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contemplatingoutlander · 2 months

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Interesting proposal by Nate Loewentheil in a guest column in The New York Times. Not only was his proposal thought provoking, but two of the comments regarding it by readers were also worth contemplating. Below are some excerpts from the column, followed by the two comments.

Here is a proposal for the environmental movement: Pool philanthropic funds for a day, buy a small plot of land in Washington, D.C., and put up a tall marble wall to serve as a climate memorial. Carve on this memorial the names of public figures actively denying the existence of climate change. Carve the names so deep and large, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren need not search the archives. This is not a metaphor. The problem with climate change is the disconnect between action and impact. If politicians vote against construction standards and a school collapses, the next election will be their last. But with climate change, cause and effect are at a vast distance. We are already seeing the consequences of our past and present greenhouse gas emissions. In coming decades, those emissions will wreak their full havoc on the climate, and it will take hundreds, possibly thousands, of years for those pollutants to fully dissipate. But in the short term, the most immediate burdens are borne mostly by the poor in America and distant people in distant lands. Misaligned incentives are at the heart of why some political and business leaders deny and delay. [...] I would first nominate those who have sown confusion over climate science, like Myron Ebell, who recently retired as director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, where he sought to block climate change efforts in Congress, and served as the head of Donald Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Ebell has argued that the idea that climate change is “an existential threat or even crisis is preposterous.” Then there are lawmakers who have consistently stood in the way of federal action, like the recently retired senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the author of the book “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.” [color emphasis added]

Below is the first thought provoking comment to this article:

There is, in Iceland, a memorial to a dead glacier - the Ok Glacier. It reads: "Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it." [color emphasis added] --Chris D., Colorado

Photo of the plaque at the at the Okjökull (OK Glacier) memorial.

Here is the second thought provoking comment to this article:

For reference this graph https://i.redd.it/ljifc828iui31.jpg is from the Exxon internal scientific report on climate change, 1982, produced by scientists working for that fossil fuel corporation. Look at what their graph predicted for 2020. Approaching 420 ppm CO2 and a rise of 1.2 C degrees above pre-industrial temperature - very close to what we actually got in 2020. Then look at what the graph shows for later this century, based on not reducing emissions. Very serious temperature rises, that could make agriculture very difficult in many countries. Yes, and then Exxon, having seen this, got involved in PR campaigns to "cast doubt" on climate science, to protect their assets. [color emphasis added] --Erik Frederiksen, Ashville, NC

1982 Exxon graph depicting average global temperature increases over time correlating with increases in atmospheric CO2. NOTE: Graph color was modified for greater clarity.

Fossil fuel companies like Exxon, and fossil fuel oligarchs like the Koch brothers should be included in any "Climate Wall of Shame."

#climate change #disinformation about climate change #climate change deniers #climate wall of shame #myron ebell #james inhofe #koch brothers #exxon #fossil fuel industry #ok glacier memorial #nate loewentheil #the new york times

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tomorrowusa · 1 year

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DW debunked disinformation in circulation about renewable sources of energy.

After the debunking segment, they looked into where the disinformation was coming from and who kept recirculating it. Rightwing think tanks funded by fossil fuel companies play a significant role. Of course far right politicians also add to the mix of Earth-hating crap.

It was cool to see a factchecker listed in the credits for the vid at YouTube.

Also in the credits was a link to The Debunking Handbook – written by scholars at 20 universities in 5 countries. The handbook, first written in 2011 and updated in 2020, is published in 18 languages in addition to English.

Debunking Handbook 2020

#climate change #debunking crap about renewable energy #wind turbines #solar power #renewable energy #carbon footprint #disinformation #misinformation #rightwing think tanks #rightwing media #smear campaign #fossil fuel companies #mark jacobson #auke hoekstra #paulina jaramillo #neil johnson #malte rohwer-kahlmann #debunking handbook

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thrivingisthegoal · 12 days

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I'm sure you may have seen a lot of "how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation" posts, but we're experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest's to put pressure on the internet. And it's been really concentrated for a few months.

The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it's important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn't pay for it if they didn't need it.

Most of the disinfo looks like "yeah climate change is real but we can't possibly do anything to fix it" or "these solutions simply don't work." about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.

So if you wake up today and ask "what can I do today that makes a difference?" is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding people, cool solutions to targeting methane, etc. Post about a climate book or show you liked, or whatever. Just make sure it's clear to an onlooker that there are people who believe climate change is anthropogenic, it was mostly caused by extractive practices and fossil fuel use, and that we can still demand rapid action to fix it. And all of this is true, because the science supports it.

