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shiredded · 4 years

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A white animation student’s take on Soul and POC cartoons

This got long but there’s lots of pretty pictures to go with it.

Hi, I’m Shire and I’m as white as a ripped-off Pegasus prancing on a stolen van. Feel free to add to my post, especially if you are poc. The next generation of animators needs your voice now more than ever.

My opinion doesn’t matter as much here because I’m not part of the people being represented.

But I am part of the people to whom this film is marketed, and as the market, I think I should be Very Aware of what media does to me.

And as the future of animation, I need to do something with what I know.

I am very white. I have blue eyes and long blond hair. I’ve seen countless protagonists, love interests, moms, and daughters that look like me. If I saw an animated character that looks like me turn into a creature for the majority of a movie, I would cheer. Bring it on! I have plenty of other representation that tells me I’m great just the way I am, and I don’t need to change to be likable.

The moment Soul’s premise was released, many people of color expressed mistrust and disappointment on social media. Let me catch you up on the plot according to the new (march 2020) trailer. (It’s one of those dumb modern trailers that tells you the entire plot of the movie including the climax; so I recommend only watching half of it)

Our protagonist, Joe Gardner, has a rich (not in the monetary sense) and beautiful life. He has dreams! He wants to join a jazz band! So far his life looks, to me, comforting, amazing, heartfelt, and real. I’m excited to learn about his family and his music.

Some Whoknowswhat happens, and he enters a dimension where everyone, himself included, is represented by glowing, blue, vaguely humanoid creatures. They’re adorable! But they sure as heck aren’t brown. The most common response seems to be dread at the idea of the brown human protagonist spending the majority of his screen time as a not-brown, not-human creature.

The latest trailer definitely makes that look pretty darn true. He does spend most of the narrative - chronologically - as a blob.

but

That isn’t the same as his screen time.

From the look of the trailer, Joe and his not-yet-born-but-already-tired-of-life soul companion tour Joe’s story in all of its brown-skinned, human-shaped, life-loving glory. The movie is about life, not about magic beans that sing and dance about burping (though I won’t be surprised if that happens too.)

Basically! My conclusion is “it’s not as bad as it looked at first, and it looks like a wonderful story.”

but

That doesn’t mean it’s ok.

Yes, Soul is probably going to be a really important and heartfelt story about life, the goods, the bads, the dreams, and the bonds. That story uses a fun medium to view that life; using bright, candy-bowl colors and a made-up world to draw kids in with their parents trailing behind.

It’s a great story and there’s no reason to not create a black man for the lead role. There’s no reason not to give this story to people of color. It’s not a white story. This is great!

Except...

we’ve kind of

done this

a lot

The Book of Life and Coco also trade in their brown-skinned cast for a no-skinned cast, but I don’t know enough about Mexican culture to say those are bad and I haven't picked up on much pushback to those. There’s more nuance there, I think.

I cut the above pics together to show how the entire ensemble changes along with the protagonist. We can lose entire casts of poc. Emperor's New Groove keeps its cast as mostly human so at least we have Pacha

And while the animals they interact with might be poc-coded, there’s nothing very special or affirming about “animals of color.”

So, Soul.

Are we looking at the same thing here?

It’s no secret by now that this is an emerging pattern in animation. But not all poc-starring animated films have this same problem. We have Moana! With deuteragonists (basically co-protagonists) of color, heck yeah.

Aladdin... Pocahontas... The respect those films have for their depicted culture is... an essay for another time. Mulan fits here too. the titular characters’ costars are either white, or blue, and/or straight up animals. But hey, they don’t turn into animals, and neither do the supporting cast/love interests.

Dreamworks’ Home (2015) is also worth mentioning as a poc-led film where the deuteragonist is kind of a purple blob. But the thing I like a lot about Home is that it’s A Nice Story, where there’s no reason for the protagonist to not be poc, so she is poc. Spiderverse has a black lead with a white (or masked, or animal) supporting cast. But, spiderverse also has Miles’ dad, mom, uncle, and Penny Parker.

I’d like to see more of that.

And less of this

if you’re still having trouble seeing why this is a big deal, let’s try a little what-if scenario.

This goes out to my fellow white girls (including LGBTA white girls, we are not immune to propaganda racism)

imagine for a second you live in a world where animation is dominated to the point of almost total saturation by protagonist after protagonist who are boys/men. You do get the occasional woman-led film, but maybe pretend that 30 to 40 percent of those films are like

(We’re pretending for a second that Queen Eleanor was the protagonist, because I couldn’t think of any animated movies where the white lady protagonist turns into and stays an animal for the majority of the film)

Or, white boys and men, how would you feel if your most popular and marketable representation was this?

Speaking of gender representation, binary trans and especially nonbinary trans people are hard pressed to find representation of who they are without the added twist of Lizard tails or horns and the hand-waving explanation of “this species doesn’t do gender” But again, that’s a different essay.

Let’s look at what we do have. In reality, we (white people) have so much representation that having a fun twist where we spend most of the movie seeing that person in glimpses between colorful, glittering felt characters that reflect our inner selves is ok.

Wait, that aesthetic sounds kind of familiar...

But I digress. Inside Out was a successful and honestly helpful and important movie. I have no doubt in my mind that Soul will meet and surpass it in quality and and in message.

There is nothing wrong with turning your protagonist of color into an animal or blob for most of their own movie.

But it’s part of a larger pattern, and that pattern tells people of color that their skin would be more fun if it was blue, or hairy, or slimy, or something. It’s fine to have films like that because heck yeah it would be fun to be a llama. But it’s also fun to not be a llama. It’s fun to be a human. It’s fun to be yourself. I don’t think children of color are told that enough.

At least, not by mainstream studios. (The Breadwinner, produced by Cartoon Saloon)

It’s not like all these mainstream poc movies are the result of racist white producers who want us to equate people of color with animals. In fact, most of those movies these days have people of color very high up, as directors, writers, or at the very least, a pool of consultants of color.

These movies aren’t evil. They aren’t even that intrinsically racist (Pocahontas can go take a hike and rethink its life, but we knew that.) It’s that we need more than just the shape-shifting narratives of our non-white protagonists.

It’s not like there isn’t an enormous pool of ideas, talent, visions and scripts already written and waiting to be produced. There is.

But they somehow don’t make it past the head executives, way above any creative team, who make the decisions, aiming not for top-of-the-line stories, but for the Bottom line of sales.

When Disney acquired Pixar, their main takeover was in the merchandising department. The main target for their merchandise are, honestly, white children.

So is it much of a surprise

that they are more often greenlighting things palatable for as many “discerning” mothers as possible?

I saw just as many Tiana dolls as frog toys on the front page of google, so don’t worry too much about The Princess And The Frog. Kids love her. But I didn’t find any human figures of Kenai from Brother Bear, except for dolls wearing a bear suit.

So. What do I think of Soul?

I think it’s going to be beautiful. I think it’s going to be a great movie.

But I also think people of color deserve more.

Let’s take one more look at the top people who went into making this movie.

Of the six people listed here, five are white. Kemp Powers, one of the screenplay writers, is black.

It’s cool to see women reaching power within the animation industry, but this post isn’t about us.

We need to replace the top execs and get more projects greenlit that send the message that african, asian, latinix, middle eastern, and every other non-white ethnicity is perfect and relatable as the humans they were meant to be.

Disney is big enough that they can - and therefore should - take risks and produce movies that aren’t as “marketable” simply because art needs to be made. People need to be loved.

Come on, millennials and Gen Z. We can do better.

We Will do better.

TLDR: A lot of mainstream animation turns its protagonists of color into animals or other creatures. I (white) don’t think that’s a bad thing, except for the fact that we don’t get enough poc movies that AREN’T weird. Support Soul; it’s not going to be as bad as you think. It’s probably gonna be really good. Let’s make more good movies about people of color that stay PEOPLE of color.

#soul #pixar #disney #poc #animation #long post #shire screams

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Wokeness has not simply taken over the CIA, as the entire foreign policy establishment has moved in the same direction. A particularly sinister aspect of this shift is that we are seeing a merger between a fanatical new faith and long-standing institutions specializing in manipulating populations.

Spreading democracy is an important part of American foreign policy. While it’s fashionable to brush off concerns with democracy as hypocritical or just a cover for power politics (“look at Saudi Arabia!”), I believe that outside of the Middle East, where pretty much everyone is non-democratic, American foreign policy is driven by ideological goals that aren’t reducible to material interests.

In this worldview, all countries called “democracies” have reached the end of history, while all others are candidates for regime change, if not today then when the time is right. When countries fight back against this, it’s considered aggression on their part. Hillary Clinton believes that Putin interfered against her in the 2016 election because she spoke out against his government as Secretary of State. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly what I would do if I were Putin, and the lady who tried to overthrow me was running for president.

It seems strange that such a concept would drive US foreign policy, given how little Americans themselves agree on what is or isn’t “democratic.” Was Trump casting doubt on the legitimacy of 2020 “undemocratic”? How about when Democrats did the same in 2016? What about gerrymandering? Court packing?

These are silly debates, and I feel sorry for people who have strong opinions on them, which always boil down to “what my side does is democracy, what the other side does isn’t.”

…

Nonetheless, the American government clearly has something in mind when it uses the term, and it often relies on non-governmental institutions (NGOs) as supposedly objective sources of information. One of the most important of these is Freedom House, and it is therefore worth looking at the organization in some depth.

According to its financial report, in the fiscal year that ended in 2019, Freedom House raised $48 million. Of that, $45 million, or 94%, came from the American government. Its current President is Morton Abramowitz, a lifelong American diplomat. The Chair of the Board is Michael Chertoff, who was Secretary of Homeland Security under the second Bush.

Looking at the 12 members of the Executive Board, and just going off their bios on the Freedom House website, it appears that 6 have had jobs for the federal government, with at least one other appearing to have worked as a government contractor.

You might think that an organization that is funded almost completely by the American government, and staffed by former American officials, wouldn’t have much credibility as an “independent non-governmental organization.” Yet it is called an NGO, and regularly cited by the press as an objective authority on which government actions are legitimate.

Much of what is called “civil society” functions this way. The American government then uses the work of “independent” organizations to justify its own policies, as you can see by going to the State Department website and searching for “Freedom House.”

…

Freedom House has represented the American foreign policy establishment as long as it has existed. According to its own website, the organization at its founding in 1941 had among its leaders Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, the Republican who lost to FDR in 1940. So imagine a “non-governmental organization” today being founded by an alliance of Jill Biden and Donald Trump.

After advocating for American entry into World War II, Freedom House supported the Cold War. Although the website mentions these facts, it tends to downplay or ignore its more recent history, which has involved cheerleading for disastrous wars in the Middle East.

…

So it is this organization, run by former American officials and funded by the US government, whose former Chairman was also the director of the CIA and helped lie the country into Iraq, that is the nation’s most important source for deciding who is or isn’t free.

Recently, Freedom House released its annual report on the state of democracy in the world. It would be one thing if the organization simply declared some countries “democracies” and others not. Instead, it gives a number to each country on a scale that goes up to 100, updating the scores on a yearly basis. So in 2020, Ethiopia gets a 24, Switzerland is a 96, and North Korea is a 3. After 20 years of war, the US has managed to get Afghanistan to 27.

Here’s an interactive map where you can find out how well your country is doing.

There’s actually a formula that they use to calculate each score, although it’s not always clear what causes a country to gain or lose points. 40% of the score is determined by how well a country does on “Political Rights,” and 60% on “Civil Rights,” with subsections under each of these headings.

The 2021 report tells us that 2020 saw “the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” Sounds really bad. But it’s one thing to say, that for example, the US is freer than China, or that the coup in Myanmar was a blow against democracy. It’s quite another to pretend to have a neutral formula that can compare the state of democracy in say Hungary versus France, the US versus Canada, or Syria versus Cuba. But that’s what Freedom House gets tens of millions of dollars a year from the American government to do.

…

In Europe, Freedom House tells us that “Hungary has undergone the biggest decline ever measured in Nations in Transit, plummeting through two categorical boundaries to become a Transitional/Hybrid Regime last year. Poland is still categorized as a Semiconsolidated Democracy.”

That’s a nice coincidence, how the two European countries that have moved in the most conservative policy direction are the ones also becoming more “authoritarian.” Looking in more detail, it appears that Freedom House classifies conservative countries as authoritarian in two ways

1) Portraying things that would otherwise be considered normal politics as “authoritarian”, while ignoring things that are similar or worse when done by non-right wing governments; and

2) Just directly penalizing countries for conservative policies.

…

This map gives the game away.

…

The connection between how many genders a government acknowledges and its level of democracy is never explained. The report also mentions the Polish government’s opposition to abortion and Slovenia reducing funding for its public broadcaster.

Many conservatives in the United States criticize the media and would like to ban abortion, cut funding for NPR, and not have schools teach that gender is a social construct. They may be surprised to learn that they are engaging in “anti-democratic” activities.

To show the kind of hackery at work, here’s the report on Poland for 2020. We are told that the Archbishop of Kraków describes “LGBT as a ‘rainbow plague’ bearing similarities to communism.” So apparently countries are judged based on the wokeness of their clergy, so Poland loses a point in part for that, and appears to get another point deducted for some combination of the government’s positions on birth control, abortion, and gay adoption.

You can really tell that American conservatives annoy Freedom House analysts more than any other people in the world. In the US, not only are conservatives’ views on abortion and gay marriage undemocratic, but so are their positions on organized labor, with Freedom House mentioning a Supreme Court ruling that government employees could not be forced against their will to contribute to public sector unions.

…

Not only does Freedom House portray the behavior of conservative governments in an unflattering light, but it looks past what are much clearer violations of individual liberty and democratic norms when they are committed in the service of left-wing social or political goals.

Sweden, for example, is one of only three countries to receive a perfect score of 100. This is despite having hate speech laws, which have in the past been used to arrest Christian preachers for their interpretation of the Bible. Norway, another “perfect democracy,” in 2020 expanded its hate speech laws to cover gender identity, with punishments of up to three years in prison for violators.

“Whether a country arrests people for speech” seems like it could be a clear criterion an organization interested in democracy can use, but Freedom House prefers a vague points system that allows it to penalize countries for everything it doesn’t like.*

…

As seen above, Freedom House doesn’t mind criticizing the United States; the country after all only gets an 83, making it a not very good democracy. Yet it’s notable what the US doesn’t lose points for: NSA spying programs, and the prosecution of journalists who have brought them to light. Julian Assange is, in the words of Glenn Greenwald, “responsible for breaking more major stories about the actions of top US officials than virtually all US journalists employed in the corporate press combined,” and he’s now facing life in prison. Yet Assange goes unmentioned in the 2020 report, along with Edward Snowden.

On the question “Are there free and independent media?” the US only gets a 3 out of 4, because “Fox News in particular grew unusually close to the Trump administration” and “Trump was harshly critical of the mainstream media throughout his presidency, routinely using inflammatory language to accuse them of bias and mendacity.” The US gets 4/4 on the question “Are individuals free to express their personal views on political or other sensitive topics without fear of surveillance or retribution?” Surveillance programs are mentioned, but here no points are deducted (the US also gets 4/4 on academic freedom).

It’s a strange algorithm that deducts points for criticizing journalists, but not for putting them in jail. It’s the algorithm you’d expect, however, from an organization run by former American government officials.

…

If the US government and the NGOs it relies on define conservatism as undemocratic, we will in the coming years find ourselves having hostile relations with nations that do not threaten American interests and whose only crime is offending the sensibilities of a liberal elite that holds positions that are far from universally accepted within the United States itself.

The potential implications for liberty at home are no less catastrophic. If conservatives are not only wrong, but “undemocratic,” it becomes easier for the other side to justify attempts to silence dissent and take extreme steps to prevent them from coming to power.

The media, when it advocates censorship or government suppression of its enemies, never says that it’s going about silencing dissenting views. Rather, the propaganda it uses involves classifying what the target is saying as “hate,” “disinformation,” or “foreign propaganda” to delegitimize the speech as unworthy of either First Amendment protection or respect from non-government institutions.

