Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmFar-right agitation on Irish social media mainly driven from abroad2023-12-05T11:16:22+00:00
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2023/12/05/most-ireland-is-full-and-irish-lives-matter-online-posts-originate-abroad/
jm
The research showed the use of the phrases increased dramatically, both in Ireland and abroad, once word started spreading that the suspect in the knife attack was born outside Ireland.
“Users in the UK and US were very, very highly represented. Which was strange because with hashtags that are very geographically specific, you wouldn’t expect to see that kind of spread,” said Mr Doak.
“These three hashtags have been heavily boosted by users in the US and UK. Taken together, UK and US users accounted for more use of the hashtags than Ireland.”
Other countries that saw use of the phrases on a much smaller scale include India, Nigeria and Spain.
]]>ireland politics far-right agitation racism fascism trolls twitter facebook tiktok instagramhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2114c2e28b5d/The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of 'The Last of Us Part II'2023-12-04T20:57:25+00:00
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv8da4/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politics-of-the-last-of-us-part-ii
jmThe Last of Us Part II focuses on what has been broadly defined by some of its creators as a "cycle of violence." While some zombie fiction shows human depravity in response to fear or scarcity in the immediate aftermath of an outbreak, The Last of Us Part II takes place in a more stabilized post apocalypse, decades after societal collapse, where individuals and communities choose to hurt each other as opposed to taking heinous actions out of desperation.
More specifically, the cycle of violence in The Last of Us Part II appears to be largely modeled after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.
(via Alex)]]>vice commentary ethics games hate politics the-last-of-us israel palestine fiction via:alexhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d186b719864f/Insurance companies given access to UK Biobank health data, despite promises2023-11-13T11:20:11+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/12/private-uk-health-data-donated-medical-research-shared-insurance-companies
jmWhen the project was announced, in 2002, Biobank promised that data would not be given to insurance companies after concerns were raised that it could be used in a discriminatory way, such as by the exclusion of people with a particular genetic makeup from insurance.
In an FAQ section on the Biobank website, participants were told: “Insurance companies will not be allowed access to any individual results nor will they be allowed access to anonymised data.” The statement remained online until February 2006, during which time the Biobank project was subject to public scrutiny and discussed in parliament.
The promise was also reiterated in several public statements by backers of Biobank, who said safeguards would be built in to ensure that “no insurance company or police force or employer will have access”.
This weekend, Biobank said the pledge – made repeatedly over four years – no longer applied. It said the commitment had been made before recruitment formally began in 2007 and that when Biobank volunteers enrolled they were given revised information.
]]>biobank uk politics health medicine data-privacy insurance discrimination sciencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4c79e5371f73/Marina Hyde on the UK's Covid Inquiry2023-11-01T12:29:21+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/01/boris-johnson-dominic-cummings-covid-inquiry-no-10?CMP=share_btn_tw
jmFor me, the most depressing thing about the revelations at the inquiry this week – and no doubt for many weeks and months to come – is that they are not really revelations. The government was horrendously incompetent, didn’t have a plan, yet still wasted a huge amount of time – and a tragic number of lives – on mad posturing, pointless turf wars or buck-passing and catastrophic infighting. The sad fact is that all of this was said AT THE TIME, and all of it was denied repeatedly by those in charge. And it was denied not just in insidery lobby briefings or to individual journalists – but live on air, to the nation, in those wretched press conferences every night.
They lied about everything, all the time, and the lies they told backstage were just the obverse of the ones they spouted front of house. Seeing inquiry witnesses feted for punchy WhatsApps now is a bit like congratulating a serial killer for switching to an energy-efficient chest freezer. I’m sure half of them will be reflecting amiably on the period on their inevitable podcasts in due course – but the British public deserve so much more, as they did at the time.
]]>uk politics covid-19 boris-johnson dominic-cummings marina-hyde funny grimhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:87e408965eab/We just saw the future of war2023-10-12T11:13:09+00:00
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/10/10/we-just-saw-the-future-of-war-00120788
jm
[..] The famous maxim “‘The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” — apocryphally attributed to the writer William Gibson — takes on a very different meaning from the one now commonly understood. Big, rich states might inflate their defense budgets and boast of systems like Israel’s Iron Dome, but the extent to which sophisticated technology is “distributed” across a broad consumer landscape is enough for highly motivated smaller actors to do whatever violence they wish.
]]>culture politics world war israel tech gaza palestinehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:13a6c09d752c/Covid inquiry: UK's top pandemic scientist gives damning verdict on Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak2023-10-03T16:06:08+00:00
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/covid-inquiry-uk-top-pandemic-scientist-verdict-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak-2660155
jmThe inquiry also heard that in October 2020, Mr Johnson wrote “bollocks” in capital letters across a Department of Health guidance document on Long Covid, from which it is estimated more than a million people are suffering. Anthony Metzer KC, representing Long Covid sufferers, said the former PM has admitted in his own witness statement that he did not believe the condition “truly existed”
]]>long-covid boris-johnson politics uk covid-19 patrick-vallancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8c1efebb0d84/Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality | Naomi Klein | The Guardian2023-08-26T21:07:55+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/naomi-klein-naomi-wolf-conspiracy-theories
jmAlmost everyone I talk to these days seems to be losing people to the Mirror World and its web of conspiracies. It’s as if those people live in a funhouse of distorted reflections and disorienting reversals. People who were familiar have somehow become alien, like a doppelganger of themselves, leaving us with that unsettled, uncanny feeling. The big misinformation players may be chasing clout, but plenty of people believe their terrifying stories. [...]
When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. [...] on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation. [...]
To return to the original question: what is Wolf getting out of her alliance with Bannon and from her new life in the Mirror World? Everything. She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer, a fallen angel, thought it “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. My doppelganger may well still think Bannon is the devil, but perhaps she thinks it’s better to serve by his side than to keep getting mocked in a place that sells itself as heavenly but that we all know is plenty hellish in its own right.