#solarpunk #sustainability #climate change #climate crisis #activism #hope #disinformation

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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 10 months

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“By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn’t shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn—whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred—has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology—and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence—deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine.

Last year, I resigned as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a policy-coordination body that the Biden administration let founder amid criticism mostly from the right. In subsequent months, at least three artificially generated videos that appear to show me engaging in sex acts were uploaded to websites specializing in deepfake porn. The images don’t look much like me; the generative-AI models that spat them out seem to have been trained on my official U.S. government portrait, taken when I was six months pregnant. Whoever created the videos likely used a free “face swap” tool, essentially pasting my photo onto an existing porn video. In some moments, the original performer’s mouth is visible while the deepfake Frankenstein moves and my face flickers. But these videos aren’t meant to be convincing—all of the websites and the individual videos they host are clearly labeled as fakes. Although they may provide cheap thrills for the viewer, their deeper purpose is to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out. I am somewhat inured to this abuse, after researching and writing about it for years. But for other women, especially those in more conservative or patriarchal environments, appearing in a deepfake-porn video could be profoundly stigmatizing, even career- or life-threatening.

As if to underscore video makers’ compulsion to punish women who speak out, one of the videos to which Google alerted me depicts me with Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg. Because of their global celebrity, deepfakes of the former presidential candidate and the climate-change activist are far more numerous and more graphic than those of me. Users can also easily find deepfake-porn videos of the singer Taylor Swift, the actress Emma Watson, and the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly; Democratic officials such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the Republicans Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik; and countless other prominent women. By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women. The reasons for this disproportion are interconnected, and are both technical and motivational: The people making these videos are presumably heterosexual men who value their own gratification more than they value women’s personhood. And because AI systems are trained on an internet that abounds with images of women’s bodies, much of the nonconsensual porn that those systems generate is more believable than, say, computer-generated clips of cute animals playing would be.

As I looked into the provenance of the videos in which I appear—I’m a disinformation researcher, after all—I stumbled upon deepfake-porn forums where users are remarkably nonchalant about the invasion of privacy they are perpetrating. Some seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images—that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody. Others apparently think that simply by labeling their videos and images as fake, they can avoid any legal consequences for their actions. These purveyors assert that their videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. But by using that description for videos of well-known women being “humiliated” or “pounded”—as the titles of some clips put it—these men reveal a lot about what they find pleasurable and informative.

Ironically, some creators who post in deepfake forums show great concern for their own safety and privacy—in one forum thread that I found, a man is ridiculed for having signed up with a face-swapping app that does not protect user data—but insist that the women they depict do not have those same rights, because they have chosen public career paths. The most chilling page I found lists women who are turning 18 this year; they are removed on their birthdays from “blacklists” that deepfake-forum hosts maintain so they don’t run afoul of laws against child pornography.

Effective laws are exactly what the victims of deepfake porn need. Several states—including Virginia and California—have outlawed the distribution of deepfake porn. But for victims living outside these jurisdictions or seeking justice against perpetrators based elsewhere, these laws have little effect. In my own case, finding out who created these videos is probably not worth the time and money. I could attempt to subpoena platforms for information about the users who uploaded the videos, but even if the sites had those details and shared them with me, if my abusers live out of state—or in a different country—there is little I could do to bring them to justice.

Representative Joseph Morelle of New York is attempting to reduce this jurisdictional loophole by reintroducing the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, a proposed amendment to the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Morelle’s bill would impose a nationwide ban on the distribution of deepfakes without the explicit consent of the people depicted in the image or video. The measure would also provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.

In the absence of strong federal legislation, the avenues available to me to mitigate the harm caused by the deepfakes of me are not all that encouraging. I can request that Google delist the web addresses of the videos in its search results and—though the legal basis for any demand would be shaky—have my attorneys ask online platforms to take down the videos altogether. But even if those websites comply, the likelihood that the videos will crop up somewhere else is extremely high. Women targeted by deepfake porn are caught in an exhausting, expensive, endless game of whack-a-troll.

The Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act won’t solve the deepfake problem; the internet is forever, and deepfake technology is only becoming more ubiquitous and its output more convincing. Yet especially because AI grows more powerful by the month, adapting the law to an emergent category of misogynistic abuse is all the more essential to protect women’s privacy and safety. As policy makers worry whether AI will destroy the world, I beg them: Let’s first stop the men who are using it to discredit and humiliate women.