…

It’s fine to disagree with many aspects of American conservatism, as I certainly do. And it wouldn’t be correct to say that there is no objective measure of democracy one can use; certainly, some countries pick their leaders through fair elections, and others don’t. But democracy is supposed to involve a respect for various segments of society, and a consideration of their views. A definition of the concept that delegitimizes what large swaths of the population believe about economic and social issues, while overlooking the prosecution of journalists disfavored by American foreign policy elites, is little more than a tool of propaganda and potentially oppression.

Luckily, it’s easier to know what to do about Woke Imperialism than Woke Capital, or Woke Institutions more generally. The national security establishment does not survive by its ability to bring in voluntary donations or make money through selling products and services people want. Freedom House, like many other similar institutions, is almost exclusively dependent on the American taxpayer, despite the NGO label.

Given how much contempt the organization clearly has for a large portion of the public, and the threat to political liberty that can result from identifying democracy with one side of the political spectrum, there is no reason for that support to continue. While cutting it off would certainly be seen as “undemocratic” by Freedom House, it would remain at liberty to continue writing reports at its own expense.

#richard hanania #read the whole thing #freedom house #woke imperialism

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writingquestionsanswered · 5 years

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Rejection Woes

Anonymous said: Hi. I apologise for the missing part. I've been rejected by 250+ agents. Most said I have an intriguing and original premise with complex characters, but it's not right for their list right now. Some loved the concept and writing, asking for the full manuscript, and then rejected it for reasons like it had too hard issues, the violence made them uncomfortable, a character seemed underdeveloped, they didn't connect with the voice, or they simply don't feel passionate enough to represent it. I've had two professional editors and one literary agent look it over. They didn't mention any of the above issues, but felt immersed and connected, and they told me that my manuscript is different. The literary agent also told me to query the best agents out there because that's what my manuscript deserved. I sent it to an independent publishing house for yet another opinion (since I always doubt praise), and the director there compared my writing to Kahlil Gibran and wanted to publish it. However, I have to pay for the publication, and they'll distribute it to Amazon, Waterstones, and Barnes & Nobles, as they have some kind of deal with them. (I checked the publishing house and it's legit).

At this point, I'm so lost and I don't feel like a writer, or that my manuscript is worth being published. I can't figure out if something's wrong with my writing, or if it's just a matter of taste and whether my manuscript fits the format of a mainstream YA Fantasy for the agents. One of the professional editors was also a consultant at a well-known press and she was adamant about acquiring my manuscript from me (claiming that it was a powerful and different manuscript) once I'd cut the things that she wanted me to cut to follow the YA Fantasy formula, so I reworked most of it, but didn't feel comfortable compromising on the things that represented my culture and were essential to the plot. She seemed insulted and rejected me. This entire process of querying, receiving all this contradicting feedback, and being rejected over and over, has convinced me that I don't have what it takes to write a successful story, and my writing isn't good enough for the publishing world. All I wanted was to tell a story that mattered beyond just the entertainment value. To have my voice be heard. I'm sorry for dumping this on you. I don't even know what I'm trying to ask anymore.

First, more than anything else, I want to give you some virtual hugs and make sure you understand that rejection, and having a hard time finding a home for an unusual story, is not a reflection upon the quality of your story and your talent as a writer. It also doesn’t mean there’s not an audience for your book. There’s an audience for everything--it just takes a little longer to find that audience for books that stray from the “tried and true” formula, and neither agents or publishers are interested in putting in the time to search for an audience. (More on that in a bit...)

So, what’s the explanation for the conflict between the praise you’ve received and the inability to find an agent to represent you? The explanation is money. Plain and simple.

You see, the traditional publishing industry has one goal: to make money. Every decision they make is what’s best for the bottom line. And what people may not realize about the publishing industry is that every manuscript they take on presents a potential financial risk. Why? Because they’re going to pour a ton of money into that manuscript in order to turn it into a book that can sit on shelves. They have to buy the manuscript from the agent, thus paying both the agency and the author. They have to pay their in-house team (editors, cover artist, marketing, legal, overseas rights, etc.) to get the book ready for production, and then they have to pay for the physical production of the book and thousands upon thousands of copies. Finally, they have to pay to ship those books out to book stores and Amazon, and they have to pay to promote the book. It’s a costly venture. The cost of publishing a single book for a traditional publisher can be well into the tens of thousands of dollars range, and they not only need to make all of that money back, they want to make a profit, too.

The bottom line is that a traditional publisher is going to do everything they can to minimize that initial risk by making sure every manuscript they take on is one that is likely to do well. In other words, they’re always going to look for books that follow “tried and true” formulas, because they know they’re probably going to sell well. The more a book strays from what’s known to sell well, the bigger a risk it presents. For that reason, books that stray from the usual formula are almost always written by established and successful authors. Why? Because established, successful authors have a built-in fan-base, so their name alone will drive much of the book’s sale. This grants some wiggle room in which the author and publisher can take bigger risks. They’re not going to do that with a debut author or an author with only a few books to their name. So, what can you do? These are your options...

1. Pursue Traditional Publishing with Another Manuscript

If you want to break into traditional publishing, you have to do it with a manuscript that falls in line with current trends and doesn’t push the boundaries too hard. Once you get published and have a few more formulaic books under your belt, if your books sell reasonably well, you can talk to your agent or publisher about the more risky manuscript.

2. Pursue an “Assisted Publishing House” (But Beware...) It’s super important to understand that any publishing house that makes you pay to publish your book isn’t an “independent publishing house” but an “assisted publishing house,” often called a “subsidy publisher” or “vanity press.”

An “independent publishing house” is a small traditional publishing house, meaning that you don’t pay them. They cover the costs of book production, just like in the bigger traditional publishing houses. The only difference is that you may not get an advance or may get only a very small one (hundreds of dollars vs thousands.)

The problem with assisted publishing houses (again, not the same thing as an independent publishing house) is that they are a breeding ground for scammers. They can look “legitimate” and still rob you blind. And, unlike traditional publishers (who don’t pay themselves until your book sells), most assisted publishers pay themselves out of what you pay them to produce your book. In other words, they’re not taking a risk by publishing your book. They get paid (out of your pocket) whether your book sells or not. And, despite what many of them claim, they simply do not have the same reach as traditional publishing houses as far as getting your books onto actual bookstore shelves.

The advantage to this kind of publisher, if you can find one that’s vetted by groups like ALLi, is that you don’t have to worry about doing all the footwork to get your book produced. You pay them and they do most of the work. It can also make a writer feel like they look more legitimate if they have what sounds like a traditional publishing house behind their book. And, obviously, since they’re not taking on a financial risk by contracting to publish your book, they’re much more likely to publish books that don’t follow current trends and known formulas for success.

3. Self-Publish (AKA “Indie Publish”)

The indie publishing industry has bloomed over the last ten years or so. The advent and popularity of e-books and the accessibility of indie author services has made indie publishing a more accessible, more viable route for writers whose books don’t follow current trends or “tried and true” formulas, and for writers who, for various other reasons, aren’t interested in the traditional publishing industry.

The main drawback to self-publishing is that many still view it as an inferior route to getting published, which is unfortunate because traditional publishers are just as likely to crank out some really awful books, and indie authors are just as likely to publish really fantastic, award winning fiction. The other drawback is that it’s a lot of work and it does cost money, though depending on how much you’re able to do on your own, it’s possible to publish an e-book (and even a print version) pretty much for free. The amount of money you put into your book is entirely under your control.

The benefit to being an indie author is you’re 100% in control of everything. You control the rights, you control the content, you get to decide on the title and choose what’s on the cover... no one can tell you what you can and can’t do. There are boat loads of services out there targeted toward indie authors, everything from editing and book formatting to cover design and marketing, all in a variety of price ranges. The indie author community is also strong and supportive, with lots of wonderful social media communities, not to mention organizations like The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and The Association of Independent Authors. 4. Try Social Publishing

This is an emerging yet popular means of publishing that is cost-free and a great way for budding authors to find an audience. Ultimately, social publishing is when you post your story to a site where others can read it for free. Sites like Wattpad, Tapas, Swoon Reads, Booksie, and Underlined allow you to post your book so others can read it and offer feedback, and sometimes popular authors on these sites catch the attention of agents and traditional publishers. Alternatively, you can post your story in installments through your blog.

The downside, obviously, is that you don’t get a physical copy of your book and you don’t get paid. But the upside is that it’s free, there are few restrictions, and it’s a great way to help you find an audience for an unusual story, not to mention start to create a built-in fanbase. Having a built-in fanbase can be hugely important if you decide to indie publish, as well as if you decide to seek traditional publishing. You can also go on to open up a Patreon account, which at least gives you an option for making some money off the content you create.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope that one of these options will work for you. The important thing is to not get discouraged. Try to focus on the fact that you’ve gotten so many wonderful compliments about the manuscript. People love what you’ve done--they’re just too afraid to take a risk in publishing it, but the options above offer a variety of routes around that obstacle. Good luck and hang in there! <3

#writing #writing tips #writing help #writing advice #wqaadvice #wqapub

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beinglibertarian · 5 years

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No, Twitter Should Not Be Nationalized

The Twitter Conservatives are channelling their inner central planner by their call for tighter regulation, or even nationalization of their primary social network. Actor cum conservative commentator James Woods Tweeted a link to an article reporting on radio host Jesse Kelly’s reinstatement to the platform with the caption, “When will Congress regulate these jokers?” He was then one-upped by another blue checkmark, Paul Shelter, who replied, “nationalize, don’t regulate.” Then, Will Chamberlain and Michael Malice somehow got involved, and the former posted a video, with the hope of persuading Malice, with his arguments in favor of nationalizing Twitter.

The video is good-natured and friendly towards Malice and others who disagree. He, like many conservatives, is frustrated with Twitter’s banning policy, which seems to discriminate against conservative viewpoints. He sees Twitter, headed by avowed liberal CEO Jack Dorsey, as being transformed into a left-wing propaganda platform. He says the arbitrariness of his censorship policy has been a tool for ideologues to silence opposition.

Those who identify with the right-wing are being suspended or banned for ambiguous reasons. In the case of the previously cited Jesse Kelly, his account was taken down for “repeat violation of Twitter rules,” without warning, or specifics on the offending content. He was just given back his account without explanation. Others who have been permabanned may or may not have violated the Terms of Service, but it’s enforced willy-nilly. Left-wing Tweeters with just as inflammatory content do not receive the same treatment.

Even though I am not a conservative, I do not agree with Twitter’s banning policy. It should be clearer and enforced more consistently. I’m even prepared to say that Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter heads have a political angle with enforcement. However, there is firstly nothing wrong with this, especially from a libertarian point of view, and regardless, the solution to censorship is not nationalization or even regulation of Twitter.

The issue with Twitter

Wherein I attempt to persuade @michaelmalice to join the #NationalizeTwitter movement https://t.co/3rLESrKdOU

— Will Chamberlain

(@willchamberlain) November 28, 2018

The status quo is, says Chamberlain, “Our speech is being regulated by 20 liberals in a room in San Francisco.” The first response one might give is that being banned from Twitter doesn’t mean one cannot speak on other platforms, which is true, Chamberlain admits. But examples such as Milo Yiannopoulos show us that being removed from Twitter, the dominant discussion driver represents a significant diminishing of your outreach, and can lead to a cascade of banning on other platforms. The result is a “monopoly” of liberal orthodoxy.

Despite that, I would say, that’s just how the cookie crumbles. Firstly, if those platforms didn’t aggress against anyone in their removal of users, there’s nothing legally wrong occurring. Second, it represents society’s rejection of views being propagated with their facilitation. Twitter does not have an obligation to host views they disagree with, or even “facts they’re afraid of,” if the conservatives insist, at their own expense. You and I may not like the fact that Milo is banned almost everywhere, but we are not prevented from consuming his output. He has simply lost in the battle of ideas.

Above all, nobody has the right to a platform. That would represent a call to someone else’s labor on your behalf. Twitter didn’t come from the ether – it came from the foresight, ingenuity, and investment of entrepreneurs. Imagine if Twitter had been invented by a conservative instead, and its main purpose was to be a platform for conservatives to interact peer-to-peer. Then when it became popular, liberals complained that they were being marginalized, and called for the platform to be nationalized. Conservatives could rightly tell them where to stick it.

Is Twitter a monopoly? Chamberlain points out that Twitter does not make a profit, yet is valued at over $20 billion on the stock market. Investors value Twitter over profit-making institutions such as The New York Times because of its potential monopolizing influence. Profit only matters if there is competition, and there doesn’t seem to be any. The internet economy produces a winner-takes-all effect where one platform seems to represent full-spectrum dominance.

Yet this does not represent a literal monopoly. A monopoly is not just where there is no competition. It is when there cannot be any competition. There have been plenty of corporations and brands in the recent past who seemed to have had an unstoppable hold on their niche, yet are now forgotten. The obvious examples being Nokia and MySpace. It’s not obvious that Twitter will enjoy dominance forever, as they experience stock falls. They might find that it benefits them more, in the long run, to be more accommodating of opposing views. Provided the state is not involved, it cannot be a true monopoly.

The problem with State-run institutions

Chamberlain believes that a state-run Twitter would be better for free speech, even admitting that you cannot guarantee that your preferred party is in power at the time. He trusts in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution to protect the right of dissenters to have their say. Citing journalist’s Jim Acosta’s reinstatement to Presidential press conferences through a court order, he argues that state-run institutions are more accountable when it comes to constitutionally protected rights.

This is a naive trust in the efficacy of government to protect rights. There are many ways that the government makes a mockery of the 1st amendment that doesn’t involve direct censorship. Even the current mainstream news bloc is not truly private – being stuck to the hip of government. You don’t need to censor anybody if you shape the terms of the debate.

Even in the case of Presidential press conferences, not everybody is allowed in. The realities of space and time prohibit everyone in the country with a press hat shoving a microphone in the President’s face. The parameters for letting people in necessarily limit the bounds of debate – the three by five card of allowable opinion.

This form of soft-censorship is apparent in the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). Defenders of the BBC claim that it is not a state broadcaster in the sense that it is funded by a source separate from taxation, and is separate from the government. It’s true too that it does not explicitly put forward an agenda. The BBC agenda is more about streamlining the bounds of debate. You can disagree vociferously, providing it is within that impossibly small Overton window it presents.

As an example of this in action, check out this clip of a BBC Newsnight interview with Glen Greenwald around the time of the “Trump memo” in early 2017:

youtube

The presenter is happy to have him on, but as soon as Greenwald begins to question the validity of the CIA, she transforms from the dispassionate journalist to the ideological crusader. She is appalled by Greenwald’s assertion, and repeats it back in a tone that suggests, “It’s hard to believe anybody would ever dream of having this opinion.” It’s not censorship, but shame.

This is one example of how state broadcasters shape the terms of the debate without actual censorship. It’s true, Britain does not have the same constitutional protection for freedom of speech that the United States does, but regardless, what the BBC does is not directly denying a platform to anyone, or censoring at all. It’s a sleight of hand that the US government would be just as capable of doing if Twitter was nationalized.

They could do this via filtering – only showing “appropriate and relevant” content at the top of the feed. They could have keyword filtering. In other words, the many means in which Twitter soft-censors now will be available to the government too. It’s irrelevant if nobody is banned if nobody can see their content in the first place.

Moreover, nationalization of media is a totalitarian option more becoming of communist hyper states than those that supposedly champion individual freedom and a free press. No one seriously denies that RT, despite its occasional good journalism, is primarily designed to be a defender of the Russian regime. It is not a means to protect the rights of the Russian people. Suggesting the US Twitter would be anything else other than The Ministry of Truth, like every other state broadcaster, is ungrounded speculation.

International quagmires

There are also severe practical problems that prevent Twitter from being nationalized. Twitter is an international platform. Even though the US is the biggest Twitter user, Japan comes close, followed by the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia. Twitter is also known for hosting content put out by extremist political groups such as The Islamic State. The nationalization of Twitter would necessarily produce a conflict of interest as the US might be obligated to host content by opponents of the West.