]]>culture politics naomi-klein naomi-wolf us-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5b7d8dc0644/The Lab-Leak Illusion2023-08-24T21:54:37+00:00
https://quillette.com/2023/08/19/the-lab-leak-illusion/
jmI learned almost nothing of value when I was a [JFK] conspiracy theorist, but I did learn quite a lot pulling myself out of that mindset, and like [Scott] Alexander, I would never have done so had I only ever encountered people who told me I was being an imbecile. Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they allow a person to feel more intelligent than the drones who passively drift along on the current of received consensus. [...]
For now and the foreseeable future, much of the COVID-origins discourse remains committed to an illusory explanation that appeals to misfiring intuitions and trades almost entirely in suspicion and innuendo. Highly intelligent minds are as vulnerable to irrational thinking and conspiracist ideation as those of the cognitively impaired, particularly if they are used to perceiving problems in political terms. Reasoning well, Scott Alexander reminds us, is hard and “all factual claims can become the basis for emotional/social coalitions.” The best way to avoid this trap is to try to remember that we do not live through the looking glass where up is down and black is white. In quotidian reality, things are usually exactly as they appear to be.
]]>reasoning logic media lab-leak covid-19 conspiracies politics us-politics china long-readshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:95d1bb2fe74e/Evidence Undermines 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria' Claims2023-08-24T20:50:05+00:00
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-undermines-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-claims/#
jm“This is just a fear-based concept that is not supported by studies,” says Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The term ROGD is being used to “scare people or to scare legislators into voting for some of these restrictive policies that take away options for young people. It’s cruel, cruel legislation.”
]]>rogd gender trans politics healthcare transgenderhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c31317856702/The Culture War Funded by Russian Roubles2023-08-21T22:51:08+00:00
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/09/the-culture-war-funded-by-russian-roubles/
jmBetween 2009-18, anti-gender actors from within the European Union, Russia and the US have spent at least $707.2 million in Europe, with the Russian Federation making up 26.6% of that spend, according to research published by the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights.
As reported in this paper, the two main Russian funders of anti-gender disinformation are Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeyev – oligarchs sanctioned for their alleged involvement in the annexation of Crimea, after Russia’s 2014 invasion.
Their roubles have mingled with US dollars at the World Congress of Families; with Euros at the Novae Terra Foundation, and La Manif Pour Les Tous; and British pounds at Agenda Europe – in 2013, the assets manager of banker Sir Michael Hintze attended the network’s London summit, the following year Malofeyev’s man in Europe, Alexey Komov, was on the guest list.
The campaigns and individuals funded by this wealth have regularly spread anti-abortion, anti-LGBTIQ disinformation, including that abortion is “Satanic” and that there’s a “homosexual agenda” which wants to make children “sex education propagandists in the EU”. They also spread anti-trans rhetoric.
]]>russia politics terfs gender lgbtqi abortion europe eu trans-rightshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:55cfd3069679/Even in Greek towns razed by wildfires, people don’t blame the climate crisis2023-08-15T10:23:45+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/14/greece-wildfires-climate-crisis-future
jmThe more I spoke to people, including climate scientists, the more I came to see that there is often a gap that separates science from public awareness and debate. In her book Engaging With Climate Change, the psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe says that “many people who accept anthropogenic global warming continue to locate it as a problem of the future”. To my astonishment, this seemed to apply even to people who had themselves been affected directly by wildfires. Perhaps the reality is too huge and too painful, the guilt too much to bear?
]]>climate-change cognitive-dissonance reality future wildfires greece politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8c84a283373c/George Monbiot on UK climate politics2023-08-02T11:53:54+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/01/rishi-sunak-north-sea-planet-climate-crisis-plutocrats
jmbusiness economics climate-change george-monbiot uk carbon politics uk-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ac079e943e50/Some libraries in Ireland are restricting access to young adult LGBTQ+ books, employee says • GCN2023-07-25T13:24:50+00:00
https://gcn.ie/ireland-libraries-restricting-access-lgbtq-young-adult-books/
jmOur source shared that roughly one year ago, the [Irish public library] staff received training about how to provide young LGBTQ+ people with information and support. Now, this staff member feels that the library policy is restricting the same supportive material. Another anonymous source from a different library branch had this to say about the re-classification of young adult books as adult: “It is utterly galling that some Irish libraries have decided to capitulate to what amounts to terror tactics, and in a way that creates a hostile working environment to all LGBT staff who now have to work under these conditions, and are told they are not allowed to talk about it.”
]]>lgbtq books reading education sex-education nazis far-right politics irelandhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:afde0d88edf6/Children raised under UK austerity shorter than European peers2023-06-21T11:05:30+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study
jmExperts have said a poor national diet and cuts to the NHS are to blame. But they have also pointed out that height is a strong indicator of general living conditions, including illness and infection, stress, poverty and sleep quality.
The amount of damage the Tories have done to the UK in 10 years is staggering.]]>tories uk politics austerity poverty britain height healthhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d9223de23b14/Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?2023-05-05T09:09:39+00:00
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey
jmA former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.
The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey?
]]>ai capitalism mckinsey future politics ted-chianghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:96eb96e15ac3/The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn2023-05-03T12:50:54+00:00
https://washingtonspectator.org/understanding-tescreal-silicon-valleys-rightward-turn/
jm
As you encounter these ideologies [Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism] in the wild, you might use the TESCREAL lens, and its alignment with Eurasianism and Putin’s agenda, to evaluate them, and ask whether they tend to undermine or enhance the project of liberal democracy.
TESCREAL ideologies tend to advance an illiberal agenda and authoritarian tendencies, and it’s worth turning a very critical eye towards them, especially in cases where that’s demonstrably true. Clearly there are countless well-meaning people trying to use technology and reason to improve the world, but that should never come at the expense of democratic, inclusive, fair, patient, and just governance.
The biggest risk AI poses right now is that alarmists will use the fears surrounding it as a cudgel to enact sweeping policy reforms. We should resist those efforts. Now more than ever, we should be guided by expertise, facts, and evidence as we seek to use technology in ways that benefit everyone.