Nina Jankowicz is a disinformation expert and the author of How to Be a Woman Online and How to Lose the Information War.

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eretzyisrael · 2 months

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Opinion

By MICHAEL KAYE Published: FEBRUARY 28, 2024 03:04 THE WRITER speaks at a marketing conference in New York City wearing a #EndJewHatred T-shirt.(photo credit: COURTESY MICHAEL KAYE)

It’s been almost five months since October 7, a day that completely changed the lives of more than 15 million Jews around the world. But the aftermath of the attack is still present, months later. In many ways, it feels as though this nightmare just happened, while at other moments, it’s hard to remember what life was like before that day of terror.

I am not fluent in Hebrew. I do not wear a kippah. I have almost 30 tattoos. I am not your stereotypical Jew, but I have become a proud Jewish activist. But October 7 changed me, as it did many others. Who I was before is someone I can never be again. I cannot be complicit or silent. I donate to the Anti-Defamation League; I speak at conferences wearing an #EndJewHatred T-shirt; I never leave home without Jewish-themed jewelry; and I use my social media platforms to discuss the rising antisemitism on college campuses across the United States and around the world.

As someone who was educated at a Jewish school and learned about the Holocaust, I am no stranger to antisemitism or the dangerous impact it can have. My earliest memories include being taught by my parents to be proud but quiet about my Judaism, having swastikas carved on my school playground, being immediately evacuated on September 11, and always leaving my Star of David at home when traveling.

During my childhood and teenage years, I heard from and met many Holocaust survivors, including Elie Wiesel. I listened to their stories about how the world remained silent.

Today, it feels like the beginning of a second Holocaust. That is why I cannot remain silent.

A scary time to be Jewish

For this Jewish New Yorker, it’s a scary time to be Jewish. The American Jewish Committee’s State of Antisemitism in America report found that 93% of American Jews surveyed think antisemitism is a problem in the United States and 86% believe antisemitism in the country has increased over the past five years.

In November, I attended the March for Israel in Washington. Around me were Jewish people from Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Richmond, San Diego, and Queens. A man from Brooklyn put tefillin (phylacteries) on me; it was the first time I had worn tefillin in almost 20 years. I even got to meet Julia Haart and Miriam Haart from Netflix’s My Unorthodox Life, who grew up in a religious community not too far from me. While there, I realized this gathering had the most Jews I’ve been around since I was in Israel in 2006. It was the safest I had felt in years. But there were also allies, including Congressman Ritchie Torres and CNN contributor Van Jones. That day reminded me of why I am proud to be Jewish and why I cannot be silent about my Judaism any longer.

Since October 7, I have lost hundreds of followers on social media. I have received anti-Israel and anti-Jewish messages, even threats. But I am not alone. The AJC found that six in 10 people have come across antisemitic content online, and 78% of American Jews feel less safe as Jews in the United States since that horrific day.

To many of us, the current climate feels different. We’re feeling angry, confused, and isolated. In my lifetime, I have watched the nation unite after domestic and foreign terrorist attacks, social justice actions, and wars. Rarely, outside of politics, have I seen us this divided: the Jewish community against everyone else. Overnight, people who had never spoken about any Middle Eastern wars became experts on the conflict. Disinformation spread like wildfire across social media, and much of it felt aimed at damaging or discrediting Jews and Zionists. Almost immediately after October 7, it was not only taboo to express sympathy for the Israelis who were captured or murdered; it was discouraged and forbidden, often met with attacks, both physical and verbal.

BUT THROUGH these painful months, there have also been glimmers of light.

During this period of mourning, I have watched people of all backgrounds come together – to educate, to grieve, to hope, and to pray. A Christian connection on social media thanked me for sharing educational resources. Jewish friends from elementary school and high school reached out. A Muslim friend held my hand as I cried, and another has been checking on me periodically for months. These are the moments I have chosen to cling to.

Our future is not where one side loses and another wins. It’s where we all unite.

The writer is an award-winning communications strategist, data storyteller, purpose-driven marketer, and educator based in New York City. He often speaks about antisemitism, LGBTQ+ rights, and social justice issues.

#Israel #antisemitism #israel hamas war

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acti-veg · 3 months

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Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.

“They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilization,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami.

