90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #765

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #762

University of Chicago postpones course on the problem of whiteness

This first came to light about a week ago when a University of Chicago student tweeted about the upcoming class.

Naturally the professor is a white woman.

Schmidt predicted that no one else at his school would object because they would fear repercussions for speaking up.

After Schmidt tweeted about the class the website was updated to show that it had been canceled. But according to Inside Higher Ed, it hasn’t been canceled just postponed:

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1198

Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,

Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.

If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.

Please Leave Silently Into The Night......

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1898

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Visage à trois #583

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #762

The Partisan Rigging of the 2022 Election Election reform candidates are not the threat. The threat to democracy is to leave things the way they are.

In a society that retains trust in its institutions, the most authoritative source for news and information would probably be the publicly funded media property that is supposed to adhere to the highest standards of journalistic objectivity. Here in America, that would have been PBS. Except it isn’t. The American media, by and large, along with Silicon Valley’s social media communications oligopolies, are doing everything they can to deny American voters the opportunity to politically realign their nation.

It’s always useful for conservatives to watch the legacy networks, starting with PBS, to fully appreciate the level of bias that pervades their “news” organizations. While watching them all the time might quickly become intolerable, return periodically to be reminded: The political content on these networks serve the interests of the Democratic Party.

These days, and for at least the past year, PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, along with every PBS reporter, repeats the term “election denier” dozens of times during every daily news broadcast. They repeat it without irony, without hesitation or qualification. It doesn’t matter what level of skepticism someone may have about the 2020 election. Skepticism in and of itself makes one a “denier.” One can have well founded, incrementalist concerns about election integrity, or one can believe every allegation ever made about systemic election fraud, but there’s no room for such a continuum. According to PBS, all these folks are “election deniers.”

Characterizing anyone concerned about election integrity as an “election denier” is manipulative and deceptive, and with rare exceptions, every major news network is doing it. The pervasive deception practiced by the national media throughout the Trump presidency and ever since, in addition to being deliberately manipulative, is designed to cause profound election consequences. We know it was coordinated; we know it was effective. It still is. And all of it designed to elect Democrats and defeat Republicans. Does that constitute “rigging” an election, and if not, why not?

The media’s role in rigging elections to favor Democrats cannot easily be overstated, but it’s far from the only way in which elections in America are rigged. We’re all familiar with the way laws were ignored in swing states by partisan election officials. Depending on which state these violations occurred, they included ballot drop boxes, ballot harvesting, mailed ballots, changes in procedures governing ballot custody and ballot verification, same day registration, waiving voter ID requirements, and more. We all remember how one activist multi-billionaire sent over $400 million dollars to public agencies tasked with administering elections, and restricted his donations to Democrat-heavy precincts in these same swing states in order to “get out the vote.”

To reduce this to the obvious: Ignoring laws is against the law. And public entities accepting private donations that are made with explicitly partisan objectives, at the very least, violates the supposed impartiality and political neutrality of the election bureaucracy. Does any of that constitute rigging an election? Why not?

These allegations are beyond serious debate. Nearly all media is partisan, favors Democrats, and manipulates their audiences. Election officials broke state election laws to help Democratic candidates. Partisan private-sector billionaires made donations to public entities with the goal of increasing Democratic turnout.

But there’s so much more. Consider the manipulated search results on Google, and the suppressed content on the major social media platforms. The partisan participation of America’s social media and search giants in manipulating public opinion, all by itself, has decisive election consequences. These communications platforms deliberately shape...

My research team is currently monitoring online political content being sent to voters in swing states through more than 2,500 computers owned by a politically-diverse group of registered voters (our “field agents”), and we are concerned about what we’re seeing.

We are aggregating and analyzing search results on the Google and Bing search engines, messages displayed on Google’s home page, autoplay videos suggested on YouTube, tweets sent to users by the Twitter company (as opposed to tweets sent by other users), email suppression on Gmail, and more.

We have so far preserved more than 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” – exposure to short-lived content that impacts people and then disappears, leaving no trace – that Google and other companies are able to use to shift opinions and voting preferences, and we expect to have captured more than 2.5 million by Election Day.

In emails leaked from Google to The Wall Street Journal in 2018, Googlers (that’s what they call themselves) discussed how they might be able to use “ephemeral experiences” to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban. The company later denied that this plan was ever implemented, but leaked content (including multiple blacklists) and startling revelations by Tristan Harris, Zach Vorhies, and other whistleblowers show that Google is indeed out to remake the world in its own image. As the company’s CFO, Ruth Porat, said in a November 11th, 2016 video that leaked in 2018, “we will use the great strength and resources and reach we have” to advance Google’s values.

Since early 2016, my team has been developing and improving Neilsen-type monitoring systems that allow us to do to Google-and-the-Gang what they do to us and our children 24/7: to track their activity, and, specifically, to preserve that very dangerous and persuasive ephemeral content.

Since 2013, I have been conducting rigorous controlled experiments to quantify how persuasive that kind of content can be. I’ve so far identified about a dozen new forms of online manipulation that make use of ephemeral experiences, and nearly all these techniques are controlled exclusively by Google and, to a lesser extent...