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  • Here’s why this media scholar changed her mind and now thinks there’s a ’very strong’ case Russia won the 2016 election for Trump | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-media-scholar-changed-her-mind-and-now-thinks-theres-very-strong

    I originally thought that the idea that the Russians could have used social media to create a substantial impact on the election was absurd. I started to change my mind when I saw the first release of Russian social media and troll campaign ads and messaging during the U.S. Senate hearings in October and November of last year. These ads were a coherent plan and understanding of the presidential election which was consistent with Donald Trump’s political needs.

    If acted on systematically, these ads would have produced a communication effect that on the margins could have affected enough votes to change the outcome of the election in his favor. If the Russians didn’t have a coherent theory of what it took for Donald Trump to win — or what it would take to make it more likely that Hillary Clinton would lose — then all their machinations would not have mattered. But the Russians knew who to mobilize.

    The Russians were trying to mobilize evangelicals and white conservative Catholics. The Russians also knew that they needed to mobilize veterans and military households. The Russians knew they had to demobilize Bernie Sanders supporters and liberals, especially young people. The Russians were also attempting to shift the voters they could not demobilize over to Jill Stein.

    You add that together with demobilizing African-American voters with messaging that Hillary Clinton is bad for the black community, and then Clinton’s whole messaging strategy is at risk. If Hillary Clinton can’t mobilize the black vote at levels near Barack Obama’s, although not the same level, then she is in trouble.

    I then started to examine where the Russians and their trolls spent their time and attention. They were spending more of it on trying to demobilize African-American voters by emphasizing things that group may not like about Hillary Clinton. When a person casts a vote they are not thinking about every detail or issue relative to a candidate. Voters make decisions based on what is most important in that moment of time, what is on the top of their mind.

    So if you remind voters who are African-American that at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency there was a very high level of increased incarceration of African-Americans on drug charges then an African-American voter may say, “Maybe I should think about Hillary Clinton differently.”

    If you remember her “superpredator” comment and take it to be about black people in general and not about gangs specifically, then you as an African-American voter may be less likely to support her.

    By featuring these types of messages, the Russians were increasing the likelihood that while you may not be likely to cast a vote for Donald Trump, you are more likely to stay home and not vote for Hillary Clinton.

    I then started to wonder whether maybe there was enough troll activity that was addressed to the right constituencies to have impacted the margins of the vote. The question then becomes, did the Russians and their trolls target the right voters in the right places? We still don’t know that.

    The social media platforms know the answer, but they have not released the information. The trolls alone could have swung the electorate. But in my judgment the WikiLeaks hacks against the DNC is a much stronger case. There we see a clear effect on the news media agenda. We know from decades of communication scholarship that if you change the media agenda you then change the criteria that people vote on. The shift in the media agenda from October forward was decisively against Hillary Clinton. And the questions in the presidential debates which were based on information stolen by WikiLeaks and the Russians disadvantaged Clinton and, looking at the polling data, predicted the vote.

    President Trump is better at commanding the agenda than he is at any other single thing that he as a communicator does. The press has been an accomplice in the process of ceding agenda control to him by virtue of his tweeting — and having the press respond immediately, as if every tweet is presumed to be newsworthy. Donald Trump has the capacity to get whatever he wants the public to focus on by directing the cable news agenda. We really should ask: Aren’t there other things we ought to be paying more attention to? How often are we being distracted from something that Trump does not want us to pay attention to? Being distracted by his effective use of tweets to set an alternative agenda.

    Fox News is de facto Trump’s state-sponsored media. How does this impact American political culture?

    We are increasingly going into ideological enclaves to get our news. To the extent that people find the news compatible with what they already believe, that means they are not being exposed to alternative interpretations of reality and alternative points of view. What is unprecedented about the relationship between Fox News and the president of the United States is the extent to which what is said and shown on Fox News appears to influence what is said and featured by the president of the United States. The traditional model of agenda-setting is that the president sets the agenda and the news media follows. This reversal with Donald Trump and Fox News is something new.

    #Politique #Médias_sociaux #USA #Trump

  • A historian explains why right-wing criticism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s clothing mirrors the response to early female labor activists | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/historian-explains-why-right-wing-criticism-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-clot

    It seems that some critics just can’t accept the fact that an unapologetic Democratic socialist like Ocasio-Cortez – who calls for a more equal distribution of wealth and fair shake to workers – can also wear designer clothes.

    To a historian like me who writes about fashion and politics, the attention to Ocasio-Cortez’s clothing as a way to criticize her politics is an all-too-familiar line of attack.

    Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the first woman or even the first outsider to receive such treatment.

    In particular, I’m reminded of Clara Lemlich, a young radical socialist who used fashion as a form of empowerment while she fought for workers’ rights.
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    Lemlich – like Ocasio-Cortez – wasn’t afraid to take on big business while wearing fancy clothes.
    ‘We like new hats’

    In 1909, when she was only 23 years old, Lemlich defied the male union leadership whom she saw as too hesitant and out of touch.

    In what would come to be known as the “Uprising of the 20,000,” Lemlich led thousands of garment workers – the majority of them young women – to walk out from their workplace and go on a strike.

    As historian Nan Enstad has shown, insisting on their right to maintain a fashionable appearance was not a frivolous pursuit of poor women living beyond their means. It was an important political strategy in strikers’ struggle to gain rights and respect as women, workers and Americans.

    Two women strikers on picket line during the ‘Uprising of the 20,000’ in New York City. Library of Congress

    When they picketed the streets wearing their best clothes, strikers challenged the image of the “deserving poor” that depicted female workers as helpless victims deserving of mercy.

