Mark Robinson scandal explodes

The controversial lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is now running for governor has made controversial statements in the past, such as wanting to go back to a time when women couldn’t vote and condemning homosexuality in the harshest terms, calling them ‘filth’. He has made appealing to the evangelical Christian community a key part of his message. But now comes along a new report from CNN revealing that he has said and done things in the past that might make his Christian supporters cringe. They were so bad that CNN is not publishing the most graphic details.
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The election is close. US elections are always close

There is a huge vested interest in portraying elections in the US as very close, right up to election day. Each side likes to do so to prevent complacency among their supporter and to nudge people to vote, contribute money, and volunteer to do campaign work. The media loves it because it draws viewers and generates ad revenue. And there is a vast network of election pundits who are kept in business by blathering away about every little nugget of news to say how they think it will affect the election, even though they have no idea. Then there are the political consultants and media operatives who become more important in close elections, as campaign seek to squeeze out every advantage.
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Trump abortion bans are killing women

In her debate with creepy Donald Trump, one of the most compelling moments was when Kamala Harris described how, thanks to the abortion bans enabled by the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, a woman suffering a miscarriage was bleeding in her car in a hospital parking lot because doctors were afraid that they would violate the state’s abortion ban if they treated her. Harris said that this one of the consequences of what she called ‘Trump’s abortion bans’.

But that woman was by no means an isolated case. There are plenty of other horror stories and ProPublica tells the story of Amber Thurman who died because doctors were scared to treat her.
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Election strategy question: Should campaigns go wide or go deep?

Presidential campaigns have to make choices about where to pour most of their resources in the final stretch up to the election on November 5th. As many people know, the Electoral College system in the US is such that there are just seven states known as ‘swing’ or ‘battleground’ states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina) that play an outsize role in that they are seen as the only ones in contention, while the results of the other 43 states and the District of Columbia are seen as foregone conclusions for one party or the other and not worth campaigning in.

Campaigns need to decide whether they want to go on the offense and ‘expand the map’ (as the cool kids say) by making an effort in non-swing states that are leaning towards the opponents but that they think they have a chance of flipping. For the Democrats, these would be states like Indiana, Iowa, and Florida. Florida has been a tease for them for a long time. The demographics of the state with its rising percentage of Hispanic voters has long seemed promising but each election has seen their hopes dashed, with Republicans winning it comfortably. Republicans have fewer options in prying states out of Democratic hands. New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia used to be possibilities but recently they have gone Democratic and there are reports that the GOP has given up on them, although both New Hampshire and Virginia have Republican governors. Alternatively, campaigns can decide they want to play defense, focusing only on the swing states that they think they have a good chance of winning and have sufficient electoral college votes to put them over the top, and largely ignoring the others.
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Film review: Rebel Ridge (2024)

I have written multiple posts about the menace in the US of what is known as ‘civil asset forfeiture’. This is where police can seize the assets of people (cash, cars, even houses) even before they are convicted of any crime and make it well nigh impossible for them to get it back even if they are completely innocent. This has become just another way for some local jurisdictions to raise money to fund their operations, particularly their police departments.

John Oliver highlighted this abuse ten years ago.

A couple of days ago, I watched a new film Rebel Ridge on Netflix that deals with precisely this issue. A young black man Terry Richmond rides his bicycle into a small rural Alabama town with $36,000 in cash, with $10,000 meant to bail out his cousin who was arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, and the remainder for both to buy a truck and start a small hauling business.

But he is stopped by local police who find the money and confiscate it on the grounds that it might be drug-related even though they had no evidence at all. When he tries to get it back he is threatened by the sheriff. Summer McBride, a paralegal in the county courthouse, tells him that she has unearthed evidence that the police department and the judge have a scheme going where people get arrested for minor infractions, the charges get elevated, their property confiscated, and they are thrown in jail with high cash bail. She says that fighting to get their money and property back will take a long time and often cost more than what was confiscated so most people, who are poor and cannot afford a lawyer, will simply give up and walk away.
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How social media messages can escalate rumors

The recent scaremongering about Haitians in Springfield, OH arose from someone on Facebook passing on a fourth-hand rumor that turned out to be false. It illustrates how dangerous it can be to pass along rumors that can adversely affect identifiable groups pf people.

The neighborhood message board Nextdoor is one that I am a member of and even that I rarely read the posts. But yesterday I saw one that immediately brought the Springfield incident to mind.

It started when one person posted the following:

Hello everyone, I just wanted to ask if anyone has heard about people snatching up children? My daughter overheard a man on his phone telling the person on the other end to be on the lookout and to keep an eye on the children! This is very scary! Any thoughts on this?

It is also not clear what response the poster was seeking or what she was scared about. But the post spawned a variety of responses, with others responding that people should always be vigilant about their children. Then one person made the leap to sex trafficking and Mexico.
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The Cybertruck in the wild

There has been a lot of buzz about the benefits and dangers of the new generation of AI software but one thing is clear is its potential for humor. The closest I get to nature are the excellent documentaries put out by David Attenborough and so I really enjoyed this short clip of ‘David Attenborough’ describing the behavior of the Tesla Cybertruck.

Apparently there is a whole reddit section devoted to hating on the Cybertruck.

Chatting with Jehovah’s Witnesses

On Saturday morning there was a knock on my door. This is unusual since the condominium complex that I live in is not on a through street and hence the only people who knock on doors tend to be delivery people and I rarely order anything. When I opened the door, there were two women aged 65 or thereabouts standing there and I immediately guessed that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

After saying hello, one woman (let’s call her A) asked me whether I read the Bible and I said that I used to but no longer. She asked me why and I said that it no longer made any sense to me. The other woman (let’s call her B) then asked me whether I stopped reading because of the way that the world was these days and I said no, that was not it, but that I could not reconcile the idea of a god with what the laws of science said about how the world works. B was curious and asked me what scientific field I was referring to and I said physics.
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The psychology of conspiracy theory believers

Conspiracy theories, by which I mean beliefs that lack any solid evidentiary foundation but are believed by a surprisingly large number of people who sustain them by postulating elaborate explanations that involve powerful people and organizations colluding to hide what they believe is ‘the truth’, have been around for a long time. The internet has enabled much greater awareness of such beliefs, in addition to allowing them to flourish.

Naturally, this has provoked curiosity about the phenomenon, such as what makes a particular theory catch hold of the imagination of some people, what kinds of people are drawn to them, what kind of dangers they pose, and how they might best be combated.

Not all conspiracy theories are pernicious and need to be countered. Some are mostly harmless and can be ignored. The belief that the moon landing was faked, for example, does not do much harm. Neither does the belief that the Earth is flat. The belief that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job also seems largely innocuous. This is because the people who are thought to. be engaged in a conspiracy to hide the truth are not clearly identifiable or are so big (‘the government’ or ‘the deep state’) that particular individuals and communities are not placed at risk.
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When does Elon Musk do any work?

Nick Robins-Early spends an entire day reading Elon Musk’s tweets just for that day. He says that reading just the ones that make it into the news do not do justice to how extreme and frenzied her really is.

Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say “yeah”, “interesting” or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.

You have to read the article to see how weird Musk is.

This obsession with tweeting seems really unhealthy to me. It looks like an addiction. Even if Musk spends only a couple of minutes reading and reacting to tweets, that already amounts to about five hours.

Furthermore he has businesses to run. Surely they would benefit from him spending his time dealing with them? Or maybe not. Given his mercurial and impulsive nature, maybe the businesses and the people working in them are glad that he is not paying much attention to them and just letting them do their work