US Politics Mega-Blog - Page 116

On December 28 2018 02:44 GreenHorizons wrote:


Socialism isn't utopia it's just a scientific approach to addressing the problems we face as opposed to the commercial approach capitalism takes.

Surely eliminating bad social tendencies reinforced by capitalism (like greed) will take time and are unlikely to be completely eradicated by socialism, but the idea that greed is so overpowering that any system built on mutual respect and dignity will fail is something capitalists tell people to keep them trapped.

The US stands in a unique position in that we are actively (and have been since it's origin) suppressing socialism/communism and simply not incessantly trying to destroy socialists would shift the whole globe away from capitalism (though not completely).

On December 28 2018 07:50 Nouar wrote:


As long as you have humans in charge, any system will gradually get corrupted by the individuals. And even if you manage to get perfect equality and no greed, then it becomes hard to see the result of hard work, since it leads to no improvements. People will then get lazy, and everything will start going down the drain.
(I'll take a non-perfect exemple : the oil situation in Venezuela, where the state put unskilled workers in the oil company. Once a threshold was reached, things started to degenerate in the maintenance and operations of the oil industry, adding to the issues during the crisis.)

I am too lazy to list all systems of government and all things that are bound to go wrong in each of them.
I guess we have to find the less worse of the bunch, and try to find a balance to keep the planet alive ? Usually wars kept us humble and sort of served as a soft-reset. I don't know how it's going to work though, in a world where a full-scale war can mean the end of life on the planet.

On December 28 2018 09:04 IgnE wrote:
How about you draw up a list of the “problems we are facing” so we can see what you mean.

On December 28 2018 18:20 iamthedave wrote:
I'm not sure there's any political system that can properly address climate change save the New World Order; it requires everyone to pull in the same direction and make certain sacrifices. Massive migrations would likewise put a strain on any society unless it was people from the exact same philosophical and political system into the same environment (which doesn't exist).

In fact I don't think there's any system BUT the New World Order that could possibly address those problems adequately. They're all an outgrowth of basic human tribalism because at heart we're tribal animals who got uppity about our place in the world.

On December 26 2018 06:51 Danglars wrote:

Your view on hearing both sides is too pessimistic for me. I think you can hear the disagreements on timelines and impact of AGW and get a fair understanding of what climatologists think generally. The absolute worse thing is to silence the dissent. In your example, they push the so-called ‘lukewarmers’ debating models and costs right into the same group debating the temperature record and sources. That rather tends to grow the opposition if you ask me.

I’m rather used to being called post-truth, and white supremacist, and Nazi, and extremist. These labels are now so overbroad that I know my political beliefs and conclusions drawn from facts are currently in the umbrella of post-truth for a substantial section of this forum. My last vote cast for President was a grudging admission that a sledgehammer had to be taken to the edifice of censorious political discussion (put another way, a strong shift back of Washington’s Overton window). And I’m a college-educated scientist that reads articles from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal daily to become better informed of the news. I’m part of the white college-educated male demographic that split 51-47 for Trump.

You’ve listed at least four things that I have reason to believe you falsely think the debate is over and there’s no need to rehash it all publicly. Even the absurd conflation between human rights and noble societal goals makes me think there may actually be a legitimate side I’d love reading about opposed to your views on the Swiss law. If the scientists are all agreed on climate models and high cost action quickly, let them make their case (yes, it’s a powerful case). The alternative will make EVEN MORE PEOPLE conclude the powerful and influential deemed only this segment worthy of speaking to the cameras. People won’t conclude that they’ve only included the opinions worth hearing. It’s a slow march to make more and more subjects tantamount to flat-earth or Holocaust-deniers and it will divide society worse.

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered.Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them.

The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

The people are fake.

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as the Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views — 30 seconds of a video counts as a view — for as low as $15;

On December 29 2018 00:07 GreenHorizons wrote:
I mentioned this briefly back when people were pushing the "Bernie supporters were duped by Russia" nonsense but this is some pretty good reporting on just how fake it all is.



nymag.com

What I really wonder is how much do the top execs at the companies paying for the ads know about how they are getting fleeced, because I know companies like Facebook know they are robbing people blind.

New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.

The release of two Senate-commissioned reports has sparked a new round of panic about Russia manipulating a vulnerable American public on social media. Headlines warn that Russian trolls have tried to suppress the African-American vote, promote Green Party candidate Jill Stein, recruit “assets,” and “sow discord” or “hack the 2016 election” via sex-toy ads and Pokémon Go. “The studies,” writes David Ignatius of The Washington Post, “describe a sophisticated, multilevel Russian effort to use every available tool of our open society to create resentment, mistrust and social disorder,” demonstrating that the Russians, “thanks to the Internet…seem to be perfecting these dark arts.” According to Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, “it looks increasingly as though” Russian disinformation “changed the direction of American history” in the narrowly decided 2016 election, when “Russian trolling easily could have made the difference.”

The reports, from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge, do provide the most thorough look at Russian social-media activity to date. With an abundance of data, charts, graphs, and tables, coupled with extensive qualitative analysis, the authors scrutinize the output of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) the Russian clickbait firm indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018. On every significant metric, it is difficult to square the data with the dramatic conclusions that have been drawn.

Covert or Clickbait Operation?

Far from exposing a sophisticated propaganda campaign, the reports provide more evidence that the Russians were actually engaging in clickbait capitalism: targeting unique demographics like African Americans or evangelicals in a bid to attract large audiences for commercial purposes. Reporters who have profiled the IRA have commonly described it as “a social media marketing campaign.” Mueller’s indictment of the IRA disclosed that it sold “promotions and advertisements” on its pages that generally sold in the $25-$50 range. “This strategy,” Oxford observes, “is not an invention for politics and foreign intrigue, it is consistent with techniques used in digital marketing.” New Knowledge notes that the IRA even sold merchandise that “perhaps provided the IRA with a source of revenue,” hawking goods such as T-shirts, “LGBT-positive sex toys and many variants of triptych and 5-panel artwork featuring traditionally conservative, patriotic themes.”