]]>ideology future tescreal ea longtermism ai politics silicon-valleyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:069ec5bea254/The tech tycoon martyrdom charade2023-03-01T11:36:59+00:00
https://anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/
jmIt's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.
In a way, it's sort of like a "VC Qanon", and it colors almost everything that some of the most powerful people in the tech industry see and do — and not just in their companies or work, but in culture, politics and society overall. We're already seeing more and more irrational, extremist decision-making that can only be understood through this lens, because on its own their choices seem increasingly unfathomable.
]]>vc tech anil-dash radicalization politics us-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e9d970830ee7/"Poisoning Web-Scale Training Datasets is Practical"2023-02-21T14:11:10+00:00
https://twitter.com/DynamicWebPaige/status/1627861408171032577
jm"We show the fraction of images in a dataset that can be controlled by the attacker as a function of their budget. We find that at least 0.01% of each dataset can be controlled for less that $60/year." "According to our conservative analysis, we can poison 6.5%+ of Wikipedia."
As Cyd Harrell says in https://twitter.com/cydharrell/status/1624463694238478336 , "if you think that either the global white supremacy movement or the Coca Cola company (or Exxon re climate change) don't have the long game to try to get their views prioritized in LLM training data, I think you're probably underestimating their motivation by a lot".]]>models laion poisoning llms politics corpora exploits deep-learning ai via:mikemhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7d0ede6695d8/How a theory about transgender contagion went viral - MIT Technology Review2022-08-18T16:53:31+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/18/1057135/transgender-contagion-gender-dysphoria/?truid=8c8f2699f50eb3b9985a111121cfee47&mc_cid=ac68f8ae20&mc_eid=eaf496ebe1
jmThe paper, which was based on parent surveys recruited from explicitly anti-trans or trans-skeptical websites and forums, almost immediately drew criticism. Shortly after its publication in August 2018, PLOS One, a peer-reviewed open-access journal covering science and medicine, issued a comment that questioned Littman’s methodology. Brown University, her then-employer, retracted its press release about the study. In early September, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health put out a statement saying ROGD “constitutes nothing more than an acronym” and urged restraint in using the term. Six months after that, PLOS One reissued the study with a large correction emphasizing that Littman’s paper was simply a “descriptive, exploratory” one and had not been clinically validated. In 2021, the Journal of Pediatrics published a comprehensive study that found no evidence for ROGD’s existence. More than 60 psychology organizations, including the American Psychological Association, called for elimination of the term. The scientific community, in short, agreed there was no such thing as ROGD. But did it matter?
]]>rogd transgender politics gender papers science ploshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cf810b8d8602/Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic2022-04-19T10:19:14+00:00
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
jmWhat changed in the 2010s? [..] A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
]]>communication culture democracy politics social-media facebook twitter trollshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:06a2ad42f8ab/Russia's plans for Ukraine2022-04-05T08:49:33+00:00
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1510910740261134338
jmgenocide politics russia ukraine warhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8924030d08ae/A quick take on three pretty terrifying changes to the Online Safety Bill2022-03-21T11:51:11+00:00
https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/03/18/a-quick-take-on-three-pretty-terrifying-changes-to-the-online-safety-bill/
jmThe UK is, indeed, taking the “world-leading” stance – not duplicated by any other western nation – of requiring any business or organisation whose online presence could possibly be accessed in the UK to proactively monitor and scan for legal content.
That means you and your business and your project, not just the five or six companies the people who cooked up this law think the Internet is. This hits everyone and everything.
I'd have to agree with the poster that the likely result will simply be websites going offline for UK users.
]]>politics uk online-safety-bill web regulationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:06c2b06175cd/Human Life International operating in Ireland2022-03-21T11:44:19+00:00
https://the-beacon.ie/2022/03/19/irish-branch-of-us-anti-abortion-catholic-group-has-income-of-nearly-e1m-per-year-and-runs-rogue-crisis-pregnancy-agency/
jmhuman-life-international hli ireland abortion gender-rights ask-majella contraception politics right-winghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b2d12ec7439d/Fuck leftist westplaining2022-03-09T14:59:52+00:00
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/fuck-leftist-westplaining/
jmAntifascism is protecting people from individuals with structural power. Right now that is Putin. If you are protecting his hegemony over his vast and increasing empire, if you are What Abouting into helplessness, you are part of the aggressor. So pick up a weapon, or organise a fundraiser, or welcome a refugee, but even more preferably at this point – shut the fuuuuck up. Log out, touch grass, leave this war with people that actually know what they’re fighting for. You’re fighting for likes – it’s humiliating – to the left in general, and to future generations who will be left demoralised, rather than inspired to fight for a world sans dictators. Yes, your leaders are some of them, so take care of taking them down. Sadly we seldom even trust the leaders you’d put in their place. This is the level of faith that you’re losing. Look in the mirror, destroy the imperialist exceptionalist cop inside your head. Good luck.
]]>politics ukraine putin whataboutery tankieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8530384908ba/Tek Fog in Action2022-01-17T16:25:53+00:00
https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/3.html
jmindia tek-fog grim-meathook-future spam abuse harassment bjp politics social-mediahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7ee86a922a76/Discovering related sites by tracing shared ad accounts2021-12-09T17:52:55+00:00
https://twitter.com/braedon/status/1468746899700158468/photo/1
jmweb politics astroturf investigation ads google-ads advertisinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:62bb70e475b7/"Grievance Mining"2021-10-17T14:08:47+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/17/facing-chaos-and-needing-a-scapegoat-the-tories-seek-endless-fight-with-europe#comment-152562075
jmFrost is well aware of the futility of his demands – indeed, it is the whole point of his Lisbon performance. Instead of declaring victory, accepting the EU’s munificent offers and turning down the heat in Northern Ireland, he and Johnson prefer to make an impossible demand so that they can blame the EU for rejecting it.
They are, as the South Belfast MP, Claire Hanna, has put it, “mining for grievance”.
