Tag: Trump

Biden, Ageism, and the 46 Percent

Biden’s Age Handicap

Yesterday I saw two TV commercials for the upcoming NFL football season.  Both of them highlighted fast running, tackling, and catching passes (and instantly being tackled).  Seeing it immediately made me realize why Joe Biden is polling roughly equal to Trump for President, with some pundits venturing if the election were run today Trump would win or come close. To those of us on the Left, this seems both frightening and barely credible.

Even setting aside the flaws of polls in predicting elections—especially 14 months out—one can still be alarmed by at least one poll showing a horse race at 46 vs 46 pct. Who are the 46% favoring Trump?  Let’s say 20-25% of the U.S. population  are die-hard Trump supporters; many of them are members of a cult who could even find justification for Donald Trump murdering a child in broad daylight. Another 10%  are from the ranks who are not die-hard Trump supporters but who would vote for any Republican in any election.

That leaves another 10-12% of the Americans who support Trump against Biden for reasons not immediately clear.

It’s clearer if you take popularity of football as a symptom of the ageist mindset that undermines Biden’s stature.

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Another Weapon in the Radicals’ Arsenal: Deepfakes

Deepfakes: when you can’t believe your eyes, what can you believe?

Recently I sent out a link to an article on deepfakes that appeared in Reuters (not paywalled): https://www.reuters.com/world/us/deepfaking-it-americas-2024-election-collides-with-ai-boom-2023-05-30/.

Here’s another perspective from Jim Puzzanghera published in the paywalled Boston Globe where the content is nearly identical but adds a couple of political points.  From the Globe:

There are very few rules right now and few, if any, are likely coming. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation mandating the disclosure of AI in political ads, but no Republicans have signed on.

and . . .

On June 22, the Federal Election Commission deadlocked along party lines on a petition by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen to consider rules banning AI deepfake campaign ads. All three Republicans opposed the move, with GOP commissioner Allen Dickerson saying the agency lacked the authority.

and . . .  from Republican strategist Eric Wilson (not to be confused with the true conservative and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Rick Wilson)  who maintains that regulation isn’t needed right now:

I want to tamp down the moral panic because this is something that happens with any new technology. You go back to TV debates and people were worried about what that would do for voters,” he said. “We’re having conversations about it, but no one’s sitting around and having struggle sessions around artificial intelligence on our side. . . . 

We are unlikely to see professional campaigns use generative AI for disinformation purposes. That’s not to say that malign actors like nation states aren’t going to try it.

Yeah.  What malign nation states could Wilson possibly be referring to? Maybe states like Russian and China that are already hard at work confusing the American public with fake news and outright untruths? Who are already busy trying to undermine trust in our institutions, particularly the federal government? Who are hoping for an America increasingly fragmented into warring tribes? Whose activities support the agenda of the Radical Right? Those nation states?

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The Liberal Conspiracy Theory We’ve All Been Waiting For

[Note: by Liberal Conspiracy Theory I mean not a theory about liberals, but a theory held  by liberals about the Deep Right.]

Who’s dying of Covid-19?

To state the obvious—I know you’ve been thinking it, but are wary of seeming too paranoid—the Trumpian Right is getting just what it wants out of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Steven Miller goes home at night chortling at the latest death toll—OK, he may be sorry about some bigoted Trump fans dying (there’s always collateral damage in a righteous war), but not enough to suppress his glee at the bigger picture.

Those who are dying in the greatest numbers, out of proportion to their fraction of the population:

(1) People in big cities: New York; Philadelphia; Chicago; Detroit; Boston; Baltimore  . . .

(2) Minorities, African-Americans in particular: for example, in Wisconsin 40 percent of Covid-19 fatalities are blacks, and they represent 6 percent of the population.

(3) Prisoners, with blacks being imprisoned across the U.S. at five times the rate of whites.

(4)  The elderly—in the U.S. as of March 16, 80% of Covid-19 deaths were in people age 65 or older.

(5) People with serious underlying health conditions.

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Bread and Circuses in the Trump Era: Part IV of Treading into Darkness

[“Bread and circuses” was a satirical term coined by Roman poet Juvenal to characterize how Roman rulers kept the masses compliant with the provision of bread (Roman agriculture was very wheat-intensive) and circuses—public entertainment such as chariot races in the Circus Maximus, and bloody spectacles such as gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum.  Here, the target of Juvenal’s scorn was a disengaged, passive citizenry. He also had plenty of scorn for other forms of decadence prevalent in the Rome of his time.]

Republicans grovel, Trump soars, democracy frays, and who cares?