    Wearing a fancy dress or a hat signaled their economic independence and their respectability as ladies. But it also spoke to their right to be taken seriously and to have their voices heard.

    https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/file-20181203-194944-1dz76tq.jpg?itok=tHRlqc97

    Despite the criticism, Lemlich and her fellow strikers were able to win concessions from factory owners for most of their demands. They also turned Local 25 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union into one of the most influential labor unions in the country, changing for the better the lives of millions of workers like themselves.

    But more importantly, Lemlich and her colleagues changed the perception of what politically radical women should look like. They demonstrated that socialism and labor struggles were not in opposition to fashionable appearances.

    Today, their legacy is embodied in Ocasio-Cortez’s message. In fact, if Clara Lemlich were alive today, she would probably smile at Ocasio-Cortez’s response to her critics.

    The reason some journalists “can’t help but obsess about my clothes [and] rent,” she tweeted, is because “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office – or win.”

    Ocasio-Cortez has already begun to fashion an image for women who, as her worn-out campaign shoes can attest, not only know how to “talk the talk,” but can also “walk the walk.”

    #Féminisme #Politique #Lutte #Fashion #Alexandria_Ocasio_Cortez

  • MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace bursts out laughing as she tries to read Trump’s incoherent ramblings from his latest interview | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/msnbcs-nicolle-wallace-bursts-out-laughing-she-tries-read-trumps-incoheren

    En prime une vidéo totalement hilarante (enfin, un rire jaune : c’est le Président des Etats-Unis !).

    « Je crois à mon instinct plus qu’à la science et aux faits ». Terrible message de Donald Trump. Porte ouverte au fascisme : tout devient une questionde foi, de croyance. Rien ne ressort des faits et de la recherche.

    President Donald Trump’s standing as commander-in-chief has devolved into such self-parody that even as his remarks reveal darkly troubling attitudes, some observers can’t help but laugh at their sheer absurdity.

    MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace had that problem Wednesday as she tried to read out portions of Trump’s rambling and deluded mess of an interview with the Washington Post, which was published Tuesday.

    “I’m not happy with the Fed," Trump said in the interview. "They’re making a mistake because I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

    #Post_truth #Fake_news #Croyance #Fascisme

  • The controversial case of a rogue scientist responsible for the world’s the first gene-edited babies | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/controversial-case-rogue-scientist-responsible-worlds-first-gene-edited-ba

    Public perception

    This backlash may have caught He by surprise. According to one report, He commissioned a large-scale public opinion survey in China a few months prior to the announcement. The survey found that over 70 percent of the Chinese public was supportive of using gene editing for HIV prevention. This is roughly in line with a recent Pew poll in the United States that found 60 percent of Americans support using gene editing on babies to reduce lifetime risk of contracting certain diseases.
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    But polling tells only part of the story. The same Chinese poll also found very low levels of public understanding of gene editing and did not mention the details of He’s study. Abstract polling questions ignore the risks and state of the science, which were crucial to most objections to He’s experiment. It also obscures the involvement of embryos in gene editing. In the American Pew poll, despite overall support for gene editing, 65 percent opposed embryonic testing – a necessary step in the process of gene editing to address disease.

    Moreover, polling is a crude and simplistic way to engage in public debate and deliberation over the controversial issue of gene editing. Various bodies, such as the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering in the U.S. and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the U.K., have emphasized that, for gene editing to proceed to human trials, a robust public discussion is first needed to establish its legitimacy.

    But looking a little closer reveals other, more problematic motivations.

    For such couples, it is possible to safely conceive an HIV-negative child using robust IVF procedures. Such therapy is expensive, prohibitively so for many couples. But He’s study offered a particularly enticing carrot – free IVF treatment and supportive care, along with a daily allowance and insurance coverage during the treatment and pregnancy. According to the consent form, the total value of treatments and payments was approximately US$40,000 – over four times the average annual wage in urban China.

    This raises a serious concern of undue inducement: paying research participants such a large sum that it distorts their assessment of the risks and benefits. In this gene editing context, where the risks are incredibly uncertain and there is substantially limited general understanding of genetics and gene editing, society should be especially concerned about the distorting effect of such a large reward on the participants’ provision of free and informed consent.

    #Gene_editing #Designer_babies #Ethique

  • Noam Chomsky turns 90: How the controversial activist survived to become one of the most influential anarchists in US history | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-turns-90-how-controversial-activist-survived-become-one-most-

    With both his wisdom and luck, Chomsky has more than survived to become one of the most influential anarchists in U.S. history, an inspiring model for millions of anti-authoritarians, especially young ones. He has modeled taking seriously critical thinking and truth—not mainstream credentials and official badges. The truths asserted by Noam Chomsky have been powerful challenges to authoritarian society, but perhaps even more powerful, especially for young anti-authoritarians, is his modeling of an unbroken human being.

    “The person who claims the legitimacy of the authority always bears the burden of justifying it. And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that.”

    —Noam Chomsky

    #Chomsky #Anarchisme

  • Donald Trump’s endless lying is meant to undermine free thought and democracy — and lead us into fascism | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/donald-trumps-endless-lying-meant-undermine-free-thought-and-democracy-and

    In an age when speed overcomes thought, a culture of immediacy blots out any vestige of historical memory and markets replace social categories, language loses its critical moorings and becomes what Chris Hedges has called “a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.”

    No longer a vehicle for critique, doubt or possibility, language in the age of Donald Trump upholds the cultural and political workstations of ignorance and paves the way for a formative culture ripe with the death-saturated practices and protocols of fascist politics. As a species of neoliberal fascism eradicates social bonds and democratic communal relations, vulgarity parades as political wisdom and moral cowardice becomes a mark of pride. In a neoliberal age that has a high threshold of disappearance, the sins of a Vichy-inspired history have returned and are deeply rooted in a Republican Party that is as criminogenic as it is morally irresponsible and politically corrupt.

