https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pce4gMx2h4
Monday, June 14, 2021
Sunday, June 13, 2021
LEFTIST CIVIL WAR: Jimmy Dore JOUSTS with Cenk Uygur & Ana Kasparian of TYT on Twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcDrPq1CdtA
Over 35 Edible Perennials in a Backyard Garden, Fruits You Have NEVER Seen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8hpGT5x2Ug
What’s the difference between a waitress and a private equity partner? (their tax rate)
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2021/06/13/whats-the-difference-between-a-waitress-and-a-private-equity-partner-their-tax-ate/
from Dean Baker
If the waitress works in an upscale restaurant and earns a decent living, there is a good chance that she is paying a higher tax rate than a private equity partner. The reason is that private equity (PE) partners get most of their pay in the form of “carried interest.” This is money that is paid to them as a share of the returns on the money they manage. Since private equity partners are rich and powerful, their carried interest payments are taxed at the capital gains tax rate of 20 percent, instead of the 37 percent top tax rate that people earning millions a year would be paying.
The ostensible rationale for allowing PE partners to pay a lower tax rate on their carried interest is that these payments involve risk. If the funds don’t meet some threshold rate of return, then they don’t earn any money.
The New York Times had a major piece on tax avoidance and evasion by private equity partners, which gave this rationale. However, the piece neglected to point out that millions of workers take this sort of risk, since they get paid, in large part, on commission. This list would include realtors, car salespeople, and waiters and waitresses. In all of these cases, the money earned as a commission is taxed as normal income. It is only PE partners, or hedge fund and venture capital partners, that get to pay a lower tax rate.
The tax savings for PE partners are substantial. For a PE partner earning $10 million a year, the savings between the current 37 percent top marginal rate and the 20 percent capital gains rate would be roughly $1.7 million a year. That comes to more than 1,100 food stamp person years.
Breaking Points: Why Krystal and Saagar Going Independent Matters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fIGTX09zhc
“Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar” Debut SMASHES The Hill’s New “Rising”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTa6Kyl5eKw
At least 21 dead from torture in Myanmar as military holds undisclosed trials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crjVEi9RqM
Innocent Flint Family TERRORIZED by Michigan Police in No-Knock Raid Using 40-50 Officers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJtlQEMq2qM
Keystone Pipeline Abandoned After Activist Investors Force Shutdown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kNnBEdz5PA
Seattle Becomes First Major City to Reach Biden's 70% Vaccination Goal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQXf9OHHPi4
Homelessness and Oregon Legislature with Backyard Politix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsXA-k7rRHs
'Cowardly!' The Young Turks' Syria Coverage Called Out By Journalist Aaron Maté
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnS77Fy3BDY
Michael Cohen on Trump lies: "everybody lied for Donald"!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEFLJ9eCJ9s
In Defense of Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Zizek has made some serious missteps in recent years — but he remains an important theorist for the Left in our postmodern, neoliberal era.
CONRAD HAMILTON
MATT MCMANUS
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/06/slavoj-zizek-leftist-philosophy-ideology-postmodernism-neoliberalism
Slavoj Žižek is one of the most controversial left-wing thinkers in the world today. For fans, he’s a figure worthy of rapturous praise and entire journals devoted to studying his thought. For detractors, he’s a charlatan and a clown — a nose-grabbing, Lacan-citing, cartoonish emblem of everything that is wrong with out-of-touch, superficially radical continental philosophy.
These critiques sometimes have a ring of truth to them. Žižek has taken some truly bad positions in recent years, one of the worst being his crypto-accelerationist “endorsement” of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. While Žižek has tried to explain himself since then, he’s never backed away from his basic position: that Trump’s victory would help bring about a more “authentic left.” It was a bad argument that ignored the actual history of far-right movements, which — far from accelerating the rise of a genuine left — have often bred further reaction. Žižek’s arguments also ignored the incredible damage Trump was capable of — and ultimately caused.
Žižek’s 2015 comments about refugees also warrant criticism. While he rightly criticized Western states and global capital for generating many of the conditions that cause people to flee their home countries, his view of refugees from Africa and the Middle East as radically different, almost incompatible, with European society risks reinforcing far-right racism. Žižek can claim he supports solidarity with refugees in spite of this all he wants — these still remain troubling remarks.
But despite these serious missteps, Žižek remains an important theorist for the Left for two reasons. First, his reinterpretation of dialectical materialism has resuscitated the leftist philosophy in the face of intellectual assaults. Second, he has written creative, insightful studies of ideology in our postmodern, neoliberal era. Taken together these contributions constitute a formidable legacy that ensure Žižek, whatever his flaws, will remain a touchstone for a long time.
Did Somebody Say Dialectical Materialism?
Arguably Žižek’s most significant accomplishment is his rethinking of dialectical materialism. Before delving into this it will help to explain just what dialectical materialism is. The “dia-” in “dialectical” comes from Ancient Greek and refers to apart or across. The “lectical” is derived from the Greek word “logos” — a term too enigmatic to explain here, but that we’ll refer to as dialogue or discussion.
For ancient philosophers like Socrates or Plato, dialectic was the bringing forth of arguments by opposing interlocutors with the goal of reaching truth. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however — in a watershed moment for European philosophy — its meaning was transformed. No longer was “dialectic” used to describe the discrete practice of rational discussion. Instead, the German thinkers G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx applied it to characterize the entire advancement of society and its intellectual life, which they argued progresses through the negotiation of its internal contradictions.
According to Hegel, the forward momentum of history comes through the manifestation of concepts in the realm of practice. The fact that the Protestant Reformation had not happened in France, for instance, led to a moment of reckoning with feudal authorities in which “absolute violence” prevailed; in which the absence of social individualism meant the guillotining of enemies could be treated “with no more significance than cleaving a cabbage head.”
Though indebted to Hegel, Marx thought he used abstract concepts too freely. He attempted to set dialectics on a materialist footing by analyzing political economy. His famous thesis scarcely bears repeating: that capitalism, due to its propensity for replacing workers with machines and depriving them of the full product of their labor, eventually deprives itself of the consumer demand it needs to survive (which leads, of course, to communism).
Marx’s adaptation of dialectics, then, was always an explicitly materialist endeavor. But while using dialectics to explain the economic thrust of history became standard among Marxists, its application to nature remained controversial. From 1872 to 1882, Friedrich Engels authored — with Marx’s blessing — several manuscripts attempting to schematize natural phenomena ranging from biology to tidal friction using dialectics. The overly deterministic character — is boiling water really an example of dialectics? — caused Engels’s nature writing to be snubbed by much of the Marxist literati in the West from the 1920s onward.
The reception was far warmer among the apparatchiks of the Soviet Union. In 1938, Stalin went so far as to codify Engelsian “DiaMat” (dialectical materialism) as the official philosophy of the USSR. Given Stalin’s treatment of the natural sciences during his violent reign (most notoriously in the Lysenko affair), this didn’t exactly strengthen its intellectual repute.
For Žižek, the vulgarity of dialectical materialism, combined with the vulgarity of its political application, makes it “arguably the most stupid philosophical system of the twentieth century.” So why does he insist on identifying with the label? Žižek argues that without a vision of nature to oppose to capitalism, the Marxist left will find itself unable to speak decisively: it will, as he jokes of the poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler, be unable to discuss a glass of water on the table without couching it in an array of caveats.
At the same time, Žižek’s version of dialectical materialism — what he calls, as if it were a Rocky sequel, “Dialectical Materialism 2” — is quite different than its stodgier precursor. The error of “Dialectical Materialism 1” is that its attempt to subordinate reality to objective laws ignores the great intellectual upheavals of modernity: namely, philosophy’s discovery (Kant via Descartes) that the structure of our thought conditions our understanding of the external world and psychoanalysis’s discovery (Lacan via Freud) that desire constitutes itself in opposition to a lack that can never be properly filled.
Žižek’s signature gesture is not to conceive of these injunctions negatively — as proof of the limitations of human reason, or as sexuality as a site of impossibility — but positively. If humans are defined by an irresolvable tension between reason and its fallibility, between desire and its lack, this proves they are part of nature. For if contemporary science has shown us anything, it’s that nature is riddled with inconsistencies, contingencies, and tensions. It is, in other words, constitutively incomplete.