On December 29 2018 03:05 brian wrote:
ok i’m a little iffy on whether i can even post here or not since we are in fact in a shutdown, granted i didn’t get the chance to be proven right or wrong since a bill didn’t even make it to the presidents desk, but i’ll put this out there anyway and let y’all make your judgements. i think in the spirit of the bet i’m probably still taking an L here, so perhaps this’ll be it for me.

why has there been no talk about how the house essentially just provided political cover FOR the president? does the house work for the president or is it a separate political entity designed to check the power of the presidency? why did the house GOP sink the bill solely to keep the president from vetoing a bill that would’ve passed?

is this not a stain on the house GOP? or are we already operating under the understanding that they’re all ineffective legislators and it didn’t even warrant a mention?

On December 29 2018 02:59 GreenHorizons wrote:



Furthering this point and how terribly misdirected and misinformed the "Russian bots" narrative has always been and how manipulative the "reporting" on it was.



www.thenation.com

On December 29 2018 03:41 ChristianS wrote:

I don't think I ever went much for the "Russian trolls swung the election" narrative, but if I'm understanding you correctly your argument here is largely "the Russian troll campaign didn't work because all digital marketing doesn't work." Russians aside, I think there's something to the idea that Facebook ads, YouTube ads, etc. are overvalued and, in many cases, fraudulently gamed. From my limited understanding of the field, there aren't a lot of ways for companies to know whether the ads are translating into new business; you run the ads, you see how many clicks you got, you see how much you're selling, and you hope the ads are doing something.

The IRA's campaign is a little different though, from what I understand. A lot of it was closer to guerilla marketing. Corporations do that too, but it's a little harder to study whether it works. How often can we even prove they're doing it, let alone study the effects and prove causation?

That doesn't mean the Russian campaign was effective, of course. Creating Facebook groups and writing tweets pretending to be a voter with a certain viewpoint might be just as ineffective as buying Facebook ads.

On December 28 2018 14:46 GreenHorizons wrote:


Obviously any effective system will have to adapt to changes in circumstances. My general point is that scientific socialism is a better system even if imperfect.



Climate change, water/energy shortages, and massive migrations away from uninhabitable land to try to put a bow on it. But you could sprinkle in white nationalism, economic collapse and international conflict on top of that if you want.

On December 29 2018 05:03 IgnE wrote:


What about campaign finance reform?

On December 29 2018 05:32 ChristianS wrote:
I guess this is just so complicated a topic that I can't follow you all the way to your conclusion. There's a lot of hard questions along the way. Just to start off with, there's two related but distinct questions, "does this technology work?" and "to what degree was it used for this nefarious purpose?" Cambridge Analytica, for instance, seemed convinced that their technology does work, and that they can use it to manipulate elections.

You seem to be starting from the premise "no, it doesn't work" and "it wasn't used that much but it doesn't matter anyway because it doesn't work." That might be right (I'd suspect it is right, actually). Then you get other hard, interrelated questions like "how clear was it at the time that it didn't work?" and "how should journalists have covered it?" To these your answers seem to be "pretty obvious" and "not much, because it obviously didn't/wouldn't work." Then you get questions like "why did the journalists cover it the way they did?" to which you answer to "they were covering it disingenuously to create propaganda that serves their corporate overlords' interests."

I envy your certainty, I suppose, because none of those answers seem at all clear to me. From what I understand of it, it wasn't at all clear at the time that political operations like CA or IRA are ineffective, and even if you thought they probably don't work, it'd be worth covering in a pretty alarmist tone considering if they did work they would fundamentally undermine democratic government. Even if I think the evidence at this point is pretty good that they don't work, I certainly think all these questions are difficult enough that I could easily understand a journalist who did take an alarmist tone. I certainly don't think there would be strong enough reason to assume they were disingenuous at the time.

Reading this back, I realize I sound like a mealy-mouthed centrist. But you often seem frustrated that people don't see the obvious correctness of your position; in this case, for me at least, it's because you're starting with so many assumptions I don't think I can reasonably assume.

On December 29 2018 06:00 ChristianS wrote:
I mean, okay. I made an earnest effort to understand your beliefs, why you believe them, and why I don't share them. Mealy-mouthed is often how that's gonna come out. If you'd rather I keep it to myself next time I can do that.

Examples of what? Are you talking about p6, Wulfey, etc. saying things like "lol, turns out Berniebros were just Russian pawns" and the like? I thought they were wrong, and more generally that it's obnoxious to dismiss opponents without engaging with their argument like that. Same for the general trend of liberals dismissing opposing voices on the internet as Russian trolls (LegalLord used to get this a lot, for example).

On December 29 2018 06:09 GreenHorizons wrote:


I don't mean to be disrespectful, just frank.

Yes those, but more specifically spreading either negligently bad or intentionally deceitful reporting/commentary from which they were drawing/supporting their assertions on the significance or validity of those types of claims.

On December 29 2018 06:16 ChristianS wrote:

Oh, was this the story about a rally organized by Russian operatives or whatever that you kept badgering P6 about? I never researched it independently, but I'll take your word for it that it was bullshit. If that's all you're writing off as propaganda, fair enough. I was under the impression you were complaining about the entire "Russian influence campaign swung the election" narrative and calling all of it a disingenuous propaganda campaign by the corporate media, which is where I have trouble following you.