    Trump thrives on promoting social divisions and often references violence as a means of addressing them.

    The language of compassion, community and vulnerability is erased from government media sites, as is any reference to climate change. References to compassion, the grammar of ethics, justice and democracy wither as the institutions that enable and promote them are defunded, corporatized or privatized. The language of egoism, self-interest, hyper-masculinity and a vapid individualism erase any reference to social bonds, public commitments, the public good and the commons. Even worse, under the blitz of a rhetoric of bigotry, hatred and dehumanization, the ability to translate private issues into lager systemic and public concerns is diminished. The language of fascism is now reinforced by a culture of immediacy, stupidity, ignorance and civic illiteracy, and as such promotes a culture in which the only obligation of citizenship is consumption and the only emotion worth investing in is unbridled anger largely directed at Blacks, undocumented immigrants, Muslims, and the oppositional media.

    The endless lying is about more than diversion or a perpetual motion machine of absurdist theater. It is also about creating a mediascape where morality disappears and a criminogenic culture of thuggery, corruption, white supremacy and violence flourishes — and democracy dies. History seems to be repeating itself in a script in which language collapses into an ecosystem of falsehoods, militarism and racism.

    Jason Stanley, in his book, “How Fascism Works,” argues that the 10 pillars of a fascist politics are alive and well in the United States. The pillars he points to are the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety and appeals to the heartland.

    In an age when civic literacy and holding the powerful accountable for their action are dismissed as “fake news,” ignorance becomes a breeding ground not just for hate but also for a culture that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding of the importance of shared values, refuses to make tolerance a non-negotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful to poison everyday discourse.

    The threads of a general political and ideological crisis run deep in American history. With each tweet and policy decision, Trump pushes the United States closer to a full-fledged fascist state. His words sting, but his policies can kill people. Trump’s endless racist taunts, dehumanizing expressions of misogyny, relentless attacks on all provisions of the social state and ongoing contempt for the rule of law serve to normalize a creeping fascist politics. Moreover, his criminogenic disdain for any viable sense of civic and moral responsibility gives new meaning to an ethos of a selfishness and a culture of cruelty, if not terror, that has run amok in the United States.

    Under Trump, violence defines the political sphere, if not politics itself, and has become a mythic force in which all meaning, desire, relations and actions are framed with a friend/enemy divide. This is the worldview of the demagogue, and points alarmingly to a resurgence of a fascist ideology updated for the 21st century. Trump’s rhetoric of hate resembles the Nazi obsession with the discourse of elimination, ritualistic acts aimed at purging critical thought and undermining informed judgment. This is the discourse of barbarians, and a petri dish for nourishing the virus of a fascist politics.

    Of course, Trump is not simply some eccentric clown who happened to be elected by a body of angry and desperate sleepwalking voters. He is symptomatic of a savage form of neoliberalism that over the past 40 years has promoted a war against the welfare state, the most vulnerable and those deemed excess while punishing everyone else with austerity policies that also made the financial elite richer and major corporations more powerful.

    The debris of violent shootings, racism, religious intolerance, the fog of celebrity culture and the destruction of civic culture has cast an apocalyptic shadow over the future of both democracy and the United States. Trump represents a ghost of the past, and we should be terrified of the way it emboldens and resonates with what is happening both in the United States and in other countries such as Brazil, Poland, Turkey and Hungary.

    Une charge précise et bienvenue par un auteur que je ne connaissais pas

    Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is https://www.henryagiroux.com .

  • Donald Trump Spell-Check : Why Does Our Leader Insist on Capitalizing ’Country’ ? | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-spell-check-why-does-our-leader-insist-capitalizing-country

    Trump’s bizarre spelling choices may seem amusing. But stop laughing: His use of “Country” has a hidden meaning

    By Chauncey DeVega / Salon
    October 26, 2018, 3:06 AM GMT

    There is nothing funny about Donald Trump. Like other autocrats and political thugs he thrives on being underestimated. Last week there was another example of this error by Donald Trump’s detractors and others who oppose him.

    On Twitter, his preferred means of communication, Donald Trump proclaimed last week:

    When referring to the USA, I will always capitalize the word Country!

    Trump was mocked by comedians on late night television for this supposed gaffe. Other prominent voices pointed to Trump’s “misspelling” as further proof that he is a dolt and a fool. By implication, his voters are fools and dolts as well. This version of liberal Schadenfreude is a defining feature in the Age of Trump.

    It is small comfort which ignores the fact that Donald Trump’s grammatical errors and odd spelling are — as admitted by White House insiders some months ago — strategic choices designed to make him appear more “folksy” and “authentic.” Trump’s faux-populist appeal depends upon his ability to relate to his supporters by sharing their grievances and hostility toward those liberals and progressives they perceive as looking down on “real Americans.”

    To understand Donald Trump, one must begin with the fact that he is an American fascist — an autocrat and authoritarian by instinct, behavior, and values. This is the nucleus of his being. This is the prism through which to best understand Donald Trump.

    I asked several leading experts on fascism and authoritarianism to help me understand Trump’s conversion of “Country” into a proper noun.

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, author of the forthcoming book “Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall,” and featured commentator in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9”:

    Trump’s statement that he’ll capitalize the word Country represents yet another attempt to polarize the American population and set up one half as “moral,” "just" and politically and, above all, racially acceptable. It is a technique used by every authoritarian leader, often with success. Some may look at this tweet as just another quirky Trump language proposition, but nothing he does is accidental, including his capitalization strategies.