“These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years – for twice my lifetime – and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry’s denial of basic climate science decades later.”

#climate crisis #fossil fuels #climate change #articles

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mariacallous · 3 months

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In April 2018, I was invited by the American ambassador to a meeting at the embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. The ambassador had assembled a group of nongovernmental organization (NGO) leaders in the field of disinformation to meet with a senior Trump administration official from the State Department. He asked us to describe the main narratives of Kremlin disinformation. As the director of a large international democracy organization, I highlighted Russia’s manipulation of gender and LGBTQ issues to sway Georgians away from the perceived “cultural decadence” of the European Union. The official’s frustration was palpable. His response, tinged with irritation, was telling: “Is that all you people can talk about? The gays?”

A year before, several international organizations partnered with Georgian parliamentarians on a gender equality assessment, supported by several government donors. This collaboration led to an internal conflict. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) wanted to scrub the original report, as it covered abortion, notably legal in Georgia, while the Swedish government and other stakeholders wanted the complete assessment. As a result, at the time of its release, two distinct reports had to be printed, one with references to abortion and one without.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump emerged victorious from last week’s New Hampshire primary and is likely to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. His closing statement in New Hampshire praised Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who embraces the oxymoronic term “illiberal democracy” while suppressing independent media, civil society, and courts. He has repeatedly emphasized the glory of strongmen like Orban. His foreign policy has been clear: stopping support for Ukraine, NATO, and our European allies.

But while there has been plenty of analysis of Trump’s America First impact on foreign policy and security, less covered is how it will also completely redefine foreign aid as well as the liberal democracy agenda. My experience with the first Trump administration as a senior leader in democracy organizations receiving funding from USAID provides some insight into the foreign-aid agenda of a second, but likely only scratches the surface of what is to come.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, established in 2022, offers a detailed roadmap for revamping USAID under Trump—one that will undermine, eliminate, and censor the critical work of thousands of people and organizations committed to building more just societies. The Heritage Foundation has been staffing and providing a pipeline of ideas to Republican administrations since President Ronald Reagan. Project 2025 is a plan to shape the next Republican administration, and its funders have close ties to Trump. The project’s objective is to replace “deep state” employees with conservative thought leaders to carry out an executive-driven agenda.

In the overview, the project articulates its goal to end what it calls USAID’s “divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” A key component of the illiberal playbook is to attack gender and marginalized communities, an early warning sign of democratic backsliding. Illiberal strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, exploit traditional hierarchies to divide society and create pecking orders of power. Russia refused to sign, and Turkey withdrew from, the Istanbul Convention, a commitment to protect women from domestic violence. The Narendra Modi administration in India filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court against criminalizing marital rape, arguing it would destabilize marriage. Hungary and Poland lobbied to ban the term “gender equality” in international agreements and implemented anti-LGBTQ policies, including local municipalities adopting “LGBT-free” zones as part of a government-supported “Family Charter” in Poland.

As a first step, Trump’s USAID will “dismantle” all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which Project 2025 calls “discriminatory.” This mandate includes firing the chief diversity officer and all advisors and committees. In 2016, the Obama administration issued a DEI presidential memorandum to ensure USAID, among other agencies, had a diverse and representative workforce. Trump scaled back these efforts. On Jan. 20, 2021, Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that demanded that government agencies devise strategies to tackle DEI issues. Pursuant to this, USAID Administrator Samantha Power signed USAID’s DEI strategy on her first day in May 2021. Project 2025 would reverse this strategy, requiring USAID to “cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda,” which entails support for organizations overseas that work on these issues.

According to Project 2025, Trump’s new USAID will also eliminate the word “gender” full stop, arguing that “Democrat Administrations have nearly erased what females are.” This is bizarre, as I have decades of experience receiving USAID funding for numerous programs to advance women in political life and support women’s organizations. Working for democracy organizations across Asia and the former Soviet Union, I saw USAID provide critical support to expand women’s wings of political parties; recruit women election officials, observers, and administrators; train women’s advocacy and rights organizations; and build women’s committees in parliaments.

The Heritage Foundation report also accuses USAID of “outright bias against men,” an equally strange claim; in fact, gender realignment was needed and implemented. A Trump USAID will fire more than 180 gender advisors and points of contact, who work alongside USAID colleagues “to integrate gender and advance gender equality objectives in USAID’s work worldwide,” and scrub the words “gender,” “gender equality,” and “gender equity” from all documents. This would require a massive purge of decades of USAID materials and websites.

