The Dog That Caught The Car

The "straight-thinkers" in the GOP really didn't want Roe to be overturned. I'm one of those "liberals" who was sure that because the party was just playing the rubes, they'd always pull back just as it looked like the All-American Woman-Haters Club was about to make 'em do it.

And I think it's no kinda news that McConnell and McCarthy had that in mind too, but the crazies got their hands on the levers - which is what we've been warning about for 30 years - and they made it happen, and now what's left of the old guard is in that Wile E Coyote moment when they realize there's nothing under them but a very long fall to a very hard landing.

Couldn't happen to a nicer buncha guys.

 

(pay wall)

Buyer’s remorse could be creeping in for GOP on abortion

The signs are disparate, inconclusive and perhaps not fully applicable to the 2022 midterm elections. But virtually everything since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade back in June suggests Republicans have a political problem on their hands now that they’ve obtained their long-sought goal of being able to severely restrict and even ban abortion.

And if you look closely, you’ll see signs of potential buyer’s remorse creeping in.

To the extent Republicans rethink their extremely restrictive posture on abortion in the days ahead, a South Carolina state legislator might have provided a crystallizing moment last week.

At a hearing, state Rep. Neal Collins (R) recounted the arduous journey faced by a 19-year-old thanks to an abortion ban he himself supported. Collins said the woman’s fetus was not viable, but that attorneys told her doctor they couldn’t extract it because it still had a heartbeat — the standard set in the bill supported by Collins that had gone into effect just the week before.

“They discharged that 19-year-old,” Collins said. “The doctor told me at that point there is a 50 percent chance — well, first she’s going to pass this fetus in the toilet. She’s going to have to deal with that on her own. There’s a 50 percent chance — greater than 50 percent chance that she’s going to lose her uterus. There’s a 10 percent chance that she will develop sepsis and herself, die.”

Collins added: “That weighs on me. I voted for that bill. These are affecting people.”

It’s a dilemma previewed long before the Supreme Court’s momentous decision, including in this space. In many states, Republicans passed restrictive laws and what’s known as “trigger laws” that would ban almost all abortions, including in cases of rape and incest, and with stringent rules for exceptions to protect the mother’s health. Those measures worked well as messaging exercises, but now they will be law. And polls show those ideas are broadly unpopular.

Since the Supreme Court’s action, the evidence has pointed almost exclusively in one direction: that Democrats have been buoyed by the abortion issue taking on new prominence.

• Voters in red Kansas overwhelmingly voted against a ballot measure that would have set aside abortion protections in the state constitution and allowed lawmakers to severely restrict or even ban the practice.
• Democrats have overperformed in every special election held since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson — after underperforming in special elections before then. In just about every case, Democratic turnout appears to have been juiced. And in the most significant race so far — New York’s closely divided 19th District — the Democrat won after making the race a referendum on abortion, overperforming President Biden’s 2020 numbers in the district.
• The “generic ballot” — pitting an unnamed Republican against an unnamed Democrat — has shifted in Democrats’ favor enough that the average now favors Democrats slightly.
• A new Pew Research Center poll this week showed abortion rocketing up as a “very important” priority for Democratic voters — from 46 percent in March to 71 percent today — while just 4 in 10 Republicans called it a key issue.
• Both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel are sounding alarm bells about the GOP’s ability to flip Congress, with McDaniel specifically citing Democrats’ fundraising momentum post-Dobbs.

The conservative Wall Street Journal’s editorial board summarized it in a piece after the New York special election, titled “The GOP’s Abortion Problem.”

“Republicans are on the backfoot because they’re talking about abortion as if Roe were still the law, when it was easy to favor a total ban because it didn’t matter,” it wrote. “Now the policy stakes are real, and Republicans will have to make clear what specific abortion limits they favor and why.”

Republicans have been slow to do that. But there are signs that they recognize the peril of this issue’s sudden salience, and they’re charting divergent courses when forced to take positions.