    Richard Frankel, professor of modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, an expert on the rise of Nazism in Germany whose work has also been featured in Newsweek and on the History News Network:

    I see it as another way of saying “America First.” He’s putting the emphasis on country, on nation, on America before anything else. He’s contrasting himself and his followers with those who see America as part of a much larger community of nations, in which cooperation, not confrontation, is what is what’s best for everyone. Those who see it his way are the “real Americans.” Those who don’t are the enemy. It’s the pitting of “America Firsters” against the dreaded “Globalists.” It’s another way to divide the country — inclusion through exclusion.

    Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Propaganda Works” as well as the new book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them”:

    Via linguistic style and repetition, Trump is inculcating his followers with an ethic of authoritarian nationalism. Organized religion is a local authoritarian structure; the authority of God is signaled linguistically, by capitalizing “God” or not completely spelling out the word. According to Trump, like “God,” "Country" should be capitalized. This is a linguistic means of signalizing the quasi-religious authority of the nation. And since the nation is not a person, or even a person-like figure, that religious authority should be transferred to its leader, Donald Trump.

    It (again) reminded me of this quote from Victor Klemperer’s “Language of the Third Reich”: “Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously … language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it.”

    Several days after Trump made his declaration about the correct spelling of our “Country,” he announced that he was a proud “nationalist.” Because Trump is a racial authoritarian — and a student of “alt-right” guru Steve Bannon as well as White House adviser Stephen Miller, principal architect of his nativist immigration policy — his brand of nationalism is in no sense “neutral.” It is in reality white nationalism, whether called by that name or not. Donald Trump may evade or deflect from that fact. But it is true nonetheless. This is evident through his repeated and overt hostility toward nonwhites and Muslims.

    An embrace of nationalism by Donald Trump fits neatly within his logic for capitalizing the word “Country” when referring to the United States of America.

    Benjamin Hett, professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of “Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery” as well as the new book “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic”:

    This is language I do not remember hearing from any other president. And this is where the significance of “Country” comes in. Trump the “nationalist” with his capital C in “Country” uses “globalist” as a pejorative. He is step by step dismantling the international infrastructure which the United States created after the Second World War to maintain a democratic and prosperous global order. Just recently he has begun dismantling the key INF treaty with Russia, another horrifically dangerous step. This is all reminiscent of the nationalism of the German administrations of the early 1930s, up to and including Hitler — turn away from the world, turn away from crucial international connections, turn away from peace and democracy. We know, or should know, that this cannot and will not lead anywhere good.

    *

    Some people laugh when they are terrified. It is not that the situation is funny; rather, their brains process existential dread through the physical act of laughter. This is why so many of us laugh at Donald Trump’s supposed gaffes and misspellings, and his other crude and boorish behavior. Donald Trump’s America is a real thing. We are stuck in it and many of us still cannot believe this has all come to pass. In the final analysis, laughter provides some short-term relief during the walk to the political gallows. The laughter feels good. The noose is still waiting.

    #Trump #Fascisme #Typographie #Histoire #Linguistique

  • It’s Time for Video Game Makers to Unionize | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/its-time-video-game-makers-unionize?src=newsletter1097088

    The tech sector generally has a reputation for being fairly libertarian culturally — in other words, not particularly ripe for a labor movement. Yet the spectacular rise and crash of a once-renowned studio, Telltale Games, has shed a light on the plight of abused developers in a difficult industry. And the fate of Telltale and its workers has a shot at catalyzing unionization across the entire industry.

    The digital canary in the coalmine

    If you’ve never met someone who works in the game industry, their lifestyles are not glamorous. Well-being of employees is a huge issue: video game makers routinely suffer, terrible working conditions, long work-weeks, sudden layoffs with no severance. Mattias Lehman, a former developer, wrote an essay documenting the situation he witnessed in his four years in the industry: “If you work in the industry, I probably don’t need to explain how we workers are exploited by companies, only to turn around and be abused by the very communities we want to make games for,” he writes. Lehman describes witnessing rampant sexism, a horrible lack of diversity, constant overwork and “abuse of contractors” as norms in the industry.

    In November of 2017, Telltale announced it was laying off 90 developers. Employees at the time were reported to be working under intense conditions, tight deadlines and long hours — something known, in the video game industry, as “crunch”, meaning a time period in which the game is in its final stages of production and employees are rushing to finish a game. Jason Schreier, news editor at the video game website Kotaku and author of “Blood Sweat, and Pixels,” a study of the video game industry, explains that crunch is seen as a necessary evil by some and is the “big ugly side of working in the video game industry.” “It’s safe to say that a large percentage of studios incorporate some sort of crunch in their work, which is essentially overtime periods that are very long nights and weekends,” Schreier told Salon. “It could be weeks. It could be months. It could, in some very rare but horrible occasions, be entire years.”

    In a cutthroat industry, in the absence of employees advocating and organizing for better conditions,labor will continue to be taken advantage of by large corporations. As games continue to become larger and more expansive, the human cost rises. Kinema agrees:

    “How many people burned out? How many people had mental breakdowns? How many people ran out of money? How many people didn’t go home to see their kids that night while making something like ‘Assassins Creed,’ right? The latest game is so massive, right? You look at a trailer for ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ and you’re just like, ‘How could you have made this if you didn’t just overwork your developers?’”