Two days after the Republican-dominated Senate acquitted Donald Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the President’s public approval ratings shot up to 49 percent. Stunning, until you look back on the week that was and saw that two events, external to the impeachment trial, had shaped the public mood: (1) the Superbowl three days before the acquittal, and (2) the Iowa caucuses, the day before the acquittal. The first drew a TV audience of 100 million (almost a third of the country’s population) and $10,000 per ticket.  In the second (the caucuses), some missteps by the organizers delayed the vote count, to the delight of the media who were all over the story like flies on a pile of horse droppings.

The Superbowl buildup during the previous week outshone the impeachment trial in the Senate (viewership less than a tenth of Superbowl-watchers), where the Democratic managers were proving that the President had clearly abused his power, and pointed out that, if he were acquitted, he would continue to do so with a sense of impunity (not just a sense of it, but with actual impunity). Part of the fallout from that week was the precedent set by the Senate refusing to call for witnesses and documents that in the normal run of things would be part of any trial. This pseudo-trial was not in the normal run of things—no run but more like a march toward the edge of a cliff.

All the time the managers were unintentionally proving that the American people care more about football  than the rule of law. If 100 million folks watched the Superbowl, you can be sure that at least 30 million of them were feeling a steady upward climb in football fever in the two weeks between the conference championships and the Big Event.

Continue reading “Bread and Circuses in the Trump Era: Part IV of Treading into Darkness”

Senate Republicans 51, America 0 – Part III of Treading into Darkness

U.S. Senate casts vote for nihilism

9 p.m., January 31, 2020

Here I’ve been working intermittently for weeks on drafts of Part III of Treading into Darkness—researching the effects of social media—and now the Senate Republicans (almost all of them) have made easy work of this installment. One of the most ugly gifts that has ever been handed to me.

The impact of the vote not to allow witnesses or documents in the impeachment trial is far broader than a judgment upon the person of Donald Trump.  What the Senate has just done can be used henceforward by the executive branch to shield it from any investigation by Congress being performed in a timely fashion.  That’s because the task of taking the subpoenas through the courts while being continuously obstructed can take months or even years.  That’s exactly what the administration has been counting on with their refusal to turn over documents since last fall.

I can’t see the vote by the Republicans representing anything better than a descent into nihilism. Truth doesn’t matter, justice doesn’t matter, the checks and balances we thought were built into the Constitution don’t matter, the will of the American people (75% wanted witnesses) doesn’t matter, the idea that no one in America is above the law has just been completely trashed.  And government by a gang of thugs has been validated.

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Warren – Sanders: the non-handshake that shook progressives

Fundamentally, Bernie Sanders is another clueless male

When there was so much dust being kicked up around the contretemps between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, at first I thought – meh, she’ll get over it, or he’ll find a way to resolve it  that will bring her around; the dust will settle and things will go on as before . . . .  Such was his expectation after Warren charged him with calling her a liar on national television . . . then, when Warren refused his handshake and waited, looking him in the eye with clasped hands, as if beseeching him to admit a wrong, he said they should talk about it later and turned aside.

It doesn’t matter if “things will go on as before” on the surface, because at a deep level the damage has been done, and given what we saw, it will continue to get done.

Reflecting on my own version of male cluelessness, I have a good guess as to what must have happened to (1) elicit Elizabeth Warren’s fury over Sanders telling her a woman couldn’t get to be president, then denying it; and (2) explain his denial.

I think it comes down to Sanders just not getting it. Whatever his exact words, she took it as an aspersion back then, and in the heat of the Iowa race felt driven to spit it out. And Sanders, instead of taking her to heart, instead of conceding he may have made a mistake, flatly denied saying it.

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Tyrant in Your Pocket: Part II of Treading into Darkness

So much of dictatorial power comes from just showing up. Everywhere.

Soon after my return from Vietnam, I was living in Boston and saw a notice of an upcoming Black Panther Party meeting.  At the time I wasn’t sure just what they were doing, but I knew one of their primary objectives was protecting the black community from aggressive policing.

In the Army I had rubbed shoulders with enough African-Americans to understand what comes of being systematically oppressed. Although I was troubled  by the shootings of police on the West Coast, the Panthers’ Boston chapter had not been accused of violence, and was  ostensibly oriented toward helping blacks with food and education—it seemed like a positive move toward peaceful support of the black community.

I went to the meeting, curious to see what was up, and even considering helping them out. I also had a notion of showing that not all white people were clueless.