The other option would be that the US would only be obligated to host opinions of American citizens, as they are the only ones whose speech is protected by the constitution. The government could then censor content from other countries as it saw fit. That’s all fine until international content legitimately challenges the US government. Content that might be of interest to the American people could reasonably be censored under the excuse of protecting national security.

No, it is better that Twitter is politically independent. Although not perfect, and some views are bound to be marginalized, the alternative presents more serious moral hazards.

The problem is State power

Will Chamberlain does highlight a real problem with the relationship between social media and government. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Twitter is a dominant platform with a liberal political agenda, it is an issue that those persuaded by that agenda will then go to lobby government to change public policy. But that is a problem with state power, not with Twitter per se. You could argue for nationalization of just about anything, as just about any institution can influence government.

It is inherently nonsensical to combat state control with more state control. Nationalising Twitter only increases the potential spoils of political power. There will be even more incentive for censorship and control as any slight change in tone could produce serious policy repercussions. It will create more conflict as opinion will only be more influential in our lives.

Let’s take for example the almost perennial issue of prayer in schools. The only reason why we still argue about this is that of the inherent zero-sum-game that comes from government coercion. It wouldn’t be necessary to vociferously debate about the merits of prayer in school if people were free to choose schools based on their own will. As it stands, education is compulsory, so no matter who wins, someone has to lose. In a free society, there are schools with prayer and schools without. Parents may choose either.

So too with the media, we must err on the side of freedom. Nationalization is inherently a violation of liberty.

The post No, Twitter Should Not Be Nationalized appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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bakwoodzman-blog · 6 years

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September 4, 2018 Antifa Terrorists Forming 'Red Army': Call For Civil War - Quote Biggest Mass Murderer Of 20th Century As If He Were A Saint - Deep State Tools Also Call For Conservatives To Be 'Bombarded From All Sides'

By Stefan Stanford - All News Pipeline - Live Free Or Die Two very important stories came across our radar this weekend that led to this story. In the first from Spiked-Online titled "Now We Know: The 'Resistance' Is The Establishment", they perfectly illustrate for us America's present day situation where people like Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton and George Bush endlessly trash talk President Trump at John McCain's funeral (finally!) while considering themselves 'the resistance' according to this New Yorker story. Yet going back decades, they were THE establishment! The second story, which ties in perfectly with the first, from The Truth About Guns, was titled "The Violent Left Says They Want A Civil War: Antifa Forming A 'Red Army'" within which they take a look at one possible glimpse of the future with one group that has sprung up that is supporting the Obama/Bush/Clinton establishment actually having the nerve to call themselves 'anti-fascists' when they resort to fascist tactics to silence their critics. And as the Truth About Guns story tells us, now they're arming up for war. The Truth About Guns story references this story over at Red Guards Austin titled "Oppose The Counterfeits: Antifa Must Take On A Paramilitary Character!" which argues: Let’s look at the event from a military perspective. Many from the right-wing side, including the fascists, were well armed and equipped. While this makes them dangerous, their tactical strength is overshadowed by their strategic weakness. All their weapons and their fighting condition mean absolutely nothing without support from the broad masses of people. Regardless of their current lack of popularity a fascist populist movement is still a threat and backward elements of society are moved to become fascists during economic crisis. This is the main reason why we oppose fascist’s presence or any attempts on their part to organize. Our principle is that when you go against a class enemy you hit him—that if you do not hit him he will not fall. The fact that no fascists were harmed in the making of this “counter-protest” only proves that the main organizers have no stomach for antifascism—for us antifascism is concrete—it does not mean simply voicing a disagreement it means stopping fascists in their tracks and hurting their efforts to the point where they stop organizing. On the basis of our principled united front work, fascists and their collaborators can be drowned out, run out, routed, beaten bloody, and even annihilated. These are our principles and we aim to hold them to the very finish. If you think the remarks from the Red Guard Austin, Texas sound just like something a fascist would do, attempting to silence their opposition by using force, you're not the only one. And as we see from the next excerpt below taken from the 'antifa' story, they actually reference Mao Zedong who carried out a mass genocide upon tens of millions, killing landlords and redistributing land to peasants, almost just as we're seeing in South Africa today. And while none of us really like 'landlords', the fact that Zedong had nearly 20 million slaughtered, with some saying he killed more than 65 million, and antifa is referencing him as if he is some kind of saint is alarming. From their story.: What does antifascist unity look like? It is time for Austin to stand up, to shake off bad leadership trying to impose itself on antifascism and come together under a better model of actual resistance and not token performance. When we organize and lead actions the fascists do not march every step they take is met with physical confrontation and they are bombarded from all sides. We are willing to work with, and accomplish temporary unity with anyone who can be united with; we simply will not liquidate our leadership behind anti-communists, Democrats or social-democrats. Antifascism is in and of itself neither Socialist nor Communist but it must not be Anti-Communist. Communist leadership of a united front must not be liquidated. According to Chairman Mao: “Capitulationism must be strenuously opposed. When we make concessions, fall back, turn to the defensive or halt our advance in our relations with either allies or enemies, we should always see these actions as part of our whole revolutionary policy, as an indispensable link in the general revolutionary line, as one turn in a zigzag course. In a word, they are positive.” That is, our collaborations with those who genuinely wish to defeat fascism must not come at the expense of our own ability to fight fascism, or our ability to grow and expand strategically. While understanding the need for certain tactical unity against fascism we understand that antifascism is just one part of our overall revolutionary work. We will not change our color as Communists; we will not liquidate our program or allow cessation of ideological and political struggle. While we will unite first, we will not fail to criticize second. Those who are worthy of the sharpest criticism are the very same ones who frame any and all critique as a personal attack and cannot self-criticize. On September 2nd on ANP, Susan Duclos put out a story titled "What The Heck Is Going On At CNN? They Are Now Promoting Violence And Claiming Antifa Is 'Perceived As An African-American Organization,' Which Is Fake News" within which she broke down for us several different recent attempts by CNN anchor people to paint Antifa as not only an 'African American' organization but justifying antifa violence against President Trump supporters because 'antifa is on the side of what is right'. Actually going so far as to claim that there is a distinction between violence carried out by antifa and that carried out by President Trump supporters, we get an outstanding breakdown of CNN's attempt to justify antifa violence against law-abiding President Trump supporters in the first video below. Mixing clips from a recent CNN show segment in which they attempted to 'normalize' antifa violence against so-called 'white supremacists' by claiming 'fascism' must be stopped now with many antifa members claiming violence is absolutely necessary to do so, as Susan pointed out within her story, CNN and the mainstream media rarely report upon white antifa violence carried out upon black or gay President Trump supporters because that would destroy their narrative. Yet as our videographer tells us within his video, if we continue along the same track that we are on, with more and more members of antifa calling for arming up and violent resistance, there may be nothing that can stop a civil war from breaking out in this country in the months or year ahead. And as our videographer tells us, that may be exactly what 'the resistance' at the top, Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic party, want and need, to get rid of President Trump and bring back their slowly crumbling 'new world order'. With antifa and 'the resistance' quite literally backing the outgoing establishment as the previously mentioned Spiked-Online story reports, must it also be true that Conservatives are the new 'counter culture' as Paul Joseph Watson from Infowars has argued and Canada Free Press reported within this February of 2017 story? So we'll close with this excerpt from the Spiked-Online story.: So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment. It’s the old political order. It’s that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from those who resisted fascism in Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is primarily about restoring the apparently cool, expert-driven rule of the old elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump / Brexit era. The response to McCain’s death has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been the self-conscious rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential candidate and enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power overseas, has been reimagined as a plucky battler for all that is good against a wicked, overbearing political machine. ‘John McCain’s funeral was the biggest resistance meeting yet’, said a headline in the New Yorker, alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is ‘the resistance’ now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders of foreign nations, the Washington establishment. In the 2nd and final video below, our videographer takes a long look at antifa, their fascist tactics and what he believes is their overall purpose, to destroy anything related to Western civilization, with many antifa clearly not understanding that what they're doing is the work of fascists and the outgoing establishment.

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teafortwo29 · 6 years

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Gloria Steinem says black women have always been more feminist than white women

WRITTEN BY Leah Fessler @LeahFessler December 08, 2017

Gloria Steinem sets the record straight on black women's leadership. (Marla Aufmuth/Getty Images)

Gloria Steinem has been at the forefront of American feminism for a half century. But she’s never seen activism quite like today’s #MeToo movement.

“Clearly, at this moment in time we are gaining our voices in a way that has never happened before,” said Steinem, the co-founder of Ms.magazine and Women’s Media Center, at the Massachusetts Women’s Conference in Boston on Dec. 8.

Many women have found a sense of unity and purpose in #MeToo—a movement launched ten years ago by Tarana Burke, a black activist, and energized this year in the aftermath of sexual harassment and assault allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But while Steinem is heartened by this moment, she believes the quest for gender equality will not succeed if the mainstream movement ignores an essential reality: Black women have always been at the heart of feminist activism.

Speaking with American comedian and writer Phoebe Robinson, Steinem outlined the #MeToo movement’s blindspots, the importance of intersectional feminism, and how to continue dismantling sexual harassment and misogyny in the months and years to come.

Remember black women’s legacy

“We are kind of at a tidal wave point right now. But we need to remember that this all started over 40 years ago with defining the word sexual harassment,” Steinem told Robinson. In 1975, the term “sexual harassment” was coined by feminists at Cornell University. A few years later, feminist activist and lawyer Catharine MacKinnon developed the legal framework arguing that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination.

Then, Steinem continued, three black women filed successful sexual harassment lawsuits: two against the US government, filed by Paulette Barnes and Diane Williams, and one against a bank, filed by Mechelle Vinson. Vinson’s case, accusing her former supervisor of repeated harassment and rape, eventually led to the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1986 decision that sexual harassment was a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

“All three of these women were black. And these black women now symbolize the fact that [sexual harassment] is certainly is more likely to happen to people with less power in society than to people with more power,” said Steinem. She went on to note that law professor Anita Hill, also a black woman, brought sexual harassment to the forefront of public discourse with her 1991 testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Yet more often than not, white feminism and mainstream American culture have overlooked the invaluable contributions of women of color. This injustice has led many, including Quartz’s Corinne Purtill, to rightfully charge that #MeToo hijacked black women’s work on race and gender equality.

Foreground intersectionality

“Women of color fought the battles that brought society to this point, where even the faint hope of change seems possible,” writes Purtill in Quartz. “To use that work without ensuring that this broken system is replaced with one inclusive of race, in addition to gender, is not partial victory. It’s complete failure.”

Steinem echoed the same message when Robinson asked whether today’s feminists fail to uphold the importance of intersectionality—a feminist theory introduced by civil rights advocate and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, also a black woman. Intersectional feminism examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face, based not just on gender, but on race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, physical ability, and other marginalized identities.

“The problem and what [many feminists today] are not saying,” said Steinem, “is that women of color in general—and especially black women—have always been more likely to be feminist than white women. And the problem I have with the idea that the women’s movement or the feminist movement is somehow a white thing is that it renders invisible the people who have always been there.”

If you don’t believe her, consult statistics, says Steinem: In the early 1970s, when Ms. Magazine published its first national poll, over 60% of black women said they supported the women’s movement and feminist issues. Just 30% of white women voiced support, says Steinem.

Things aren’t so different today, Steinem explained, pointing out that black women voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election, while a majority of white women voted for Trump. Steinem attributed part of the split to the way that married white women vote “in the interests of their husbands’ income and identity because that’s what they’re dependent on.”

Women of color, by contrast, are necessarily aware of systemic biases in their everyday lives; they are far more likely to actively oppose oppression. Said simply: We are not born sexist or racist. Rather, systemic racism and misogyny socializes us, in Steinem’s words, “to believe that we are ranked, when in fact we are linked.”

Raise our girls to be more like cats

Given the pervasiveness of sexism, sexual harassment, and misogyny, Steinem says we must actively shift the way we socialize young girls and women. Her solution: Raise them to be more like cats.

“Have you ever tried to touch a cat,” Steinem asked me, when I inquired how we should raise the next generation of feminists. I nodded, and she made a swatting motion with her hands. “Cats don’t let you touch them. Cats tell you what they’re going to do, and that’s that.”

What’s phenomenal, says Steinem, is that before children are fully socialized to fulfill traditional gender roles, they instinctively act like cats. “Babies are not born as ‘girls’ or ‘boys.’ Babies are born human, period,” Steinem explained. “And little kids say it so wonderfully when they say things like, ‘It’s not fair,’ and ‘You are not the boss of me.’ Those statements are the basis of every social justice movement. We need to hang on to that.”

Such cat-like instincts were quite literal for Steinem, who did not attend school much until she was 12 years old because her father moved frequently. Subsequently, she says, when someone attempted to kiss her on the cheek as a young girl, she literally bit him, breaking his skin and making him bleed.

But sustaining this attitude is nearly impossible when we constantly teach little girls to be pleasing. “We dress girls in dresses that button up the back, in clothes they can’t even dress themselves in. There’s so much training to be passive, and to wait for somebody else,” Steinem explained. “So we need to look for and demand internal changes in the way we act, and the way we treat our family and friends, in addition to demanding external changes.”

Fight for bodily integrity

The patriarchy will not tumble overnight. Steinem believes that many people still misunderstand what drives sexual harassment. “I think we still have not quite got it out there that sexual harassment and assault are about power, not sex,” she said. Understanding that sexual harassment is about the drive to dominate, humiliate, and demean other people can help provide clarity about what constitutes inappropriate behavior, especially for men who ask questions like, “Can we not hug women anymore?“

“The fact that our bodies belong to us, that’s the beginning of democracy in my view,” said Steinem. “Women have a harder time with democracy because we happen to have wombs, and patriarchy wants to control reproduction. And racial cast systems only make democracy harder for women of color. But the fact is for both men and women, our right to govern our own bodies, and use our own voices is fundamental to democracy. So if we can carry it forward in that way it’s very helpful.”

One of the most important ways to carry forward this bodily integrity, says Steinem, is to acknowledge that not everything is sexual harassment, and that we all are responsible for calling out behavior that feels inappropriate so to ensure lines do not blur.

“If a guy is commenting on our appearance in a flattering but uncomfortable way, if we comment back, they’re shocked, because we’ve taken the ability to define our boundaries and our desires,” said Steinem. “So we need to keep talking to each other—we can’t have men take this moment and say, ‘now I can never interact with women,’ or vice-versa.”

Activism doesn’t stop with social media

Among the many lessons to learn from black women’s leadership in the fight against sexual harassment, says Steinem, is that activism requires real-life, consequence-ridden work. Social media posts followed by complacency does not count.

“Obviously it’s a great gift to be able to communicate [on social media] and know you’re not alone. This is huge. But we also have to remember that pressing send isn’t actually doing anything,” said Steinem. “So we need to focus on the practical steps we take in the world. The obvious ones are how we spend our money, who we reward and who we don’t, and who we vote for.”

This is not to say that tweets and Facebook posts are meaningless. When it comes to real-life and social media activism, Steinem says it’s not an “either-or” situation, because activism is “an arc.” “Consciousness always comes first, before action,” she said. “And consciousness can come from typing #MeToo, and knowing that you’re not alone—knowing that the system is crazy, not you. It’s not about making a value judgment, it’s about seeing a full circle of consciousness, to activism, to change.”

Remember the simple rules of democracy

If you’re not exhausted by today’s political climate, Godspeed. For the rest of us, it’s okay to acknowledge that we’re overwhelmed, and probably craving hibernation, says Steinem. Waves of exhaustion and even hopelessness are inevitable in the fight for social justice, she assures.

However, to prevent ourselves from normalizing sexual harassment, we need to ground our activism in two fundamental values: intersectionality and democracy. Steinem explains:

“If you have more power, remember to listen as much as you talk. And if you have less power remember, to talk as much as you listen. That can be hard when you’re used to hiding. Keep yourself in the present, and don’t obsess over what you should be doing, or could have done differently. Talk to people, don’t get isolated, and remember to empathize, because almost everybody can be changed and transformed.”

https://qz.com/1150028

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blog-cosmosuniverse1 · 3 years

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Biggest Horse-Race Fixer of All Time Says Democrats Stole Election. Here's How.