    #Jeux_video #Syndicats #Conditions_travail

  • Trump’s Absurd New Conspiracy Theory: Sexual Assault Survivors Protesting Kavanaugh Are ’Paid Professionals’ Working for Soros | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-brett-kavanaugh-protestors-george-soros?src=newsletter1096830

    As if the treatment of the protestors could be any less dignified, President Donald Trump attacked them on Friday with a bizarre conspiracy theory:

    The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love!

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2018

    Trump is claiming, with zero evidence, that because the protests had some professional organization, like mass-produced signs, the protestors are “paid professionals” in the employ of George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who sits at the core of many right-wing conspiracy theories.

    The idea that anti-Trump protestors are paid off by his political enemies is a recurring claim by the president, who previously advocated investigating the 2017 Tax March protestors to determine whether they were paid.

    However, this marks the first time Trump has explicitly mentioned Soros by name on Twitter — a move that could well fan the flames of conspiracy among the far right.

    #Conspirationnisme #Folie #Trump #Soros

  • Activist Arrests in India Are Part of a Dangerous Global Trend to Stifle Dissent | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/activist-arrests-india-are-part-dangerous-global-trend-stifle-dissent

    On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these people is their commitment to the working class and peasantry, to those who are treated as marginal to India’s state. They are also united by their opposition, which they share with millions of Indians, to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

    The “raw numbers of this terror” are best counted from Turkey. Since the failed coup of July 15, 2016, the government has arrested, detained or dismissed about 160,000 government officials, dismissing 12,000 Kurdish teachers, destroying the livelihood of thousands of people. The editor of Cumhuriyet, Can Dündar, called this the “biggest witch-hunt in Turkey’s history.” In the name of the war on terror and in the name of sedition, the government has arrested and intimidated its political opponents. The normality of this is astounding—leaders of the opposition HDP party remain in prison on the flimsiest of charges, with little international condemnation. They suffer a fate comparable to Brazil’s Lula, also incarcerated with no evidence.

    Governments do not typically like dissent. In Bangladesh, the photographer Shahidul Alam remains in detention for his views on the massive protests in Dhaka for traffic reform and against government corruption. Condemnation of the arrest has come from all quarters, including a British Member of Parliament—Tulip Siddiq—who is the niece of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The avalanche of criticism has not moved the government. Alam is accused of inciting violence, a charge that is equal parts of ridiculous and absurd.

    Incitement to violence is a common charge. It is what has taken the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour to an Israeli prison. Tatour’s poem, “Resist, my people, resist them” (Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum), was the reason given by the Israeli government to lock her up. The Egyptian government has taken in the poet Galal El-Behairy for the lyrics he wrote for the song “Balaha”—the name a reference to a character in a 1980s film who sees the world in a topsy-turvy manner, a name now used colloquially in Egypt for President Sisi. The Ugandan government has arrested the radio show host Samuel Kyambadde, who merely allowed his talk show to become a forum for a conversation that included items labeled by the government as seditious—such as the arrest of journalists and the arrest of the opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi (also known as Bobi Wine).

    All of them—photographers, poets, radio show hosts—are treated as voices of sedition, dangerous people who can be locked up under regulations that would make any fair-minded person wince. But there is not even any public debate in most of our societies about such measures, no genuine discussion about the slide into the worst kind of authoritarianism, little public outcry.

    #Néo_fascisme #Inde #Turquie #Liberté_expression

  • ’It’s Pretty Cool He Was in a Band’ : Texas Republicans’ Attempt to Shame Beta O’Rourke for Punk Rock Past Hilariously Backfires | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/its-pretty-cool-he-was-band-texas-republicans-attempt-shame-beta-orourke-p

    Trop fun : quand le Parti Républicain essaie de décrédibiliser un candidat démocrate du Texas en expliquant qu’il était membre d’un groupe de punk... voilà que cela se retourne contre lui. ne série d’exemple de Tweets trop drôles.

    The Texas Republican Party tried to shame Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke on Twitter for his unconventional past — but it hilariously backfired.

    The 45-year-old O’Rourke played bass in the alternative band Foss, which released a pair of albums on Western Breed Records and toured the U.S. and Canada in the mid-1990s, and he has openly discussed his arrests on misdemeanor charges during that same period.

    O’Rourke was charged in 1995 with burglary for jumping a fence at the University of Texas at El Paso and in 1998 with driving under the influence, but he was not convicted of either charge and has publicly addressed his arrests when asked.

    #Politique_USA #Twitter #E_reputation

  • Burning Man: Paradise for Hipster Guests — And a Nightmare for Some Workers | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/burning-man-paradise-hipster-guests-and-nightmare-some-workers?src=newslet

    A staggeringly high suicide rate among Burning Man’s seasonal workers is just one symptom of a toxic work environment

    Despite its transgressive spirit, the festival is expensive and increasingly off-limits to the underclass: Tickets run from $190 to $1,200 this year, while transportation to and fro and equipment add to the cost. Those who attend are expected to obey the organization’s “10 Principles of Burning Man,” which includes “radical self-reliance” — meaning attendees have to provide their own food, water and shelter for the week-long party.

    Over the years, the festival has attracted its share of celebrity fans, some of them unlikely: Grover Norquist, the anti-tax icon, attends regularly, as do many of Silicon Valley’s elite, including Elon Musk and much of the Google brass, along with Amazon chief Jeff Bezos. Burning Man’s remote desert location allows for unique experiences that one couldn’t replicate in other settings — in particular, the ritualistic burning of a giant human-shaped effigy at the end of the festival, from which it derives its name. It also means barbarous conditions for the seasonal workers who are tasked with constructing the grid upon which the festival operates.