USAID has spent years incorporating gender into all aspects of its programming to ensure the agency addresses the needs of women, including unique development obstacles they face. Removing a gender lens would take us back in time to programming that often harmed women, inadvertently, by failing to analyze the varying effects of programming based on gender and power dynamics in different environments. To erase all of USAID’s tools, learning, and research on how to ensure best practice would have dangerous consequences. For example, when I worked for USAID in Cambodia in the 1990s, the agency supported micro-lending for small community projects, in which most of the loans went to women. This resulted in increased domestic violence, as men were angry about the financial imbalance in the home. Today, USAID has gender analysis and research on risk factors to mitigate against such outcomes.

Relatedly, a Trump USAID will make anti-choice “core” to its mission, removing all “references to ‘abortion,’ ‘reproductive health,’ and ‘sexual and reproductive rights.’” Project 2025’s blueprint singles out specific organizations and U.N. agencies to target and defund. Further, the president himself would have the ability to oversee programming directly: “Current law in the Foreign Assistance Act gives the President broad authority to set ‘such terms and conditions as he may determine’ on foreign assistance, which legally empowers the next conservative President to expand this pro-life policy.” Previous administrations have restricted funding to organizations that provide abortions (the “Mexico City Policy”), which resulted in an increase in maternal and child mortality and unsafe abortions—exactly what the policy claimed to want to prevent. In sub-Saharan Africa, data shows the policy increased abortions by defunding clinics that provided family-planning services. The first Trump administration expanded restrictions further, impacting speech and service delivery around the world.

A Trump USAID would not only stop funding local partner organizations that support gender, LGBTQ, and rights agendas but redirect that money to religious organizations. In fact, it would mandate training and indoctrination for all USAID staff on the link between religion and development. USAID would also ensure conservative oversight of all grantmaking to ensure against “progressive policies” and a “radical agenda.” USAID already engages with faith-based partnerships, alongside secular NGOs, but Project 2025 would like to shift the balance, creating a “New Partnership Initiative” that would help prioritize religious groups.

A stated “key outcome of the transformation of USAID” under Trump will be a complete revamp of the Bureau for Democracy, Development, and Innovation, shifting its focus to trade, the private sector, and religious communities, and purging staff. Importantly, all directors of each center—not just the assistant administrator—will have political leadership, not career experts. In addition, Trump’s USAID will rewrite all policy “as soon as possible” to ensure a conservative agenda.

During the first Trump administration, I felt the impact in my work overseas. I worked closely with the LGBTQ community in Georgia, which faced horrific obstacles—ostracization, violence, homelessness—and which was targeted relentlessly by Kremlin information operations. USAID has long been a defender of human rights and funded projects on these issues. There was a shift under Trump, though I applaud individual USAID employees for creatively trying to find workarounds and continue support—like slight renaming of initiatives or cleverly filing them under more favorable, broader categories like “human rights.” They no doubt prevented damaging cuts to our important work.

I am far more worried about the impact of a second administration. Back then, there was no concrete, detailed roadmap like Project 2025 and no massive replacement of foreign aid professionals with conservative political operatives. Under a second administration, under Schedule F, Trump has planned a sweeping political takeover of our civil service, stripping civil servants of protection, forcing them to implement his political policy agenda, and giving the president unilateral power to fire employees at will.

The organization I now work for, the German Marshall Fund, supports hundreds of civil society organizations across the Balkans, Black Sea region, Ukraine, and Central Europe—thanks to more than a decade of USAID support. USAID has encouraged our goals of promoting democracy; bolstering the rights of women, LGBTQ, and other marginalized communities; and deterring illiberalism through independent media, watchdog organizations, and information integrity efforts. We do this through grantmaking, capacity-building and technical assistance, leadership programs, and policy dialogues.

With democracy in global decline and illiberal strongmen on the rise, we need these efforts more than ever. Backsliding elsewhere affects democracy everywhere. America benefits from strong, free, liberal societies—it is in our national interest and key to our global security and order. While few voters go to the polls with foreign aid on their minds, the consequences for millions of people worldwide are on the ballot this November.

