U.S. Politics

[LondonLax]

34 minutes ago, villakram said:

Errr... the republicans didn't elect Trump. The voters that they have polluted over the past X years did. The republican leadership tried pretty much every trick in the book to get rid of Trump, with no success.

Are you suggesting that because one guy is allegedly an amalgamation of Hitler/Stalin/Gacy/Bundy/Sherwood/Kissenger/Cheney that the other side get a free pass?

 

Not to speak for Davkaus but I don't think he said or implied any such thing. Indeed in the very post you quote he says the Democrats 'have problems' and called them 'pretty shit'. 

I think you might have misread his post. 

[StefanAVFC]

1 hour ago, villakram said:

Quasi meaningless... it's the same old DNC people who have thrown away things over the past 10 yrs who are in charge. He'll be sidelined in the exact same way the Hillary sidelined Bernie as soon as she possibly could.

It isn't meaningless.

They made up a position for him. They want his influence. Perez and Ellison are friends and Ellison will continue to work in congress, which he wouldn't do if he won.

In isolation it's a bad result, but looking at the entire picture, it's decent.

[HanoiVillan]

2 hours ago, villakram said:

and the DNC go ahead and elect Tom Perez... learned nothing and seems their strategy is to point fingers at Trump for the next 4yrs. Inept is too nice a description.

Pointing fingers at Trump is an excellent strategy, to be fair. 

[peterms]

4 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

He's skipping the WH correspondents dinner.

He really is the thinnest skinned individual alive. After campaigning on a ticket of political-correctness gone mad, no less.

Unsurprising.  Isn't the event traditionally one where the President makes a witty and self-deprecating speech?

He doesn't do witty, just snide and nasty.  And the idea of someone with his raging narcissism being self-deprecating is a complete non-starter.  The very idea must have brought him out in a rash.  Not that anyone could see it, under all that orange.

[Keyblade]

5 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Pointing fingers at Trump is an excellent strategy, to be fair. 

Didn't exactly work for Hillary.

[Keyblade]

5 hours ago, peterms said:

Unsurprising.  Isn't the event traditionally one where the President makes a witty and self-deprecating speech?

He doesn't do witty, just snide and nasty.  And the idea of someone with his raging narcissism being self-deprecating is a complete non-starter.  The very idea must have brought him out in a rash.  Not that anyone could see it, under all that orange.

He probably still had PTSD from this

 

[peterms]

Love the shots of Trump in those clips.  Where most people having the piss taken like that can at least pretend to take it with good grace, he sits unmoving.  I imagine him trying to contain his seething rage, and going home to smash something.

[Keyblade]

1 hour ago, peterms said:

Love the shots of Trump in those clips.  Where most people having the piss taken like that can at least pretend to take it with good grace, he sits unmoving.  I imagine him trying to contain his seething rage, and going home to smash something.

He's so sensitive. Some say that was the day he decided to run for president, out of pure spite.

[HanoiVillan]

3 hours ago, Keyblade said:

Didn't exactly work for Hillary.

No, it didn't. But running a political campaign is different to being the opposition in a legislature. 

During Obama's time, Republicans came up with almost no new policies of their own, and certainly didn't really come up with a new vision for the country. They simply said 'no', and it did them the world of good. 

[villakram]

16 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

It isn't meaningless.

They made up a position for him. They want his influence. Perez and Ellison are friends and Ellison will continue to work in congress, which he wouldn't do if he won.

In isolation it's a bad result, but looking at the entire picture, it's decent.

That is how it looks. However, I am interpreting it in terms of the known previous behavior of this power structure. Perez is the establishment DNC. After the presidential primary Clinton made all sorts of public gestures and statements about how much she cared about Sander's positions/supporters. It came out after the election that as soon as it was possible, Sanders and his camp were cast aside and ignored. How foolish this was.

This position has been created as a sop to the Sanders wing. They are fools is they are placated by this.

[HanoiVillan]

23 minutes ago, villakram said:

That is how it looks. However, I am interpreting it in terms of the known previous behavior of this power structure. Perez is the establishment DNC. After the presidential primary Clinton made all sorts of public gestures and statements about how much she cared about Sander's positions/supporters. It came out after the election that as soon as it was possible, Sanders and his camp were cast aside and ignored. How foolish this was.