    Preparing an inhospitable desert landscape for the equally brief and boggling surge in population that temporarily creates what is known as Black Rock City requires a coordinated effort of labor, workers and volunteers who toil in harsh conditions, often for low pay or no pay, for months on end: running electric lines, hauling equipment, cleaning up the mess at the end of it all, and dealing with the logistics of bringing thousands of vehicles and structures to the playa. (Although that word means “beach,” it is universally used to describe the festival zone.)

    Salon spoke to several former and current employees and volunteers for Burning Man, who painted a picture of a dangerous and stressful work environment and a toxic management culture that contributed to a number of suicides of seasonal employees, at a rate far greater than the national average. Those who spoke exclusively to Salon recalled tales of labor abuse, unequal wages, on-the-job-injuries including permanent blindness and a management that manipulated workers who were hurt or who tried to fight for improved conditions.

    Burning Man as a festival and a nonprofit prides itself on its “10 Principles” and promotes them rigorously — a set of values that include “radical inclusion,” gifting, decommodification and civic responsibility, which could factor into the blurred lines within the organization. Yet there is a steep differential between the salaries for the workers who make the festival run and the upper management: Romero told Salon he was offered $15 per hour to work this season. According to 2016 tax filings, salaried managers earn between $150,000 to $200,000, more than four and a half times Romero’s wage.

    “Burning Man is outside the mainstream,” Brunner added. “Like, people are lucky to be part of it, they’re lucky to work there. It’s part of the fun. It’s sort of like a community building this event for everybody. The reality is that a lot of money is made off of it and a lot of people seemed to be well-paid to run it. They do rely on this sort of communal aspect and the communal ethos that they have to get people to work for less money.”

    Arterburn explained to Salon that the unique conditions and experiences of working on the playa lead to unique personalities being attracted to the event — the kinds of people who, in Arterburn’s words, might not fit in elsewhere in society. “If one is in DPW, it’s my opinion that they’re in there for a reason,” she said. “Your average person who has a nine-to-five job and has watched their parents take two weeks off for holiday time a year probably wouldn’t be able to handle that environment for the amount of time that DPW was there.”

    Salon found that in the seven years between 2009 and 2015, there were seven DPW worker suicides in the department.

    That number is statistically significant enough to be alarming, according to Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist and the lead of the Workplace Task Force for the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. “To give you a benchmark, in a community of 1,000 people we would expect one suicide death in one decade,” she explained. Spencer-Thomas noted that the construction industry in the U.S. does have an elevated suicide rate.

    Because of the unique and tight-knit nature of the Burning Man worker community, getting fired can be particularly devastating, as many workers have never felt that level community or camaraderie in any other aspect of their lives. According to Romero, the experience creates potentially dangerous highs and lows.

    "There are high rates of depression because you do have the effects of institutionalization out there,” Romero said. “It is a remote location. It can be a long season. It’s mentally and physically stressful and you’ve got a lot of camaraderie and it’s a place where you feel important.”

    The kind of people who are attracted to work in such an extreme and isolated environment may already be struggling, as Brown and Close were.

    "The ethical part is that employers need to look in the mirror and ask, if you knew there was something you could do that could make a difference, why aren’t you doing it?” Spencer-Thomas of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention told Salon.

    The late Larry Harvey, Burning Man’s co-founder, laid out his vision for Burning Man in the aforementioned document now known as the “The 10 Principles of Burning Man." In it, Harvey describes Burning Man as being guided by a vision of “radical inclusion,” "decommodification" and “civic responsibility." “We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation,” Harvey wrote.

    Burning Man is intended to be a utopian celebration, a break from the banal routine of a capitalist work culture, an event that is radically inclusive to all who desire to express an authentic part of themselves that is not accepted in what Burners call the “default world.” Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, the festival appears to have replicated the very problems it sought to transcend. Burning Man set out to burn “the man," but in many ways it has become the man.

    #Burning_man #Droit_travail #Travail

  • German Towns Where Facebook Use Is Higher Than Average Reliably Experience More Attacks on Refugees: Study | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/german-towns-where-facebook-use-higher-average-reliably-experience-more-at

    A sobering new study found that looked at anti-immigrant violence in Germany over a two-year period found a startling link between the violence: Facebook.

    The New York Times reports:

    Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

    #Facebook #Violence

  • Scholar Warns We Could Be Headed for a ’Violent Conflict’ Between Republicans and Democrats | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/scholar-warns-we-could-be-headed-violent-conflict-between-republicans-and-

    How did America become so divided? Why has political polarization become so extreme? In what ways have political parties become like sports teams where winning is all that matters and the common good is unimportant? Can American democracy to survive Donald Trump amid the rise of a conservative movement that views Democrats and liberals as an “un-American” enemy?

    In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Lilliana Mason. She is a assistant professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of the new book “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.”

    He really pointed to a group of people who were feeling vulnerable and condescended to and made fun of and said, “You guys are losers, right? We’re all losers, we are losing all the time.” Then he said, “But I’m going to make you winners, I’m going to make us win again.” So it was this almost perfect message delivered to a group of people who were ready to hear a message like that, and were committed to defeating the Democrats because the other party is so socially “other” from them. Ultimately, Donald Trump tapped into a dynamic that has been developing over the last few decades in America.

    But there are now such strong partisans that will do almost anything just for their political team to win. As I said earlier, this is partly because when our party “wins,” our racial group and our religious group and our other cultural and social identities “win” too. The victory of our political party is taking up more and more of what I describe as “self-esteem real estate.” Every part of us is involved now in the outcome of the election. So when our party loses, it hurts a lot more than it did before, because we used to have other meaningful identities.

