknowledged in a legal filing that he allowed his presidential campaign staff to coordinate with the Trump Foundation in holding a fundraiser for veterans during the run-up to the 2016 Iowa caucuses. The event was designed “to further Mr. Trump’s political campaign,” Scarpulla said.
He pimps a worthy cause to raise money for the veterans, but instead of giving over the full amount, he puts a big chunk of the money in his own pockets - which is consistent with his pattern of self-dealing, and why he and his kids are now barred from being involved in charitable organizations.
Anyway -
This is a day for remembering the fallen
The lost
Those who won't grow old with us.
And yet they're still right here
Forever young
Forever by our sides
And will remain for as long as we don't forget their names
I raise my glass to them
The lost
Those who won't grow old with us.
And yet they're still right here
Forever young
Forever by our sides
And will remain for as long as we don't forget their names
I raise my glass to them
Nov 10, 2019
Today's Tweet
There really is something wrong with that guy.
People are "debunking" it, saying it's a selective edit, but that's a real hiss. He really did kinda spit the words "thank you" at the reporters as they continued asking questions after he tried to dismiss them the first time.Trump has been hissing at reporters all morning because of the #KentuckyElection#BlueWave pic.twitter.com/rKXe9iKqXG— Hear Me Roar (@Stop_Trump20) November 6, 2019
I'm not giving him any kind of pass on this at all.
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