• The black box warning on philanthrocapitalism - Jocalyn Clark & Linsey McGoey | The Lancet
    http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32184-5/fulltext

    On Sept 21, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced plans to invest US$3 billion in a mission to “cure, prevent or manage all diseases” by 2100, part of an earlier promise to donate 99% of their stock in Facebook, a company Zuckerberg founded. It is the latest example in a growing number of pledges by billionaires to give away their wealth for social causes rather than pass it down to descendants.

    Opinion: Charities and Taxpayers Deserve More From Donor-Advised Funds - The Chronicle of Philanthropy
    https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Opinion-Charities-and/238202

    What all of these organizations have in common is that they offer donors the ability to make what appear like outright donations to charity. Behind the scenes, what is happening, in essence, is that DAF sponsors make a side agreement with the donors to hold these funds and let the contributor have control over the money.

    #philanthrocapitalisme #fondations #donations #bmgf

  • They Have, Right Now, Another You
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/they-have-right-now-another-you

    Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux Peter Thiel speaking at the Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and a cofounder of #PayPal, is a founder of #Palantir, a #Silicon\Valley firm funded by the #CIA, whose algorithms allow for rapid analysis of voluminous data that it makes available to intelligence agencies and numerous police forces as well as to corporations and financial institutions.

    Advertisements show up on our #Internet browser or #Facebook page or #Gmail and we tend to think they are there because some company is trying to sell us something it believes we want based on our browsing history or what weʼve said in an #e-mail or what we were searching for on #Google. We probably donʼt think they are there because we live in a particular neighborhood, or hang out with certain kinds of people, or that we have been scored a particular and obscure way by a pointillist rendering of our lives. And most likely, we donʼt imagine we are seeing those ads because an algorithm has determined that we are losers or easy marks or members of a particular ethnic or racial group.

    As OʼNeil points out, preferences and habits and zip codes and status updates are also used to create predatory ads, “ads that pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises.” People with poor credit may be offered payday loans; people with dead-end jobs may be offered expensive courses at for-profit colleges. The idea, OʼNeil writes, “is to locate the most #vulnerable people and then use their private #information against them. This involves finding where they suffer the most, which is known as the ‘#pain_point.

    #algorithme #délétère #données #data

  • Une première lettre appelant au boycott d’israel, signée par 70 personnes, a été publiée dans la prestigieuse New York Review of Books le 13 octobre dernier. Elle appelle au boycott économique des produits des colonies. Pas de boycott des produits israéliens, pas de boycott culturel ni universitaire :
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/10/13/economic-boycott-israeli-settlements

    #Angela_Davis, #Joan_Scott, #Alice_Walker, #Roger_Waters et une centaine d’autres ne se satisfont pas de cette demi mesure, envoient une lettre de réponse... et elle est publiée aussi :

    L’arbre qui cache la forêt
    Angela Davis, Chandler Davis, Farid Esack, Richard Falk, Ronnie Kasrils, Rashid Khalidi, Malcolm Levitt, John Pilger, Alice Rothchild, Joan Scott, Alice Walker, Roger Waters et une centaine d’autres signataires
    New York Review of Books, le 20 octobre 2016
    http://www.aurdip.fr/lettre-au-redacteur-en-chef-du-new.html

    Une déclaration récemment publiée dans le New York Review of Books appelle à « un boycott économique et une non-reconnaissance politique des colonies israéliennes dans les territoires occupés » (Lettres, 13 octobre).

    Nous saluons la façon dont la déclaration brise le tabou qui frappe le boycott des institutions israéliennes complices – au moins partiellement - des violations des droits humains des Palestiniens.

    Défiant néanmoins le sens commun, la déclaration appelle à boycotter les colonies en laissant Israël, l’État qui a illégalement construit et entretenu ces colonies depuis des décennies, en dehors du coup.

    De plus, les banques israéliennes non implantées dans les colonies mais qui financent leur construction ne devraient-elles pas être ciblées elles aussi ? C’est ce qu’ont fait l’Église Méthodiste Unie et l’important Fond de pension néerlandais PGGM.

    En omettant les autres violations graves du droit international perpétrées par Israël, la déclaration ne satisfait pas au test de cohérence morale. Les réfugiés palestiniens, qui représentent la majorité des Palestiniens, n’ont-ils pas droit au respect des droits qui leur sont stipulés par l’ONU ? Les citoyens palestiniens d’Israël ne devraient-ils pas jouir de l’égalité des droits, par le rejet des dizaines de lois israéliennes qui les soumettent à la discrimination raciale ?