    In the United States, historically, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. You don’t have them anymore. This means the loss feels much worse and the victory feels much better. So we end up approaching our elections in a way that’s very much like a sports game where we don’t actually care what the team does after they win. That’s the whole thing that you wanted and you’re happy and excited and you cheer. But you don’t follow the team around and ask them what they’re going to do next in order to make your life better. Having Trump be like a performer enhances that sports-like competition, and it really reduces the attention that people pay to what government is actually doing.

    In American society and politics at large, where we have much powerful identities, people are willing to give up a lot in order to get a win. The stronger the identity, the more they’re willing to give up. So when we see people who are essentially willing to give away democracy for their partisan win, there is perhaps no better example of the power of identity. This is extremely dangerous for democracy because it creates this rift between partisans where no one wants to cooperate or compromise, ever. We’re not only seeing democratic norms erode but we’re also losing the ability to functionally govern. The greater good is no longer of interest to many Americans. The only thing that we care about is whether or not we get the victory and after that nothing really matters.

    But if you look at partisan feelings towards the groups that make up the other side — for example, this would be whites, Christians, evangelicals, police and men for Republicans. For Democrats this would include gays and lesbians, blacks, Hispanics and activists, among a long list of people.

    What we found is that Democrats don’t dislike the groups that make up the Republican Party as much as Republicans dislike the groups that make up the Democratic Party. This helps to explain why there is so much anger from Republicans, because every group associated with the Democratic Party is a groups they do not like. Because of the nature of the respective parties, Democrats practice tolerance a lot more than Republicans are forced to practice it.

    #Politique_USA #Politique_identitaire

  • RESPECT: Here Are 5 of Aretha Franklin’s Most Important Contributions to Civil Rights | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/respect-here-are-5-aretha-franklins-most-important-contributions-civil-rig

    The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, has died at the age of 76. Franklin, who had suffered from pancreatic cancer and other severe health problems, was among the most iconic and influential R&B singers of all time—and during the final days of her life, she was visited by R&B legend Stevie Wonder as well as veteran civil rights activist, the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

    Many of Franklin’s hits, from “Chain of Fools” in 1967 to “Think” in 1968 to “Day Dreaming” in 1972, are staples of classic soul. Franklin’s contributions, however, were not only musical, but also, political—and she was an important figure in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Here are five of the Queen of Soul’s most important contributions to civil rights and politics in the United States.

    1. “Respect” Became a Civil Rights Anthem

    2. Franklin Embraced the Activism of the Black Church
    3. Martin Luther King, Jr. Presented Franklin with Southern Christian Leadership Award
    4. The Queen of Soul Sang at Martin Luther King’s Funeral
    5. She also sang at Barack Obama’s Inauguration❞

    #Musique #Droits_humains

  • ’We Need Healthcare Champions, Not Puppets’: Documents Expose Big Pharma’s Scheme to Turn Democratic Candidates Against Medicare for All | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/we-need-healthcare-champions-not-puppets-documents-expose-big-pharmas-sche

    At least three of the six candidates running to represent the “reliably” Democratic district in Hawaii “took time out from their schedules to talk to a consultant dispatched by the Healthcare Leadership Council, a lobbying group that seeks to advance the goals of the largest players in the private healthcare industry,” according to a new report by The Intercept.

    Although much of the report focuses on the Hawaii race, as The Intercept notes, the Healthcare Leadership Council—which is funded by Big Pharma companies such as Pfizer and Novartis—spends more than $5 million a year representing the interests of “insurers, hospitals, drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, pharmacies, health product distributors, and information technology companies” across the nation.

    #Big_Pharma #Corruption

  • LED Lighting Has Become a Global Threat to Public Health | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/led-lighting-has-become-global-threat-public-health

    The hyper-aggressive marketing of bright, white LED street lighting to cities and towns has advanced to a breathtaking level. The US Department of Energy (DoE) and a group of international partners have launched an effort called ‘Rise and Shine: Lighting the World with 10 Billion LED Bulbs’ in ‘a race to deploy 10 billion high-efficiency, high-quality and affordable lighting fixtures and bulbs (like LEDs) as quickly as possible’. Ten billion is more than the number of people on the planet.

    In response to this relentless attack on night, the American Medical Association (AMA) stepped up and adopted an official policy statement in 2016. I was one of the co-authors of the AMA statement, in which my colleagues and I recommended reducing the brightness and blue content of the LED products being deployed by utilities around the country.

    The reaction from the DoE and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) was swift and highly critical of the AMA’s audacity, asserting that the AMA was not qualified to make any statements on lighting. But this reaction was disingenuous because without the AMA statement, the nationwide retrofit would have continued unabated without regard to the environment or human health.

    Electric light can be a great benefit to people when used wisely. To get to the ‘used wisely’ part requires all the science happening now. But there must also be a desire for effective use of electric lighting on the part of government and the public. Recycling is now entrenched because children are being raised with new awareness. Water conservation has also become important; few people will leave the faucet running much longer than necessary. Yet some people think nothing of using more electricity than they actually need.
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    LED technology is not the problem, per se. In fact, LED will probably be a large part of the solution because of its versatility. The issue in street lighting is that the particular products being pushed by utility companies and the DoE are very strong in the blue – and they don’t have to be. Different LED products can be marketed that are much more friendly to the environment and our circadian health. This is of paramount importance when lighting the inside of buildings where we live and work.

    #Lumière #LED #Effet_rebond

  • Trump Just Attacked the Very Idea of Objective Reality: ’What You’re Seeing and What You’re Reading Is Not What’s Happening’ | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-just-attacked-very-idea-objective-reality-what-youre-seeing-and-what

    Since President Donald Trump’s legacy in office is filled with broken promises and dismal failures, he and his defenders are working to create an alternative reality for his supporters to believe in where administration policy is a resounding success.

