The Generalist

One's identity is far more than one's profession.

Education

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Flood the Zone

Since the election, I have greatly reduced the time I spend on the media. I rationalize my indifference to political news in various ways, but the effect is to disengage. Advertising-funded media are cowering at the threat of losing subscribers or ratings. They pull their punches or give too much airtime to political theater. I have retreated to reading a few blogs that I have found to be credible: Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, and Talking Points Memo (TPM).

But I know that I am succumbing to Steve Bannon’s “Flood the Zone With Shit” strategy. If you don’t know what that is and how it affects you, read on. What follows is a ChatGPT generated briefing. Feel free to share it widely.

Briefing on “Flood the Zone with Shit”Download

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Freedom!

We love our democracy because we believe it is the best way to govern and secure for ourselves and our kids the blessings of freedom, the common good, and security.

Timothy Snyder is a scholar who has devoted much of his life to understanding both tyranny and freedom. He has lived in eastern European countries long enough to learn the languages and know the people. He has drawn on the experiences of people who were long denied freedom to better understand what exactly the word means. He also has come to recognize that most Americans don’t have a clear understanding of it. We take our freedom for granted. Like the air we breath, we don’t think about it until we are deprived of it. Here is an introduction to Snyder’s insights.

I’m reading On Freedom because I want to see what he sees. I think understanding freedom is central to defending against the tyranny threat of the Trump administration.

You probably know of Snyder’s book On Tyranny in which he identifies important lessons of 20th Century history. This little pocket-size book is a guide to how people who wish to be free should think and act. If you are wondering what you as an individual can do, take inspiration from Timothy Snyder.

Here are some links to interviews:

If you have not read On Tyranny watch this:

Twenty Lessons on Fighting Tyranny from the Twentieth Century
Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. From across the fearful twentieth century, here are twenty lessons about what it takes to oppose tyranny, adapted to the circumstances of today.

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Back to Civics!

This article from The View in Time Magazine’s current issue makes a case for a return to teaching basic civics. Democracy depends upon people being free to have differing opinions and learning to arrive at a compromise.

Our children (to say nothing of most adults) are ignorant of how our systems of governance actually work. Predatory opportunists now exploit that ignorance. Isn’t it curious how so many of our biggest national problems could be resolved if people had the goodwill toward each other to listen and seek equitable solutions?

We must learn to wage peace at home and abroad.

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Countering Disinformation

I’m not an engineer, but I think like one. I’ve disciplined myself to be analytical and logical and to distinguish between assumptions and known facts.

Humans are not naturally rational. We must train ourselves to consciously construct a theory about the nature of reality, and then test our theory by experimenting and observing. Absent such scientific practices, we instinctively invent stories to explain patterns we observe. These stories need not be accurate representations of reality to serve as an organizational tool or a memory device. We may call these stories “hunches” or “intuition” about what’s beyond our certain knowledge.

Our stories may influence our behavior more readily than our reason. But stories are inherently fluid, and unlike the laws of physics or chemistry, they can be manipulated. People can lock on to a narrative (story) and act upon it without deliberation. Bad actors exploit this human tendency to their advantage and gain, often to the detriment of individual wellbeing and the common good. We get played and duped by persuasive narratives designed to harm–disinformation.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has come to understand how disinformation and misinformation can overpower factual contrary evidence. People will continue to trust and rely on stories that have been thoroughly debunked by rigorous scientific research to establish a true perception of reality. We need only look at the anti-vaccination movement, the false narratives asserting that global warming is a hoax, or the denial of the risks of smoking tobacco to verify the power of disinformation and misinformation.

Science Rising and UCS have produced training materials that are intended to help science advocates push back more effectively. On Sunday October 16th at 9:45 am, I spoke on the topic using UCS materials as the core of my presentation. The bibliography of all my sources is below.

Video of October 16th Presentation

Here is a video recording of the presentation done on 10/16/22 at Newtown Friends Meeting Adult Firstday School.

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Rumors

Some of us think of rumors as the idle speculation of a social gossip–just superficial trash talk, not to be taken seriously. If someone characterizes our conversation as gossip, we are offended.

Rumors are a serious and lucrative business these days. They have been weaponized and are tools for social and political manipulation. Rumors are a favorite ploy of those who manipulate because they are cheap and effective. Once seeded, they take on a life of their own, traveling with dazzling speed and persisting for months or years. They bypass most people’s skepticism because they often come from a friend or relative–a person we trust.

Frequently the seed is a photo, a video, or a fake news item that is cleverly crafted to look authentic and launched in a context that lends credibility. It’s easy to be fooled.

We can train ourselves to recognize the seeds of disinformation so that we don’t contribute to the spread. None of us wants to be dismissed as one who gossips. To learn more, check out RumorGuard.

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We Still Don’t See It Coming!

Many of the pundits are saying, “nobody saw this coming.” They go on to describe the revolt of the less educated white working-class male, or some other demographic that has been marginalized by globalization, or income inequality.

There is no denying that they are at least partly right. But I know that I personally missed something that’s context for Trump’s win – it’s political gaming of the system that’s been a GOP strategy for decades and was happening big time in this election.

As I was puzzling out loud over the fact that Hillary won the popular vote, and Trump won the Electoral College.  Marguerite said, “It’s gerrymandering.” I scoffed at her interpretation. I think of gerrymandering as a way to guarantee seats in the House of Representatives by, in effect, picking your voters by demographic mapping.

How Gerrymandering Works
How Gerrymandering Works

However the reality is much subtler. Gerrymandering  helps a party that does not have a majority of voters support at the congressional level. The “red” minority (see chart) can get three of the five districts (60%) by clever carving. The “blue” majority can draw districts to give themselves all five (100%).