]]>grievances neologisms phrases boris-johnson uk brexit politics northern-ireland euhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ba5d9adc89f5/Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election2021-09-29T15:00:27+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/
jmfacebook politics russia disinfo kosovo macedonia us-politics manipulationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1c4085532e1d/'I don't want to be seen as a zealot': what MPs really think about the climate crisis2021-08-11T15:38:41+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/i-dont-want-to-be-seen-as-a-zealot-what-mps-really-think-about-the-climate-crisis
jmRunning these workshops was a fascinating experience. In each, there was a definite point which I came to think of as a “penny-drop moment”, when the participants came to realise the significance of the climate crisis and the way it would shape our collective future.
In one workshop, for example, a very eminent scientist explained to MPs how crop yields are likely to be severely affected by extreme weather, a likely scenario if global average temperatures rise by 2C or more – and that this could lead to food shortages. The response was striking. There was a silence, a collective intake of breath, a recognition of the significance of the changes that could be upon us if we don’t act.
And then, at the end of our workshop, they walked out of the door and back to their normal lives. [...]
It became clear to me that there were two main reasons why MPs struggled with the issue: first, because it didn’t fit easily into the culture of political life and their own identity as a parliamentarian; and second, because they worried that public support for climate action was limited, and that, as representatives, they needed to be led by their electorate.
I have some confidence that a Citizen's Assembly approach is the right answer here. In Ireland it was clear that politicians felt more comfort with gay marriage and abortion as topics once those CAs had delivered their findings and demonstrated how an electorate really felt about them.
]]>democracy elections future climate-change uk politics politicianshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d9a00ba47a41/Discourses of climate delay2021-06-30T13:30:39+00:00
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainability/article/discourses-of-climate-delay/7B11B722E3E3454BB6212378E32985A7
jmecology climate climate-change discourse denialism policy politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e3257d86f2fe/Interviews with Loyalist kids2021-05-06T10:47:30+00:00
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-north-riots-stopped-because-prince-andrew-or-philip-or-something-he-s-dead-1.4538444?mode=amp
jm“Unionism is losing power and control. It needs leaders who have the skill to say, look, we have cards to play and if we are sensible we can save this place. Instead, Arlene said if there was a united Ireland she’d leave. People are left feeling unappeased but it is not a definite thing. It is more a kind of grief or sense they have lost something intangible. It is about shattered dreams.”
]]>ulster unionism loyalists northern-ireland politics brexithttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:056cea61a3ad/Dr Rory Hearne: The Government does not want you to be able to afford to buy a home2021-05-06T08:43:47+00:00
https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/ireland-investment-housing-5428746-May2021/
jm
The Government has been called on to do something to stop this. Even Fianna Fáil politicians have come out crying crocodile tears of outrage. But the truth is the investor purchase of housing in Ireland on a major scale is actually Government policy and has been for the last decade.
The Government does not actually want you to be able to buy or rent an affordable home. They have created an unaffordable housing system that is focused on delivering housing as an investment asset, not a home.[...]
This current crisis has been brewing for a long time. It goes back to the Celtic Tiger days of the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Fianna Fáil-PD Governments encouraged the shift from housing to be treated as a home, to people buying it up as an investment asset.
They told people to speculate in the property market and gave tax breaks for landlords to buy a second, or third, home to rent out. These became the ‘buy-to-let’ investors. The banks lent out massively which added fuel to the fire of rising housing prices, and the inevitable crash happened in 2008 and 2009.
As their response to the disaster they had created, Fianna Fáil turned to global ‘vulture’ funds to buy up the bad loans and failed housing projects. They set up the ‘bad bank’ NAMA, which went on, under the Fine Gael Government from 2011 to the current day, to sell off (at a discount) huge land banks and billions of euro worth of properties to vulture and real estate investment funds.
]]>
reits real-estate ireland politics housing homes rory-hearnehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c23143f1035d/I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. | by Indi Samarajiva2020-11-02T21:26:31+00:00
https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-there-ba1e4b54c5fc
jmIn the last three months America has lost more people than Sri Lanka lost in 30 years of civil war. If this isn’t collapse, then the word has no meaning. You probably still think of Sri Lanka as a shithole, though the war ended over a decade ago and we’re (relatively) fine. Then what does that make you?
America has fallen. You need to look up, at the people you’re used to looking down on. We’re trying to tell you something. I have lived through collapse and you’re already there. Until you understand this, you only have further to fall.
]]>collapse usa politics columbo sri-lanka history civil-warhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:11908d44dbbb/Covid: The libertarian population immunity strategy is wrong-headed & dangerous2020-09-29T11:25:59+00:00
https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2020/09/29/covid-the-libertarian-population-immunity-strategy-is-wrong
jmAs cases of covid in the UK surge once again, the debate has restarted about whether to suppress covid until a vaccine becomes available, or whether to pursue a deliberate strategy of achieving population immunity without a vaccine. The assumption is that vulnerable populations can be protected while the rest of the population, who are at low risk of hospitalisation and death, can be safely encouraged to live life normally and be exposed to the virus without a vaccine. Some even advocate that younger people, because they are at lower risk, should be the first to actively seek infection. "Not only is it a good thing for young people to go out there and become immune," one commentator said, "but that is almost their duty". It is this deliberate strategy which I find so troubling, for six reasons. [....]
]]>uk politics covid-19 herd-immunity immunity risk pandemicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d1f2b3f74b50/Political Compass of Rural Ireland : ireland2020-09-17T11:19:08+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/itqlvm/political_compass_of_rural_ireland/
jmpolitics ireland country rural funny reddithttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:97a4319da0b9/The Plot Against George Soros2020-09-16T23:16:45+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgrassegger/george-soros-conspiracy-finkelstein-birnbaum-orban-netanyahu
jmpolitics hungary george-soros lies antisemitism propaganda misinformationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8074edfdab37/QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded2020-09-09T13:41:30+00:00
https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/
jmA secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.
Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon. [...]
The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902.