    La société civile palestinienne a appelé au Boycott, au Désinvestissement et aux sanctions (BDS) contre toutes les entités, israéliennes ou internationales, qui se font complices de la négation des droits des Palestiniens où qu’ils soient. Comme l’a montré le boycott de l’apartheid sud africain, c’est le moyen non-violent le plus efficace pour atteindre la liberté, la justice et l’égalité pour tous.

    #Palestine #New_York_Review_of_Books #BDS

  • #Panama: The Hidden Trillions
    Alan Rusbridger
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/10/27/panama-the-hidden-trillions

    In a seminar room in Oxford, one of the reporters who worked on the Panama Papers is describing the main conclusion he drew from his months of delving into millions of leaked documents about tax evasion. “Basically, we’re the dupes in this story,” he says. “Previously, we thought that the #offshore world was a shadowy, but minor, part of our economic system. What we learned from the Panama Papers is that it is the economic system.”

    [...] “The economic system is, basically, that the rich and the powerful exited long ago from the messy business of paying tax,” Harding told an audience of academics and research students. “They don’t pay tax anymore, and they haven’t paid tax for quite a long time. We pay tax, but they don’t pay tax. The burden of taxation has moved inexorably away from multinational companies and rich people to ordinary people.”

    #fiscalité #économie

  • Tony Blair’s Eternal Shame: The Report
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/10/13/tony-blairs-eternal-shame-chilcot-report

    And yet in the end Tony #Blair isn’t a messiah or a madman or a monster. He’s a complete and utter mediocrity. He might have made an adequate prime minister in ordinary days, but in our strange and testing times he was hopelessly out of his depth. Now we are left with the consequences.

    #criminel #sans_vergogne

  • When We Loved #Mussolini
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/when-we-loved-mussolini

    Already in 1972 John Patrick Diggins, in his Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, had revealed the widespread enthusiasm for Mussolini among progressive American intellectuals. What Migone’s book laid bare was that these affinities were founded on more than ideas and politics. Behind the scenes, financial interests had a part in orchestrating the connubio between America and Italian fascism. As he puts it in his preface, Migone may not have started out as a Marxist, but through “reading documents produced by central banks and investment bankers” he sometimes felt as though he might “become one.”

    #Etats-Unis #progressistes #Wall-Street #fascisme

  • Fences : A #Brexit Diary

    Back in the old neighborhood in North West London after a long absence, I went past the local primary school and noticed a change. Many of my oldest friends were once students here, and recently—when a family illness returned us to England for a year—I enrolled my daughter. It’s a very pretty redbrick Victorian building, and was for a long time in “special measures,” a judgment of the school inspection authority called Ofsted, and the lowest grade a state school can receive. Many parents, upon reading such a judgment, will naturally panic and place their children elsewhere; others, seeing with their own eyes what Ofsted—because it runs primarily on data—cannot humanly see, will doubt the wisdom of Ofsted and stay put. Still others may not read well in English, or are not online in their homes, or have never heard of Ofsted, much less ever considered obsessively checking its website.


    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/fences-brexit-diary

  • L’Amérique d’abord

    Dans un article de la New York Review of Books, Mark Danner rappelle un texte publié par M. Donald Trump en 1987, sous la forme d’une publicité pleine page parue dans trois grands quotidiens américains. Le candidat républicain y développait certains de ses thèmes actuels.

    Pendant des décennies, [écrivait M. Trump] le Japon et d’autres nations ont profité des États-Unis. Cette histoire continue puisque nous défendons le golfe Persique, une région d’une importance marginale pour l’approvisionnement en pétrole des États-Unis, mais dont le Japon et plusieurs pays sont totalement dépendants. Pourquoi ces États ne versent-ils pas de l’argent aux États-Unis en compensation des vies humaines et des milliards de dollars que nous perdons pour défendre leurs intérêts ? (…) Le monde rit des politiciens américains parce que nous protégeons des navires que nous ne possédons pas, et que nous transportons du pétrole dont nous n’avons pas besoin.