To illustrate the point, Žižek often brings up quantum physics. Before quantum physics, our Newtonian understanding of the natural world was as a mechanically functioning material artifact. The shattering of this image, Žižek says, was like a player’s discovery of a video game glitch. When a gamer finds a glitch — when, say, they pass beyond a door that was put in the game for decorative purposes — they frequently find themselves mired in a mishmash of chaotic lines of code; in a liminal space in which the apparent rules of the game do not hold. But these spaces are still part of the game.According iteration of dialectical misses that reality is no holistic and harmoniou laws.
According to Žižek the same can be said of quantum physics: the shadowy conjuncture of waves and particles demonstrates the anarchic character of nature. The earlier iteration of dialectical materialism misses that reality is not holistic and harmonious, but defined by disunity and a refusal to submit to iron laws.
Given Žižek’s stress on failure and incompleteness as inherent features of the universe, it’s appropriate that his own system isn’t perfect either. One could question how useful it is to base one’s conception of nature upon contingency. Doesn’t this risk promoting a view where anything unknown can be seen as proof of its “incompleteness”?
Still, the great strength of Žižek’s dialectic materialism is that it incorporates criticisms of earlier versions. Many postmodernists have assailed orthodox dialectical materialism for being too rigid and deterministic, for assuming the knowability of reality. Žižek doesn’t reject these views outright — he builds them into his system.
It is often said that dialectics progresses in a three-step waltz, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. With “Dialectical Materialism 2,” Žižek accomplishes a quintessentially dialectical feat: the synthesis of his opposition into something new.
The Sublime Resurrection of Ideology
If Žižek’s “Dialectical Materialism 2” attempts to renew Marxist thought by jettisoning a naïve idea of objective reality, the same can be said of his theory of ideology.
In the late 1980s and ’90s, when Žižek made his name, ideology studies were thoroughly passé. Poststructuralist and “post-Marxist” critics had launched a volley of attacks on the classical account given by luminaries from Marx and Engels to Louis Althusser.
Generations of Foucauldians claimed that, contra its seemingly radical qualities, the theory of ideology was too simplistic — replicating the old appearance/reality distinction of Enlightenment liberal philosophy, just at a higher level of sophistication. Even worse, it was elitist in suggesting that only a privileged cadre of intellectuals could cast aside the illusions of ideology and approach the truth.
Building on this, more politically minded critics claimed the binary logic underpinning ideology theory generated a simplistic notion of power: ideology was treated as merely part of an epiphenomenal superstructure that justified and obfuscated the real material basis of class exploitation. According to these critics, it was crucial to recognize how ideas molded us into the entrepreneurial, neoliberal subjects who both participated in and created a world dominated by capital.
Žižek’s argument acknowledges many of these criticisms while showcasing why ideology remains a vital theoretical category for the Left. His innovation is to show that ideology is best understood not in terms of an illusion that conceals reality, but as a psychological disposition and set of behaviors. This is especially important to grasp in a postmodern society, where ironic detachment and meta-awareness of our own manipulation have become familiar cultural tropes.
Often, these sorts of dissociations are perceived as critical gestures: by stressing my awareness of ideology and power, I disenchant it. Žižek insists this is nonsense. Taking a minimal distance from ideology in fact facilitates our reconciliation with it.
There are venerable precedents for this ideological dissociation and retrenchment. The Catholic practice of confession allows people a safe space to indulge their sinful natures while retrenching the power of the Church by requiring congregants to performatively absolve these forays. It’s common to suppose we’ve moved on from such antiquarian practices. But Žižek argues we are more likely than ever to adopt customs that allow us to mock ideology while submitting to its imperatives.
The phenomena of commodity fetishism is a good example. Once upon a time we’d say that the problem is that people see commodities like expensive cars, Gucci purses, and Starbucks coffee as talismanic objects. The point of ideological analysis is therefore to make people aware that these are all just simple material objects, very often produced under exploitative conditions.
But as Žižek points out, we all already know this today. One of the reasons businesses proclaim their (superficial) commitment to racial justice is because consumers will parrot a seemingly critical rhetoric about the fashion industry depending on unrealistic beauty standards, that clothes don’t make the man, and so on. And when pushed to defend their attachment to consumer products, they’ll note that Gucci supports the LGBTQ community, that Starbucks recently committed itself to hiring more female executives, or even claim that we’re just consuming “ironically.”
The combination of expressing awareness of our consumerism, with the symbolic escape provided by appeals to cosmetic inclusion or ironic dissociation, performs the same function that confession has for the Catholic church. It gives us a safe space to take a minimal distance from ideology, while ensuring we are as beholden to it as ever. In other words, the proper ideological subject isn’t one who doesn’t know what’s going on, but someone who says “I know, but…”
The same is true of political ideologies. One of the strange features about postmodern conservatism was the number of young right-wingers, particularly online, who claimed to be supporting Trump ironically or satirically. They often claimed this wasn’t about sticking up for anything like conservative principles, but instead “owning the libs” or sending a message to “elites.”
But of course these dissociations from reactionary views provided an ideal defense against conventional forms of criticism: whenever someone pointed out that Trumpists were often thin-skinned plutocrats defending an exploitative and bigoted system of power, postmodern conservatives could claim their support was all a big joke and mock critics for taking it seriously. Far from being countercultural, this allowed them to support reactionary ideas without having to take possession of them or offer justifications.
The Value of Žižek
Žižek is a mercurial figure whose work can be bafflingly spasmodic. His propensity to adopt the most provocative position has led him to conclude French voters have no reason to prefer the neoliberal Emmanuel Macron over the xenophobic Marine Le Pen. His writing vacillates between enjoyably accessible, with plenty of pop culture references to brighten things up, and frustratingly dense. And even sympathetic readers sometimes wish he would quit repeating himself throughout his myriad writings.
But these faults shouldn’t obscure the value of Žižek’s work on dialectical materialism and ideology. Few left-wing theorists have been as effective in refocusing our attention on the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism and the increasingly mysterious ways its ideology surfaces in everyday life.
Likewise, while his leftist opponents have often taken issue with his exhumation of dialectical materialism, accusing it of being pre-scientific, they could perhaps learn something from it. Žižek’s dialectics of incompleteness show us how novelty in politics, as in science, is possible — how Lenin could emerge from the periphery to seize power in the Russian Revolution, to cite one of his favorite examples.
The views of his left opponent often seem more primitive and binary. There is inequality, they tell us, so we should redistribute wealth. What this elides is the need to radically upend a system that, at present, makes fulfilling this goal nearly impossible.
If the mission of critical theory is to analyze and critique the ailments of its time, then Žižek is one of our finest diagnosticians. His work may not be sublime, but it is revelatory — which is just what the Left needs right now.
Chevron Imprisons Lawyer Who Exposed Their Crimes Against Humanity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6kMtNjoR28
Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats
FEC investigation failed to uncover link to Rally Forge, a firm with close ties to Turning Point USA
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/11/facebook-ads-turning-point-usa-rally-forge
A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal.
In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.
Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.
Rally Forge would go on to set up a pro-Trump domestic “troll farm” for Turning Point Action, a “sister” organization of Turning Point USA, in 2020, earning a permanent ban from Facebook.
“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.
She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”
Some of the Facebook ads from America Progress Now. Composite: Facebook
Devon Kearns, a spokesperson for Facebook, said: “We removed Rally Forge from our platforms for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Since the 2018 midterms, we have strengthened our policies related to election interference and political ad transparency. We continue working to make political advertising more transparent on our platform and we welcome updated regulations and help from policymakers as we evolve our policies in this space.”
The revelation that the ads were linked to a rightwing organization raises questions about the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of campaign finance laws. APN and its ads appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the FEC and include proper disclosures on advertisements, as ProPublica and Vice News first reported in 2018.
The non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint against APN and subsequently sued the agency in an attempt to force it to investigate the group. But in July 2020, the FEC voted to dismiss allegations that America Progress Now had violated federal law, after an individual, Evan Muhlstein, took responsibility for the ads and attributed the lack of proper disclosures and filings to his “inexperience”.