In the New York special election, for instance, Republican Marc Molinaro said he opposed a federal abortion ban. Some GOP Senate candidates, particularly in the West, have effectively endorsed allowing abortion early in a pregnancy. Colorado Senate candidate Joe O’Dea has said abortion should be banned only after 20 weeks. Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt endorsed banning abortion after 13 weeks. Arizona candidate Blake Masters called his state banning abortion after 15 weeks “a reasonable solution” after previously calling abortion “demonic” and likening it to genocide.

Efforts to reckon with rape, incest and other exceptions are less evident but are lurching forward in some red states. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) has said he prefers the state to have them, but he has yet to press the issue with the state legislature. West Virginia’s state legislature added the exceptions after Democrats forced a vote on an amendment, though the final version of the bill remains uncertain. And Indiana Republicans split over an effort to nix rape and incest exceptions from their bill, leaving them in.

It’s too simple to say Democrats’ sudden signs of hope in their effort to keep Congress are exclusively the result of the abortion issue. It’s also possible this issue creates a Democratic turnout edge in primary and special elections that won’t be replicated in the general election, when more casual voters are more likely to vote.

What’s pretty clear, though, is that Republicans are in the kind of pickle the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted. They’ve now got this power to do something they’ve long said they aspired to do — and which their base demands — but which creates potential problems for them and their very real ambitions of reclaiming power in Washington. In many cases, as the video of state Rep. Collins shows better than just about anything, they’re now contending with the consequences.

At the very least, it’s a complicating factor. Now they must decide how much they fear that factor, and whether they can do anything about it without alienating the voters they’ve spent decades firing up about what was then a much more abstract — and apparently advantageous — issue.

Today's Trae

Trae Crowder - Liberal Redneck

College kids make some poor decisions - that's pretty much what being a college kid is all about.

On Slavery & War

(888) 373-7888

National

Human Trafficking Hotline

Slavery and war are tightly connected – but we had no idea just how much until we crunched the data

Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family controlled sex trafficking in the United States to the enslavement of fishermen in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry and forced labor in the global electronics supply chain, enslavement knows no bounds.

As scholars of modern slavery, we seek to understand how and why human beings are still bought, owned and sold in the 21st century, in hopes of shaping policies to eradicate these crimes.

Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.

In 2016, the United Nations Security Council named modern slavery a serious concern in areas affected by armed conflict. But researchers still know little about the specifics of how slavery and war are intertwined.

We recently published research analyzing data on armed conflicts around the world to better understand this relationship.

What we found was staggering: The vast majority of armed conflict between 1989 and 2016 used some kind of slavery.

Coding conflict

We used data from an established database about war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), to look at how much, and in what ways, armed conflict intersects with different forms of contemporary slavery.

Our project was inspired by two leading scholars of sexual violence, Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordås. These political scientists used that database to produce their own pioneering database about how rape is used as a weapon of war.

The Uppsala database breaks each conflict into two sides. Side A represents a nation state, and Side B is typically one or more nonstate actors, such as rebel groups or insurgents.

Using that data, our research team examined instances of different forms of slavery, including sex trafficking and forced marriage, child soldiers, forced labor and general human trafficking. This analysis included information from 171 different armed conflicts. Because the use of slavery changes over time, we broke multiyear conflicts into separate “conflict-years” to study them one year at a time, for a total of 1,113 separate cases.

Coding each case to determine what forms of slavery were used, if any, was a challenge. We compared information from a variety of sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, scholarly accounts, journalists’ reporting and documents from governmental and intergovernmental organizations.

Alarming numbers

In our recently published analysis, we found that contemporary slavery is a regular feature of armed conflict. Among the 1,113 cases we analyzed, 87% contained child soldiers – meaning fighters age 15 and younger – 34% included sexual exploitation and forced marriage, about 24% included forced labor and almost 17% included human trafficking.

A global heat map of the frequency of these armed conflicts over time paints a sobering picture. Most conflicts involving enslavement take place in low-income countries, often referred to as the Global South.