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finelinens · 4 months

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thinking about the current state of internet literacy actually makes me feel a bit ill, to be honest. it makes me feel scared for the future. editing is so easy and ai has become so commonplace and so well-trained (thanks to the enthusiastic participation of those using ai for "art" and those using ai for memes) that now we cannot even trust what is documented in photos and videos online. there is a serious dearth of education, resources to build an education, and even interest in getting an education in internet literacy. we live in an age of misinformation and so many of us are just more than happy to join in as long as it serves our own interests. it is genuinely very scary. yes i'm a dream fan so of course i care that he was just made a victim of a years-long smear campaign that was widely believed online with little to no substantiated evidence to support any of it. but that situation was, and continues to be, just a symptom of a much larger and much more insidious issue. truly, i am scared for the future of information. i don't know how we will be able to verify things, i don't know how we will be able to trust sources, and i don't know how we will be able to trust each other. i'm sure we will find a way, but i just fear the things that will happen and the harm that will be done in the meantime. look at this excerpt from the book "anti-social media" released 5 years ago, and just think about how things have progressed:

there are a lot of reasons to not trust institutions such as universities and government agencies, but we can't trust anything now and that may be an even more concerning issue. the author goes on to say "what has changed is the social dynamics of identifying as a member of a group that holds positions like climate change is fictional or vaccines are dangerous have found new ways to assemble and reinforce their practices of acculturation." the stances of fringe groups are becoming more and more mainstream because misinformation and disinformation are often given just as much social prevalence as anything else. i work in a library that holds current events discussions, so i see what happens when people get all of their information from social media and don't take any time to verify or even just think about what they see. because they likely just don't know how to go about that process. i hate to think that it's all willful ignorance, i can't think that or i'll go fucking crazy.

we can't trust each other and we can't trust any institutions of information, but we trust whatever google pushes to the top of the results and whatever twitter's algorithm puts on our for you page. it's dangerous. there is no filtering out the noise, it's just all noise all the time. i'm tired. i'm tired of seeing so much yet feeling like i don't know anything, because i can't know anything.

i'm being pessimistic right now and i don't know if i'm even making sense, i'm just typing out my thoughts, but i just fear for the future of information and i don't know what to do about it. i feel like i'm watching a car crash in slow motion.

#idk if i'll answer any asks about this because it bums me the fuck out to think about LOL i just needed to say it #i hope literally any of this makes sense

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solarwynd · 22 days

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I am doing my research in media and sub cultures and bts fandom is such an intriguing cesspool of phenomenon. I was talking to a peer about some of these narratives surrounding JM and how they often paint him as evil etc, they raised a good point. Narratives can’t be wiped clean. Stories can be proven wrong. But narratives are more than that. If someone buys into a narrative, proving it isn’t wrong kinda becomes their motive. For instance if person A believes JM is a bad friend to Taehyung and is distracting the youngest with his sexual super powers (typing that out made me gag), ensuring that this narrative is real and true is their goal. The moment you refute it, they go into denial. They double down. Facts don’t matter. Real footage doesn’t matter. What any of the three do and say don’t matter. If it did, flat earthers won’t exist. Climate deniers won’t exist.

PJMs have to start driving narratives from the front, especially using YouTube shorts, Instagram and TikTok about JM, about how HYBE treats him and how he’s a better human than most of the crew. You can’t play fair to fight disinformation. You need narratives that would override it all, that’s rooted in sentiments.

Idk if this is relevant at all to anyone, but please shout for Jimin from every corner and call out everything because this fandom actively works against him.

These are all very good points, but pjms have been doing what you described for ages. Even when I was an army, I observed that one of the main actions solos in general would do is proving how their bias was mistreated and wronged in some shape or form. (Even if it was nonsensical, which in most cases it was) In recent times where the sabotage is still at its peak for Jimin I’ve seen countless threads and vids detailing how hybe fucked him over, or correcting misinfo from shippers. It doesn’t change anything because like you said they’re set in their beliefs and just have unadulterated hatred for Jimin.

There was an anon I had a while back that had suggested that pjms needed to start making positive vids about jimin. Like showing off his personality and talents and I’d more agree with doing that because that’s more likely to bring in new fans or ward off any bad vibes for the fresher ones. I think constantly surrounding the stanning experience of jimin in negativity can turn out to be draining if all anyone on the outside sees is him being dogged on and mistreated. The best thing I’d say is to drown it out with info on him and for people to see how amazing he truly is, cause I’ve seen it work in the past.

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tomorrowusa · 10 months

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A lot of people won't like hearing this, but the meat industry is terrible for this planet.