It is illegal to knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to federal agencies, and the FEC appears to have taken Muhlstein at his word that the ads were a sincere but novice attempt to support Green party candidates.
The former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel, who reviewed the case at the request of the Guardian, said that were she still on the FEC, she would now refer this “stunning” case to the justice department for investigation.
“It seems as if it’s a clear fraud,” Ravel said, noting that the FEC general counsel’s office appeared to have been “misled” by Muhlstein. “The requirement for the justice department to take on an electoral matter is that it be serious and willful, and clearly in this case it was willful, in my opinion.”
Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, said: “This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw ‘America Progress Now’ ads promoting Green party candidates would’ve had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives. The FEC’s job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters’ right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation.”
‘A crystal clear example of astroturfing’
On 27 October 2018 – just days before the 6 November election – America Progress Now began running a series of ads that used leftist motifs, such as the red rose emoji and images of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to rail against the “corporate, two-party oligarchy” and the “corporate, capitalist wage system”. Some of the ads urged voters to choose a third party, but others endorsed Green party candidates by name – triggering FEC rules for independent expenditures.
Following the 5 November publication of a ProPublica/Vice News report on the “mysterious” group behind the ads, Facebook launched a “hi-pri[ority]” escalation to investigate whether they constituted “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) – the name Facebook gives to the kind of deceptive tactics that a Russian influence operation used during the 2016 election.
The investigation was straightforward since Facebook has access to information that regular users do not: the names of the people who control Facebook Pages. Investigators quickly realized that America Progress Now was administered by three individuals – Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg and Colton Duncan – who also served as Facebook Page administrators for Turning Point USA, the rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012. Hoffman and Clegg were also administrators for Kirk’s Facebook Page.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, left, with Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at a summit in 2019. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters
“These admins are connected to Turning Point USA,” one staffer from the civic integrity team said, according to internal task management documents seen by the Guardian. “This is very inauthentic. I don’t know what the policy here is but this seems very sketchy.” Another staffer named Rally Forge as being responsible for the ads. APN had spent nearly $5,000 to have the ads shown to users nearly 300,000 times, a third staffer noted.
A rightwing political marketing firm that ran a $350,000 pro-Trump Super Pac in the 2016 election, Rally Forge was founded and run by Hoffman, an Arizona Republican who was at the time a member of the town council in Queen Creek, Arizona. In November 2020 Hoffman was elected to serve in the Arizona state legislature.
Clegg and Duncan were alumni of Texas State University, where they had been elected student body president and vice-president respectively in 2017. Clegg was impeached and removed from office shortly before his term would have ended in 2018. Duncan resigned from his post in 2017; he appears to have been hired directly by Turning Point USA in 2019.
Since 2017, Rally Forge has been Turning Point USA’s highest-compensated independent contractor, paid more than $1.1m over two years, according to the non-profit’s public filings. Turning Point Action, an affiliated organization also founded by Kirk, paid Rally Forge $700,000 for work supporting Trump and opposing Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign, and an additional $400,000 for work on the US Senate runoff races in Georgia.
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, said that neither Turning Point USA nor Turning Point Action had “any involvement” with America Progress Now or its Facebook ads.
In addition to America Progress Now and Turning Point USA, Hoffman, Clegg and Duncan all also served as administrators for a number of other rightwing Facebook Pages. The trio each maintained two accounts to administer their Facebook Pages, one using their full names and one using their first and middle initials – a violation of the company’s policy that each user can only have one Facebook account. One of each of the three men’s accounts had been authorized by Facebook to run political ads, a process that required submitting a government ID to Facebook for verification.
One of Hoffman’s accounts had spent approximately $650,000 to run Facebook ads on behalf of 40 Pages, including the official Page of Donald Trump Jr.
Hoffman declined to answer detailed questions from the Guardian, including about the nature of Rally Forge’s relationship with Muhlstein. “The premise of your questions is either ill-informed or intentionally misleading,” he said in a statement. “Rally Forge is a marketing agency, not a compliance company. Furthermore, it is my understanding that the small handful of ads, totaling less than 2,500 dollars, which qualified as independent expenditures, have been fully disclosed by the responsible organization in coordination with the FEC.”
Duncan said that he had never heard of America Progress Now before the Guardian’s inquiries and had “zero knowledge or insight into the group”. When asked about the CG Duncan account, which had passed Facebook’s verification process and was an administrator of the APN page, he responded: “I urge you to reach out to JM [Hoffman]. Let me know what you find out, I’m as curious as you are.”
Clegg did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.
Despite possessing clear evidence of inauthenticity, Facebook staffers determined the Green party ads did not violate existing company policies related to political ads or CIB. They decided to deactivate the three men’s extra accounts, but after the election and only after providing them with advance notice.
The episode inspired some disquiet among Facebook staff.
“What I find very problematic is that the intention here is clearly to mislead users,” said the civic integrity staffer. “The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity, which would be grounds for removal on most surfaces,” she added, referring to Facebook’s rules requiring people to use their real names on their accounts.
One product manager produced an internal postmortem of the incident in which she described it as “a crystal clear example of astroturfing” – deceptive campaign tactics designed to appear as grassroots actions – “… as well as playing both sides … and political ad opacity, since users cannot see who they are. Furthermore, I could see making a case for voter suppression.”
‘The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity,’ said a Facebook civic integrity staffer. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
“Unfortunately, it turned out there was nothing we could do against these ads,” she added. “We ended up only aiming to remove a few [duplicate] accounts under the fake account policy, but only after proper notice – and I believe we have not removed them yet.”
“Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?” she asked.
A Facebook spokesperson said that the company had indeed removed the duplicate accounts following the midterms, and that Rally Forge’s network of Pages and accounts had gone dormant after November 2018. The company made a number of updates to its policies on political ads before the 2020 elections, including requiring advertisers to provide more information about their organizations before being authorized to run ads. It also introduced a new policy to encourage more transparency regarding who runs networks of Facebook Pages.
Rally Forge reactivated its network of Pages and accounts in June 2020, according to Facebook. It established a domestic “troll farm” in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed.
Facebook said that its automated systems had detected and deleted fake accounts made by Rally Forge, which then created “thinly veiled personas” to carry out deceptive campaigning. In October 2020, the platform permanently banned Rally Forge and Hoffman for violating its policy against CIB, work that Facebook said the firm had undertaken “on behalf of Turning Point USA” and another client.
A spokesman for Turning Point USA disputed the characterization of the operation as a “troll farm” and noted that it was a project of Turning Point Action, which is a separate entity.
In September 2019, CLC filed a complaint alleging that APN’s failure to register with the FEC violated federal law. The FEC responded by sending a letter to an inaccurate address that America Progress Now had listed on its Facebook Page, but it does not appear to have taken further action, prompting CLC to sue it in February 2020.
“If nothing is done, the FEC will instead be sending a message that anonymous or fake entities like America Progress Now can pop into existence just prior to an election, exploit lax registration and reporting requirements by digital platforms, spend unlimited sums of money, and then disappear into thin air once an election is over,” the group said at the time.
In April 2020, the FEC wrote again, this time to the address listed on an Arizona state business filing for America Progress Now.
On 15 April 2020, Evan Muhlstein responded to the FEC by email. Muhlstein described the lack of filing as an “error”, writing, “I believe that it is important for the commission to understand that any potential failure on either of those items is based entirely on my inexperience to the process.” He wrote that he had “assumed that Facebook’s ‘political disclaimer/disclosure’ was all that was necessary”, said his expenditures totaled “only $2,467.54”, and expressed surprise that “a spend as small as this would require any type of reporting”.
Donald Trump speaks at a Turning Point USA summit in 2019. Photograph: SMG/Rex/Shutterstock
“I again offer my sincerest apology for any potential errors in failing to disclose,” Muhlstein wrote. “Given the apparent obstacles and unknowns of participating in the election process in this manner (of which I am learning some of now), it is highly unlikely I will ever participate in it again. I feel terrible for having been so ignorant to the process.”