About 12% of the conflicts involving some form of enslavement took place in India, where there are several conflicts between the government and nonstate actors. Teen militants are involved in conflicts such as the insurgency in Kashmir and the separatist movement in Assam. About 8% of cases took place in Myanmar, 5% in Ethiopia, 5% in the Philippines and about 3% in Afghanistan, Sudan, Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria and Iraq.

This evidence of enslavement predominately in the Global South may not be surprising, given how poverty and inequality can fuel instability and conflict. However, it helps us reflect upon how these countries’ historic, economic and geopolitical relationships to the Global North also fuel pressure and violence, a theme we hope slavery researchers can study in the future.

Strategic enslavement

Typically, when armed conflict involves slavery, it’s being used for tactical aims: building weapons, for example, or constructing roads and other infrastructure projects to fight a war. But sometimes, slavery is used strategically, as part of an overarching strategy. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used “strategic slavery” in what they called “extermination through labor.” Today, as in the past, strategic slavery is normally part of a larger strategy of genocide.

We found that “strategic enslavement” took place in about 17% of cases. In other words, enslavement was one of the primary objectives of about 17% of the conflicts we examined, and often served the goal of genocide. One example is the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidi minority in the 2014 massacre in Sinjar, Iraq. In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.

The connections between slavery and conflict are vicious but still not well understood. Our next steps include coding historic cases of slavery and conflict going back to World War II, such as how Nazi Germany used forced labor and how Imperial Japan’s military used sexual enslavement. We have published a new data set, “Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict,” and hope other researchers will also use it to help better understand and prevent future violence.

New Day, New Shit

Takeaways from the redacted affidavit used for the Mar-a-Lago search

The largest piece of the puzzle about why FBI agents searched former president Donald Trump’s residence is out: the affidavit submitted to warrant the search. In its full form, this usually sealed document spells out exactly what FBI agents thought was hidden at Mar-a-Lago and what crimes may have been committed. But the version the Justice Department released to the public Friday is heavily redacted.

Here’s what we were able to glean about the investigation — and still have to learn.

1. 184 classified documents, including some top secret, were once at Mar-a-Lago

This affidavit, by definition, was written before FBI agents searched Trump’s clubhouse and took away more boxes of suspected classified information. They are likely sifting through that now. But when National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of official material in January from Mar-a-Lago, they found “a lot of classified records,” according to the affidavit, and flagged the FBI.

A subsequent FBI tally of classified information in those boxes found, according to the affidavit: “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”

That’s an astonishing amount of classified material, legal experts said.

In addition, the FBI believed that the material contained what it calls “national defense information,” or some of the most guarded secrets. (The Washington Post has reported the government feared nuclear secrets were at Mar-a-Lago.)

In addition, the FBI was concerned that the classified information was treated carelessly. The National Archives wrote to the bureau that the boxes it retrieved from Mar-a-Lago contained: “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and postpresidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records.’ Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.”

People who have worked at the White House and handled classified documents stress that each document is treated with extreme care; some of the most secret material are returned to a secure room or even a safe after the president or other authorized top officials review it.

“The affidavit confirms that the documents were stored in various locations around Mar-a-Lago and that none of these locations was an approved storage facility for classified material,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor.

2. The Justice Department is suspicious of obstruction by Trump or his allies

“There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the PREMISES,” reads the affidavit. We don’t learn much more than that from this document.

But the affidavit states that the National Archives spent six months in the latter half of 2021 trying to get more documents. And then the FBI got involved. The Post’s Josh Dawsey, Carol Leonnig, Jacqueline Alemany and Rosalind Helderman reported that all this year, Trump resisted handing much of anything over, to the point where his allies feared he was “essentially daring” the FBI to come after them.

Trump was also warned before he even left the White House that taking any official documents with him, let alone national secrets, was illegal under the Presidential Records Act. And even Trump’s attorneys agreed that the former president needed to give the documents back, report Dawsey and Alemany, citing the National Archives’ conversations with Trump’s lawyers.