I am the only nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host in America who spent his prior career as a professional gambler and "the King of Vegas Sports Gambling" (as the media dubbed me). But don't take my word for it. Next time you're in Vegas, look for my 180-pound granite star on Las Vegas Boulevard in front of Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino.

So, no other conservative media personality has friends like I do. In addition to many of the top GOP politicians and the president of the United States, my list of buddies includes some "only in Vegas" characters such as "Richie." Richie is a professional gambler and a convicted horse-race fixer.

Back in the day, Richie may have been the greatest and most prolific horse-race fixer in history. He fixed over 1,000 horse races in 11 years at every racetrack in California, bribing over 100 jockeys. Eventually, he was convicted and served time in prison.

That was 25 years ago. Today, Richie is one of the good guys and a respected member of his community, as well as a noted philanthropist. But Richie still has his street smarts -- something no one in Washington, D.C., has. For over 50 years, he witnessed the smartest and sharpest scammers and cheaters in the gambling world. No one can spot a scam like Richie. My buddy has a Ph.D. In the Art of the Steal.

Richie watched and studied the 2020 presidential election. He calls it "the greatest scam and steal in world history." He says anyone who denies this election was stolen is a criminal who was in on the scam; a bribed politician or bureaucrat who benefits from the scam; or a complete naive moron.

What does the world's greatest horse-race fixer believe happened on election night? Richie says it's clear that President Donald Trump won in a landslide in key battleground states, so big that Democrats had to move quickly to plan B and bring in reinforcements -- vans, U.S. Postal Service trucks, even planes filled with fake ballots, in the wee hours of the morning, with no GOP witnesses watching.

The millions of fake ballots reportedly cast for Joe Biden weren't enough. Democratic scammers had to call a timeout and obviously brought in millions of additional fake ballots to erase Trump's massive lead.

In a coordinated conspiracy so easy to see -- Richie calls it "amateur hour" -- five states clearly agreed at the same time to pause or stop counting votes, thereby buying themselves time to have millions of additional fake ballots filled out, trucked in or, in some cases, flown into nearby airports.

In the case of Georgia, there are accusations of scammers faking that a pipe burst and caused a flood, during which they rolled out suitcases filled with ballots, all of which was caught on video.

Any idiot who isn't blind can see what happened, says Richie. It was as if a brazen gang of 50 carrying AK-47s and not wearing face coverings robbed five banks at the exact same time, showed their IDs on the way out the door, and then got a blind eye turned by every FBI agent and every judge. Maybe people are in denial. Maybe the D.C. Swamp got to them. Maybe they're in on the scam. A lot of respectable people in power must be getting filthy rich on this scam, says Richie.

Some telltale signs of the scam: reports that GOP witnesses had to be removed from the room; that these ballots had only one name filled out (Biden) because scammers were rushing and didn't have time to fill out down-ballot races; and that many of the ballots looked pristine because they were clearly never mailed but rather rushed from printing presses to counting rooms.

Street-smart Richie says this case is such a slam dunk that any judge who throws it out is dirty and any prosecutor who can't convict these scammers should lose his or her license to practice law.

Richie compares this case to Scott Peterson's 2004 murder trial. Peterson got the death penalty based only on circumstantial evidence. This 2020 election scam was so obvious it makes Scott Peterson look innocent by comparison.

Yet here we sit, with a conspiracy so deep that political leaders, mainstream media, social media, judges, prosecutors, the U.S. justice system, and virtually every person in power in D.C. act as if nothing happened. And they do it so casually, so matter-of-factly, that Richie says it's easy to conclude they're all in on the scam.

Jan. 20 will determine whether we are still a nation of laws or a corrupt, third-world banana republic where horse-race fixers tell the truth and politicians are the real scam artists.

(Information in this email is intended for those who chose to be included on this mailing list and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of any organization I may belong to. If you want to be removed from this mailing list, simply respond with "remove" in the subject line.)

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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Christian Right Claims to be ‘Above Politics’ Are Unbelievable | Religion Dispatches

Have you ever noticed that for hardline ideologues, only their opponents are “doing politics,” while they are simply “being objective”? In my last piece for RD I looked at the related ways in which even overtly political evangelicals often connect the notion of “the biblical worldview” to their political vision. For example, Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, claims that if churches played down politics and simply instructed their congregants “better” in matters of theology, right-wing politics would naturally follow. What I also initially wanted to address in that piece but ultimately had to leave out is how claims that an action or belief is entirely “apolitical” can serve the same ends.

To take a recent example from the current news cycle, witness racist Fox News host Tucker Carlson lambasting those who correctly draw connections between climate change and the massive fires here in the American West that continue to rage: “It took no time at all for the usual vultures and parasites to swoop in and try to make a political advantage.” Clearly, Carlson wants viewers to believe that he is not playing politics with his climate change denialism. No, you see, only their concerns are politics; our concern is truth.

It is thanks in large part to the often subtle but powerful influence of the dominionist ideology known as Christian Reconstructionism that the conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture has come to place so much emphasis on an all-encompassing Christian or “biblical” worldview as a source for “correct” action in every sphere of life. No one has done more to uncover and unpack this influence than University of North Florida Religious Studies Professor Julie Ingersoll, whose work carefully examines the ludicrous claims of Christian Reconstructionists that their drive for “dominion” is apolitical. Asked to comment for this piece, Ingersoll said:

“Christian Reconstructionists assert that God has delegated earthly authority to three institutions: the church, the family, and the civil government. For them, ‘politics’ pertains only to the realm of the civil government, while most aspects of life fall under the authority of the family. So, health care, reproductive rights, issues related to economics and property, etc., are all non-political.”

She added that Christian Reconstructionists consider all three of these “spheres” of authority to be “still accountable to God, so even the political, in their very limited usage, is religious.” Given the influence of this worldview on mainstream evangelicals it seems likely that there are echoes of this thinking in their claims to be apolitical even as they seek to impose their authority in such matters.

In any case, whether in more or less secular or overtly religious form, the rhetorical trick of grasping moral authority by claiming to be outside of or ‘above’ politics—as if any such thing were possible with respect to social issues and their accompanying human conflicts—works depressingly well for America’s right-wingers, who understand that many Americans will accept the claim. Further, in both its secular and religious incarnations, this type of rhetorical power play serves to uphold white supremacism.

While I am inclined to agree with Megan Goodwin’s claim that religion has “always been politics, full stop,” unfortunately, many otherwise savvy journalists and commentators forget that “the personal is political” when it comes to religion. They seem to sign on to a tacit agreement that anything Christians label “religious belief” shouldn’t be examined or criticized, regardless of the impact powerful conservative Christians’ politics have on those who don’t share conservative Christian beliefs. This is often accompanied by the nonsensical positing of a clear division between religion and politics that allows conservative Christians’ claims to be above politics to go essentially unchallenged, thus reinforcing the (white Protestant inflected) Christian supremacism that pervades American society.

Notice, for example, how the New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias leaves unquestioned a claim that Christianity Today, the flagship “respectable” evangelical magazine, “is very apolitical,” despite its frequent discussion of such things as Supreme Court decisions, “religious freedom,” and other matters of concern to social conservatives.

The spread of campaign-style “Jesus 2020” yard signs around the country, which prompted me to think about this issue in this moment, might seem at first blush like a frivolous thing to pay attention to. But when such actions go viral, how we frame them matters. And in any case, the framing provided by Joyce Hubbard, a member of Sampey Memorial Baptist Church in Ramer, Alabama, who helped conceive the initiative with other women from her church, neatly illustrates how a claim to be promoting “apolitical” religion can function as a shrewd political move. By the same token, the way journalist Greg Garrison framed his write-up of the story for Al.com provides a neat illustration of how the media normalizes Christian supremacism and evangelical extremism by failing to unpack evangelical rhetoric.

To be sure, Garrison notes, “People have speculated about ulterior motives in attempting to affect the race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.” But instead of finding such people to talk to, or even adding a sentence or two regarding what reasons they might have for their suspicions, Garrison allows Hubbard to dismiss the concern.

As he reports, “’We’re trying to keep politics out of this,’ she said. ‘Our focus is on Jesus.’” Good journalism—of which most religion journalism, frankly, is not—would press for what “focusing on Jesus” means in this context, including the voices of those who do not see Sampey Memorial Baptist Church’s project as apolitical. Instead, Garrison gives us only the hometown church’s celebratory perspective, leaving it to us to read between the lines of Hubbard’s rhetoric—or not.

And what does Hubbard have to say about the “Jesus 2020” signs? Firstly, that “We don’t see Jesus’ name out there,” a claim that anyone who has ever looked at billboards while driving through the South or the rural Midwest can immediately confirm is patently false. Hell, even here, in and around “secular” Portland, Oregon, I’m regularly bombarded with obnoxious billboard evangelism.

Yet Hubbard still states, presumably without irony, “We’re trying to put Jesus out there so that people can see his name,” as if seeing Jesus’s name is not an everyday occurrence for, well, every American who doesn’t live under a rock. This disconnect from reality would seem to belie an insecurity related to white evangelicals’ persecution complex.

Meanwhile, Hubbard claims, “We want people to elect Jesus leader in their life. It’s not political, not denominational, we’re not trying to sway anyone’s votes.” But she also states, “We all have our personal beliefs and moral issues we’re standing for,” and adds, “Jesus is here for all the sinners.”

Her statement about “personal beliefs and moral issues” is an example of a kind of convenient deliberate vagueness that’s become common among “respectable” evangelicals, but to anyone intimately familiar with white evangelical subculture, in context it’s instantly recognizable as a dog whistle gesturing toward anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stances.

Meanwhile, the statement “Jesus is here for all the sinners” represents a faux-inclusive stance of the sort called out by Church Clarity, an organization that calls on churches to be unambiguous regarding whether or not they view LGBTQ identities as inherently sinful. In addition, in a pluralist society marked by Christian hegemony, “electing Jesus” can hardly be regarded as an apolitical statement by the non-religious and members of minority religions.

Any reporter who truly wanted to know how “apolitical” Sampey Memorial Baptist is should have pressed Hubbard for her and her church’s stance on abortion, LGBTQ acceptance, and religious freedom for atheists and members of minority religions. Instead, Garrison published a puff piece apparently based on a softball interview, which is an unfortunate pattern in religion journalism.

So what of Hubbard’s claim that her initiative is not meant to sway votes? Well, perhaps there’s no need to try to influence votes directly if, as discussed above, one believes that a “Christian worldview” will automatically lead to “correct politics.” Indeed, some of Hubbard’s other statements give away the game. “There are a lot of things in the world that are disheartening. We know that Jesus is the answer. He can solve everything.”

Here she echoes the long-time message of the late Billy Graham, often referred to as “America’s pastor.” Despite inconsistent attempts to avoid being seen as partisan, the anti-Communist Cold Warrior Graham was certainly engaged in politics. Although he’s often contrasted with his son Franklin, Billy Graham’s political efforts to sacralize American society and government, to place them “under God,” were massively influential in the formation of the Christian Right in which Franklin, who claims “I don’t speak on political views, unless they are moral issues,” now plays such a prominent role.

Not coincidentally, as Garrison reports, several members of Hubbard’s church “plan to attend a prayer march led by Franklin Graham in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 26, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol building. Sampey Memorial Baptist and other churches plan to host prayer events that Saturday at 8 a.m.”

Hubbard says the members of her church are “praying for a revival in this country.” This is another obvious Christian nationalist dog whistle to those of us who were taught in our families, churches, homeschooling curricula, and/or Christian schools that for the nation to be blessed, we must be obedient to God, which, in this context, means banning abortion, putting officially sanctioned prayer back in public schools, and keeping LGBTQ folks from having equal rights.

At the end of the day, a flood of “Jesus 2020” yard signs is far from the worst thing Americans will face in the current election cycle. But to allow such an obvious expression of Christian supremacism to be painted as “apolitical” plays right into the hands of those who want an authoritarian version of Christianity to dominate every aspect of American life.

This content was originally published here.

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loadingmediacontent-blog · 7 years

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Post #3: Is Digital Activism an Effective Medium for Change?

When I hear people speak of ‘activism’, I tend to firstly think about the arguably more obvious and physical examples such as rallies, organised protests, street marches, or strikes.

That being said, the internet (specifically social media) has also been highlighted as another method. Digital or cyber activism involves the use of these internet tools to promote certain ideas while gathering support at the same time (Al-Dosari 2014). However, putting digital activism on the same level or podium as traditional means of activism has certainly proven controversial; there are varied opinions regarding whether it is truly valuable in today’s society. Perhaps this stems from the debate over the concept of sociability existing on social network sites.

Before exploring both sides of the discussion, it would be best to quickly go back to the basics. According to Henrik Bang (2005), activism “expresses a collective enterprise for keeping the state accountable to their needs of civil society”. This also extends to other dominant powers such as mainstream media, specific corporations, academic institutions...you get the idea. Activism is essentially making an effort to promote (or impede) social, political, environmental or economical change. In that case, if we apply this to a digital sense then it can be quite clear that efforts to make societal improvements certainly do exist online as these sites already serve as venues for shared expression. The question is though, is this enough?

Arguments for: Those who do believe in online activism and its benefits to society tend to contend elements of community visibility, solidarity and mobilisation, or that it is “better than nothing” (Rintel 2013). Social media platforms are argued to play a vital role in expanding the reach through networks, and therefore assisting like-minded activists to come together and potentially take part in further action. Some believe there are little to no differences as to the specific platform used, though others claim otherwise. One analysis stated that for a revolution to occur, Facebook tend to be used to form groups and set the dates, Twitter produces the logistics and news dissemination, while Youtube shows the world. All together, they ultimately connect people to a cause (Gerbaudo 2012, p.3). In my opinion, I do agree that these networks are important and useful in terms of spreading ideas with a large reach, creating awareness, prolonging a social movements lifespan and starting important discussions between those that may otherwise never have met in ‘real’ life. It should be noted though that research from the University of Washington highlights the fact that digital activism does tend to work best when it is in conjunction with street-level organisation (Edwards, Howard & Joyce 2013). Effective digital activism also supposedly requires use of a number of social media tools as opposed to just tweeting alone for example.

Arguments against: I briefly spoke about the main issue with activism in my last post when I reflected on the statement that “the Revolution will not be tweeted” (Jericho 2012). This is based on the widespread view that activism requires real, offline connections as opposed to being built around weak ties that aren’t deep enough to generate any change. As noted by Rintel (2013), those skeptical about digital activism tend to base their reasoning on the idea of ‘slacktivism’ and that attention or awareness should not be treated the same as action.

If this is the case then many of us have fallen victim to slacktivism, whether it be undertaking the ALS ice bucket challenge, sharing a video, liking a page, signing a petition, ‘supporting’ KONY 2012 or updating our Facebook profile picture to a certain filter overlay in order to support a certain cause such as marriage equality. These are all great examples of what is considered thoughtless or lazy and essentially too easy to be valuable. There is also hint of an altruistic undertone; for a moment we feel good about our contribution to ‘activism’, yet then simply move on with our lives and are unlikely to give it a second thought. Steven Mazie (2015) explains it as “a means to the end of social gain, rather than of social change”.

So yes, I do agree that there are elements of slacktivism online and I have certainly been guilty of it at times, however I think it would be unfair to generalise this as an entirety. In other words, online activists are not all slacktivists. There are countless examples of how digital activism has proved just as effective as what society would consider as traditional or ‘normal’ methods of advocation for change. Not only that, but even some of the common examples of what is though to be slacktivism have indeed led to some form of significant action despite what skeptics may think. For example, many online petitions have actually changed decisions by major corporations, for example policies related to survivors of sexual assault or local photography permit requirements (Earl 2016). One study regarding the 2011 Occupy movement and the 2013 Gexi Park protests actually found that those who created virtual content as opposed to being involved in the live protests were “at levels that [were] comparable to core participants” (Groetzinger 2015). There may also be a crossover, as it was also said that those who supported online movements are actually more likely to contribute to physical activism.