This position has been created as a sop to the Sanders wing. They are fools is they are placated by this.

Clinton is nothing to do with this position. 

[Marka Ragnos]

Hillary lost because her ground game was filled with arrogance and hubris, but even more, she had no compelling story to tell. I remember how it was virtually impossible for months upon months to get yard signs and bumper stickers from the local campaign offices. Over and over again, the campaign staff would tell me, "Our research tells us signs don't work." They would sneer at Trump and his supporters' millions of signs. Our state was filled with Trump and "Hillary For Prison" signs right up until Election Day. Having voted in every other election since I was 18, I can tell you this was completely different than anything I'd ever seen. Hillary's people thought they had the thing locked. Arrogant. 

She never EVER connected emotionally with even her greatest supporters. Typical third-way technocrat but without the (now dated-seeming) charisma of a Blair and certainly nothing like her husband. She was, in short, a bore, only slightly more appealing than Dukakis in 88.

And what, in the end, was the story of Hillary? She had these dumb one-word signs that read "Together." What the fug does that mean? "Together." What kind of story is that? Sorry, man, but that ain't a story. That's an abstraction. 

Make America Great Again. The perfect, evil, dog-whistle code to the dormant Reagan Democrats and their poorly informed grandchildren. A whole, hateful story. And it worked.

 

 

 

 

[snowychap]

An interesting and long read which probably could go in a number of threads but I'll link to it and post some extracts in here:

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

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With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?

I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.

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Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Germany are next.

...

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But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

It sounds creepy, I say.

“It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

...

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“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

...

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In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”

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Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did. Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being led by money and politics.”

...

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THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

 

...much more on link

Edited February 26, 2017 by snowychap
Formatting

[peterms]

Greenwald makes a reasonable point about the correspondents' dinner.  Which is not to suggest that this was Trump's reason for not attending (I bet Versailles would be his dream scenario).

 

[maqroll]

I truly believe that what Breitbart wanted and what Bannon and to a lesser degree Trump want is a race war. They want to reassert white supremacy, not only in America but in the UK, France, Holland, etc. I believe Bannon won't be satisfied until a form of neo-Apartheid is established in white majority countries. Rounding up brown people for expulsion from America should be a screaming wake up call to anyone who thinks that genocide can't happen again. There are people on the far right who now have incredible power, and they don't intend to do anything good with it.

[Keyblade]

[peterms]

17 minutes ago, Keyblade said:

Superb.

Looks like it was filmed by an 8-year old while simultaneously wiping his arse.

Scripted by someone who has recently lobotomised himself with a blunt chisel.

[Awol]

8 hours ago, maqroll said:

I truly believe that what Breitbart wanted and what Bannon and to a lesser degree Trump want is a race war. They want to reassert white supremacy, not only in America but in the UK, France, Holland, etc. I believe Bannon won't be satisfied until a form of neo-Apartheid is established in white majority countries. Rounding up brown people for expulsion from America should be a screaming wake up call to anyone who thinks that genocide can't happen again. There are people on the far right who now have incredible power, and they don't intend to do anything good with it.

Serious question, are Mexicans regarded as "brown people" in the States? Odd if so as Latinos are of European extraction by definition. It's like calling Italians or Greeks 'brown people'.

I would have thought there were very few illegal immigrants in the US who could be described as 'brown people', simply because they can't get there.

[HanoiVillan]

39 minutes ago, Awol said:

Serious question, are Mexicans regarded as "brown people" in the States? Odd if so as Latinos are of European extraction by definition. It's like calling Italians or Greeks 'brown people'.

I would have thought there were very few illegal immigrants in the US who could be described as 'brown people', simply because they can't get there.

There are actually a lot, as most illegal immigration to the USA consists of visa overstays, which are primarily Asian. 

[maqroll]

1 hour ago, Awol said:

Serious question, are Mexicans regarded as "brown people" in the States? Odd if so as Latinos are of European extraction by definition. It's like calling Italians or Greeks 'brown people'.

I would have thought there were very few illegal immigrants in the US who could be described as 'brown people', simply because they can't get there.

The majority of Mexicans are mestizo, and the majority of Central Americans are mostly native blood.