Muhlstein also expressed his desire to come into compliance “correctly and quickly”. At no point in the communication did Muhlstein disclose that the advertisements had been handled by a major political marketing firm.
“Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC is extremely misleading and might warrant a criminal investigation,” said Fischer, of the CLC.
Muhlstein did not respond to multiple attempts to make contact with him. His connection to Rally Forge is not known. He is a resident of Queen Creek, Arizona, the town where Hoffman also lives.
The FEC has the power to issue subpoenas and carry out serious investigations, but only after a vote of four of its five commissioners.
In a report dated 4 May, the FEC’s general counsel argued that, while it appeared that Muhlstein had violated federal law, the small amount of money involved and Muhlstein’s statement that he was unlikely to engage in further political spending led it to recommend that the FEC exercise prosecutorial discretion and dismiss the allegations with a warning.
In July, the FEC voted to follow the general counsel’s recommendation and dismiss the case, forestalling any actual investigation.
Commissioner James “Trey” Trainor went further, lambasting the CLC in a statement of reasons. “Contrary to CLC’s wild speculation, this case wasn’t about a ‘fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,’” he wrote. “In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech.”
Trainor asserted that “there was no evidence to contradict” Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC “and no evidence to support CLC’s salacious theories about the ‘unknown person or persons’ behind APN”.
It would not be until 23 December 2020 – six months after the FEC had voted not to pursue the allegations of law violations and more than two years after the election – that Muhlstein would provide the FEC with that evidence, when he finally registered APN with the FEC and disclosed that the independent expenditure had been made through Rally Forge.
The FEC did not respond to questions from the Guardian, citing a policy not to comment on enforcement matters. Trainor did not respond to a request for comment. Fischer said: “It looks like we were right.”
Daniel Hernandez contributed reporting
Study finds brain areas involved in seeking information about bad possibilities
Provides insight into how people decide whether they want to know what future holds
June 11, 2021
Washington University School of Medicine
Researchers have identified the brain regions involved in choosing whether to find out if a bad event is about to happen.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210611110807.htm
The term "doomscrolling" describes the act of endlessly scrolling through bad news on social media and reading every worrisome tidbit that pops up, a habit that unfortunately seems to have become common during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The biology of our brains may play a role in that. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified specific areas and cells in the brain that become active when an individual is faced with the choice to learn or hide from information about an unwanted aversive event the individual likely has no power to prevent.
The findings, published June 11 in Neuron, could shed light on the processes underlying psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety -- not to mention how all of us cope with the deluge of information that is a feature of modern life.
"People's brains aren't well equipped to deal with the information age," said senior author Ilya Monosov, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience, of neurosurgery and of biomedical engineering. "People are constantly checking, checking, checking for news, and some of that checking is totally unhelpful. Our modern lifestyles could be resculpting the circuits in our brain that have evolved over millions of years to help us survive in an uncertain and ever-changing world."
In 2019, studying monkeys, Monosov laboratory members J. Kael White, PhD, then a graduate student, and senior scientist Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, PhD, identified two brain areas involved in tracking uncertainty about positively anticipated events, such as rewards. Activity in those areas drove the monkeys' motivation to find information about good things that may happen.
But it wasn't clear whether the same circuits were involved in seeking information about negatively anticipated events, like punishments. After all, most people want to know whether, for example, a bet on a horse race is likely to pay off big. Not so for bad news.
"In the clinic, when you give some patients the opportunity to get a genetic test to find out if they have, for example, Huntington's disease, some people will go ahead and get the test as soon as they can, while other people will refuse to be tested until symptoms occur," Monosov said. "Clinicians see information-seeking behavior in some people and dread behavior in others."
To find the neural circuits involved in deciding whether to seek information about unwelcome possibilities, first author Ahmad Jezzini, PhD, and Monosov taught two monkeys to recognize when something unpleasant might be headed their way. They trained the monkeys to recognize symbols that indicated they might be about to get an irritating puff of air to the face. For example, the monkeys first were shown one symbol that told them a puff might be coming but with varying degrees of certainty. A few seconds after the first symbol was shown, a second symbol was shown that resolved the animals' uncertainty. It told the monkeys that the puff was definitely coming, or it wasn't.
The researchers measured whether the animals wanted to know what was going to happen by whether they watched for the second signal or averted their eyes or, in separate experiments, letting the monkeys choose among different symbols and their outcomes.
Much like people, the two monkeys had different attitudes toward bad news: One wanted to know; the other preferred not to. The difference in their attitudes toward bad news was striking because they were of like mind when it came to good news. When they were given the option of finding out whether they were about to receive something they liked -- a drop of juice -- they both consistently chose to find out.
"We found that attitudes toward seeking information about negative events can go both ways, even between animals that have the same attitude about positive rewarding events," said Jezzini, who is an instructor in neuroscience. "To us, that was a sign that the two attitudes may be guided by different neural processes."
By precisely measuring neural activity in the brain while the monkeys were faced with these choices, the researchers identified one brain area, the anterior cingulate cortex, that encodes information about attitudes toward good and bad possibilities separately. They found a second brain area, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that contains individual cells whose activity reflects the monkeys' overall attitudes: yes for info on either good or bad possibilities vs. yes for intel on good possibilities only.
Understanding the neural circuits underlying uncertainty is a step toward better therapies for people with conditions such as anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which involve an inability to tolerate uncertainty.
"We started this study because we wanted to know how the brain encodes our desire to know what our future has in store for us," Monosov said. "We're living in a world our brains didn't evolve for. The constant availability of information is a new challenge for us to deal with. I think understanding the mechanisms of information seeking is quite important for society and for mental health at a population level."
Co-authors Bromberg-Martin, a senior scientist in the Monosov lab, and Lucas Trambaiolli, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, participated in the analyses of neural and anatomical data to make this study possible.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Washington University School of Medicine. Original written by Tamara Bhandari. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Ahmad Jezzini, Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, Lucas R. Trambaiolli, Suzanne N. Haber, Ilya E. Monosov. A prefrontal network integrates preferences for advance information about uncertain rewards and punishments. Neuron, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.05.013
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210611110807.htm
The term "doomscrolling" describes the act of endlessly scrolling through bad news on social media and reading every worrisome tidbit that pops up, a habit that unfortunately seems to have become common during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The biology of our brains may play a role in that. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified specific areas and cells in the brain that become active when an individual is faced with the choice to learn or hide from information about an unwanted aversive event the individual likely has no power to prevent.
The findings, published June 11 in Neuron, could shed light on the processes underlying psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety -- not to mention how all of us cope with the deluge of information that is a feature of modern life.
"People's brains aren't well equipped to deal with the information age," said senior author Ilya Monosov, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience, of neurosurgery and of biomedical engineering. "People are constantly checking, checking, checking for news, and some of that checking is totally unhelpful. Our modern lifestyles could be resculpting the circuits in our brain that have evolved over millions of years to help us survive in an uncertain and ever-changing world."
In 2019, studying monkeys, Monosov laboratory members J. Kael White, PhD, then a graduate student, and senior scientist Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, PhD, identified two brain areas involved in tracking uncertainty about positively anticipated events, such as rewards. Activity in those areas drove the monkeys' motivation to find information about good things that may happen.
But it wasn't clear whether the same circuits were involved in seeking information about negatively anticipated events, like punishments. After all, most people want to know whether, for example, a bet on a horse race is likely to pay off big. Not so for bad news.
"In the clinic, when you give some patients the opportunity to get a genetic test to find out if they have, for example, Huntington's disease, some people will go ahead and get the test as soon as they can, while other people will refuse to be tested until symptoms occur," Monosov said. "Clinicians see information-seeking behavior in some people and dread behavior in others."
To find the neural circuits involved in deciding whether to seek information about unwelcome possibilities, first author Ahmad Jezzini, PhD, and Monosov taught two monkeys to recognize when something unpleasant might be headed their way. They trained the monkeys to recognize symbols that indicated they might be about to get an irritating puff of air to the face. For example, the monkeys first were shown one symbol that told them a puff might be coming but with varying degrees of certainty. A few seconds after the first symbol was shown, a second symbol was shown that resolved the animals' uncertainty. It told the monkeys that the puff was definitely coming, or it wasn't.