At the end of the day, social media did not create activism; this notion was around well before Web 2.0. It merely acts as an additional platform or tool that allows citizens to promote and gain awareness, and in some cases support protest and revolution. Perhaps by being caught up in what the ‘right’ way to protest is, maybe we end up missing the point entirely. Instead of focusing on the differences between forms of activism and creating a certain standard of who is a ‘real’ activist, maybe efforts should instead be simply trying to find ways to include everyone and therefore making use of all practices including social media. After all, changes in society start by engaging as many people as possible, and if social media can assist in that while potentially prolonging the lifespan then I don’t think it should be looked past at all.

See below for references.

References:

Al-Dosari, S 2014, Studying pros and cons of digital activism, Arab News, viewed 7 April 2017, <http://www.arabnews.com/news/569451>.

Bang, H 2005, ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’, in J Newman (ed), Remaking governance: Peoples, politics and the public sphere, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 159-178.

Earl, J 2016, ‘‘Slacktivism’ that works: ‘Small changes’ matter’, The Conversation, viewed 8 April 2017, <http://theconversation.com/slacktivism-that-works-small-changes-matter-69271>.

Edwards, F, Howard, P & Joyce, M 2013, “Digital Activism and Non-Violent Conflict,” Digital Activism Research Project, Seattle, University of Washington, pp. 1-23.

Gerbaudo, P 2012, Tweets and the Streets, Pluto Press, London.

Groatzinger, K 2015, ‘Slacktivism is having a powerful real-world impact, new research shows’, Quartz, viewed 8 April 2017, <https://qz.com/570009/slacktivism-is-having-a-powerful-real-world-impact-new-research-shows/>.

Jericho, G. 2012 ‘How many votes are there on Twitter?’ in The rise of the Fifth Estate: social media and blogging in Australian politics, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, Australia, EBL eBook Library, viewed 7 April 2017, pp 254 – 278.

Mazie, S 2015, ‘Three Big Problems With Facebook Activism’, Big Think, viewed 8 April 2017, <http://bigthink.com/praxis/facebook-is-fraying-not-saving-the-world>.

Rintel, S 2013, ‘‘Slacktivism’ vs ‘snarktivism’: how do you take your online activism?’, The Conversation, viewed 8 APril 2017, <http://theconversation.com/slacktivism-vs-snarktivism-how-do-you-take-your-online-activism-13180>.

#MDA20009 #Digital activism #Slacktivism #social change

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threezframe-blog · 7 years

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A Bad Case of Influencer Part 2

A Bad Case of Influencer Part 2.

...

(To her amazement, her Facebook following isn’t shabby at 90K Likes, despite the fact she hardly touches it apart from linking her Instagram to it—a no-no according to the “gurus”. B*tch, please.)

Jeres would be quite happy to simply continue bewitching the public and getting paid to look pretty, if time was on her side. She knows that at the (ripe) age of 28, in one or two years, she will probably lose out to younger social influencers who are more willing to undergo more extreme surgeries to look even more Instagram-worthy; who are more willing to Snapchat what their boobs look like after augmentation.

(The thought occurs to her, fleetingly, that maybe Instagram won’t be around in two years, and neither will “social influencers”. But she brushes it out of her mind. No time for ridiculous notions! She needs to get her hair fixed right now.)

Sighing, she gets off her pink armchair and picks up her phone. She knows it’s a little too soon to call, but surely Dave at Tomlinson Hair will give her a much-needed hair makeover. She might even—gasp—give him a freebie Instagram and Snapchat in return.

Looks like she’ll have to call that dreaded Garry and ask him to come down and take her photos, and pay him ten whole dollars plus Uber fee. Not even her legendary dimples can melt that bastard’s heart.

* * *

Ping!

Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping!

Ping! Ping!

Jeres opens her eyes at the sound of her iPhone exploding… with Whatsapp messages and iMessages. She knows it’s something important. But just five… minutes…more…

“Ah Bee!”

The sound of her sister’s voice jerks her awake. She sits up crossly. “What lah? Why cannot let me sleep?”

“The ranking of Top Social Influencers is out in the Straits Times this morning!”

How could she have forgotten about the ranking, the most important mainstream event of the year, the only reason on earth web personalities actually go out and buy physical copies of the national newspaper?

It registers briefly that this scenario is heavy with irony.

Jeres heaves her 169-centimetre frame out of bed, and grabbing her phone, dashes out to the living room. Her father is reading—sitting in the branded massage chair she was gifted last Christmas—the Life! section. Jeres spots her own photo in the collage on the front page.

“Pa, can I borrow the papers?” she asks in her calmest, most neutral voice.

“You can wait. I’m still reading,” comes the expected response.

Jeres resists the temptation to throw herself into a dining chair in a show of temper. Maintaining peace in the home is very important. It is what keeps a social influencer from being thrown out of the house that she contributes zero to.

Nervously, she taps on Notifications that keep lighting up her phone screen. First message was from her best friend and fellow Influencer Gigi Hafiz (real name: Anika Hafiz): “Babe, hugs xoxo. It’ll be better next year.”

Jeres’ heart sinks and a bitter, metallic taste fills her mouth.

She taps on the next message. Colin, the maybe-boyfriend. “Jeresalynne. Ur much more than a number ok. Drinks on me 2nite. Pick u at 9.”

It must be bad. Colin never offers to buy drinks.

She knows if she goes on Instagram, everybody’s going to be talking about it. She doesn’t think she has the strength for that. Not on home ground.

Finally, her father puts the paper down. He fixes a stare at her, which, despite her best efforts at nonchalance, reduces her internally into a mass of melted lipsticks on the dashboard of a car parked outdoors.

“I don’t even understand what you do with your life, Ah Bee,” he finally says. Oh no, Jeres cringes, he’s going to ask me to find a real job.

“You’re 28, still living in my house, eating up all my rice…”

Oh gawd, it’s the Korean serial version today, she moans to herself while she keeps her eyes in “regret” mode, looking down at the placemat sitting on the dining table, a gift from the pasta brand that sent her an unsolicited hamper of sauces and spaghetti last week.

Thankfully, her father does not go on. He simply hands her the folded up wad of print and ambles off to the kitchen to get his post-newspaper cup of soya bean milk.

Hands trembling, Jeres scans the cover page—she is featured somewhere left of centre in the collage. She does not want to turn the page but is unable to stop.

Pirelli Pang’s image takes up the length of Page 2. Looking a million dollars, she (with her shiny Red Velvet Hair) is wearing an Alice + Olivia embroidered, multi-colored patterned mini dress with matching gladiator sandals. Jeres notes cattily that Pirelli’s oversized silicone pouches masquerading as breasts makes what is supposed to be an elegant dress look vulgar. At the same time, she is sure the vulgarity does not hurt Pirelli’s popularity one bit.

The words hurt far more than the photo. Under the headline, which reads “SOCIAL SCORCHERS”, the cloying standfirst belts out: “Pirelli Pang (@callmepirelli) is the undisputed princess of Singapore’s Instagram universe. Outshining her closest competitors, which include last year’s winner Candy Chan (@candyanime) and runner-up Jeresalynne Chionh (@jeresababe), Pang shows them how it’s done.”

Jeres wants to put the paper away and not look at it at all (actually she feels like ripping it to shreds but her mother hasn’t read it yet). As if powered by a sadistic poltergeist, she finds herself searching frantically for her face. Her mind is a blur as she scans the first two pages. Candy Chan is Number 2, but the rest of the pages are filled with people she barely or does not recognise. Jeres stares in disbelief that she does not appear in the top six. There must be some kind of mistake.

She flips the page. There, on the top of Page 4, is a quarter page photo of her. It is the Bindi Photo. Next to her name, “7”.

“Jeresalynne Chionh, who ranked number 2 last year, fell from grace this year due to a series of unfortunate posts,” the story reads. What series of unfortunate posts?! screams Jeres in her head.

The article goes on to list just what: the infamous Bindi Incident (which cost her 26 Instagram followers), the time she took a selfie against the background of Singapore Civil Defence Force personnel carrying a body to an ambulance (which became a viral photo and the topic of many print media discussions about what constituted insensitive social media—but Jeres read none of that, it didn’t concern her) and the time she was Instagram’d using her Chanel handbag to press the lift button.

“That wasn’t even my post!” Jeres says out loud, indignantly. That bloody Colin. She should have untagged herself from his stupid post. So she is a little bit germ-phobic. Do these people judging her know the number of foreign talents staying in her HDB block? “These talents don’t enjoy the same education system as we do,” Jeres had told Colin, “so their standards of hygiene are likely to be different from ours.” Colin had quoted her next words almost verbatim: “Haven’t you noticed that [people of undisclosed nationality] never wash their hands after going to the toilet? I’m not touching that lift button. I can disinfect my Chanel later.”

Now she wishes she had made him delete that post. He did mention that it drew a lot of comments and Re-grams, but he never made her listen to what he was really saying: that it made a lot of people angry! Just for that, I’m going to order a whole bottle of single malt tonight! she decides in fury.

Number 7. She had dropped five places. How in the world was she ever going to catch up to Pirelli now? Last year Pirelli was a measly Number 4, but Jeres was already seriously worried because Pirelli wasn’t even a social media sensation till that year itself.

Jeres sits, slumped over the dining table, her head in her hands. Sok Choo, her sister, seeing that the worst is over, comes and sits next to her with a cup of soya bean milk.

“Here, drink, Cheh,” she soothes. “You’ll feel better.”

“I have to do something about this, Ah Choo,” Jeres says resolutely, gulping the drink. “I can’t peak at number two. I just can’t.”

Sok Choo nods, patting her sister on the back. “You just need to do something desperate, like XiaXue. She always shocks her followers so they never unfollow her.”

Jeres stares at her sister and suddenly sees the genius in her otherwise ordinary sibling. Of course. XiaXue was the first to have a multitude of surgical procedures done (copied by others). Then she coloured her hair an unapologetic pink (copied by others, in a range of colours). Then she got pregnant (copied by one other). Then she blogged about her unbearably cute kid (copied by many others).

Jeres simply has to do something—or some things—that nobody else has dared try before.

Jeres envelopes Sok Choo in the best bear hug her skinny arms can muster. “One of these days, I’m going to Instagram you!” she promises as she floats back to her room for a deep planning session.

TO BE CONTINUED...

#influencer #social shortstory fiction

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ecoamerica · 16 days

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Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

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politicalfilth-blog · 6 years

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Political Prisoners of the USSA: Cody Wilson Joins Snowden, Assange, Ulbricht

Land of the free? Protectors of freedom of speech? Right to own arms?

I’m not sure what country you’re thinking of… if there is one, it’s Liberland. But the last place with those values is the US… or USSA as I call it.

The creator of Defense Distributed---a website offering downloadable files that can be used to 3-D print firearms from home---has been released from being kidnapped (jailed) after paying a $150,000 ransom (bond).

In what could possibly be a honeypot setup by the state, Cody Wilson was arrested and charged with “sexually assaulting a minor” in Travis County, Texas.

The timing cannot be discounted: the entrepreneur and gun-rights activist has been at the center of an ongoing legal battle over the existence and operations of Defense Distributed.

Prior to the arrest, Wilson was hanging out in Taiwan where there is no extradition treaty. It makes one think he was wise enough to know the government was coming for him.

As reported by Cnet:

“...the State Department settled a legal case that allowed an organization called Defense Distributed to release those plans online….That prompted 19 states to file a lawsuit seeking to block the free distribution of those files due to public safety concerns....” Whether or not the allegations hold any water remains to be seen. Using alleged female victims to discredit a man’s reputation is an old tactic of the powers that shouldn’t be. The same type of suspicious allegations have followed whistleblower Julian Assange.

Another freedom fighter, Ross Ulbricht of the Silk Road, was framed of “hiring a killer” to smear his public persona, even though those charges, nor any evidence, were ever even taken to court.

A similar (yet more popular) circus is currently unfolding with Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Defense Distributed has posed a threat to the state’s restrictions for years now. It’s like the Bitcoin of firearms---crypto guns.

The state’s quest to disarm its citizens (except the police of course) will fail practically and theoretically as long as people can arm up at the press of a button.

Gun control advocates have seethed with fury at Cody’s operation, namely because ALL firearm regulations are rendered useless when anyone can simply 3-D print their own weapon.

Self-defense for a digital age; it’s truly revolutionary.

But now Wilson has been forced to quit the company he founded.

So, what if this accuser is actually malicious and is lying about her age on adult websites to extort men for money?

There’s a possibility that she was already in counseling due to a prior arrest and court order, so she had handlers.

What if Wilson gave her money because she blackmailed him and said she would report him as having had sex with her if he didn't pay up?

No one should be automatically guilty of an act where the malicious, fraudulent actions of others could make someone guilty by default.

In an interview just a few weeks ago, Cody had this to say:

Yet, according to CBS:

“Austin police received an arrest warrant for Wilson for sexual assault after a counselor contacted the police on Aug. 22 and said a girl under the age of 17 had told her she had sex with Wilson after meeting through a dating website SugarDaddyMeet.com. Police said Wilson and the girl met at a South Austin coffee shop before going to a North Austin hotel, where he allegedly assaulted her and paid her $500 in cash.”

Cody appears ready to fight the allegations, however. His attorney released the following statement:

“We are glad that Cody is back in Texas again where we can work with him on his case. That’s our focus right now, representing our client and preparing his defense.”

The fact that “child” and “sexual assault” are the mainstream headlines when a girl who supposedly said she was 18 (the arbitrary age by which you magically change into a woman by government edict), by using an adult hookup site, and who took payment for the consensual, voluntarily agreed-upon sex shows how much the media works as the propaganda arm of the government.

If it even happened at all, the headline should be something like, “Cody Wilson tricked by young, experienced girl into paying for sex under false pretenses.”

But, since when does the truth matter in the USSA?

The 3-D printing pioneer was invited to be a featured guest speaker at Anarchapulco, The World’s Premier Liberty Event.

Considering the circumstances, it’s uncertain if he’ll be able to attend.

All should take note, however, of just how easily it is for the US government to frame people, track someone down and kidnap them within days. Hours after ALL the mainstream media outlets pushed the story of Wilson being charged, he was identified as to his whereabouts in Taiwan, had his passport immediately revoked and found himself in custody.

Even though Taiwan doesn’t have an extradition agreement with the fasco-communist US government, once they revoked his passport, Taiwan had the opportunity to remove him for being in the country illegally.

For all those involved in anything cryptocurrency related or anti-state, I have always said there are two important things to do. #1 is get out of the USSA immediately. They can and will target you and take you down by any means necessary. And, #2, is try to get a second passport (and even better renounce your US passport) for further protection.

Things are just getting worse and worse in the “land of the free”. Ross Ulbricht, who only set up a free market website, was given numerous life sentences for such a crime in the highest security prison in the US. It’s so bad that Ross recently asked to be put into solitary confinement for his own protection. You can sign a petition HERE demanding his release by the Orange Fuhrer.

As for Cody, we’ll be waiting for more information to expose what looks like a shady plot by the US government to set up and kidnap him.

There’s a price to pay for being an enemy of the state, and technically, we all are.

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Australia's largest precious metals event Symposium is presenting the 8th Annual Precious Metals Investment Symposium. This 2-day investment and educational event is being held at the Pan Pacific Perth Hotel, on the 3rd-4th of October 2018.

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from The Dollar Vigilante https://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2018/09/30/political-prisoners-of-the-ussa-cody-wilson-joins-snowden-assange-ulbricht.html via The Dollar Vigilante

#Politics #Investing #The Dollar Vigilante

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

The indictment of a dozen Russian intelligence operatives offered new details about how Russia hacked into the communications of Democratic officials during the 2016 election. Information exposed in the hack provided fodder for countless news articles about internal Democratic Party discussions. In March, Nathaniel Zelinsky made the case that journalists and social-media platforms can voluntarily reduce the damage to democracy caused by foreign hackers:

It may be time for patriotic citizens who want to preserve the integrity of our democracy to start thinking outside the box about how we can prevent Russia from meddling in our elections.