The Justice Department already released the search warrant that Judge Bruce E. Reinhart signed off on. It was a short document that revealed that the FBI found top-secret information there while looking for evidence of the violation of three potential crimes, including part of the Espionage Act. The affidavit doesn’t shed much more light on that.

3. It’s possible Trump allies were talking to the FBI about all this

Included in the paperwork with the affidavit was a formal notice that the redacted memorandum was being released. In it, the Justice Department writes that the redactions are necessary to protect “a broad range of civilian witnesses.”

“This language suggests that people inside Trump’s former administration, or at Mar-a-Lago, are providing information to the FBI,” McQuade said.

The redacted affidavit itself suggests that the investigation includes detailed monitoring of Mar-a-Lago to find out how many boxes of official material were still there and where they were being stored.

4. What’s missing

We’re not seeing the full affidavit; far from it.

The Justice Department was allowed to pretty liberally ink-out many details of its investigation, because lawyers said this was still in its early stages.

We don’t know exactly what they cut.

But Jack Sharman, a corporate litigator who has been involved in numerous government investigations, said affidavits that get publicly released are usually protective of confidential informants as well as personal identifying information of the informants, or of law enforcement agents, given the threats to law enforcement from some Trump supporters. (The name of the FBI agent primarily responsible for writing the affidavit is withheld.) Also, statements made by witnesses or informants can be redacted. And just about anything having to do with a related investigation or potential subjects or targets is usually cut from these kinds of releases, Sharman said.

5. We still don’t know why Trump wanted these documents

In addition to whether the Justice Department will charge Trump or someone in his orbit with a crime, why all these documents were at Mar-a-Lago in the first place is one of the biggest unanswered questions of this whole thing.

Trump and his lawyers were repeatedly asked to return them. Under requests from the National Archives, a subpoena and visits to Mar-a-Lago from Justice Department officials, they did return some boxes. But much more, it seems, remained in Trump’s possession.

6. The full affidavit is a road map to potential prosecution

An affidavit is essentially a report of all the evidence and witnesses and reasoning for why agents need a search warrant to go through someone’s private stuff. The private home of a former president has a particularly high bar, so this affidavit was likely extremely thorough and detailed.

Attorney General Merrick Garland signed off on it, and FBI agents presented this sworn document to a magistrate judge. The judge agreed that agents convincingly laid out there was probable cause that a crime was committed at Mar-a-Lago by Trump keeping classified documents there, or at least that there was strong potential of evidence of a crime. The search warrant and affidavit mention potential crimes that don’t require information to be classified, though. So simply just taking the material out of the White House and refusing to give it back could be enough for prosecution.

These affidavits are usually kept sealed, because they are a road map for any potential prosecution after the search. But citing the overwhelming public interest, Reinhart ordered the Justice Department to release as much as it could without revealing secrets of its ongoing investigation.

“It’s highly unusual that this is even happening, period,” Sharman said.

Thanks, Joe

On my travels across the intertoobz

Paying Up And Paying Back

Is student loan forgiveness the whole solution?

    No

Can it be made better if we put more Dems in office?

    Yes

Will Republicans work with us to make it better?

    No

Will Republicans fuck it up if they get back in power?

    Yes

Republicans Opposing Student-Loan Relief Are Forgetting the Biblical Tradition of Debt Forgiveness

While President Biden’s announcement of student-debt forgiveness elicited shouts of joy from many of the 43 million Americans who could experience relief under his plan, Republicans have responded by declaring their opposition to the very idea of debt forgiveness. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Biden of “socialism,” while Pennsylvania Representative Dan Meuser declared it a “moral hazard” to forgive “self imposed debt.” For decades, Republicans have claimed to champion biblical values, and MAGA enthusiasts like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have more recently embraced the goal of a “Christian nation.” But nothing exposes the hypocrisy of Christian nationalism more than Republicans’ knee-jerk reaction against debt forgiveness. It is, after all, something Jesus taught his disciples to pray for.