]]>qanon politics conspiracy-theories history nazism nazis antisemitismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:549ccfe1759e/The Trump 2020 app is a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power | MIT Technology Review2020-06-23T09:44:52+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/21/1004228/trumps-data-hungry-invasive-app-is-a-voter-surveillance-tool-of-extraordinary-scope/
jmTrump’s casino-like campaign app seems to be his own attempt to create a “one-way tool of propaganda.” Its deployment is part of a global trend, piggybacking on years of unresolved privacy and security issues within the app ecosystem. As researchers studying the intersection of technology and propaganda, we understand that political groups tend to lag behind the commercial ad industry. But when they catch up, the consequences to truth and civil discourse can be devastating.
The array of data-gathering tools the Trump and Modi apps use are a legacy of a “freemium” social-media and app landscape that is manipulative, non-transparent, and purposefully addictive, with a mentality of “collect data first and ask question later.” For the last five to 10 years, the pervasiveness of these tools and their use in data scooping has been well documented. Sporadic, state-by-state data regulations have been the only response. In Europe, the GDPR was a big step toward meaningful consent and transparency, but the Official Trump 2020 App does not fall under its jurisdiction. A global perspective is now critical to understanding the implications of data-fueled political manipulation and preparing for the next wave of disinformation. Countries must work together to create effective regulation, and citizens must demand this of them.
It took about five years for Modi’s strategies to jump from India to the US, and in the next few years we are on track to see the arrival of strategies used in the dark-money disinformation campaigns of Mexico and Latin America. The Mexican journalist we'd interviewed for our study put it this way: “I think what’s coming all around the world is going to be very chaotic, at least in [the US], I think you’re on the brink of a sort of civil war in one or two years ... You’re going to have a lot of work to do.”
]]>trump politics apps surveillance advertising voting modi gdpr privacy data-privacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:add5fa6051a6/The 'lockdown sceptics' want a culture war, with experts as the enemy | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian2020-05-18T15:08:48+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/18/lockdown-sceptics-coronavirus-brexit?CMP=fb_cif
jmin the comment sections of some of the rightwing press, a new, virulent strain of Covid-19 scepticism has emerged that is the precise opposite of journalism. Rather than holding power to account, it distorts and bends reality to serve elite interests – and to warp public debate. In the pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and other outlets, Britain’s contemporary “lockdown sceptics” have dedicated themselves to a singular cause: proving that the UK response to coronavirus has been a massive, hysterical overreaction. “Lift the lockdown” is their cogito ergo sum; Sweden their promised land.
]]>lockdown uk politics brexit experts daily-telegraph spectator right-wing covid-19 sceptics libertarians contrarians culture-warhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5f10b0daef7/Coronavirus and Brexit: the connections and their consequences2020-04-28T11:06:08+00:00
https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-and-brexit.html
jmWhat both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way [the UK] are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in, and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing.
They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.
]]>uk-politics uk politics brexit covid-19 government populism crisis-managementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ec79d9a751c2/We scientists said lock down. But UK politicians refused to listen | Helen Ward | Opinion | The Guardian2020-04-15T14:30:43+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/uk-government-coronavirus-science-who-advice
jmon 12 March, the government alarmed many public health experts by abruptly abandoning containment and announcing that community case-finding and contact-tracing would stop. The aim was no longer to stop people getting it, but to slow it down while protecting the vulnerable.
The evidence underpinning the government’s decision appears in a report from 9 March summarising the potential impact of behavioural and social interventions. The report did not consider the impact of case-finding and contact-tracing, but it did suggest that the biggest impact on cases and deaths would come from social distancing and the protection of vulnerable groups.
And yet social distancing was not recommended then. That day, 12 March, after hearing with disbelief the government announcement that didn’t include widespread social distancing, I recommended to my team at Imperial that they should work from home for the foreseeable future. Indeed, I have not been to my office since.
Neither the advice nor the science were followed that week. My colleagues, led by Neil Ferguson, published a report on 16 March estimating that without strong suppression, 250,000 people could die in the UK. The government responded that day with a recommendation for social distancing, avoiding pubs and working from home if possible. But there was still no enforcement, and it was left up to individuals and employers to decide what to do. Many people were willing but unable to comply as we showed in a report on 20 March. It was only on 23 March that a more stringent lockdown and economic support was announced.
Between 12 and 23 March, tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people will have been infected. Boris Johnson himself may well have been infected that week, and his stay in the intensive care unit may have been avoided if the government had shifted to remote working on 12 March. The current best estimate is that around 1% of those infected will die.
]]>nhs health uk politics covid-19 pandemics predictionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:90b1914c61f5/'They are leading us to catastrophe': Sweden's coronavirus stoicism begins to jar | World news | The Guardian2020-03-31T09:26:40+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/catastrophe-sweden-coronavirus-stoicism-lockdown-europe
jmA petition signed by more than 2,000 doctors, scientists, and professors last week – including the chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Prof Carl-Henrik Heldin – called on the government to introduce more stringent containment measures. “We’re not testing enough, we’re not tracking, we’re not isolating enough – we have let the virus loose,” said Prof Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér, a virus immunology researcher at the Karolinska Institute. “They are leading us to catastrophe.”
]]>sweden fear covid-19 europe politics sciencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cb54a97611c2/The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic | The New Republic2020-03-13T20:07:57+00:00
https://newrepublic.com/article/156901/dismantled-state-takes-pandemic
jmIt didn’t occur to the right that a more terrifying series of words than “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” would turn out to be “I’m from the government, and I guess I anticipated that the private sector would have engaged.”
]]>cdc coronavirus covid19 politics republicans us-politics pandemics governmenthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d1a9bd2dcff0/How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart | World news | The Guardian2020-02-20T16:39:28+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremacists-nationalism-tearing-india-apart-modi-bjp-rss-jnu-attacks?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
jmFor seven decades, India has been held together by its constitution, which promises equality to all. But Narendra Modi’s BJP is remaking the nation into one where some people count as more Indian than others.