In that vein, consider this admittedly radical idea: American journalists should take a pledge to not report the contents of a hack, and social media sites should remove from their networks any news stories discussing hacked material.

This commitment — call it the “responsible journalism pledge” — would be an extraordinary step for writers and editors who pride themselves on their independence and bristle at outside suggestions to limit their reporting. It would also represent a marked shift in how traditional journalists and social media firms operate.

Most reporters distance themselves from questions about the origin of information, so long as it remains verifiable, while tech companies tend to believe no one should restrict access to information on the internet. But at this particularly dangerous point in our nation’s history, reporters and Facebook alike just might be willing to embrace a new ethical obligation out of a sense of civic duty.

One reason is that the Trump administration appears reluctant to do much about Russian hacking. National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers testified in February before Congress that President Donald Trump had yet to order the NSA to combat Russian interference in America’s 2018 midterm elections. The administration also dragged its feet on implementing congressionally mandated sanctions on Russia.

What’s more, according to the New York Times, as of March “the State Department [had] yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in [overseas] elections or sow distrust in democracy.” In the meantime, the Washington Post has reported that Russian hackers may already be targeting Senate staffers’ email accounts, so another of Moscow’s trademark email dumps may be just around the corner.

Enter the press, social media sites, and a self-constraining pledge.

At the outset, it’s important to note what this pledge would and would not entail. In essence, journalists abiding by it would promise to refrain from doing what they did in the 2016 election: packaging the information unearthed by Russian hackers into narratives that American voters could understand. In the runup to the presidential election, whenever Russia’s intermediates released stolen emails, reporters eagerly mined the dumps of hacked communication for salacious tidbits that created an aura of political scandal but at the same time did not add meaningfully to the public discourse.

Consider the 20,000 or so emails stolen from Democratic National Committee servers before the Democratic National Convention. The main supposed “revelation” — that senior Democratic Party officials supported Hillary Clinton’s nomination over Bernie Sanders’s — was no surprise to even casual observers of politics. (Vox was among the many publications that reported on the DNC hacks and published some of the contents of hacked emails.)

The version of the pledge taken by the social media sites would be similar: They’d decline to provide a digital megaphone to publications that did report on the content of hacked material. That would limit the pageviews of those journalists who refused to follow the pledge.

The pledge would hardly mean a blackout on news about hacks: Journalists, though they would vow not to report the precise contents of cybertheft, could still report the general fact that a hack occurred, and people could still share such stories on social media.

The pledge also would not prevent the media from reporting about leaked information, including leaks of classified material, which are often mistakenly conflated with hacks.

Leaks occur when an insider within the government or other organization provides information to an unauthorized party. The government can prosecute leakers to discourage leaks in the first instance — though as a practical matter, the government tends not to pursue leakers, for a variety of reasons.

In contrast, hackers infiltrate their targets from the outside and can operate outside the effective reach of American law enforcement. In theory, the United States can respond to state-sponsored hacks with economic sanctions, a cyber counterattack, or even military force. But in practice, it can be difficult to craft a foreign policy that measurably deters an adversary but simultaneously does not spiral into a dangerous conflict.

And that’s in the best of times. Deterring a hostile power like Russia becomes almost impossible when the president possesses ulterior motives.

One could reasonably suspect that President Trump — who openly admires Vladimir Putin and often denies Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign — is not wholeheartedly committed to deterring and punishing Russia.

As I have argued elsewhere, it is possible that the difficulty of stopping state-sponsored hackers leaves room for Congress to pass legislation punishing newspapers that published hacked material. In an important 2001 case, Bartnicki v. Vopper, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prevented the government from imposing civil liability on a radio station that broadcast an illegally intercepted cellphone call. (The case was from a time in which wireless communication was far less secure.) Crucially, in Bartnicki, the radio station itself had not engaged in the illegal interception but was simply the passive recipient of the illegal recording.

The government tried to defend imposing liability on the station on the grounds that discouraging the station from broadcasting could help to “dry up the market” for stolen information. But the Supreme Court rejected this argument, noting that if the government wanted to protect private communication, it should instead find and prosecute the actual phone interceptors.

Federal courts have wrestled with Bartnicki’s implications since 2001. It’s conceivable that in very narrow circumstances — as in the case of hard-to-discourage foreign state-sponsored hackers — courts might be tempted to conclude that imposing liability on the press to “dry up the market” is the only way to deter illegal activity.

But such a law would set a dangerous precedent, altering the relationship between the government and the press in fundamental ways. Far better, then, if journalists and social media companies voluntarily work together to ameliorate the harms that hacks pose to our society.

To be sure, obvious objections abound, and the press will most likely resist adopting the pledge. Nicholas Lemann, a professor of journalism at Columbia, told me that he “made a private vow to not publish” any of the material emanating from the hack of John Podesta’s emails during the 2016 campaign.

Still, despite describing himself as “empathetic” to the concept of journalistic self-censorship, he is convinced it’s impossible in practice. Once a “less reputable player publishes,” according to Lemann, “a mainstream player cannot avoid it.”

But I’m a little more hopeful. Pew polling suggests that a large percentage of Americans still consume news via established outlets: “57% of U.S. adults often get TV-based news, either from local TV (46%), cable (31%), network (30%) or some combination of the three.” If these mainstream stations refused to provide a platform for hacks, a good number of Americans might never come across them.

Social media companies can have an even greater impact. According to Pew, 67 percent of Americans reported having used social media for news at some point; 20 percent said they did so often. Indeed, the commitment to this agreement by the two dominant networks, Twitter and Facebook, should quell the concerns of some journalists that if they don’t report the contents of a hack, one of their competitors will — and the rogue article will go viral. Without retweets and shares, such stories will reach a vanishingly small number of readers.

Is it unreasonable to expect traditional news organizations and social media sites to exercise this degree of self-restraint? I don’t think so. These companies already abide by a host of professional norms that limit what they report.

During ISIS’s rise, major television networks and sites like YouTube enacted more aggressive policies aimed at flagging and removing graphic, unedited ISIS propaganda videos from the site. While it hasn’t worked perfectly, unless someone intentionally seeks out ISIS propaganda online, they’d be hard-pressed to accidentally come across a full-length ISIS beheading video today.

Similarly, reporters frequently weigh the harms of disclosing classified material against the potential benefit to the public of their disclosure (and even consult with government officials in such cases). In 2017, CNN withheld key details from a story about terrorists using laptop bombs to protect sensitive sources and methods. Journalists, too, almost universally decline to reveal the name of rape victims, though the First Amendment clearly protects their right to do so.

If the media declined to publicize the contents of hacks to protect our democratic institutions from foreign interference, even skeptical reporters might come around to the view that this is an analogous act of noble sensible self-restraint.

To avoid the charge of partisanship and bias, it’s crucial that journalists and social media companies take the pledge in advance of a hack — and, ideally, well before the midterm elections. If they wait for a hack to occur to pronounce this new professional ethic, whatever political party benefits from the hack will accuse reporters of seeking to protect the other side. If media organizations do so today, the charge that they’re politically motivated is less likely to stick.

To be sure, some journalists will not abide by the pledge; no voluntary professional norm will ever be 100 percent effective. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, reporters and social media companies have recognized anew their civic responsibilities in a free society.

If slogans like “Democracy Dies in Darkness” mean anything, they mean the press should play a part in protecting America’s most basic political processes against our foreign foes.

Nathaniel Zelinsky is a member of the Yale Law School class of 2018. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where he researched propaganda in historical and contemporary contexts. This article draws on arguments he made in the Yale Law Journal.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> The case for not publishing hacked emails