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/the-magic-of-donald-trump

    #cdp #st

    http://zinc.mondediplo.net/messages/33627 via Le Monde diplomatique

  • Kenneth Roth de Human’s Rights Watch est furieux contre le dernier livre de Noam #Chomsky,
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/09/a-case-against-america

    Who Rules the World? is also an infuriating book because it is so partisan that it leaves the reader convinced not of his insights but of the need to hear the other side.

    Entre autres parce que Chomsky occulterait le fait que Assad et Poutine sont aussi responsables que les #Etats-Unis quant à la situation délétère du Moyen-Orient,

    President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq fits his thesis of American malevolence, and the terrible human costs of the war get mentioned, but Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s decision to fight his country’s civil war by targeting civilians in opposition-held areas, killing hundreds of thousands and setting off the flight of several million refugees, does not. Nor does Russia’s decision to back Assad’s murderous shredding of the Geneva Conventions, since Chomsky’s focus is America’s contribution to global suffering, not Vladimir Putin’s.

    • Un vrai débat crucial et pas facile à mener étant donné l’activité propagandiste des grands médias qui opacifie ou floute notre perception des actions des différents acteurs.

      Les objections de Kenneth Roth sont valables. Mais on aimerait avoir sa vision complète de la politique étrangère d’Obama (rechargeant par exemple Israël en munition en plein bombardement de Gaza à l’été 2014).

    • The Supposedly Liberal NY Review of Books Published a Very Strange Review of Chomsky’s Latest | Alternet
      http://www.alternet.org/books/whats-wrong-review-noam-chomskys-new-book

      In the first paragraph of his surprisingly inept and unfriendly review in the New York Review of Books of Noam Chomsky’s Who Rules the World? (May 2016), Kenneth Roth described the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as a “blunder.” This wasn’t a good sign, since it signaled either ignorance or rejection of the UN Charter’s prohibition of the threat or use of force by states in the conduct of their international relations. This stipulation in the Charter—Article 2(4)—has been described by a distinguished group of international law scholars as the “keystone” and “cardinal rule” of modern international law (see below). It is also a centerpiece of Noam Chomsky’s long-standing criticism of U.S. foreign policy, a fact about which Roth—the long-time head of Human Rights Watch—also seemed unaware. Roth’s “blunder” (defined as “a stupid or careless mistake”) signaled what was to come, and indeed spiraled downward into a web of chronic mistake-making in his analysis of Chomsky’s book.

  • We Are Hopelessly Hooked | The New York Review of Books (Jacob Weisberg, 25 février 2016)
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/we-are-hopelessly-hooked

    Some of Silicon Valley’s most successful app designers are alumni of the Persuasive Technology Lab at #Stanford, a branch of the university’s Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. The lab was founded in 1998 by B.J. Fogg, whose graduate work “used methods from experimental psychology to demonstrate that computers can change people’s thoughts and behaviors in predictable ways,” according to the center’s website. Fogg teaches undergraduates and runs “persuasion boot camps” for tech companies. He calls the field he founded “captology,” a term derived from an acronym for “computers as persuasive technology.” It’s an apt name for the discipline of capturing people’s #attention and making it hard for them to escape. Fogg’s behavior model involves building habits through the use of what he calls “hot triggers,” like the links and photos in Facebook’s newsfeed, made up largely of posts by one’s Facebook friends.

    (…) As consumers, we can also pressure technology companies to engineer apps that are less distracting. If product design has a conscience at the moment, it may be Tristan Harris, a former B.J. Fogg student at Stanford who worked until recently as an engineer at Google. In several lectures available on YouTube, Harris argues that an “attention economy” is pushing us all to spend time in ways we recognize as unproductive and unsatisfying, but that we have limited capacity to control. #Tech_companies are engaged in “a race to the bottom of the brain stem,” in which rewards go not to those that help us spend our time wisely, but to those that keep us mindlessly pulling the lever at the casino.

    Harris wants engineers to consider human values like the notion of “time well spent” in the design of consumer technology. Most of his proposals are “nudge”-style tweaks and signals to encourage more conscious choices. For example, Gmail or Facebook might begin a session by asking you how much time you want to spend with it that day, and reminding you when you’re nearing the limit. Messaging apps might be reengineered to privilege attention over interruption. iTunes could downgrade games that are frequently deleted because users find them too addictive.

    A propos de quatre bouquins :

    Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle

    Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle

    Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web, by Joseph M. Reagle Jr.

    Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, by Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover

    #écrans #conversation #commentaires #addiction #critique_techno #temps #déconnexion via @opironet