Last weekend, Elon Musk posted one of his more outrageously false tweets to date: “Important to note that what happens on Earth’s surface (eg farming) has no meaningful impact on climate change.” Musk was, as he has been from time to time, wrong. As climate experts rushed to emphasize, farming actually accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Musk spewing disinformation is not exactly news. But even by his standards, his contention regarding livestock agriculture and climate was on a par with George Santos's fantasies.

The tens of billions of chickens, pigs, cows, and other animals we raise and slaughter for food annually account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from cow burps, animal manure, and the fertilizer used to grow the corn and soy they eat. More than one-third of the Earth’s habitable land is used for animal farming — much of it cleared for cattle grazing and growing all thatcorn and soy — making animal agriculture the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss globally. Deforestation causes emissions itself, but it also represents a missed opportunity to sequester carbon. If that land were “rewilded,” or retired as farmland, it would act as a carbon sink, sucking massive amounts of climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. But we keep clearing more and more forestland, especially in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere in the tropics, mostly for beef, pork, and poultry.

Yep, livestock grazing accounts for almost a third of our usable land.

The message regarding livestock agriculture just isn't getting out.

Madre Brava also conducted a media analysis that found that between 2020 and 2022, less than 0.5 percent of stories about climate change by leading news outlets in the US, the United Kingdom, and Europe mentioned meat or livestock. Last month, two groups that work on issues related to animal agriculture — Sentient Media and Faunalytics — published an analysis with similar findings. The organizations looked at the 100 most recent climate change stories from each of the top 10 US media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, and found that 7 percent mentioned animal agriculture. Of that 7 percent, most only discussed how climate change-fueled weather events like droughts, floods, and heatwaves impact animal farmers. “Across the 1,000 articles we examined, only a handful of stories reported in depth on the connection between consuming animal products and climate change,” the researchers wrote. The media is an easy target, and some criticism is deserved — it’s a disservice to readers to largely ignore a leading cause of the climate crisis. Part of the problem is that the media, like everyone else, operates in an information environment in which the meat lobby downplays and in some cases suppresses the full extent to which burgers, ribs, and chicken nuggets pollute the planet. But journalists could be doing more to cut through the noise.

We need to speak up more ourselves. Entrenched interests and powerful lobbying groups are not shy about promoting livestock businesses which harm the planet.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the industry’s leading lobby group, runs a “climate messaging machine,” food journalist Joe Fassler recently wrote in the Guardian, that trains influencers to confuse the public and downplay beef’s emissions. The list goes on. Last year, leaked documents showed that delegates from Brazil and Argentina successfully lobbied the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to remove any mention of meat’s negative impact on the environment, or recommendations for people in rich countries to reduce their meat consumption, in its recent report. Meat giant Tyson Foods spends a much bigger share of its revenue than ExxonMobil lobbying Congress to stop climate policy. Outside the animal rights movement, there aren’t many voices pushing back against these narratives. The US environmental movement has largely shied away from campaigning to reduce meat and dairy production, with some leaders outright rejecting the notion that we need to eat fewer animals. Policymakers largely avoid the issue too.

We have a lot of catching up to do – and fast.

“The food conversation is probably about 20 years behind the energy conversation, and it is catching up, but it’s not visceral to people in the way energy is — that they immediately know energy is a climate issue,” said Michael Grunwald, a food and agriculture columnist for Canary Media, in the Sentient Media panel discussion. But time is in short supply. Experts say that if we don’t change what we eat — especially reducing beef and dairy — we can’t meet the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less.

In addition to publicizing the issue, we can lead by example. Eating less meat or even no meat lets people know we're serious about what we're saying.

There will be pushback from the industry and also from populist blowhards. We can imagine at least one saying something like: "Hunter Biden wants to steal your double cheeseburger. SAD!"

But no discussion of carbon emissions is complete without talk of livestock agriculture and its effects.

#the environment #climate change #carbon emissions #meat #livestock agriculture #livestock grazing #deforestation #elon musk #disinformation #rewilding #vegetarian #vegan

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kp777 · 1 year

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By Olivia Rosane

Common Dreams

May 15, 2023

More than 1,000 scientists and academics in over 21 countries engaged in nonviolent protest last week under the banner of Scientist Rebellion to demand a just and equitable end to the fossil fuel era.

At least 19 of the participating scientists were arrested in actions linked to the group's "The Science Is Clear" campaign from May 7-13, organizers said at a Monday press conference. The group believes that researchers must move from informing to advocating in the wake of decades of fossil fuel industry disinformation about the climate crisis and the downplaying or ignoring of their warnings by governments and media organizations.