But I was greatly disappointed.  It was a small gathering of young black men in a windowless room (lacking windows made sense, but it was depressing nonetheless). While I, as the only white person there, was understandably greeted with suspicion, they seemed more curious than hostile. It was a good start. But then I began asking questions, and before answering, whoever I was talking to would consult the Little Red Book (“The Sayings of Chairman Mao”) which everyone possessed.  Where the book was not actually lying out in full view on a table or shelf, it would be in someone’s pocket—pants pocket, shirt pocket, out it came.

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Democracy’s Downward Slide and Totalitarianism’s Upward March – Treading into Darkness, Part I

Recession of democracy

On the day I began writing this (December 18), the depressing spectacle of the House of Representatives impeachment vote on Donald Trump occurred, and I happened to come across an even more depressing op-ed by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post.  Zakaria described a trend toward repression of minorities, tribalism, and incipient totalitarianism.

    • The widening schism between Hindus and Muslims in India,  now being codified into laws that repress the latter. For a look at the rising persecution of Muslims in India, check out this in The New Yorker.
    • Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Trumplike attack on the Israeli justice system, together with an accusation that the police and prosecutors are attempting a coup.
    • Hungary’s  Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s moves to silence opposition voices, curtail the power of local governments, and throttle immigration with fences and razor wire and a limit of 10 asylum applications per day.
    • The massive government persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
    • White-hot partisanship in the U.S. political system (compounded by the resurgence of White Nationalism), whipped up by a demagogue whose bent is toward autocracy.

Zakaria refers to the human rights watchdog group Freedom House finding a worldwide decline in global freedom over the past 13 years. He quotes Stanford’s Larry Diamond, coeditor of The Journal of  Democracy, saying that we are seeing a worldwide “Democratic Recession.” Zakaria puts it more strongly: it may be a “Democratic Depression.”

Totalitarianism in the Information Age: the China model

To Zakaria’s list, we can add human-rights abuses in China, on the cusp of becoming a totalitarian surveillance state (more on that in later parts of Treading into Darkness).  The Chinese leadership’s actions to control its population is pulling it so far away from democracy that democratic aspirations are destined to become an illusion for the people of China (no matter what the outcome in Hong Kong).  The Artificial Intelligence-assisted mass surveillance system they have developed in the Xinjiang region to control, police, detain,  sometimes torture, and imprison minorities (such as the Uighur Muslims) serves as a model to extend throughout China going forward.

Continue reading “Democracy’s Downward Slide and Totalitarianism’s Upward March – Treading into Darkness, Part I”

Fake Fears, Legit Fears . . . and Fears of the Undefinable

Happy? Thanksgiving?

Yes, it’s still a beautiful world in  many respects.  So as we head into the holidays with visions of impeachments dancing in our heads, let us rejoice that: we are not in a nuclear war; Donald Trump has not assumed dictatorial powers; William Barr is about to resign in disgrace;* Adam Schiff has not been assassinated (as of this writing); Russia has not annexed the whole of Ukraine; New York City is still above sea level; more than a dozen elephants remain in the wild;  Ruth Bader Ginsburg lives on; and Artificial Intelligence has still not determined that it’s worth taking over this messy, irrational, bigotry-infested world. 

You have much to be thankful for. You can be thankful that, despite much Fox News/National Enquirer-generated fake news, we do not have on our southern border hordes of raping, thieving, murderous people  itching to invade the U.S. and take away our jobs; Ukraine is not hacking our elections although Russia has and is; a non-negligible number of Americans actually understand the value of the rule of law; wind turbines do not cause cancer;  the mainstream media are not Enemies of the People; vaccines do not cause autism; Hillary Clinton is not running a child sex ring; a majority of Americans actually do believe that guns kill people; George Soros has no plan to undermine the American political system.

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Trump’s Immaturity Defense

Are you guilty if you don’t know right from wrong?

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if the inability to tell right from wrong is a sign of insanity.  What I know of it comes from TV shows, movies, and written fiction. In those cases not knowing right from wrong  is a symptom of either insanity or serious mental defect, which exempts the defendant for responsibility for their acts. 

This line of thinking appears to be the line which the defenders of the President are taking.  Trump said the phone call was “perfect”—that’s the one where he was shaking down the president of Ukraine for political purposes.

The Republican defenders are now casting this manipulation of the newly elected president of a vulnerable, militarily dependent ally as a proper exercise of diplomacy. No matter that this is preposterous—when you are forced to defend the indefensible, any weapon that comes to hand is better than nothing.

It boils down to, the President gets a pass because he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Based on a life in which Donald Trump has been largely unaccountable for his actions, this is perfectly plausible.

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