The researchers measured whether the animals wanted to know what was going to happen by whether they watched for the second signal or averted their eyes or, in separate experiments, letting the monkeys choose among different symbols and their outcomes.
Much like people, the two monkeys had different attitudes toward bad news: One wanted to know; the other preferred not to. The difference in their attitudes toward bad news was striking because they were of like mind when it came to good news. When they were given the option of finding out whether they were about to receive something they liked -- a drop of juice -- they both consistently chose to find out.
"We found that attitudes toward seeking information about negative events can go both ways, even between animals that have the same attitude about positive rewarding events," said Jezzini, who is an instructor in neuroscience. "To us, that was a sign that the two attitudes may be guided by different neural processes."
By precisely measuring neural activity in the brain while the monkeys were faced with these choices, the researchers identified one brain area, the anterior cingulate cortex, that encodes information about attitudes toward good and bad possibilities separately. They found a second brain area, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that contains individual cells whose activity reflects the monkeys' overall attitudes: yes for info on either good or bad possibilities vs. yes for intel on good possibilities only.
Understanding the neural circuits underlying uncertainty is a step toward better therapies for people with conditions such as anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which involve an inability to tolerate uncertainty.
"We started this study because we wanted to know how the brain encodes our desire to know what our future has in store for us," Monosov said. "We're living in a world our brains didn't evolve for. The constant availability of information is a new challenge for us to deal with. I think understanding the mechanisms of information seeking is quite important for society and for mental health at a population level."
Co-authors Bromberg-Martin, a senior scientist in the Monosov lab, and Lucas Trambaiolli, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, participated in the analyses of neural and anatomical data to make this study possible.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Washington University School of Medicine. Original written by Tamara Bhandari. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Ahmad Jezzini, Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, Lucas R. Trambaiolli, Suzanne N. Haber, Ilya E. Monosov. A prefrontal network integrates preferences for advance information about uncertain rewards and punishments. Neuron, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.05.013
Saturday, June 12, 2021
New discovery shows human cells can write RNA sequences into DNA
June 11, 2021
Thomas Jefferson University
In a discovery that challenges long-held dogma in biology, researchers show that mammalian cells can convert RNA sequences back into DNA, a feat more common in viruses than eukaryotic cells.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210611174037.htm
Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed cell. That same class of machines, called polymerases, also build RNA messages, which are like notes copied from the central DNA repository of recipes, so they can be read more efficiently into proteins. But polymerases were thought to only work in one direction DNA into DNA or RNA. This prevents RNA messages from being rewritten back into the master recipe book of genomic DNA. Now, Thomas Jefferson University researchers provide the first evidence that RNA segments can be written back into DNA, which potentially challenges the central dogma in biology and could have wide implications affecting many fields of biology.
"This work opens the door to many other studies that will help us understand the significance of having a mechanism for converting RNA messages into DNA in our own cells," says Richard Pomerantz, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Thomas Jefferson University. "The reality that a human polymerase can do this with high efficiency, raises many questions." For example, this finding suggests that RNA messages can be used as templates for repairing or re-writing genomic DNA.
The work was published June 11th in the journal Science Advances.
Together with first author Gurushankar Chandramouly and other collaborators, Dr. Pomerantz's team started by investigating one very unusual polymerase, called polymerase theta. Of the 14 DNA polymerases in mammalian cells, only three do the bulk of the work of duplicating the entire genome to prepare for cell division. The remaining 11 are mostly involved in detecting and making repairs when there's a break or error in the DNA strands. Polymerase theta repairs DNA, but is very error-prone and makes many errors or mutations. The researchers therefore noticed that some of polymerase theta's "bad" qualities were ones it shared with another cellular machine, albeit one more common in viruses -- the reverse transcriptase. Like Pol theta, HIV reverse transcriptase acts as a DNA polymerase, but can also bind RNA and read RNA back into a DNA strand.
In a series of elegant experiments, the researchers tested polymerase theta against the reverse transcriptase from HIV, which is one of the best studied of its kind. They showed that polymerase theta was capable of converting RNA messages into DNA, which it did as well as HIV reverse transcriptase, and that it actually did a better job than when duplicating DNA to DNA. Polymerase theta was more efficient and introduced fewer errors when using an RNA template to write new DNA messages, than when duplicating DNA into DNA, suggesting that this function could be its primary purpose in the cell.
The group collaborated with Dr. Xiaojiang S. Chen's lab at USC and used x-ray crystallography to define the structure and found that this molecule was able to change shape in order to accommodate the more bulky RNA molecule -- a feat unique among polymerases.
"Our research suggests that polymerase theta's main function is to act as a reverse transcriptase," says Dr. Pomerantz. "In healthy cells, the purpose of this molecule may be toward RNA-mediated DNA repair. In unhealthy cells, such as cancer cells, polymerase theta is highly expressed and promotes cancer cell growth and drug resistance. It will be exciting to further understand how polymerase theta's activity on RNA contributes to DNA repair and cancer-cell proliferation."
This research was supported by NIH grants 1R01GM130889-01 and 1R01GM137124-01, and R01CA197506 and R01CA240392. This research was also supported in part by a Tower Cancer Research Foundation grant.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Thomas Jefferson University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Gurushankar Chandramouly, Jiemin Zhao, Shane McDevitt, Timur Rusanov, Trung Hoang, Nikita Borisonnik, Taylor Treddinick, Felicia Wednesday Lopezcolorado, Tatiana Kent, Labiba A. Siddique, Joseph Mallon, Jacklyn Huhn, Zainab Shoda, Ekaterina Kashkina, Alessandra Brambati, Jeremy M. Stark, Xiaojiang S. Chen, Richard T. Pomerantz. Polθ reverse transcribes RNA and promotes RNA-templated DNA repair. Science Advances, 2021; 7 (24): eabf1771 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf1771
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210611174037.htm
Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed cell. That same class of machines, called polymerases, also build RNA messages, which are like notes copied from the central DNA repository of recipes, so they can be read more efficiently into proteins. But polymerases were thought to only work in one direction DNA into DNA or RNA. This prevents RNA messages from being rewritten back into the master recipe book of genomic DNA. Now, Thomas Jefferson University researchers provide the first evidence that RNA segments can be written back into DNA, which potentially challenges the central dogma in biology and could have wide implications affecting many fields of biology.
"This work opens the door to many other studies that will help us understand the significance of having a mechanism for converting RNA messages into DNA in our own cells," says Richard Pomerantz, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Thomas Jefferson University. "The reality that a human polymerase can do this with high efficiency, raises many questions." For example, this finding suggests that RNA messages can be used as templates for repairing or re-writing genomic DNA.
The work was published June 11th in the journal Science Advances.
Together with first author Gurushankar Chandramouly and other collaborators, Dr. Pomerantz's team started by investigating one very unusual polymerase, called polymerase theta. Of the 14 DNA polymerases in mammalian cells, only three do the bulk of the work of duplicating the entire genome to prepare for cell division. The remaining 11 are mostly involved in detecting and making repairs when there's a break or error in the DNA strands. Polymerase theta repairs DNA, but is very error-prone and makes many errors or mutations. The researchers therefore noticed that some of polymerase theta's "bad" qualities were ones it shared with another cellular machine, albeit one more common in viruses -- the reverse transcriptase. Like Pol theta, HIV reverse transcriptase acts as a DNA polymerase, but can also bind RNA and read RNA back into a DNA strand.
In a series of elegant experiments, the researchers tested polymerase theta against the reverse transcriptase from HIV, which is one of the best studied of its kind. They showed that polymerase theta was capable of converting RNA messages into DNA, which it did as well as HIV reverse transcriptase, and that it actually did a better job than when duplicating DNA to DNA. Polymerase theta was more efficient and introduced fewer errors when using an RNA template to write new DNA messages, than when duplicating DNA into DNA, suggesting that this function could be its primary purpose in the cell.
The group collaborated with Dr. Xiaojiang S. Chen's lab at USC and used x-ray crystallography to define the structure and found that this molecule was able to change shape in order to accommodate the more bulky RNA molecule -- a feat unique among polymerases.