“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” is more than a line from the Lord’s Prayer that children memorize in Sunday school. For practicing Christians, it is a regular reminder of the Jubilee tradition that Jesus embraced in his first sermon in Luke’s gospel. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus declared from the prophet Isaiah, “and has anointed me to proclaim… the favorable year of the Lord.” As his 1st-century hearers knew, Jesus was referring to the debt forgiveness laid out in Leviticus 25, which prescribes a regular social practice of clearing debts in order to correct for the accumulated injustice of an unequal distribution of resources in society. The idea doesn’t come from Karl Marx, as McConnell suggests, but from ancient Scripture.

It’s amazing to us that many of the same people who consistently vote for corporate tax breaks and policies that give more money to our wealthiest neighbors cry “socialism” when anyone proposes relief to poor people who are saddled by debt. As people who took vows to proclaim the biblical text, we find such reactionary defense of wealth to be the antithesis of biblical values.

While the Jubilee is a clear command of Scripture, biblical scholars have debated how often it was actually practiced in ancient Israel. But the economic historian Michael Hudson, who has directed a decades-long study at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, argues in his book …and forgive them their debts that the notion of Jubilee wasn’t simply an ideal for ancient Israel, but rather a practical lesson learned during the Babylonian exile. Ancient Mesopotamian societies had learned from experience that crippling debt was an inevitable consequence of lending at interest (what the Bible calls “usury”). For the good of the whole, a practice of “Clean Slate” debt forgiveness emerged to keep society functioning. The children of Israel came to understand this practice as God’s design.

Some of Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Critics Went to College for Less Than $400 Per Year

Of course, people of goodwill can disagree on policy. While some conservatives have expressed concern that Biden’s debt-forgiveness plan could exacerbate inflation, we side with those who argue that the Administration should do more, along with Congressional action, to address extreme inequality and the racial wealth gap in America. By forgiving twice as much for borrowers who qualified for Pell Grants as undergraduates, Biden’s plan does target relief to low-income families, which are disproportionately Black, brown, Asian, and Native. Equally important to the plan is its hedge against interest going forward. For borrowers who pay 5% of their expendable income toward repaying the undergraduate loans each month, interest will be forgiven. And low-income debtors who make less than 225% of the federal poverty line will not owe any payments until their income rises to a living wage. These, too, are steps toward an economy where people who go to work every day can afford to feed, clothe, and house their families, and even take a little time off now and then to enjoy time with one another.

But it’s not enough. The $20,000 cap for Pell Grant recipients, for instance, leaves millions of those most severely impacted by predatory lending still saddled with debt. To experience the full benefit of Jubilee, we need to wipe the slate clean for those who are carrying the heaviest burdens of debt.

As Christian pastors, we know that the false promise of a “Christian nation” has persuaded millions of Americans to support policies that hurt God’s people. In a multi-faith democracy, we don’t need our faith to be privileged by state power. But every faith can and should inform our vision for our common life. The tradition of debt forgiveness, which is shared by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, offers a powerful vision for a way forward from the historic inequality that currently harms our economy. It’s no surprise that defenders of the wealthy elite are crying “socialism.” Their forebearers attacked New Deal and Great Society programs along the same lines. But moral movements throughout our nation’s history have made the case that moral policies that lift from the bottom are good for all of us.

Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan won’t bring the Jubilee we pray for every day, but it’s a step in the right direction. Some of us would love to hear the President and other Democrats talk more about how policies like this help poor and low-income people, not just the “working class.” Such public commitments to the common good can go a long way toward motivating voters who don’t believe politicians from any party care about them. If a moral movement of people committed to the common good can rally for the midterms, this week’s action shows that the Biden Administration is ready and willing to push further toward an economy that works for all of us in 2023. That’s a vision we pray more Americans can get behind.