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: We have blind men, one-eyed men, squint-eyed men, men with long sight, short sight, clear sight, dim sight, [and] weak sight. All that is a faithful enough image of our understanding; but we are barely acquainted with [men of] false sight. — Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, 1924. Knopf, NY. [M]ost establishment…journalists tend to be like their writing, and so, duly warned by the tinkle of so many leper-bells, one avoids their company. — Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001, Abacus, 2001. I heard the news today, oh boy…! — John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “A Day in the Life”, 1968. Brief: The gulf dividing established institutions—governments, political parties, academia, the judiciary, legislature, bureaucracies, the national security state, think-tanks, lobby groups, and especially the mainstream media—and those within and across the broader body politic, particularly those who’d challenge the chokehold such institutions seek to impose on the information and knowledge that forms the foundation of our political discourse as well as that of the official historical record, is expanding at a rate of knots. With a focus on one man who saw it all coming, it’s time to reflect on the backstory of this bourgeoning, perilous impasse, and what the implications might be for geopolitical stability and security, and indeed, the future of humanity. Living in a Fog of Historical Myth With an attendant lack of transparency and accountability, the Fourth Estate routinely subordinates the basic tenets of ethical reportage in the public interest to the interests, demands, and expectations of what we now refer to as the ‘deep state’. This is largely driven by the failure or refusal of the corporate media to live up to its basic remit in holding the ‘deep staters’ in turn responsible for their decisions and actions. This palpable, vicious circle, downward spiral reality is especially evident in matters of war and peace. Sadly, as we’ll see it was ever thus. Trump going all wobbly on America To underscore such sentiments and prepare the ground as it were, accounts of two recent newspaper pieces should do the trick. A Washington Examiner report by one Tom Rogan called on the Kiev regime to bomb the just completed Crimean Bridge. Even given the anti-Russian fervour in the West at present, the unreserved call by any purportedly responsible media outlet of what is after all an unprovoked act of war against that nuclear-armed country might’ve once been unthinkable. In the Salem-like milieu that beclouds the Beltway, though, for British analyst Neil Clark such ‘hate-filled incitement, masquerading as “commentary”’ is now evidently ‘thinkable’. More to the point, it perfectly showcases one of our key premises: the propensity for the MSM to act as cheerleaders for the war mongering ‘deep staters’. We’ll return to the theme of the warmongering press in due course. But a quite different report—as surreal as that of the Examiner, but which also serves to highlight another of the motifs reflected in the opening—appeared via the New York Times. The erstwhile Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was quoted expressing deep distress on behalf of America’s democracy, saying amongst things there was a ‘crisis of ethics and integrity’ therein. Let’s place to one side the fact he was using the occasion to have a none-too-subtle dig or three at his old boss Donald Trump over the Oval One’s obvious shortcomings in this respect. Ditto for the reality that as the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, he was presumably never troubled by shareholder anxiety over him prioritising corporate social responsibility (“ethics” and “integrity” being key components thereof) ahead of their pecuniary interests. We might then marvel at why it took Tillerson so long to imbibe this reality and then share such disquiet with his fellow Americans. After advancing a scenario wherein we ‘allow our leaders to conceal the truth’, and/or ‘become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts’, Tillerson went on to say, ‘we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.’ For the ex-oilman, ‘even small falsehoods and exaggerations are problematic…[W]hen we…as a free people, go wobbly on the truth even on what may seem the most trivial matters, we go wobbly on America’. Now space herein limits a thorough unpacking of Tillerson’s profound insights. Suffice to say all manner of pundits would have a field day if invited to do so. Judging by what Tillerson himself doubtless views are heart-felt ruminations on the body politic, he sees this as a recent development. Yet contrary to his remarks, this scenario did not arise with Trump; as Chris Hedges and many others have noted, Number 45 is more a product of the malaise Tillerson described than he is a precursor. As it is, said “malaise” has been a work in progress for some time, with British historian David Andress observing that its roots run ‘deep into our history’. Declares Andress in his recent book Cultural Amnesia: How the West has Lost its History, and Risks losing everything Else, there’s now ‘a crippling void at the core of politics’, most notably in the historically leading nations in the West [Britain, France, the US]. He further says of this “void”: ‘[There is] an absence of reflection so profound it is hard for conventional commentary even to perceive it…[P]olitical perceptions are breaking dangerously free from a mooring in history.’ [My emphasis]. Central to that “malaise” or “void”, of course, is the corporate media, and herein we include the increasingly powerful—and insidious—social media forums such as Facebook, Twitter and the like. We might for good measure throw in Hollywood, Amazon, and the public relations industry as well. In juxtaposing dichotomous themes of trust and suspicion, truth and lies, facts and propaganda, reality and perception, acceptance and denial, reason and unreason, justice and injustice, democracy and autocracy, and to no lesser extent, war and peace, amongst our literary icons it was perhaps George Orwell who captured all this best. This is strikingly evident with regard to the mindset we as ‘consumers’ receive, process, and act on, knowledge about our history and from there, do same with information regarding the more contemporary events propelled by our political, media and bureaucratic elites and their paymasters. Of course, Orwell has been name checked to within an inch of his not insubstantial repute. But to paraphrase one of the English language’s other great wordsmiths Samuel Johnson, the man’s observations about the core rationale behind modern political psychopathy have touched little that haven’t adorned our day-to-day reality. These embrace the hidden motives that propel it into the public sphere, the ‘substance’ of the discourse that frames it, along with the amount of people reached and thus influenced by it. The outcome of this rationale as it’s applied doesn’t just suborn our history; by extension, it dilutes our memory and devalues our understanding of it. That it continues to do so is self-evident. At least it is if we allow the ‘evidence’ some ‘breathing space’. As for Orwell’s insights, what’s not to like about the following, each of which is pertinent in some way to our narrative and authored over 75 years ago?: ‘Who controls the past controls the future…Who controls the present controls the past’; ‘In our time political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible’; ‘Such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in….[T]hey may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions’; ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations’;…and last but not least, that perennial family favourite, ‘Big Brother is Watching You!’ There are many others on Orwell’s menu to be sure, but this will do for starters. From there, Orwell also sought to reveal how “Big Brother” and his siblings endeavour to disparage, marginalise, and then disenfranchise (or worse) those who might offer conflicting analyses outside their own tightly scripted ‘Newspeak’, ‘doublethink’ purview. A diverse range of folks from William Binney, Julian Assange, Coleen Rowley, John Kiriakou, Jesselyn Radack, Jeffrey Sterling, Karen Kwiatkowski, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden amongst others would, one suspects, provide ample testament to that reality. One of the most (ahem) memorable of plot devices in his novel 1984 was the concept of the memory hole. This was a process allowing for the modification or destruction of troublesome or awkward information in order to alter history and people’s memory of it or create the impression that something never happened. Two recent examples of the memory hole in action are worth mentioning briefly, both involving incidentally the West’s current bete noir Russia. The first is the recent documentary film Remembrance – Rewriting history: Red Army’s role in liberating Europe censored in the West, the title leaving one with no uncertainty as to what the narrative is all about. Suffice to say: Much of today’s generation is of the belief it was the US who did most of the heavy lifting in World War II, as ‘that’s what their textbooks tell them’. Yet as the historical record tells it, compared to American deaths in the European theatre (around 300,000), the Soviets suffered around 27 million or more including millions of massacred civilians; further their country was trashed, whilst America and its inhabitants remained largely untouched by the conflict. Put simply, the US got off light! Moreover, the Red Army fighting on its own turf killed over four times as many Germans as the US and its allies did on the Western Front. In fact, the D-Day invasion, belatedly opened the second front in Europe in June 1944 after being delayed several times over two years prior largely due to prevarications by the then UK PM Winston Churchill, much to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s justifiable chagrin. By this time, it was clear the Soviets could accomplish complete victory over the Nazis on their own, but by no means did this mean the allies were going to let them claim bragging rights to such an outcome. In any event, it appears this narrative has been quietly ‘memory-holed’. One is tempted to ask: To what end is this being done? It is straight out of the Orwell playbook. (The recent revival of the long dormant accusation the Russians were responsible for the downing of the MH-17 passenger plane over eastern Ukraine in 2014 is no coincidence. Again it provides further evidence that the West’s march to war with Russia remains very much on the agenda, with my own country Australia being amongst the most vocal in pointing the finger, sans it would appear anything resembling convincing new evidence.) And the second “memory hole” exemplar was an extraordinary interview with Mikhail Poltoranin, former Head of the Government Committee on the Declassification of KGB Archives. He revealed that in 1950, the U.S. Air Force actually attacked Soviet bases just outside Vladivostok and destroyed over 100 aircraft. Poltoranin further disclosed that Stalin himself was poisoned; ‘Uncle Joe’ didn’t die of natural causes! This assassination operation was carried out on Churchill’s instructions by British intelligence, themselves assisted by ‘some internal forces’ of the Soviet ruling elite, of which Stalin’s later successor Nikita Khrushchev was ‘certainly one’. On any number of levels this latter revelation is highly credible. Churchill himself was one of the earliest cheerleaders of the as yet unnamed Cold War with his hysterical 1946 “Iron Curtain” tirade thereby inaugurating one of history’s most consequential of self-fulfilling of prophecies. As well there was no love lost between these two former WWII allies, a reality laid bare in Susan Butler’s masterful 2015 book Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership. It is further noteworthy that when, during the course of this astonishing exchange, the interviewer expressed disbelief at his revelations, Poltoranin responded with a comment very pertinent to our narrative: ‘We hid a lot of things. Actually, we live in a fog of historical myth…’ The “we” here doubtless included the West! All Wars are Media Wars (Lest we Forget) To be sure if Orwell were to be somehow resurrected today and allowed at his leisure to take in the zeitgeist, even he’d be at pains to appreciate how insightful his prognosis was; how much he’d misjudged the power elites predisposition for orchestrated groupthink, perfidy, malevolence, disinformation, thought control, surveillance, censorship, manipulation, and oppression; and the degree to which the mass of ‘proles’ (that’s us cupcakes!) seem all too willing as it were, to ‘suck it all up’. This is despite the knowledge and information we supposedly have available today via the internet and especially social media, not least ironically the author’s own prescient admonitions via his writing or vicariously through others in the alternative media who are clued up on what’s happening! We might easily imagine the T-shirt cum bumper-sticker adage doing the rounds at present, to wit: ‘Memo to power elites: 1984 was not an instruction manual!’ would likely leave the fabled wordsmith at a loss for, well, words! You’ve read the book, seen the movie, now get the T-Shirt! All of the above insights into the psychopathologies of the human condition (to say little about the societies and polities that emerge from the way in which they’re permitted to manifest themselves over time), are interconnected, of course. Some of these will become evident throughout. Many others are self-evident. Let’s continue with another Orwellian maxim not included above, but still nonetheless crucial to our main leitmotif: ‘War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it’. With this in mind, in my own study and experience of history and the human drama and utterly avoidable tragedy at its core, I cannot recall a more precipitously dangerous time for humanity than the here and now. More to the point, when any of us spend time thinking about those who previously served, suffered or died for the noble cause (or the ‘noble lie’ whichever one prefers), even if they’d done so fighting for freedom, democracy, peace, love, understanding and the pursuit of happiness against the oppression, tyranny, and evil intent of the ‘bad guys’ (the de rigueur cover story for the “noble cause”/“noble lie”), they’d be, one imagines, furiously spinning in their eternally designated plots of terra firma at what is now unfolding. Put another way, what would they think of us allowing it all to happen déjà vu like all over again, especially given what we now know about how previous conflagrations unfolded and the real reasons why? To be sure, for its part “fake news” is now the new “conspiracy theory”: It is the political, economic, business, and financial power elites’ and assorted ruling classes’ preferred weapon of choice in their defence against those ‘heretics’ who challenge the official narratives of western capitalist governments and all those who seek via a range of tools (from cognitive infiltration, false consciousness to cultural hegemony and so many others not excluding plain old school, garden variety bullshit), to perpetuate the status quo. In the final analysis, fake or real, so much of today’s news becomes tomorrow’s history. For their part, the mainstream media mavens and their assorted paymasters cum patrons have adopted this ‘best form of defence is attack’ modus operandi for any number of reasons, not least of which is aimed to claw back the public’s trust and rebuild their credibility. With the more recent being those in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, so many conflicts have been feverishly championed by the major media outlets with few, if any, mea culpas forthcoming in the pear-shaped aftermath. Indeed, if anything, they have doubled down. It is largely because of this they’ve squandered whatever trust, integrity, and credibility upon which they might’ve once claimed bragging rights. The very things, of course, that animated Tillerson’s earlier comments. Yet whilst the road back up on to the high moral ground is invariably a rocky one even for the most redemptively minded, any attempt by the MSM to return there is likely to be little more than a ‘one-step forward, two steps back’ endeavour. And there’d be nothing remotely “moral” about the mission; its end-game will be all about perception management (their stock-in-trade after all), and rehabilitating their generic brand. Which is to say, their fundamental goal is the same as it ever was: a) to create and sustain believable, acceptable establishment narratives by which its elites might justify its policy decisions and thereby solicit public support for their often hidden, self-serving, progressively more dangerous, irrational agendas; b) to provide crucial camouflage for those individuals and institutions (including their very own) they seek to safeguard from public scrutiny regarding their true motives and [thereafter] impunity from legal accountability, and/or ethical and moral responsibility for their actions; c) to preserve and bolster these illusory narratives as well as to burnish the reputations, then solidify the legacies, of those who fashioned the mythologies and deceits that underpin the narratives in the first instance; and lastly, d) to establish an unassailable, yet still bogus, frame of reference (historical, political, educational, economic, psychological, social, intellectual, cultural) allowing for successive generations of elites to perpetuate then ‘recycle’ these “mythologies and deceits” to their own ends. If all this sounds like a purpose built, vicious-cycle, ‘keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em on bullshit’, perpetual motion construct for history repeating itself, then that’s possibly because it is difficult to view it as anything but. With the possible exception of wealth and poverty (issues themselves which I hope to similarly address in a follow-up, companion essay), in few other matters concerning the human condition and its oft presumed progressive betterment, the history of human endeavour, and the contemporary body politic is this more evident—or of greater import—than those to do with war and peace. For most reasonably informed observers of history and how the media works, if attended by an appreciation of the contemporary political landscape in general, they will immediately recognise it for what it is. Pope Gregory XV (1554-1623). ‘La Papa’ recognised the importance of a good PR arm. It’s worth noting here that the origin of the word “propaganda”—a concept that in its variant forms is a recurring motif herein—derives from the era of Pope Gregory XV. In 1622, the then Vatican (ahem) ‘commander-in-chief’ directed his cardinals responsible for foreign evangelical missions to establish the congregatio de propaganda fide, aka ‘congregation for propagation of the faith’, an organisation whose raison d’être should be self-explanatory. For some this is perhaps fitting if not surprising. Viewed another way, it’s the Catholic Church (the original “deep state” perhaps?), which might lay claim to having conceived the first ‘psy-ops’ gambit, a Holy See enterprise that around 400 years later is apparently still ‘Johnny Walker’! It is further notable that British philosopher John Gray in his compelling Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, opened with the following: Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith—moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion. And when it comes to the subject of propaganda, per se, although he deserves a ‘chapter’ all on his ‘Pat Malone’, we cannot, of course, not at least name-check Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s nephew—the man generally acknowledged as the father of modern public relations. Which brings us once again back to fake news. The descriptor might have only recently entered into political discourse and popular vernacular; but as the Scottish authors and bloggers Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor observe, it has ‘a long history’. It’s propaganda frocked up in a different guise. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor Via their website and their two published books (see here and here), Docherty and Macgregor’s excursions into the historical terrain of the most consequential event of the twentieth century—that being the Great War—have not just provided us with possibly the most compelling, far-reaching insight into the causes and conduct of this catastrophic inferno, but its, well, consequences. They’ve also delivered us a crucial understanding of how perfidious Albion (i.e. Great Britain) inveigled the rest of the world into fighting this war. With the ancien regime doing everything in its power to provoke Russia into war at present, this observation should not go unnoticed. (Those who think the British Empire as such had passed its UBD by 1945 haven’t been paying attention, need to get out more, or require a check up from the neck-up.) Now doubtless many folks will be having a “say wha?” moment at this point, to wit: Wasn’t it the Germans who provoked the First World War? Not so, according to Docherty and Macgregor. Even more than that, for our purposes herein, they’ve provided us with a telling insight into the key role the media mavens of the era knowingly played in facilitating the grand schemes of the ruling classes (termed the Secret Elites by the authors). The campaign to ‘sell the war’ to the British public and to the rest of the world began in earnest at least ten years prior to its outbreak. Although many abound, one example will suffice. This was the dogged manner in which various members of the Secret Elites coerced, cajoled and curried favour in the pre-war years with the various dominions and colonies specifically amongst their respective media outlets and leading politicians of the day—Australia, India, New Zealand, Canada to name the obvious ones—to ensure that once war began, there would be unstinting loyalty from all and sundry to the noble cause. It was all up, of course, an astonishing political, diplomatic and propaganda achievement, yet one we can now safely say, came at great cost for all those dominions and colonies, with little or nothing to show for it. To be sure, one of history’s greatest snow jobs perpetrated in the cause of perpetuating empire. This was Great Britain’s great propaganda machine at work, ‘an ‘infernal engine created in war…’ as described by author Richard Milton in his Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany: 100 years of Truth and Lies….‘…[b]ut impossible to switch off in peace….The indelible memory of atrocity stories that had taken place only in the imaginations of British propaganda agents proved to be stronger and more persistent than any facts. This curious discovery, the power of myths over facts, was the real legacy of the First World War.’ [My emphasis]. History Down the Memory Hole Now although it’s been rightly noted that “all wars are bankers’ wars” (underscored by the preceding Orwellian maxim about the “moneyed classes”), few could argue that the “bankers” would’ve had great difficulty selling their wars on their own; a pliant, subservient, gung-ho media is by definition crucial at the outset in mobilising the populace at large and from there manufacturing the collective consent needed to do so. Docherty and Macgregor’s follow-up tome—Prolonging the Agony: How International Bankers and their Political Partners Deliberately Extended World War 1, the title clearly underscoring what we’ve just observed—drives home the point. Which is to say, the war against Germany wasn’t just ‘sold’ to the world, with the establishment media at the time leading the charge and indispensible to this propaganda effort. The same media then played their own part in prolonging the war by ensuring the public did not lose their patriotic fervour. Moreover, the British political establishment—incestuously intertwined with not just each other, but with the press of the era, academia, business and finance, and the broader Western intellectual diaspora as well—ensured that through their control over the higher learning and research institutions and the education bureaucracy, they gave enduring, inviolable substance to Winston Churchill’s infamous maxim, ‘history is written by the victors’. (Along with being one of official history’s most acclaimed authors—whose genre specialty we might now say was historical fiction—Churchill himself, of course, was a ‘Secret Elitist’.) So effective was this propaganda exercise that the false narrative still stands today as the official version. It’s embraced by just about everyone from our politicians, our mainstream media, our academics, our military leaders, our veterans’ associations, and [to] our school curriculum writers and even those folks who end up teaching the fake history. Those rare folk who’d question this let alone decry it find themselves at best on the outside looking in. Herein, Docherty and Macgregor unambiguously lay out their stall: Lies masquerading as news are as old as news itself, with royalty, governments, public figures and the mainstream media purveying it to manipulate public opinion. In an Orwellian twist those very same groups now employ it as a pejorative term against the alternative media, truth writers and bloggers as a way of dismissing inconvenient truths and crushing dissent. We should all be aware of the state as keeper of ‘the truth’. “Fake History” is another powerful weapon that has long been used by those in authority to retain that power and keep the masses in the dark. Of course, we can travel further back in time to the Boer War (1899-1902) and the “splendid” Spanish American War (1898) to find examples of Western MSM perfidy in sounding the battle cry for freedom as a cover for highly dubious state-sponsored wars of aggression, conquest, dominion, plunder and oppression. Docherty and Macgregor cite the former as primarily a dress rehearsal for the Big One to follow, a war championed by the British establishment press of the era, whose prime objective was laying claim to the huge Transvaal gold mines. Less ‘White Man’s Burden’ then than ‘White Man’s Booty’ then!’ As they note: ‘Their ambition overrode humanity, and the consequences of their actions have been minimised, ignored or denied in official histories.’ Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in their heyday. And though opinion remains divided as to the impact the media played in the US declaring war on Spain, there can be little doubt it was decisive. The ensuing conflict has since been classified as the first “Media War”, with the two most notable press barons of the era William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer going toe to toe and above and beyond the call of journalistic duty in their efforts to inflame U.S. public sentiment against the Spanish and incite an otherwise indifferent populace to man the barricades. The propaganda onslaught included dodgy stories of atrocities allegedly committed by the Spanish against the Cubans—fortified by a conveniently timed false flag attack on the U.S. Navy ship the USS Maine anchored in Havana harbor thereby providing the pretext for the subsequent declaration of war—with then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, budding imperialist, and future POTUS Teddy “the Rough Rider” Roosevelt being amongst the most hot-to-trot of the leading politicians. If the U.S. emerged from the nineteenth century as a leading world power after this war there can be little doubt Hearst and Pulitzer had done their bit to bring this about as great American patriots might’ve been expected to. As a consequence the centuries-old blood-soaked Spanish empire was finally ‘deep-sixed’ for good with the U.S. taking control of Cuba and full possession of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, themselves the first baby steps towards expanding its own already considerably “blood-soaked” empire outside of its own territory. For any aspiring hegemonist, this had to be seen as both a good start and an excellent return on their piddling investment, which doubtless contributed in no small measure to its fabled designation as that “splendid little war”. That Hearst and Pulitzer sold a shit load of newspapers into the bargain—in an age when doing so actually meant something—and cemented their reputations as media monopolists and political power players to be reckoned with was, of course, neither here nor there. But they had in a sense pioneered a prototype of the more au courant phenomenon of fake news, in those days called “yellow journalism”. It is perhaps one of the supreme Orwellian ironies permeating the polity that the most sought after award in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize, is named after one of its most ruthless, opportunistic, and unethical of practitioners. Whether by accident or design, they’d moreover done their bit to inculcate firmly into the collective psycho-pathology and historical memory of the ruling classes and power elites in America an incipient, and from there an abiding, sense of ‘exceptionalism’ and manifest destiny, the essence of which has been sustained by and large through propaganda. With only occasional lapses, this has framed and underpinned political discourse in U.S. foreign policy, and been a key driver of its interventionist approach ever since. It set the template for the future manner in which the Western media mavens embraced their responsibilities insofar as they were expected to act in the public interest or guide civic opinion for the common good. Another example that is instructive herein, of course—one which Docherty and Macgregor again provide key insights into—is the way in which the British government, once it found the pretext to declare war on Germany in 1914, then persuaded the U.S. to join in the melee. Here again, the media’s role herein was decisive. The First World War was a pivotal point in the way in which news and information began to be more formally and precisely, albeit covertly, manipulated—and indeed frequently contrived—to serve the interests of those seeking to mould public opinion towards a certain consensual view. In this it is instructive to note it was the Great War that, if it did not quite give provenance to one of the great truisms in the history of conflict, that being, ‘Truth is the first casualty of war’, it facilitated from there its popular usage. Thus was the age of public relations born, and it was from there that Bernays and his ilk never looked back. At its most basic “public relations” was/is “fake news”; indeed PR became the new terminology designed to replace the increasingly repellent phrase “propaganda”. Such was the decisive impact of this new mode of communication, it’s difficult to see how Americans might’ve been convinced to enter the war on the side of Britain, and by extrapolation, how Britain and its allies could have avoided defeat at the hands of the Germans. Fake News Good, Real News Bad As the mainstream media—as deservedly much-maligned as it is malignant—descends further and further into deceptive arrogance and dangerous incoherence, it increasingly seeks, in indirect proportion it seems and with an equal mix of hubris, dishonesty, chutzpah, and hypocrisy, to double down in its attempts to preserve and maintain its façade of credibility and integrity. Western political, intellectual and media elites are veritably hyperventilating at the prospect that their own “fake news” is being viewed for what it is: a desperate attempt to paper over the cracks in the wall of a crumbling Anglo-American-Zionist empire. It’s instructive here to consider a few of the recent, most preposterous narratives that have been—or are being—breathlessly promulgated. These stories are ones amongst many that no serious media outlet claiming a modicum of integrity or credibility should be touching with the proverbial forty-foot barge pole. That is, of course, unless it’s to refute the generally always evidence-free claims that frequently attend them and ridicule then discredit the person(s) making them. Here are just three of the ‘greatest hits’ as it were, currently topping the MSM charts: a) the farcical, transparently duplicitous anti-Russian propaganda onslaught emanating from Britain and America that seeks amongst countless other high crimes and dastardly deeds to blame that country and its leader for constant interference in the affairs of other countries, whilst ignoring their own respective, and destructive track records in this regard; b) the illegal seven-year old, seemingly endless war currently being waged by Britain, America, and Israel against Syria and president Bashar al-Assad, one which he’s successfully fought with all the resources at his disposal despite the combined forces of the empire pulling out all stops to malign him and then terminate him with extreme prejudice; and, last but not least, c) the increasingly deranged Israeli despot Benjamin Netanyahu reprising once again his tried and true dog and pony show to sell-out audiences advocating war on Iran because he claims they’ve not adhered to the 2016 agreement not to build any nukes, whilst refusing point-blank to answer questions about his own country’s nuclear program. Whether in the U.S., Britain, Australia or anywhere else in the West for that matter, few of us should be under any illusions that the monolithic Fourth Estate remains steadfastly devoted to the ongoing betrayal of its purported brief by supporting the hidden—and not so hidden—agendas of those to whom it is, and indeed has always been, beholden. It’s notable that one of the U.S. establishment media’s flagship marques the ‘venerable’ Washington Post—whose high-minded, yet pedestrian positioning statement, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is so positively Orwellian one suspects its authors were wearing ‘Freudian slips’ at its moment of conception—was given a deliciously outsized serve of ridicule recently by the media watch organisation Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). And rightly so we might opine. The article, by Adam Johnson, chronicles the Wash-Post’s ‘top ten’ columns that he’s characterised as “sociopathic” in tone and temper. For ‘casually threatening economic ruin, inciting violence against entire populations, pushing for bombing faceless Muslims, or downplaying racism and child rape, there’s no better outlet’ Johnson says of the Post, ‘than [this] long-time echo chamber of power-serving conventional wisdom...’ ‘In the pages of the Post’s opinion section, you can say the most sociopathic things and get away with it, because you are, by definition, Serious People offering Serious Solutions in a Serious Paper. The human cost of these extreme, reactionary opinions is of little matter; what matters is packaging calls for violence, sexism and racism in a nice, official-sounding tone.’ Along with ‘pointing the bone’ at the paper’s editorial board itself for its own track record of sociopathic sensibilities when opining about the Big Issues, Johnson name-checks several of their high profile ‘by-liners’ past and present for special attention. These include Joshua Muravchik, John Bolton (now the White House’s Chief Chicken-hawk-in-Residence), and Richard Cohen amongst others. For Johnson, if there’s “one thing” the Post opinion editors love—and which is highly pertinent to the here and now along with being instructive in respect of our narrative—‘it’s columns threatening, plotting and advocating war against Iran. It’s the little black dress of foreign policy punditry—[it] never goes out of style’. To bolster his assertion, Johnson showcases a piece written in 2015 by Muravchik, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Muravchik’s op-ed piece was titled “War With Iran Is Probably Our Best Option”. Johnson responded with the following: [Muravchik]…argued nonchalantly that launching a war of aggression against Iran was “probably” “our” best “option.” He doesn’t explain who “our” refers to, or why a military attack was even an “option” to begin with….He [Muravchik] then asserts that Iran is uniquely irrational and cannot be compelled with material needs, asserting that “ideology is the raison d’etre of Iran’s regime” and concluding, as if he were settling on a Thai food order, that a bombing campaign that would kill tens of thousands is the “best option.” From this above ‘catalogue’ of dodgy Post reportage we might draw the following conclusion: It is in matters of war and peace that perhaps the MSM is most at conflict with the now decidedly old school journalistic canons, these being, of course: accuracy, fairness, accountability, objectivity, truthfulness, and impartiality. The current state of geopolitical affairs and international relations—as existentially precarious as it is—should be ample testament to this reality. The mainstream mastheads are not—and have never been known for being—bastions for the promotion of peace, love and understanding amongst nations, anymore than they have been known for their adherence to truthfulness, accuracy or any of the other “canons” cited earlier. As anyone who’s delved into the real (unofficial) backstory behind virtually all of the major wars and conflicts over the years knows, the “noble cause” is never, ever the real reason, the “noble lie” never, ever justified. And the “cause” will never be the real reason—or the “lie” rationally justified—whilst we as a species continue to tolerate those within our midst whose congenital and moral defects push them towards these ends. It’s critical for this reason alone then we all disabuse ourselves of the notion that what’s happening now has anything to do with making the world safe for democracy and freedom; enforcing the tenets of international law in the cause of human rights; ridding the world of evil men with evil ambitions as if inspired by some vague quasi-Manichean apocalyptically-minded desire to make the world a better place; or some other such transparently fatuous nonsense. The only thing we’re making the world safe (or better) for is an entrenched, ruthless plutocracy. The reality, though, is this: We should all try to open our eyes to how we as ordinary people allow our political, financial, intellectual, media, and corporate ‘elites’ hoodwink then railroad us into supporting—mostly without question as if collectively driven by some inner, yet inexplicable, Pavlovian suicidal impulse—their grandiose, self-serving, and wholly disastrous schemes. Such “schemes”—political, military, financial, economic, psychological, social, cultural, educational—are engineered entirely for the preservation of their own personal material fiefdoms and the collective fiefdoms that were then, and remain, those of power, ambition, wealth, control, dominion, and above all, empire. And in this “empire”, as in all, the benefits are few for the many and many for the few, with “power” (as noted again by Orwell) an end in itself, not a means. In the process, this ‘deep state’ cabal—whom Voltaire might’ve referred to as “tyrants of the soul”—have embraced ever more cunning, manipulative and (in every sense of the word) violent intrigues—and let’s not shy away from it, out and out gambits of the conspiratorial kind to cover their respective and collective asses—making them increasingly less transparent in their motives and therefore increasingly less accountable, before, during, or even well after the fact, for their actions. As a distinct corollary to this, they’ve sought—ever so successfully and as noted, with our increasing acquiescence—to exercise ever-greater control, influence and power over us, at the expense of not just our privacy, but our social, economic, and political security. This is evident not least in the backlash that is taking place against those folks and groups who dare to challenge the conventional wisdom, or more aptly, the conventional lunacy! ***** In order to bring things to a close, it is both prudent and relevant to name check the esteemed and courageous Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. As he frames it in his tellingly titled book Ten Myths about Israel—the nation that arguably best embodies and reflects the Orwellian verities we’ve visited herein along with being the one nation to which the deference of the mainstream media seems to recognise few limits: …history lies at the core of every conflict. A true, unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace…[T]he distortion or manipulation of history…will only sow disaster…. Of course, Pappe herein is referring to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, along with the subjugation—and what amounts to the ethnic cleansing—of its original, long-time inhabitants. ‘Historical disinformation’ he continues, ‘even of the most recent past, can do tremendous harm. This wilful misunderstanding of history can promote oppression…’ It is not surprising, therefore, that policies of disinformation and distortion continue to the present and play an important part in perpetuating [the occupation of Palestine], leaving very little hope for the future. Constructed fallacies about the past and the present…hinder us from understanding the origins of the conflict. Meanwhile, the constant manipulation of the relevant facts works against the interests of all those victimized by the ongoing bloodshed and violence. [My emphasis]. Pappe could, of course, be referencing any current ‘work-in-progress’ conflict, such as that which is brewing now, for example, between Israel, the U.S. and Iran; the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia; or the never-ending Anglo-American-Zionist campaign of regime change against Syria, whose allies are, of course, Russia and Iran. Anyone of these ‘hotspots’ could trigger a larger geopolitical conflict, and if it so happens this way, it will be largely because of “policies of disinformation and distortion”, especially those which have been facilitated by the Fourth Estate. In his seminal book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Canadian author John Ralston Saul noted that ‘[R]eason is a narrow system swollen into an ideology. With time and power it has become a dogma, devoid of direction and disguised as disinterested inquiry. Like most religions, [it] presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.’ Now whilst it’s reasonable (no pun intended) to assume our corporate media elites and those to whom they are most beholden would be reluctant to view themselves in any such light, from this writer’s vantage point, it seems like a pretty good ‘fit’ to me. Put another way, if this is truly what defines “reason” today, then we are ‘mos def’ in big trouble! http://clubof.info/