]]>bjp abvp rss india fascism hindutva politics asiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:201edc418f75/Kashmiri cops filed a case against people using VPN and social media2020-02-19T16:25:50+00:00
https://thenextweb.com/in/2020/02/18/kashmiri-cops-filed-a-case-against-people-using-vpn-and-social-media/
jmvpns future grim-meathook-future politics censorship india kashmir social-mediahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:40eb2067c638/An Indian politician is using deepfake technology in an election campaign2020-02-19T16:22:52+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615247/an-indian-politician-is-using-deepfakes-to-try-and-win-voters/
jmA deepfake of the president of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Manoj Tiwari, went viral on WhatsApp in the country earlier this month, ahead of legislative assembly elections in Delhi, according to Vice. It’s the first time a political party anywhere has used a deepfake for campaigning purposes. In the original video Tiwari speaks in English, criticizing his political opponent Arvind Kejriwal and encouraging voters to vote for the BJP. The second video has been manipulated using deepfake technology so his mouth moves convincingly as he speaks in Haryanvi, the Hindi dialect spoken by the target voters for the BJP.
]]>deepfakes video fakes campaigning politics india bjphttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:82c1d03fc10b/Steve Bannon on shitposting2020-01-24T22:44:09+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-09/has-anyone-seen-the-president
jmshitposting distraction tactics steve-bannon trump tories politics misinformation disinformationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9c7b4406cd90/Facebook Ad Library Showed Just How Unreliable Facebook’s Security System For Elections Is2020-01-15T14:17:45+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rorysmith/the-uk-election-showed-just-how-unreliable-facebooks
jmOn Dec. 10, just two days before the United Kingdom went to the polls, some 74,000 political advertisements vanished from Facebook’s Ad Library, a website that serves as an archive of political and issue ads run on the platform. [....]
Facebook has said it will not fact-check political ads or restrict the ability for campaigns to target people. Instead, it said it will provide transparency with tools like the Ad Library, the Ad Library report, and the Ad Library API, so the public, researchers, and journalists can monitor how elections play out on the platform. But that only works to the degree that those tools operate properly. It was only the news media’s reporting that brought the issue out into the open.
“The fact that they could have an outage like this that went up to the day before an election, and they didn’t really publicly communicate,” Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at NYU whose work involves using the API, told BuzzFeed News, “that’s just not how you treat a security system. That’s what this is — this is a security system for elections.”
]]>facebook ads politics uk-politics transparency microtargeting social-mediahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:038ab9c5b5af/The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’2020-01-14T22:13:09+00:00
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/13/the-center-blows-itself-up-care-and-spite-in-the-brexit-election/
jmThe center of British politics has become a smoldering pit. The country is now being governed by a hard-right government placed in power by its oldest citizens, in the face of the active hatred of its increasingly socialist-inclined youth. It’s fairly clear that for the Johnson team, Brexit was never anything but an electoral strategy, and that they don’t have the slightest idea how to translate it into economic prosperity. (It is an unacknowledged irony of the current situation that the people most likely to profit from the Brexit process are, precisely, lawyers—and, probably secondarily, accountants. For everyone else, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they will improve their current situation, and quite easy to imagine Johnson being remembered as one of the most disastrous prime ministers in British history.)
]]>labour brexit uk politics tories boris-johnson jeremy-corbyn centrismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1729cca0291d/SSP3: The Nightmare Scenario for Climate Scientists2020-01-13T13:51:19+00:00
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-nightmare-climate-scenario-that-keeps-scientists-up-1840912111
jm“A resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues. This trend is reinforced by the limited number of comparatively weak global institutions, with uneven coordination and cooperation for addressing environmental and other global concerns. Policies shift over time to become increasingly oriented toward national and regional security issues, including barriers to trade, particularly in the energy resource and agricultural markets... A low international priority for addressing environmental concerns leads to strong environmental degradation in some regions. The combination of impeded development and limited environmental concern results in poor progress toward sustainability. Population growth is low in industrialized and high in developing countries. Growing resource intensity and fossil fuel dependency along with difficulty in achieving international cooperation and slow technological change imply high challenges to mitigation. The limited progress on human development, slow income growth, and lack of effective institutions, especially those that can act across regions, implies high challenges to adaptation for many groups in all regions.”
Hausfather called our current world “SSP3-ish,” particularly the rise of populism. Leah Stokes, an energy policy researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Earther that in some ways “beginning to wake up to much of what SSP3 captures, which is fascism and nationalism and erecting of border between places.”
Research linking this vision with society and the climate paints a bleak picture. Findings show there’s no scenario in which society achieves the Paris Agreement goals of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) under SSP3. And the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) goal is but a pipe dream if the world continues its march to fragmentation and lack of cooperation. Hausfather said because of this and computing limitations, the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report will only model SSP3 in conjunction with a high emissions scenario since it’s the most likely outcome.
Welp, that's depressing.]]>ssp3 climate-change climate populism politics fascism nationalism racism futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5c5d33eae28d/New Left Review - Mike Davis: Who Will Build the Ark?2020-01-02T23:34:02+00:00
https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/courses/10/reader/New%20Left%20Review%20-%20Mike%20Davis%20%20Who%20Will%20Build%20the%20Ark.htm
jmmike-davis climate-change climate politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:06b4e1a0c19b/J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British culture2019-12-20T15:41:59+00:00
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/12/19/21029874/jk-rowling-transgender-tweet-terf
jmTrans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) ideology has been helped along in the UK by media under the leadership of Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London for years. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,” language that sounds an awful lot like Donald Trump speaking about immigrants.
According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate at the social-justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader skeptical movement in the early aughts — which was hyperfocused on debunking “junk science” and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of “non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,” Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. “Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, ‘Biology isn’t bigotry.’ In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.”
]]>feminism politics terfs trans-rights gender biology uk jk-rowling transphobiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:92b21900ec46/COP-25 Report from Prof. John Sweeney of An Taisce2019-12-16T13:14:23+00:00
https://www.antaisce.org/Sweeney-COP25-Final
jmThere is no doubt but that the failure of COP25 is symptomatic of a world failing to advance the multilateralism ideals many of us grew up with. International cooperation in economics, politics and in solving environmental problems, such as ozone depletion, have now given way to narrow national and populist ideologies. What is most worrying about current developments in tackling climate change is however the disconnect between the power brokers and society at large. The advice of the scientists and the pleas of the young were ignored in Madrid. Indeed some 200 young people were summarily ejected from the conference after a protest, and the eloquent arguments presented by the young Irish activists at several side events fell on deaf ears. Attempts by some world leaders and some media commentators to direct personal vitriol against young activists even surfaced.