This simple example illustrates how the US political system can be modeled like any other complicated set of interdependent rules and variables. Consider that each state makes the rules about how it runs its elections. It is the governor and the legislature that also define political boundaries.  So if a political party can optimize boundaries to get the most seats in congress, it can lock in some districts without having majority of the votes. In addition, it can target the campaign money on districts where there is no such lock.

Another gambit is voter suppression. Voter ID rules, polling hours, polling locations, number of voting machines, early voting, absentee ballot rules — all the many aspects that are controlled at the state level can be played to the advantage of one party over another.

Those tactics will be reflected in not just the House of Representatives, but also the Electoral College.

The GOP figured out how to game the system long ago. The book “Rat F**ked” explains how it happened.  The title is a vulgar expression for political sabotage.

The process is ongoing. When the smart money in the GOP campaign pulled back from supporting Trump, it refocused on supporting GOP candidates for state legislatures and governorship. Already the GOP has a lock on the US House.  They are working on voter supression strategies to gain wider control.

If you believe in democracy you should be concerned.  But even if you are concerned you may not be able to change it.  It will take a super motivated electorate to reverse the many ways our political system is being corrupted.

The Citizens United decision is another element of the strategy.  Now that huge amounts of money can be targeted at particular state and even local races, it has become possible to hammer any candidate that opposes your interests.  The NRA is perhaps the least subtle. It wants politicians to think that taking a stand on gun regulation is just not worth it. But the tactic can work to defeat a popular candidate who opposes any moneyed interest.

Partisan news networks are another facet. Fox News learned how to game the system and President Elect Donald Trump became a master at playing the system to his advantage. Propaganda does not need to be grounded in truth to have devastating effect.

One of the tragedies of public education is the evident lack of discernment and critical thinking exercised by massive numbers of people. Another is the dumbfounding ignorance of basic civics – most people don’t know how our government works, don’t know who the current leadership is, and don’t understand their role as a citizen and voter.

When most of us are indifferent and ignorant to civic processes, the field is wide open to those who want to game the system at our expense.

God Bless Save America!

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Populists vs. Elite

In 1966 I wasn’t paying much attention to world politics and none at all to Red China, but Mao was tipping over the socioeconomic apple cart much as the populists here in the USA seem to want to do. Mao felt that the pointy-headed elite intellectuals (no, he didn’t call them that) had become over-educated and were perpetuating an elitism that was introducing too much capitalism.

The fix was to tell the elites “we don’t need you” and banish them to the rural mountains and country side where they could be re-educated through hard work on the farm.

Chaos ensued for five years. The resulting hardships took even longer to overcome. In the US, there was little empathy. As commie-fearing devout capitalists, we were happy to see the Reds shoot themselves in the proverbial foot.

I can’t help thinking that today’s populists and their “Make America Great Again” revolution are the US version of China’s cultural revolution half a century ago: so much anti-intellectualism; so much blind faith in a man whose image and career is more smoke and mirrors than substance; so much arrogant ignorance and bravado.

When all our political elites and pointy-headed intellectuals have been dispatched to the hills and country, will we too face a decade of economic chaos while the Trumpists figure out that their leader doesn’t have any capacity to lead or to fulfill his sweeping pledges to make the mythical greatness of yesteryear return?

So far it looks like most Americans are smarter than Mao was, but in less than 90 days we will know for sure.

 

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“The Donald” Exercise in Web Propaganda

Viral email messages, a stealth tool in political motivation, abound during political campaigns. I collect them as samples of propaganda because they are so blatant that they make good examples when I want to talk about critical thinking. The same propaganda techniques are widely used in popular media, especially MSN and Fox News — they are just more nuanced.

So in this post I wanted to deconstruct a viral email that is circulating among conservatives. email pix I have redacted the email names but othewise what you see is what I pulled from my gmail inbox.

Click the image to view the actual PDF file. I have added notes which you can point to and read and I’ve highlighted certain words and phrases that triggered my skepticism.

My aim is to show readers how easy it is to spot inauthentic information, and deliberate dis-information if you train your eye.

The first thing you will notice about the item is the very large font and the use of red type. The sender uses all-caps in the subject and the phrase “a must read”.  So from the outset, there’s lots of hype; and that’s often a signal that it’s not credible.  The body text repeats both the words and the emphasis and tells us that the author is a very important, educated, and credible source … at least if you are a fan of conservative opinion. But the adjectives are too over blown and the sender’s evident need to promote the author triggers my skepticism.

Reading further, the use of common clichés leads me to suspect that this writing is not the work of a high profile PhD affiliated with a scholarly think-tank like Heritage Foundation.  The overuse of absolutes like “all”, and “never” begs credibility as well.

The further down the page you get, the more the language sounds like a rant. The writer uses certain phrases as if they were well accepted and shared by the reader. Among  like-minded people already wedded to his point of view, those phrases would have special meaning. For insiders the language is familiar and evokes a belief, for outsiders it sounds oddly dogmatic. The “us” versus “them” mindset pervades the piece. It smacks of conspiracy paranoia.

After reading it through I noted that there were no actual facts or verifiable examples to support the writer’s assertions or speculation. It could not have been authored by Bennett or anyone else of his education and experience.  Sure enough, a quick web search revealed that Snopes had discredited the item long ago. The PDF has live links to fact checking commentary. Bennett did not write it, and actually contradicted it in an interview. But most of you probably guessed that it was bogus without fact-checking or even finishing the article.

 

 

Read about Skepticism Triggers here (click).