"It's urgent that scientists come out of their laboratories to counter the lies," Laurent Husson, a French geoscientist from ISTerre, said.

"Experts on tropical rainforests told me privately that they think the Amazon has already passed its tipping point. Let that sink in. The world needs to know."

Participating scientists in Africa, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America organized more than 30 discrete events during May's spate of actions. Scientific Rebellion is concerned that climate policy is not in line with official warnings like the final Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of the decade, released earlier this year, which called for "rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate" reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in its "Summary for Policymakers."

However, some scientist-activists say that what researchers discuss internally is even more alarming.

"I was just at a NASA team meeting for three days in D.C.," Peter Kalmus tweeted Wednesday. "The scientific findings are so fucked up. Experts on tropical rainforests told me privately that they think the Amazon has already passed its tipping point. Let that sink in. The world needs to know."

The Science Is Clear campaign had three clear demands: that governments rapidly decarbonize their infrastructure in coordination with citizens assemblies that would also address growing inequality, that the Global North both provide money to the Global South to help them pay for the inevitable loss and damage caused by the climate crisis and forgive their outstanding debt, and that ecosystems and the Indigenous people and local communities that depend on them be protected from extractive industries.

Local actions also had independent demands in line with these goals. For example, Rose Abramoff—a U.S.-based scientist and IPCC reviewer—helped disrupt a joint session of the Massachusetts Legislature Wednesday with the demands that Massachusetts ban all new fossil fuel infrastructure and fund a just transition to renewable energy. The activists, who also included members of Extinction Rebellion, occupied the House Gallery for six hours before they were arrested.

Abramoff said at the press conference that she joined Scientific Rebellion when the data turned up by her field work grew too alarming.

"This can't be my job to just calmly document destruction without doing anything to prevent it," she said.

She has now been arrested six times including Wednesday. And while she was fired from one job, she remains employed, housed, and healthy with a clean record.

"I think more scientists and other people with privilege should be taking these measures," she said.

Janine O'Keefe, an engineer and economist, said she was treated with much more respect by police when she protested in a lab coat compared with when she didn't, and was often not arrested at all.

"I implore you to find the courage to go against the silence," she said.

IPCC author Julia Steinberger also said she felt activism was part of a scientist's duty.

"It is us doing our jobs and holding our government to account on the commitments they have made to protect us."

"It is us doing our jobs and holding our government to account on the commitments they have made to protect us," Steinberger said.

Several other scientists risked arrest alongside allied activists in direct actions throughout the week. Three scientists were arrested for protesting Equinor in Norway. In Italy, police stopped activists before they could begin a protest at Turin Airport and arrested all of the would-be participants. In Denmark, five scientists were arrested at protests alongside more than 100 other activists, and in Portugal, scientists and allies managed to block the Porto de Sines—the main entry point for fossil fuels into the country—without any arrests being made.

In France, meanwhile, police arrested 18 activists including five scientists for blocking a bridge in the Port of Le Havre Friday, near where TotalEnergies is building a floating methane terminal for imported liquefied natural gas.

Tanakula, who helped organize marches and spoke to staff and students at her university, pointed out that Africa had only contributed less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions but was on the "frontline" of their impacts, such as extreme flooding May 5 that killed more than 400 people.

"We can't just be observers or do research. We need to engage people, and we need to act in the name of science," Tanakula said.

Scientific Rebellion doesn't just focus on the climate crisis. The Science Is Clear webpage notes that human activity has overshot six of nine planetary boundaries that sustain life on Earth, and that—beyond just the fossil fuel industry—the entire current economic system is to blame.

"The underlying cause of this existential crisis is our growth-based economic system," Matthias Schmelzer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany, said in the press conference.

"The underlying cause of this existential crisis is our growth-based economic system."

More than 1,100 scientists and academics have signed a letter urging both public and private institutions to pursue degrowth—a planned and democratic realignment of the goal of the global economy from increasing gross domestic product to ensuring well-being within planetary boundaries.

Members of Scientific Rebellion expressed optimism that direct action could help push through the changes it seeks. Abramoff pointed to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, which banned private jets months after activists blocked them from taking off. She also argued that two major pieces of U.S. climate legislation—the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law—would not have passed without grassroots pressure.

"I feel that we have so much power," Abramoff said, "and we just have to be brave enough to use it."