"Our research suggests that polymerase theta's main function is to act as a reverse transcriptase," says Dr. Pomerantz. "In healthy cells, the purpose of this molecule may be toward RNA-mediated DNA repair. In unhealthy cells, such as cancer cells, polymerase theta is highly expressed and promotes cancer cell growth and drug resistance. It will be exciting to further understand how polymerase theta's activity on RNA contributes to DNA repair and cancer-cell proliferation."
This research was supported by NIH grants 1R01GM130889-01 and 1R01GM137124-01, and R01CA197506 and R01CA240392. This research was also supported in part by a Tower Cancer Research Foundation grant.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Thomas Jefferson University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Gurushankar Chandramouly, Jiemin Zhao, Shane McDevitt, Timur Rusanov, Trung Hoang, Nikita Borisonnik, Taylor Treddinick, Felicia Wednesday Lopezcolorado, Tatiana Kent, Labiba A. Siddique, Joseph Mallon, Jacklyn Huhn, Zainab Shoda, Ekaterina Kashkina, Alessandra Brambati, Jeremy M. Stark, Xiaojiang S. Chen, Richard T. Pomerantz. Polθ reverse transcribes RNA and promotes RNA-templated DNA repair. Science Advances, 2021; 7 (24): eabf1771 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf1771
The difference between ‘woke’ and a true awakening
Sri Lanka Guardian
10:28 PM
by Slavoj Zizek
The supposedly liberal ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture have little to do with awakening to what’s going on in the world and trying to change it – it’s just noise for the sake of noise, while the status-quo is carefully preserved.
http://www.slguardian.org/2021/06/the-difference-between-woke-and-true.html
The usual liberal-conservative reproach to the so-called woke cancel culture is that it is too radical: Its partisans want to destroy all statues, cleanse our museums, rewrite our entire past… in short, they want to deprive us of our entire collective memory and purify our everyday language into a flat, heavily censored jargon. However, I think Ben Burgis is right in his claim that the woke agents of cancel culture are “Canceling Comedians While the World Burns”: Far from being ‘too radical’, their imposition of new prohibitions and rules is one of the exemplary cases of pseudo-activity, of how to make sure that nothing will really change by pretending to act frantically. No wonder new forms of capital, in particular anti-Trump tech capitalists (Google, Apple, Facebook), passionately support anti-racist and pro-feminist struggles – ‘woke capitalism’ is our reality. One does not really change things by prescribing measures which aim at establishing a superficial ‘just’ balance without attacking the underlying causes of the imbalance.
Here is a fresh case of the politically correct struggle against privilege: California’s Department of Education proposed that the gap between well-performing students and their less able peers must disappear. Professors should hold well-performing students back and push their less intellectual peers forward, as if they were all equal in abilities. Justification? “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” since “there is no cutoff determining when one child is ‘gifted’ and another is not.” The goal is thus to “replace ideas of innate mathematics ‘talent’ and ‘giftedness’ with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway.”
This is a showcase of fake egalitarianism destined to just breed envy and hatred. We need good mathematicians to do serious science, and the proposed measures certainly don’t help in this regard. The solution? Why not more access to good education for everyone, better living conditions for the poor? And it is easy to imagine the next step in this direction of the false egalitarianism: Is not the fact that some individuals are much more sexually attractive than others also a case of supreme injustice? So should we not invent some kind of push towards equity in enjoyment also, a way to hold the more attractive back, since there is no cutoff determining when one person is sexually attractive and another is not? Sexuality effectively is a domain of terrifying injustice and imbalance… Equity in enjoyment is the ultimate dream of false egalitarianism.
There are rare voices of authentic Left opposition to this drive towards false justice – apart from Burgis, one should mention Angela Nagle and Katherine Angel. The only problem I have with Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Againis its title, which seems to imply that sex was once good (not-antagonistic) and will be that again. I’ve rarely read a book with whose basic premise I agreed so fully – since this premise is formulated concisely in the publicity paragraph for the book, I will shamelessly quote it:
“Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?”
The parts italicised (by me) are crucial: Any feminist theory should take into account not-knowing as a key feature of sexuality and ground its opposition to violence in sexual relationship not in the usual terms of ‘yes means yes’, but by evoking this not-knowing. This is why the motto that women “must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently” is not just a violent imposition on sexuality but literally de-sexualizing, a promotion of ‘sex without sex’. This is why feminism, in some instances, enforces precisely the same ‘shaming and silencing’ of women’s sexuality that it seeks to oppose. What lies under the direct physical (or psychological) violence of unwanted male sexual advances is the patronizing assumption he knows what the ‘confused’ woman doesn’t know (and is thereby legitimized to act upon this knowledge). It could thus be argued that a man is violent even if he treats a woman respectfully – as long as it’s done under this presumption of knowing more about her desires than she does herself.
This in no way implies that women’s desire is in some sense deficient compared to that of men (who are supposed to know what they want): The lesson of psychoanalysis is that a gap always separates what we want from what we desire. It may happen that I not only desire something but want to get it without explicitly asking for it, pretending that it was imposed on me – demanding it directly would ruin the satisfaction of getting it. And inversely, I may want something, dream about it, but I don’t desire to get it – my entire subjective consistency depends on this not-getting-it: Directly getting it would lead to a collapse of my subjectivity. We should always bear in mind that one of the most brutal forms of violence occurs when something that we secretly desire or fantasize about (but are not ready to do in real life) is imposed on us from outside.
The only form of sex that fully fits the politically correct criteria is a sado-masochist contract.
Leftist partisans of political correctness often reproach to its critics that their focus on PC ‘excesses’, on the prohibitive aspect of cancelling and woke culture, ignores a much graver threat of censorship. Just in the UK, we have police infiltrating trade unions, regulation of what gets published in the media and appears on TV, underage children from Muslim families questioned for terrorist links, up to single events like the continuing illegal imprisonment of Julian Assange… While I agree that censorship is much worse than the ‘sins’ of cancel culture, I think it provides the ultimate argument against the woke culture and PC regulations: Why does the PC Left focus on regulating details of how we speak, etc. instead of bringing out the above-mentioned much bigger things? No wonder Assange was also attacked by some PC feminists (not only) from Sweden who did not support him because they took seriously the accusations about his sexual misconduct (which were later dismissed by the Swedish authorities). An unproven infraction of PC rules outweighed the fact of being a victim of state terror…
However, when the woke stance touches on a really important aspect of the reproduction of the hegemonic ideology, the reaction of the establishment changes from ridiculing the opponent for its excesses to a panicky attempt of violent legal suppression. We often read in our media complaints about the ‘excesses’ of critical gender and race studies which try to reassess the hegemonic narrative of the American past. But we are now in the middle of an ongoing reactionary counter-offensive to reassert a whitewashed American myth. New laws are proposed in at least 15 states all across the US that would ban the teaching of ‘critical race theory’, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and, euphemistically, ‘divisive concepts’.
Are the prohibited theories really divisive? Yes, but only in the precise sense that they oppose (divide themselves from) the hegemonic official myth which is already in itself divisive: It excludes some groups or stances, putting them in a subordinate position. Furthermore, it is clear that to the partisans of the official myth, truth does not matter here but only the ‘stability’ of the founding myths – these partisans, not those dismissed by them as ‘historicist relativists’, are effectively practicing the ‘post-truth’ stance: They like to evoke ‘alternate facts’, but they exclude alternate founding myths.While criticizing the PC cancelling culture, we should thus always bear in mind that we share their goals (for feminism, against racism, etc.), and that we criticize their inefficiency in reaching these goals. With advocates of the founding myths, the story is a different one: Their goals are unacceptable, and we hope they will fail to reach them.
by Slavoj Zizek
The supposedly liberal ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture have little to do with awakening to what’s going on in the world and trying to change it – it’s just noise for the sake of noise, while the status-quo is carefully preserved.
http://www.slguardian.org/2021/06/the-difference-between-woke-and-true.html
The usual liberal-conservative reproach to the so-called woke cancel culture is that it is too radical: Its partisans want to destroy all statues, cleanse our museums, rewrite our entire past… in short, they want to deprive us of our entire collective memory and purify our everyday language into a flat, heavily censored jargon. However, I think Ben Burgis is right in his claim that the woke agents of cancel culture are “Canceling Comedians While the World Burns”: Far from being ‘too radical’, their imposition of new prohibitions and rules is one of the exemplary cases of pseudo-activity, of how to make sure that nothing will really change by pretending to act frantically. No wonder new forms of capital, in particular anti-Trump tech capitalists (Google, Apple, Facebook), passionately support anti-racist and pro-feminist struggles – ‘woke capitalism’ is our reality. One does not really change things by prescribing measures which aim at establishing a superficial ‘just’ balance without attacking the underlying causes of the imbalance.