Oops Again, Republicans

Hoping this is another sign that Republicans have badly over-reached, and that the ladies are coming out to show these idiots what happens when you fuck over half the population.

Judge who denied Florida teen an abortion citing grades loses reelection

A state judge who, in a highly publicized case, denied a 17-year-old an abortion in part because of her grades lost his election in a Florida primary on Tuesday.

Jared Smith, who was appointed to Florida’s 13th Circuit Court by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in 2019, narrowly lost his nonpartisan primary against attorney Nancy Jacobs.

Jacobs received roughly 51.9 percent of the vote, beating Smith by about 3.7 percentage points, or roughly 7,900 votes.

Smith had ruled in January that the 17-year-old, who was kept anonymous in court documents, could not receive an abortion, citing her grades. An appeals court overturned the ruling.

“While she claimed that her grades were ‘Bs’ during her testimony, her GPA is currently 2.0,” Smith ruled. “Clearly, a ‘B’ average would not equate to a 2.0 GPA.”

Florida is one of six states that require both parental notification and consent for minors to obtain abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The teen had asked the court to waive the requirement.

Under Florida law, a judge can waive parental consent if it finds by “clear and convincing evidence” that the minor is “sufficiently mature” to decide to have an abortion. In considering those requests, judges are required to assess factors like the minor’s age, overall intelligence and emotional stability.

The statute has led to multiple high-profile cases, including one earlier this month in which a Florida appeals court ruled a 16-year-old did not demonstrate she met the maturity requirement to circumvent the parental notification and consent requirements.


Smith received an array of endorsements in the primary race, including former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez (R), the Tampa Bay Times’s editorial board and multiple retired judges who served on the circuit.

Democrats have hoped the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion in June will help energize voters in this year’s midterm elections and avoid steep losses for the party as it seeks to maintain control of Congress.

Voters in Kansas, a traditionally red state, rejected a ballot question earlier this month that would remove abortion rights from the state constitution.

As voters headed to the polls in Florida on Tuesday and defeated Smith in his circuit court race, New York’s simultaneous primary showed another sign of the potential impact of the abortion ruling.

Pat Ryan (D), who made supporting abortion rights a cornerstone of his campaign, defeated Marc Molinaro (R) in the state’s 19th Congressional District, a bellwether district that voted for former President Obama in 2012, former President Trump in 2016 and President Biden in 2020.

Well Shit

I've always kinda liked Shaq. I can't now. I just have to walk away.

Shaquille O'Neal clarified his comments about the Earth being flat after taking a flight from the United States to Australia.

The NBA legend, 50, was asked during an appearance on The Kyle & Jackie O Show if his former comments about the conspiracy theory were a "joke" or if he did, in fact, believe the notion to be true.

"It's a theory," O'Neal told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson. "It's just a theory, they teach us a lot of things. It's just a theory," he repeated.

The former LA Lakers star explained his rationale by using his flight from the U.S. to Australia as an example."I flew 20 hours today, not once did I go this way," O'Neal said, noting he "didn't tip over" or "go upside down." He added that he's also unsure about whether the planet is spinning.

"You know they say the world is spinning? I've lived on a lake for 30 years and I've never seen the lake move to the left or right," he told listeners.

When Kyle mentioned that it's possible to travel from the U.S. to Australia from both coasts, Shaq responded, "It's still a straight line."

The NBA Hall of Famer first made his opinion known in 2017 while chatting with co-host John Kincade on The Big Podcast With Shaq.

"It's true. The Earth is flat," he said at the time. "Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind—what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school, the first thing they teach us is, 'Oh, Columbus discovered America,' but when he got there, there were some fair-skinned people with long hair smoking on the peace pipes. So, what does that tell you? Columbus didn't discover America."

"I'm just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it's flat to me," he continued. "I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle and all that stuff about gravity. Have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It's not. The world is flat."

He then went on to dispute satellite imagery, calling it "drawn and made up."