]]>cop25 world future climate-change economics politics failhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9b1787e7f091/How the Tories won the online election: pick a line, ignore the facts and repeat | Alex Hern | Opinion | The Guardian2019-12-14T21:38:52+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/tory-online-election-campaign-russian-bots-misinformation-retweeting
jmThe internet wasn’t the place for smart campaigning. The Labour party put out slick video after slick video, outspent the Tories on Snapchat and Facebook, and handed Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account to someone who understands memes extremely well for the entirety of election day. The Conservatives simply sat down and spent six weeks being wilfully stupid, and it worked.
In fact, one of the few changes in strategy we saw in the online election was the Conservatives doubling down on simple and stupid. The opening of the campaign was marked by a “shitposting strategy”, with the Tory party sharing low-effort, banally funny campaign messages in the clear hope that they would get as much distribution from opponents as supporters.
But, as the election went on, that approach was dropped in favour of a brutally simple one: pick three lines, whether or not they’re true, and just repeat them, for ever, on every platform, without shame or variation. Invent some Labour policies, make up a price-tag for them, and tweet it out as the cost of Labour. Make up a taxation strategy to pay for it, and tweet that out as the party’s tax bombshell. Endlessly, humourlessly, robotically come back to “get Brexit done”. There are lessons here for other political parties, but they aren’t pretty.
]]>uk politics shitposting brexit labour torieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3468e6f8dcfb/New Google political ad policy2019-11-21T11:12:57+00:00
https://twitter.com/WhoTargetsMe/status/1197307265117761536
jmtargeting google facebook ads politics ukhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:892f8ce3dc4a/Excellent Twitter thread on Facebook in Myanmar2019-10-20T20:24:40+00:00
https://twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/1185982325084934145
jmfacebook whatsapp genocide politics hate-crimes india myanmar sri-lanka abuse moderationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b2c83ffe879e/Computer says no: the people trapped in universal credit's 'black hole'2019-10-15T13:57:40+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/oct/14/computer-says-no-the-people-trapped-in-universal-credits-black-hole
jmTears filled the eyes of Danny Brice, 47, in London when he showed the Guardian how difficult he has found negotiating the UC programme with learning disabilities and dyslexia.
“I call it the black hole,” he said. “I feel shaky. I get stressed about it. This is the worst system in my lifetime. They assess you as a number not a person. Talking is the way forward, not a bloody computer. I feel like the computer is controlling me instead of a person. It’s terrifying.”
Nine million people in the UK are functionally illiterate and 5 million adults have either never used the internet or last used it more than three months ago. And yet many of these people rely on a “digital by default” welfare system.
]]>poverty ai algorithms uk politics universal-credit dystopia bureaucracy dwp benefits grim-meathook-futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8fd6fbf76f2c/Green New Deal critics are missing the bigger picture2019-09-26T11:21:23+00:00
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/23/18228142/green-new-deal-critics
jmNew EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently dismissed the latest IPCC report as being based on a “worst-case scenario,” which is darkly ironic, since the report is all about the dangers that lie between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming. But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism. [...]
Two degrees would be terrible, but it’s better than three, at which point Southern Europe would be in permanent drought, African droughts would last five years on average, and the areas burned annually by wildfires in the United States could quadruple, or worse, from last year’s million-plus acres. And three degrees is much better than four, at which point six natural disasters could strike a single community simultaneously; the number of climate refugees, already in the millions, could grow tenfold, or 20-fold, or more; and, globally, damages from warming could reach $600 trillion — about double all the wealth that exists in the world today.
The worst-case scenario, which, contra Wheeler, is virtually never discussed in polite political circles in the US, is, as Wallace-Wells quotes famed naturalist David Attenborough saying, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.”
That is alarming and, if you must, “alarmist,” but as Wallace-Wells says, “being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand.” [...]
Choosing to continue down our present path is madness. Nihilism. It is not “moderation.”
]]>activism climate-change climate green-new-deal green future ipcc david-attenborough nihilism politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d611efdaec14/TERFs: the rise of “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” explained - Vox2019-09-06T12:17:02+00:00
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/5/20840101/terfs-radical-feminists-gender-critical?fbclid=IwAR3ro7S9VN2Q62KaYs3h-utRy2SZ2m_eF02D2tziardajAymyiZJOF-V96w
jmterfs transgender politics identity gender uk feminismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9ea8eef64589/'Bees, not refugees': the environmentalist roots of anti-immigrant bigotry | Environment | The Guardian2019-08-19T14:01:14+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti
jmproclamations of looming dystopia in the form of a mass climate-caused global refugee crisis put well-intentioned environmentalists on some shared ground with fear-mongering nativists, even as they’re attempting to convey a useful urgency about the future of the planet and the disproportionate impacts of climate crisis on the developing world.
“Not to say there won’t be climate-related migration, but I think that portrayal of migrants as climate change refugees, especially these mass movements of people, feeds into the anti-immigrant environmental worldview,” said Hartmann. “Alarmist hyperbole and stereotypes around climate conflict and even climate mass refugee dislocation is based on kind of old, racially and colonially charged stereotypes of poor people of color being more prone to violence in times of scarcity.”
A worsening climate crisis could easily become a cudgel for anti-immigration activists looking to use ecological preservation as an excuse to close borders, a means of gesturing toward doing something about climate crisis that aligns with the right’s other political goals.
“As it becomes more difficult for Republicans to deny that climate change is a thing, this is a really likely next move for the right in climate politics,” said Hultgren.