Here is a fresh case of the politically correct struggle against privilege: California’s Department of Education proposed that the gap between well-performing students and their less able peers must disappear. Professors should hold well-performing students back and push their less intellectual peers forward, as if they were all equal in abilities. Justification? “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” since “there is no cutoff determining when one child is ‘gifted’ and another is not.” The goal is thus to “replace ideas of innate mathematics ‘talent’ and ‘giftedness’ with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway.”
This is a showcase of fake egalitarianism destined to just breed envy and hatred. We need good mathematicians to do serious science, and the proposed measures certainly don’t help in this regard. The solution? Why not more access to good education for everyone, better living conditions for the poor? And it is easy to imagine the next step in this direction of the false egalitarianism: Is not the fact that some individuals are much more sexually attractive than others also a case of supreme injustice? So should we not invent some kind of push towards equity in enjoyment also, a way to hold the more attractive back, since there is no cutoff determining when one person is sexually attractive and another is not? Sexuality effectively is a domain of terrifying injustice and imbalance… Equity in enjoyment is the ultimate dream of false egalitarianism.
There are rare voices of authentic Left opposition to this drive towards false justice – apart from Burgis, one should mention Angela Nagle and Katherine Angel. The only problem I have with Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Againis its title, which seems to imply that sex was once good (not-antagonistic) and will be that again. I’ve rarely read a book with whose basic premise I agreed so fully – since this premise is formulated concisely in the publicity paragraph for the book, I will shamelessly quote it:
“Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?”
The parts italicised (by me) are crucial: Any feminist theory should take into account not-knowing as a key feature of sexuality and ground its opposition to violence in sexual relationship not in the usual terms of ‘yes means yes’, but by evoking this not-knowing. This is why the motto that women “must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently” is not just a violent imposition on sexuality but literally de-sexualizing, a promotion of ‘sex without sex’. This is why feminism, in some instances, enforces precisely the same ‘shaming and silencing’ of women’s sexuality that it seeks to oppose. What lies under the direct physical (or psychological) violence of unwanted male sexual advances is the patronizing assumption he knows what the ‘confused’ woman doesn’t know (and is thereby legitimized to act upon this knowledge). It could thus be argued that a man is violent even if he treats a woman respectfully – as long as it’s done under this presumption of knowing more about her desires than she does herself.
This in no way implies that women’s desire is in some sense deficient compared to that of men (who are supposed to know what they want): The lesson of psychoanalysis is that a gap always separates what we want from what we desire. It may happen that I not only desire something but want to get it without explicitly asking for it, pretending that it was imposed on me – demanding it directly would ruin the satisfaction of getting it. And inversely, I may want something, dream about it, but I don’t desire to get it – my entire subjective consistency depends on this not-getting-it: Directly getting it would lead to a collapse of my subjectivity. We should always bear in mind that one of the most brutal forms of violence occurs when something that we secretly desire or fantasize about (but are not ready to do in real life) is imposed on us from outside.
The only form of sex that fully fits the politically correct criteria is a sado-masochist contract.
Leftist partisans of political correctness often reproach to its critics that their focus on PC ‘excesses’, on the prohibitive aspect of cancelling and woke culture, ignores a much graver threat of censorship. Just in the UK, we have police infiltrating trade unions, regulation of what gets published in the media and appears on TV, underage children from Muslim families questioned for terrorist links, up to single events like the continuing illegal imprisonment of Julian Assange… While I agree that censorship is much worse than the ‘sins’ of cancel culture, I think it provides the ultimate argument against the woke culture and PC regulations: Why does the PC Left focus on regulating details of how we speak, etc. instead of bringing out the above-mentioned much bigger things? No wonder Assange was also attacked by some PC feminists (not only) from Sweden who did not support him because they took seriously the accusations about his sexual misconduct (which were later dismissed by the Swedish authorities). An unproven infraction of PC rules outweighed the fact of being a victim of state terror…
However, when the woke stance touches on a really important aspect of the reproduction of the hegemonic ideology, the reaction of the establishment changes from ridiculing the opponent for its excesses to a panicky attempt of violent legal suppression. We often read in our media complaints about the ‘excesses’ of critical gender and race studies which try to reassess the hegemonic narrative of the American past. But we are now in the middle of an ongoing reactionary counter-offensive to reassert a whitewashed American myth. New laws are proposed in at least 15 states all across the US that would ban the teaching of ‘critical race theory’, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and, euphemistically, ‘divisive concepts’.
Are the prohibited theories really divisive? Yes, but only in the precise sense that they oppose (divide themselves from) the hegemonic official myth which is already in itself divisive: It excludes some groups or stances, putting them in a subordinate position. Furthermore, it is clear that to the partisans of the official myth, truth does not matter here but only the ‘stability’ of the founding myths – these partisans, not those dismissed by them as ‘historicist relativists’, are effectively practicing the ‘post-truth’ stance: They like to evoke ‘alternate facts’, but they exclude alternate founding myths.While criticizing the PC cancelling culture, we should thus always bear in mind that we share their goals (for feminism, against racism, etc.), and that we criticize their inefficiency in reaching these goals. With advocates of the founding myths, the story is a different one: Their goals are unacceptable, and we hope they will fail to reach them.
African great apes to suffer massive range loss in next 30 years
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210607161000.htm
June 7, 2021
Wildlife Conservation Society
A new study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions predicts massive range declines of Africa's great apes -- gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos -- due to the impacts of climate change, land-use changes and human population growth.
For their analysis, the authors compiled information on African ape occurrence held in the IUCN SSC A.P.E.S. database, a repository that includes a remarkable amount of information on population status, threats and conservation for several hundred sites, collected over 20 years.
The first-of-its-kind study quantifies the joint effects of climate, land-use, and human population changes across African ape ranges for the year 2050 under best- and worst-case scenarios. "Best case" implies slowly declining carbon emissions and that appropriate mitigation measures will be put in place. "Worst case" assumes that emissions continue to increase unchecked -- business as usual.
Under the best-case scenario, the authors predict that great apes will lose 85 percent of their range, of which 50 percent will be outside national parks and other areas protected by legislation. Under the worst-case scenario, they predict a 94 percent loss, of which 61 percent will be in areas that are not protected.
This paper examines whether great apes can or cannot disperse away from where they are currently found, and the best- and worst-case scenarios in each case. For example, mountains are currently less suitable than lowland areas for some great ape species. However, climate change will render some lowlands less suitable -- warmer, drier, perhaps less food available -- but the nearby mountains will take on the characteristics that those lowlands currently have. If great apes are able to physically move from the lowlands to the mountains, they may be able to survive, and even increase their range (depending on the species, and whether it is the best- or worst-case scenario). However, they may not be able to travel (disperse) away from the lowlands in the time remaining between today and 2050.
Joana Carvalho, postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Science, Liverpool John Moores University, lead author of the study says: "By integrating future climate and land-use changes as well as human population scenarios, this study provides strong evidence for synergistic interactions among key global drivers constraining African ape distribution."
Carvalho adds: "Importantly, massive range loss is widely expected outside protected areas, which reflects the insufficiency of the current network of protected areas in Africa to preserve suitable habitats for great apes and effectively connect great ape populations."
Fiona Maisels of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and a co-author of the study, said: "As climate change forces the different types of vegetation to essentially shift uphill, it means that all animals -- not only great apes -- that depend on particular habitat types will be forced to move uphill along with the vegetation, or become locally extinct. And when the hills are low, many species, great and small, will not be able go higher than the land allows, and huge numbers of animals and plants will simply vanish."
