Contemptible disinformation

It happens every time. A terrible event happens, and despicable conspiracy theorists/propaganda agents respond by spreading terrible lies. It’s happening right now with the survivors of the Parkland shooting, a concerted effort to discredit anyone who criticizes the status quo by lying about the event.

Some students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School immediately took to social media calling on President Donald Trump and Congress to do something about guns and calling out commentators like Fox’s Tomi Lahren for saying now wasn’t the time to talk about guns. David Hogg, a student journalist who interviewed students on lockdown during the shooting, made several TV appearances demanding leaders take action. Another student, Emma Gonzalez, called out the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the legislators who do its bidding. Melissa Falkowski, a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, went on CNN calling on Congress to do more to “to end gun violence, to keep our kids safe.” Lori Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter was killed, screamed at President Trump on CNN to “do something.” Student survivors are organizing a march on Washington D.C..

And now, Parkland survivors are targets for fake news campaigns, conspiracy theories, harassment and doxxing. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has already suggested that the entire shooting is a false flag, which implies that all of the survivors are actors in an elaborate hoax. As survivors speak up, there are already attempts to attack and discredit them individually.

There are tells that let you know these sources are lying to you. These words are dead giveaways: False flag and Crisis actor. You see someone babbling about that, they’re simply awful, dishonest, crazy people. Another giveaway is when they start piecing together photos of the victims or the crime scene and try to match them to other photos they’ve crudely googled to pretend that the actual victims were actually in Hawaii or something, when all they’ve demonstrated is that people resemble other people. Just shut them down.

There are some people/sources that have negative credibility.

Alex Jones
Tucker Carlson
Fox & Friends
Gateway Pundit
NRATV
Lucian Wintrich
Dinesh D’Souza
r/theDonald
4chan
Anyone with the last name “Trump”

And many more. One additional problem, though, is that Twitter has become the perfect propaganda machine — anyone can manipulate it to automate broadcasting thousands of tweets promoting the lies invented by other disinformation agents, masking their origin and making sound like they have a broad base of support.

Information has become a tool to be twisted and manipulated by the right wing. We should be afraid. This is how democracies fall.

Everyone should know by now that Twitter is a bad company

From an inside look at Twitter’s problems with management, technology, and trolls:

At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would become, a third former executive told me, “you never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.” Instead of building a product that could scale alongside the platform, former employees say, Twitter papered over its problems by hiring more moderators. “Because this is just an ass-backward tech company, let’s throw non-scalable, low-tech solutions on top of this low-tech, non-scalable problem.”

Calls to rethink that approach were ignored by senior executives, according to people familiar with the situation. “There was no real sense of urgency,” the former executive explained, pointing the finger at Harvey’s superiors, including current C.E.O. Jack Dorsey. “It’s a technology company with crappy technologists, a revolving door of product heads and C.E.O.s, and no real core of technological innovation. You had Del saying, ‘Trolls are going to be a problem. We will need a technological solution for this.’” But Twitter never developed a product sophisticated enough to automatically deal with with bots, spam, or abuse. “You had this unsophisticated human army with no real scalable platform to plug into. You fast forward, and it was like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we just have basic rules in place where if the suggestion is to suspend an account of a verified person, there should be a process in place to have a flag for additional review, or something?’ You’d think it would take, like, one line of code to fix that problem. And the classic response is, ‘That’s on our product road map two quarters from now.’”

None of this means that Twitter is going to vanish soon — after all, COBOL is still around, and software legacies just hang around, decaying slowly, like an assortment of pseudogenes. But still, maybe you should consider jumping ship, since the one way to kill it is to erode its user base. Mastodon is out there, waiting for you with open arms.

Normalizing the intolerable

Here is an article about the Virginia Tech shootings, over a decade ago. It’s remarkable how little has changed, how little has been done.

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia’s governor, Tim Kaine, said, “People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it’s about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere.”

You remember Tim Kaine, right? Democrat? Failed vice presidential candidate? It’s not just Republicans with their heads in the sand. Guess what? I’ve got nothing but loathing for politicians who see their constituents murdered, and who do nothing but kowtow before the NRA. (Kaine does have an “F” rating from the NRA, which just shows how little resistance you have to exhibit to get dinged by those ghouls).

Here’s another dismaying story from 2016. A woman is in an abusive relationship; the guy is good looking and intelligent, but becomes progressively more possessive and controlling. It just gets worse and worse, but she’s in denial and tries to see the man she loves in this domineering, temperamental monster. The relationship doesn’t end until he shoots her in the face.

It’s a metaphor for America. We’re also in a terrible, abusive relationship, where any outsider looking in would say it’s obvious, you’ve got to break it up, you know this is bad for you, why are you tolerating this impossible, self-destructive affair? Get out! Get out now!

Only it’s worse, because in this metaphor, he shoots us in the face, and we don’t leave. He shoots us in the face again, we don’t leave. He shoots us in the face every few days, and we say, “This is not the time to dissolve our relationship, he just shot me in the face. I need time to heal!” And he shoots us again.