Flat Earthers, and the Rise of Science Denial in America

At the time, a slew of basketball stars including Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving, former Denver Nuggets wing Wilson Chandler and Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green also agreed the Earth was flat.

The news gained so much traction that NBA commissioner Adam Silver had to address it during a press conference at the 2017 All-Star Game.

"Kyrie and I, you know, went to the same college. He may have taken some different courses than I did," Silver said to a room full of laughter, before adding, "Personally, I believe the world is round."

O'Neal later backtracked on his comments during the NBA on TNT broadcast, claiming he was joking.

Newsweek reached out to O'Neal for comment.

Several scientists previously spoke out on why O'Neal's comments are potentially problematic, whether he's teasing or not.

Sam Bentley, a geology and geophysics professor at the star's alma mater, Louisiana State University, told Bleacher Report in 2017 that the former center should "act responsibly" considering he has such a large platform.

"If Shaquille O'Neal is claiming that the Earth is flat based on his observations driving from California to the East Coast, then he is not using all of the available data," Bentley told the outlet.

Derek Muller, who earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Sydney and runs the YouTube channel "Veritasium," agreed.

"It leads their fanbases to consider ridiculous ideas to be true," Muller noted. "Obviously, these people have god-like reputations among some of their fans. They're clearly prominent, and even if you don't fully believe them, it definitely raises the visibility of the claims."

He added that it "does damage in the long term" because "you have a group of people who don't know what to believe."

"When you don't have those established consensuses, the world makes bad decisions."

Overheard

Republicans

claiming that Republicans

committed Voter Fraud

against Republicans

to ensure

that Republicans won and Republicans lost

in Republican Primaries.

Peak Republican.

What Ho, Propaganda

Like any other tool, propaganda - which is basically Sales & Marketing - can be in service of good things as well as the dark and nefarious.

The messaging has to line up with reality for it to be assessed as ethically worthy, and not deemed valuable simply because it's effective at motivating the masses.

What you're trying to motivate those masses to do is kinda important if you want to keep the thing legit.

"We need to be brave in the face of an aggressor nation that has invaded our country, and has articulated an intent to annihilate or national identity..."

...is quite a bit more in keeping with the moral code of decent human behavior than...

"Ukraine is ours, but they are being misled by evil forces within, so we must rid the earth of people who refuse to see themselves as truly Russian..."

With ‘bravery’ as its new brand, Ukraine is turning advertising into a weapon of war

When a preview of Vogue’s October 2022 cover story on Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska hit Twitter on July 26, 2022, reactions on social media were swift and polarized. Some critics said that a photo shoot by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz for a fashion magazine was a “bad idea” and glamorized war.

Others lauded the magazine and Ukraine’s first lady for bringing awareness to the suffering of Ukrainians, five months after Russia first invaded its neighboring country.

In the cover photo, 44-year-old Zelenska wears a cream-colored blouse with rolled up sleeves, black trousers and flats. She sits on the stairs of the Ukrainian Parliament, leaning forward with hands intertwined between her knees. Her makeup is minimal, her hair casually tossed as she looks directly at the camera. Within hours Ukrainian women started using the hashtag #sitlikeagirl to share photos of themselves in the same pose as a show of solidarity.

Vogue’s profile of Zelenska, headlined “A Portrait of Bravery” and written by journalist Rachel Donadio, fits into a larger communication strategy, mounted by Ukraine’s government, that’s intended to keep the world focused on the country’s fight against Russian aggression. As part of that effort, Ukraine also initiated a nation branding campaign in April with the tagline “Bravery. To be Ukraine.”

As a communications scholar, I have studied how former communist countries like Ukraine have used marketing strategies to burnish their international reputations over the past two decades – a practice known as nation branding.

Ukraine, however, is the first country to launch an official nation branding campaign in the midst of war. For the first time, brand communication is a key part of a country’s response to a military invasion.