]]>environment racism politics climate-change future dystopia refugees immigrationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b8ec5fba47df/Irish State told to delete ‘unlawful’ data on 3.2m citizens2019-08-16T11:53:13+00:00
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/irish-state-told-to-delete-unlawful-data-on-3-2m-citizens-1.3987606
jmThe State has been told it must delete data held on 3.2 million citizens, which was gathered as part of the roll-out of the Public Services Card, as there is no lawful basis for retaining it.
In a highly critical report on its investigation into the card, the Data Protection Commission found there was no legal reason to make individuals obtain the card in order to access State services such as renewing a driving licence or applying for a college grant. [...]
Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner, told The Irish Times that forcing people to obtain such a card for services other than those provided by the department was “unlawful from a data-processing point of view”.
]]>psc ireland politics data-privacy privacy data-collection dpo dpchttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c93f54fa3bfd/How YouTube Radicalized Brazil2019-08-14T09:41:00+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-brazil.html
jmYouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.
A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.
Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors.
Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.
And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation.
YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our screens.
]]>youtube politics brazil future grim engagement machine-learning google zikahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:12d281599891/Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too. - VICE2019-08-08T10:31:45+00:00
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too
jmgop corruption twitter politics filtering ai fascism republicanshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:038061c5ca96/When Non-Jews Wield Anti-Semitism as Political Shield | GQ2019-07-18T11:40:00+00:00
https://www.gq.com/story/anti-semitism-political-shield
jma spate of ultra-Christian would-be spokespeople have demonstrated outrage against congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for daring to use the term “concentration camps” to describe the camps in which thousands of migrants are concentrated in squalor, and have died, on the Southern border. Wyoming representative Liz Cheney and Meghan McCain have volunteered, unasked-for, as blonde Christian Loraxes, prepared at all times to speak for the Jews. In late June, Cheney demanded Ocasio-Cortez apologize for utilizing the term, stating that “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
But Jews are not trees, not animals, not mute props to use as cudgels in a war of escalating rhetoric. We do not need to be spoken for, we who have been here since before this country was a country, and want to remain, and know no other home; we are not waiting for your apocalypse. As if to prove a counterpoint, on Tuesday, July 15, one thousand “Jews and allies” led by a group called #NeverAgainAction and the immigrant justice group Movimiento Cosecha enacted a protest in Washington, D.C., blockading the entrances and exits to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s headquarters and the approaching street. Their chief slogan defied those who would use Jews’ bloody history to deny present atrocities; those who would utilize Jews as weapons to silence anti-racists; those who want us to wait, meekly, to be cozened by Christ in the end of days. What they chanted, holding hands, were four simple words: “Never Again is Now.”
]]>antisemitism us-politics politics smearing aoc rhetorichttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:22caeb0f1f0b/excellent Twitter thread about Brexiteer attitudes to Ireland2019-07-14T21:59:01+00:00
https://twitter.com/Niall001/status/1150431326006317058
jmbrexit britain uk ireland politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e51364828cd4/Russians used fake Foster email for disinformation – researchers2019-06-24T11:13:45+00:00
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/russians-used-fake-foster-email-for-disinformation-researchers-1.3935125
jm
Facebook believes this is the first time fake information about Northern Ireland and topics concerning Anglo-Irish relations has been disseminated by Russian operators acting in concert.
The Atlantic Council’s research centre found the campaign was “persistent, sophisticated and well-resourced” and said that “the likelihood is that this operation was run by a Russian intelligence agency”.
The operation “appeared designed to stoke racial, religious or political hatred, especially in Northern Ireland”, the researchers said, disclosing their findings in an online article published on the Medium self-publishing online platform over the weekend.
]]>ireland russia disinformation fake-news facebook dfrlab ira politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7b231e3bcb71/The Making of a YouTube Radical - The New York Times2019-06-10T15:15:08+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html
jmNear the end of our interview, I told Mr. Cain that I found it odd that he had successfully climbed out of a right-wing YouTube rabbit hole, only to jump into a left-wing YouTube rabbit hole. I asked if he had considered cutting back on his video intake altogether, and rebuild some of his offline relationships.
He hesitated, and looked slightly confused. For all of its problems, he said, YouTube is still where political battles are fought and won. Leaving the platform would essentially mean abandoning the debate.
He conceded, though, that he needed to think critically about the videos he watched.
“YouTube is the place to put out a message,” he said. “But I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.”
]]>youtube politics nytimes racism right-wing dystopiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:44b44bb39295/What I Learned Trying To Secure Congressional Campaigns (Idle Words)2019-05-29T12:59:16+00:00
https://idlewords.com/2019/05/what_i_learned_trying_to_secure_congressional_campaigns.htm
jmpolitics security dnc democrats funny yubikeys gmail google auth phishing hacking congresshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eb264fb4e0a5/British Far Right Extremism Manipulating Ireland2019-05-27T14:11:31+00:00
https://medium.com/@irexitparody/british-far-right-extremism-manipulating-ireland-1e863cea0267
jmastroturf ireland irexit nigel-farage ukip brexit politics dirty-trickshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5b4780ef1504/What's next after the Extinction Rebellion demos?2019-04-25T10:43:56+00:00
https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/blog-post/3074582/rebel-alliance
jmYou would think anyone who accepts the science on climate change and understands the civilisation-threatening scale of the risks spelled out in the most recent IPCC report would look at people willing to get arrested in their desperation to drive bolder action against those risks and recognise the least they deserve is an honest and engaged response, perhaps even characterised by a touch of humility and a guilty acceptance decarbonisation efforts to date are yet to make so much as the slightest dent in global emissions trajectories. But apparently not. Glib Tweets about China are obviously easier.
The response to the critical 'what's the plan' question seems to be 'more of the same, with a touch more ambition perhaps, but let's not scare the horses; look, we're doing our best here, we've got the message, no we haven't got any better ideas, can you please put the superglue down and let us get back to business-as-usual'. It is disappointing, a dereliction of duty, and in no way commensurate to the scale of the climate crisis, to put it mildly.
]]>future climate-change climate-breakdown xr extinction-rebellion uk-politics green politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3305d8cb1581/