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martechadvisor-blog · 6 years

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The State Of Programmatic Out Of Home (or The Problem With “Impression Multipliers”)

Out-of-Home advertising is undergoing a wave of digital expansion, but has yet to enter the programmatic arena. Ari Buchalter, CEO of Intersection, explores the state of programmatic Out-of-Home and how current offerings fall short of what programmatic marketers need

The Out-of-home (OOH) industry has a lot to celebrate. It’s the second-fastest growing advertising channel after digital, and the only traditional form of advertising that is gaining share. It offers advertisers massive national reach, but can also be tailored to have local relevance. It enables life-sized and larger-than-life creative experiences unlike any other channel. It reaches consumers in the real-world, influencing thoughts and decisions on their journeys between home, work, shopping and entertainment. It’s been shown to be not only effective at driving foot traffic, but more effective than any other traditional medium at driving consumers online as well. Studies also show OOH to be successful at all points of the funnel, from driving brand awareness to driving conversion, generating higher ROI than channels like digital display, radio and print. And it is more trusted by consumers than any form of online advertising. With all of that, one would think digital dollars would be flocking to OOH, but that hasn’t happened because one thing OOH has not been able to celebrate is successfully entering the programmatic arena.

**OOH companies have been anxiously pacing on the sidelines of programmatic for some time now, watching digital ad spend grow by double digits annually.** They understand that growth has been driven in part by programmatic technology, as 75-85% of online, mobile, and digital video advertising now transacts programmatically. With OOH accounting for a mere 4% of US ad spend, OOH media companies are eyeing that massive and growing pool of digital ad spend, and wanting to get in on the action. After all, the growth in OOH has been largely driven by the digitization of advertising displays, and digital displays should be able to attract some of those digital dollars, or so the logic goes.

As a result, there has been no shortage of press releases around the launch of programmatic OOH solutions. A veritable mini-Lumascape could be drawn up just around this would-be cottage industry, which by some accounts has been around for 4 or 5 years now. But if you talk to the actual buyers and sellers of OOH media, they will tell you that all of those solutions have had disappointingly little impact, and that “programmatic” OOH is yet to crack the 1% mark in terms of share of OOH revenue. As is sometimes the case when it comes to programmatic, the ratio of vapor to substance, of talk to walk, has gotten out of hand (hence the use of quotes referring to existing “programmatic” OOH solutions below).

The lack of traction has been true both with respect to traditional buyers of OOH media, as well as with programmatic buyers of digital media. From the standpoint of traditional OOH players, one challenge is that many “programmatic” OOH solutions are taking a page from the old ad network model, bundling unsold inventory and marking it up - often on both the buy and sell sides - in opaque fashion. For the sell side, that means OOH media companies have little ability to distinguish their inventory, and a huge share of revenue ends up in the middleman’s pockets instead of theirs. That is why many OOH media companies have either pulled their inventory out of these platforms entirely, or limited it to their less desirable remnant inventory. For the buy side, the specialist agencies and buyers who have been buying this medium effectively for decades, already have their own processes and technologies (and are innovating new ones as we speak). For many of them, there simply isn’t enough added value from today’s “programmatic” OOH offerings to offset the additional workflow and lack of transparency around the inventory and economics, not to mention the prospect of getting less media for every working dollar. As a result, many traditional OOH buyers have eschewed these solutions. (Tip: if you do work with an existing “programmatic” OOH technology platform - either as a buyer or seller - ask them what percentage fee they take from the buy side and from the sell side, as well as exactly what OOH inventory is in their system, and ask for it in writing).

From the perspective of programmatic buyers, however, there is another set of challenges arising from the fact that every “programmatic” OOH solution thus far has approached the opportunity by simply trying to automate the traditional process for buying OOH media. To be sure, there are some important differences between OOH and online, mobile, or social media, a key one being the one-to-many nature of the medium: a single out-of-home ad will be seen by multiple individuals, not just the user of a single device.

That one-to-many aspect has given rise to a curious feature of “programmatic” OOH solutions: the impression multiplier. **Impressions are the currency of digital ads, and implicitly there is an assumption that an ad delivered on a laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet is seen by one person, and hence is one impression**. But OOH ads are seen by many people, just like TV and other broadcast media. And just as with TV, there are companies in the OOH space that use statistical methods to estimate the number of people that see a given ad. Those estimates, typically using data from the census, department of transportation statistics, surveys, and other data sources, are the tried-and-true currency of measurement in the OOH space. These approaches, well-grounded in traditional media channels, are the standard for measuring reach-oriented buys.

What existing “programmatic” OOH platforms have done is ask DSPs to accommodate accepting an impression multiplier field so that for every ad served you can multiply it by this number to come up with the number of “impressions” delivered. So if an ad is shown, say on a particular billboard, during a particular hour, the pertinent model might say 10 people saw it (and that would be the same answer at any point during the hour). An impression multiplier of “10” would, therefore, be applied to that ad play, resulting in 10 impressions. But are they really impressions to a programmatic buyer?

In the programmatic world, a true impression is atomic; it is the record of a single event. It has its own log-level data, which importantly associates an identifier to that event that can be used as a key to perform attribution i.e., to map each impression event to subsequent business outcome events like purchases, app downloads, site visits, etc. The impression multiplier does none of that. Imagine if in the programmatic world, impressions could not be tied to outcomes and could not power attribution; if they were just counts that could be tied to nothing at all. The traditional TV and print industries have already found that statistical or panel-based approaches to impression measurement don’t translate for machine-driven programmatic buying. Neither does the impression multiplier for OOH. All it tells you is that your ad reached 10 people. Or did it...?

**Trying to adapt statistical, reach-based measures of impressions to programmatic could have the unintended consequence of leading, in the worst case, to discussions around fraud**. OOH companies proudly proclaim that there are no bots walking around the real world and seeing ads (well, at least not yet). But let’s define fraud, in a programmatic context, as “paying for impressions not seen by humans.” The impression multiplier for a given ad might say that 10 people saw it, and that is how many “impressions” buyers pay for. Remember, that is a periodic estimate derived from statistical models, which has served as the standard in the OOH world for decades. But the programmatic world is different. Imagine if big walled-garden media companies (which are often the systems of record for many digital ad buyers), or telcos, or mobile location data providers, or computer vision companies, etc. were able to determine that there were actually 6 real people who were exposed to the ad. What would a programmatic buyer call the 4 impressions they paid for that could not be definitively be tied to actual people? Perhaps “paying for impressions not seen by humans?” Programmatic buyers have a word for that.

Now, on top of all of this, let’s say you’re a programmatic buyer and your DSP does commit their engineering team to the non-trivial effort of supporting impression multipliers and other unique requirements around these “programmatic” OOH integrations. All you end up with is a painful new silo. Since they have focused on merely automating the traditional process for buying OOH, existing “programmatic” OOH solutions require completely different workflows, different creatives, and different reporting. You have to set up and manage a multitude of direct deals (essentially one for each campaign buy against each OOH media provider), go back to a creative agency and spend money and time generating new creatives against different specs, and (if you want more than the impression multiplier sums), settle for emailed Excel reports of metrics like aggregated delivery by screen. All of that to activate a channel that remains detached from the rest of programmatic and without any ability to perform attribution and measure impact in the ways normally done for digital media.

It’s not hard to understand why “programmatic” OOH hasn’t taken off. It’s clear the industry needs a different approach before OOH can enter the programmatic mainstream. As mentioned above, this state of affairs has arisen because solutions to this point have all tried to automate the existing process for buying OOH. What no one has done yet, is look at the true benefits of programmatic and understand how OOH can be re-conceived to deliver those.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

#martech #marketing #technology #business #cmo

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