Nation branding and the end of communism

The idea that nations can be branded emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. This kind of work uses advertising, public relations and marketing techniques to boost countries’ international reputations. Campaigns are often timed to coincide with major sporting, cultural or political events – like the Olympics.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, formerly communist Eastern European countries were particularly eager to rebrand themselves and get an updated international image.

When Estonian musicians won the international singing competition Eurovision in 2001, Estonia became the first post-Soviet country to hold this prize. Subsequently, the country’s government hired an international advertising company to design a modern national brand for Estonia as it prepared to host Eurovision the following year.

Research has shown, however, that former communist countries’ nation branding efforts were not meant just for international consumption. They also provided a new way to talk about national identities at home, and re-imagine national values and goals, via marketing terms.

But until 2022, no country had used nation branding to fight a war.

‘Bravery is our brand’

Executives from the Ukrainian advertising agency Banda first pitched the idea for Ukraine’s Bravery Campaign to the government shortly after Russia invaded in February 2022. Based in Kyiv and Los Angeles, the agency had already worked before the war on government-sponsored campaigns, marketing Ukraine as a tourism and investment destination.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy endorsed the wartime branding campaign and publicly announced its launch on April 7, 2022, in a video address. “Bravery is our brand,” he stated. “This is what it means to be us. To be Ukrainians. To be brave.”

In the following months, Banda produced numerous messages in formats ranging from billboards, posters and online videos, to social media posts, T-shirts and stickers. A campaign website offers downloadable logos and photographs and asks visitors to share the message of bravery and donate to Ukraine.

Some billboards feature images of courageous, ordinary Ukrainians and soldiers. Other billboards are emblazoned with bold slogans in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag. They urge audiences to “Be brave like Ukraine” and say that “Bravery lives forever.”

Inside Ukraine, the campaign’s messages appear on everything from juice bottles to 500 billboards in 21 cities. The campaign is also running in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada and 17 countries in Europe, including Germany, Spain and Sweden, according to AdAge.

This massive communication effort is happening at a minimal cost to Ukraine. Banda is donating its services, and the Ukrainian government pays only for production costs. Media space, including high-profile billboards in Times Square and other major cities, was donated by several global media companies.

Branding as a weapon of war

Banda’s co-founder, Pavel Vrzheshch, has said the campaign aims to strengthen Ukrainians’ morale as they continue to fight Russia. But the focus on bravery is also about Ukraine’s future, he says.

“The whole world admires the Ukrainian bravery now, we must consolidate this notion and have it represent Ukraine forever,” Vrzheshch said in a media interview.

At its core, the campaign attempts to transform an intangible value, like bravery, into an asset that can be converted into real military, economic and moral support. In other words, it aims to cultivate positive public opinion in the West that will support further aid to Ukraine in order to help fight the war.

This way of using brand communication in a war is unprecedented in at least three ways.

First, rather than relying only on diplomatic channels to seek international support, Ukraine is harnessing popular media and social media networks to speak directly to citizens of other countries. It gives ordinary people around the world a chance to show solidarity through donations or by sharing campaign messages and pressuring their government to support Ukraine.

A formal brand campaign also allows Ukraine to extend the visibility of the war beyond news coverage. As the conflict continues, it is likely to fade from news headlines in international media. But billboards, social media posts and the strategic use of entertainment publications like Vogue can keep it in front of audiences.

Finally, the best brand messages connect with consumers by inviting them to imagine better versions of themselves. Famous ad slogans like Nike’s “Just do it” or Apple’s “Think different” illustrate this idea. So does Ukraine’s call to people around the world to “Be brave like Ukraine.”

It is notoriously difficult to measure the effectiveness of nation branding campaigns, as brand consultants point out. The process is costly and time-consuming, and results are often contested.

The direct impact of the Brave Campaign may not be clear for months to come. It is also not clear how long its message will continue to resonate. But it is clear that Ukraine is transforming nation branding into a new propaganda weapon, adapted for the age of consumer culture and constant media stimulation.