    Trump made this strategy explicit Tuesday (as Kellyanne Conway once did when she coined the phrase “alternative facts”) in his speech at the VFW in Kansas City.

    “This country is doing better than it ever has before, economically,” Trump said, touting his plan to slap tariffs on foreign goods.

    He added: “It’s all working out. Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

    It was a startling admission: Trump doesn’t want people to believe the very things they’re seeing.

    #Fake_news #Post_truth

  • Some of Trump’s Biggest Donors Are Profiting Big-Time on Immigration Detention Centers | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/some-trumps-biggest-donors-are-profiting-big-time-immigration-detention-ce

    The giant retail stores being converted into detention centers and these large tent cities cropping up to house immigrants, where did they come from? As always, it is important to follow the money. This plan to lock-up asylum-seeking migrants may seem like it happened overnight, but it has been years in the making. Only weeks after Donald Trump put his filthy hand on Lincoln’s Bible and took the Oath of Office, this was the February 24, 2017, headline at CNN Money:

    The actions Donald Trump, his sycophant Stephen Miller and Minister of White Supremacy Jeff Sessions are taking today are a huge payoff to the prison lobbyists and the border security industry that spent millions helping to get Donald Trump elected. Private for-profit prison executives were furious that President Obama decided to end the practice of using private prisons. They poured everything into Donald Trump and his campaign, maxing out $250,000 donations and even helping Trump raise $100 million in sketchy, secret money for his “inauguration committee.” And it paid off, as one of the first decisions from the Trump administration was to rescind Obama’s order to phase out private prisons.

    They didn’t stop there. These groups have been spending lavishly at Trump’s private business as well. The Miami New Times noted the private prison company GEO Group was one of the newest big spenders at Trump’s Doral property in Florida.

    In March of 2017, then Homeland Security chief John Kelly told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he was considering a plan to separate families and detain them.

    “We have tremendous experience of dealing with unaccompanied minors,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.” "We turn them over to (Health and Human Services) and they do a very, very good job of putting them in foster care or linking them up with parents or family members in the United States."

    It didn’t take long for Kelly to publicly walk back that statement, denying he meant it would be a cruel, intentional warning or deterrent to others who might be thinking of seeking asylum in the U.S. But we can clearly see now, they’ve been plotting this for quite some time.

    [UDPATE] Bloomberg reports a Texas non-profit got a nearly $500 million contract to take care of the immigrant kids.

    The Trump administration plans to pay a Texas nonprofit nearly half a billion dollars this year to care for immigrant children who were detained crossing the U.S. border illegally, according to government data.

    The nonprofit, Southwest Key Programs Inc., is to be paid more than $458 million in fiscal 2018, according to the data — the most among the organizations, government agencies and companies that run a detention and care system for immigrant children on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services. Southwest Key has about a dozen facilities in Texas, including a site at a former WalMart Inc.store in Brownsville that has drawn attention from members of Congress and national news organizations.

    #Capitalisme_carcéral #Prédation #Conflits_intérêt

  • Scholar Henry Giroux: Trump’s Relentless Lies Demand We Make Truth-Telling Great Again | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/scholar-henry-giroux-trumps-relentless-lies-demand-we-make-truth-telling-g

    As in any dictatorship, the Trump regime dismisses words, concepts and news sources that address crucial social problems such as climate change, police violence and corporate malfeasance.

    In Trump’s dystopian world, words such as a “nation of immigrants,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “diversity,” “entitlement,” “climate change,” “democratic,” “peaceful,” “just” and “vulnerable” disappear into a “memory hole.” Under the Trump regime, language has become a political tool and operates in the service of violence, unchecked power and lawlessness.

    For Trump, lying has become a toxic policy for legitimizing ignorance and civic illiteracy. Not only does he relish lying repeatedly, he has also attacked the critical media, claimed journalists are enemies of the American people and argued that the media is the opposition party. His rallying cry, “fake news,” is used to dismiss any critic or criticism of his policies, however misleading, wrong or dangerous they are.

    The president’s fabricating Twitter machine is about more than lying, it is also about using all of the tools and resources to create a dystopia in which authoritarianism emerges through the raw power of ignorance, control and police-state repression.

    Of course, Trump does not lie in isolation. He is encouraged by a right-wing disimagination machine that American sociologist Todd Gitlin rightly calls “an interlocking ecology of falsification that has driven the country around the bend” and into the abyss of authoritarianism.

    Trump’s endless fabrications echo the propaganda machines made famous in the fascist regimes of the 1930s. He values loyalty over integrity, and he lies in part to test the loyalty of those who both follow him and align themselves with his power.

    Trump’s lying undermines the public’s grip on language, evidence, facts and informed judgement, and in doing so promotes a form of civic illiteracy in which words and meaning no longer matter. Depriving the public of the capacity for critical analysis and discerning the truth from lies does more than empty politics of any meaning, it also undermines democracy.

    As ethics wither, people become prisoners of their own experiences, indifferent to an ignorance and brutishness in which they become complicit.

    As the theatre of lies, insults, and childish petulance triumphs over measured arguments, a world emerges in which the only real choices are among competing fictions — a world in which nothing is true and everything begins to look like a lie.

    If the spirit and promise of a sustainable democracy is to survive, it’s crucial to make truth-telling virtuous again. If we are going to fight for and with the powerless, we have to understand their needs, speak to and with them in a language that is mutually understandable as well as honest.

    There is also a need to reinvent politics through alternative narratives in which the American public can both identify themselves and the conditions through which power and oppression bear down on their lives.

    #Fake_news #Post_truth