We’ve always got an excuse. It’s way past time that we stopped rationalizing this deadly relationship and ended it.

How can you screw up an appeal to the alt-right?

One of the dismaying things about the world right now is that being an alt-right/Nazi/”centrist” is so darned easy: they’re fanatically dominating YouTube*, they’re raking in the Patreon bucks, it’s almost as if mindlessly shouting “MAGA” and “WHITE GENOCIDE” is the magic cheat code for immense popularity. So when I see someone fail, it’s a bit jarring.

Look at Jon del Arroz, the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction, as he’s fond of claiming. He’s got the MAGA hat. He’s fond of Trumpian hyperbole and raging at liberals and SJWs. He got banned from WorldCon for his troubles, so he’s busy waving his martyr’s flag. And then he announced that he was going to sue WorldCon, and started a fundraiser to scrape up $10,000 for a lawyer.

He’s raised nothing. He’s a total failure. Maybe it’s because he compared his persecution to that of the entire gay community, which isn’t going to gather much sympathy from the usual gang of racist homophobes. Anyway, it’s nice to see a right-winger fall flat on his face.

*Since I’m trying to participate more in YouTube lately, I’m seeing signs that this may not be entirely true. I’ve encountered a few people who’ve been haranguing me with multiple sock puppets — one guy is up to about 20 pseudonyms — and I’m beginning to suspect that the right-wing success story on that medium is more about fanaticism, misrepresentation, and persistence. Maybe if YouTube were to tighten up their rules on handing out new accounts freely there’d be a change, because jeez, a lot of the problems in their comment threads are due to the deniability and meaninglessness of their contributors.

The Dora Milaje had an actual historical inspiration

It’s not exactly a pretty story, saturated as it is with slavery, colonialism and war, but it turns out that the Kingdom of Dahomey maintained an elite force of warrior women, the N’Nonmiton, in the 19th century. The comic book linked above tells their story, and these were definitely not put on for show — they were an active fighting force.

The Dahomey Warriors were known to be especially skillful, competitive, and brave. Their drills and military parades were always performed to dancing, music, and songs and their weapons were sometimes used as choreographic props. As expressed in their songs, their goal was to outshine men in every respect, and European travelers observed that they were better organized, swifter and much braver than male soldiers. As such, the King would send them to war as opposed to their male counterparts and European soldiers would also hesitate to kill them as they were often young women.

More details at the Smithsonian.

I don’t even want to imagine

But we have to imagine, don’t we? It’s the only way we can get change done.

I recently stumbled across a cell phone video made by a student at Parkland as they were fleeing their classroom. The teacher was dead in a pool of blood. Another student was dead. Yet another student was moaning in pain, wounded. They fled through a hallway with more students lying dead. It was so horrific that I could not in good conscience repost it, out of respect for the dead and the families who have lost people they loved. I closed my eyes and shut that window, unwilling to look at it again. It’s no wonder that those students are being so articulate in speaking out against this ongoing nightmare.

We are allowing kids to be slaughtered and traumatized so the gun industry can make more profits and so the NRA can prosper. When will we wake up and shut those ghouls down?

How come when Republicans talk about free speech it’s always about silencing me?

Minnesota Republicans are pushing a bill they say defends free speech on campus.

Introduced last week by State Sen. Carla Nelson (R-Rochester) and State Rep. Bud Nornes (R-Fergus Falls) at a press conference alongside members of the University of Minnesota College Republicans, the bill would make state-funded universities adopt policies that place a higher emphasis on free speech.

You will not be surprised to learn that the actual text of the bill does the opposite of that.

although faculty are free in the classroom to discuss subjects within areas of their competence, faculty shall be cautious in expressing personal views in the classroom and shall be careful not to introduce controversial matters that have no relationship to the subject taught, especially matters in which they have no special competence or training and in which, therefore, faculty’s views cannot claim the authority accorded statements they make about subjects within areas of their competence, provided that no faculty will face adverse employment action for classroom speech, unless it is not reasonably germane to the subject matter of the class as broadly construed, and comprises a substantial portion of classroom instruction.

So, placing a “higher emphasis on free speech” is to be accomplished by gagging college professors. That doesn’t sound like free speech to me. As usual, right-wingers use “free speech” as a code for limiting speech they don’t like.

This is also a bill that demonstrates a deep ignorance about how universities work. I am part of a team of faculty who have the mission of helping students acquire basic knowledge about a rich, complex subject. That knowledge is not imparted in a single class (why, not even my class); I rely on students learning preliminary information in the prerequisites to my courses, and my colleagues expect that students will emerge from my classes with knowledge they can build on. There is a tremendous amount of peer pressure to keep class content focused and substantial. I don’t need a law saying that I can’t spend hours and hours of class time talking about, oh I don’t know, Trump, atheism, lobsters, or feminism.

I really don’t need a bluenosed ideologue hovering over my should to police my class time in order to teach well, and in fact, that would be one other factor that would compromise my effectiveness.