The authors argue that effective conservation strategies require careful planning for each species that focuses on both existing and proposed protected areas -- the creation and management of which can be informed by these habitat suitability models. Additionally, efforts to maintain connectivity between the habitats predicted to be suitable in the future will be crucial for the survival of African apes. Conservation planners urgently need to integrate land-use planning and climate change mitigation and adaptation measures into government policy of great ape range countries.
The study highlights the need for urgent action to combat both biodiversity loss and climate change if great apes are to continue into the future. Governments must protect and conserve the habitats of great apes -- where they are now, and where they will need to move. Governments attending the upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity CoP 15 in September and the UN Climate Change Conference in November should adopt meaningful commitments to protect and conserve great apes and their habitats and combat climate change.
The results of the study corroborate other recent studies showing that African ape populations and their habitats are declining dramatically. All African great apes are classified either as Endangered (mountain gorillas, bonobos, Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees, eastern chimpanzees, and central chimpanzees) or Critically Endangered (Cross River gorillas, Grauer's gorillas, western lowland gorillas, and western chimpanzees) on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and all are regarded as flagship species for conservation.
Hjalmar Kuehl, from iDiv in Leipzig, Germany, and senior author of the study said: "There must be global responsibility for stopping the decline of great apes. Global consumption of natural resources extracted from ape range countries is a major driver of great ape decline. All nations benefitting from these resources have a responsibility to ensure a better future for great apes, their habitats and the people living therein by developing more sustainable economies."
The study involved over 60 co-authors from academic and non-academic organizations and government agencies, including Antwerp Zoo Society, Born Free Foundation, Chimbo Foundation, Conservation Society of Sierra Leone, Environment and Rural Development Foundation, Fauna & Flora International, Frankfurt Zoological Society, Jane Goodall Institute, Rio Tinto, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, Sekakoh Organisation, Sierra Rutile Limited, Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, The Biodiversity Consultancy, West African Primate Conservation Action, Wild Chimpanzee Foundation, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and World Wide Fund for Nature.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Wildlife Conservation Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Joana S. Carvalho, Bruce Graham, Gaёlle Bocksberger, Fiona Maisels, Elizabeth A. Williamson, Serge Wich, Tenekwetche Sop, Bala Amarasekaran, Benjamin Barca, Abdulai Barrie, Richard A. Bergl, Christophe Boesch, Hedwige Boesch, Terry M. Brncic, Bartelijntje Buys, Rebecca Chancellor, Emmanuel Danquah, Osiris A. Doumbé, Stephane Y. Le‐Duc, Anh Galat‐Luong, Jessica Ganas, Sylvain Gatti, Andrea Ghiurghi, Annemarie Goedmakers, Nicolas Granier, Dismas Hakizimana, Barbara Haurez, Josephine Head, Ilka Herbinger, Annika Hillers, Sorrel Jones, Jessica Junker, Nakedi Maputla, Eno‐Nku Manasseh, Maureen S. McCarthy, Mary Molokwu‐Odozi, Bethan J. Morgan, Yoshihiro Nakashima, Paul K. N’Goran, Stuart Nixon, Louis Nkembi, Emmanuelle Normand, Laurent D.Z. Nzooh, Sarah H. Olson, Leon Payne, Charles‐Albert Petre, Alex K. Piel, Lilian Pintea, Andrew J. Plumptre, Aaron Rundus, Adeline Serckx, Fiona A. Stewart, Jacqueline Sunderland‐Groves, Nikki Tagg, Angelique Todd, Ashley Vosper, José F.C. Wenceslau, Erin G. Wessling, Jacob Willie, Hjalmar S. Kühl. Predicting range shifts of African apes under global change scenarios. Diversity and Distributions, 2021; DOI: 10.1111/ddi.13358
Bacteria are connected to how babies experience fear
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210604135433.htm
New research from MSU shows that an infant's gut microbiome could contain clues to help monitor and support healthy neurological development
Why do some babies react to perceived danger more than others? According to new research from Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, part of the answer may be found in a surprising place: an infant's digestive system.
The human digestive system is home to a vast community of microorganisms known as the gut microbiome. The MSU-UNC research team discovered that the gut microbiome was different in infants with strong fear responses and infants with milder reactions.
These fear responses -- how someone reacts to a scary situation -- in early life can be indicators of future mental health. And there is growing evidence tying neurological well-being to the microbiome in the gut.
The new findings suggest that the gut microbiome could one day provide researchers and physicians with a new tool to monitor and support healthy neurological development.
"This early developmental period is a time of tremendous opportunity for promoting healthy brain development," said MSU's Rebecca Knickmeyer, leader of the new study published June 2 in the journal Nature Communications. "The microbiome is an exciting new target that can be potentially used for that."
Studies of this connection and its role in fear response in animals led Knickmeyer, an associate professor in the College of Human Medicine's Department of Pediatrics and Human Development, and her team to look for something similar in humans. And studying how humans, especially young children, handle fear is important because it can help forecast mental health in some cases.
"Fear reactions are a normal part of child development. Children should be aware of threats in their environment and be ready to respond to them" said Knickmeyer, who also works in MSU's Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, or IQ. "But if they can't dampen that response when they're safe, they may be at heightened risk to develop anxiety and depression later on in life."
On the other end of the response spectrum, children with exceptionally muted fear responses may go on to develop callous, unemotional traits associated with antisocial behavior, Knickmeyer said.
To determine whether the gut microbiome was connected to fear response in humans, Knickmeyer and her co-workers designed a pilot study with about 30 infants. The researchers selected the cohort carefully to keep as many factors impacting the gut microbiome as consistent as possible. For example, all of the children were breastfed and none was on antibiotics.
The researchers then characterized the children's microbiome by analyzing stool samples and assessed a child's fear response using a simple test: observing how a child reacted to someone entering the room while wearing a Halloween mask.
"We really wanted the experience to be enjoyable for both the kids and their parents. The parents were there the whole time and they could jump in whenever they wanted," Knickmeyer said. "These are really the kinds of experiences infants would have in their everyday lives."
Compiling all the data, the researchers saw significant associations between specific features of the gut microbiome and the strength of infant fear responses.
For example, children with uneven microbiomes at 1 month of age were more fearful at 1 year of age. Uneven microbiomes are dominated by a small set of bacteria, whereas even microbiomes are more balanced.
The researchers also discovered that the content of the microbial community at 1 year of age related to fear responses. Compared with less fearful children, infants with heightened responses had more of some types of bacteria and less of others.
The team, however, did not observe a connection between the children's gut microbiome and how the children reacted to strangers who weren't wearing masks. Knickmeyer said this is likely due to the different parts of the brain involved with processing potentially frightening situations.
"With strangers, there is a social element. So children may have a social wariness, but they don't see strangers as immediate threats," Knickmeyer said. "When children see a mask, they don't see it as social. It goes into that quick-and-dirty assessment part of the brain."
As part of the study, the team also imaged the children's brains using MRI technology. They found that the content of the microbial community at 1 year was associated with the size of the amygdala, which is part of the brain involved in making quick decisions about potential threats.
Connecting the dots suggests that the microbiome may influence how the amygdala develops and operates. That's one of many interesting possibilities uncovered by this new study, which the team is currently working to replicate. Knickmeyer is also preparing to start up new lines of inquiry with new collaborations at IQ, asking new questions that she's excited to answer.
"We have a great opportunity to support neurological health early on," she said. "Our long-term goal is that we'll learn what we can do to foster healthy growth and development."
Story Source:
Materials provided by Michigan State University. Original written by Matt Davenport. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Alexander L. Carlson, Kai Xia, M. Andrea Azcarate-Peril, Samuel P. Rosin, Jason P. Fine, Wancen Mu, Jared B. Zopp, Mary C. Kimmel, Martin A. Styner, Amanda L. Thompson, Cathi B. Propper, Rebecca C. Knickmeyer. Infant gut microbiome composition is associated with non-social fear behavior in a pilot study. Nature Communications, 2021; 12 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23281-y
Friday, June 11, 2021
Laith Marouf Joins Fault Lines To Discuss Norman Finklestein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tII7ryCIVvI
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