industryterm:mainstream media

James J. Zogby sur Twitter : “Listening to pundits & reading the press, one thing comes thru clearly: #BernieSanders isn’t just running against 24 other Dems, he’s running against the mainstream media & the political #elites. They’ve been fawning over others & dismissing him since 2015. Not a fair fight.” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/jjz1600/status/1144273410563985408

#guerre_à_la_dissidence #dissidence #MSM

Marines seize an airfield and small island while testing tactics for fight against China
▻https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/03/21/marines-seize-an-airfield-and-small-island-alongside-special-opera

https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/U7Mn8OTIBDV2Wut5DfJbAyOuUwM=/1200x630/filters:quality(100)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NM7YIJKJEBBRXESJLOOLXALMOI.jpg

Marines with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, seized a small island and airfield with elite special operations airmen and soldiers as part of a test of its future fighting concept.

That fighting concept, known as expeditionary advanced base operations, or EABO, will see Marines spread thinly across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, operating from small bases — a tactic that will help Marines stay alive in a high-end fight with China.

EABO is still in the early stages of experimentation. The concept recently was signed off by Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert B. Neller, but still awaits the signature of Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson.

It’s a fight that will require assistance from the other services and the recent exercise that spanned March 11–14 included participation by U.S. Air Force 353rd Special Operations Group and soldiers with 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, according to details in a command release.
[…]
The exercise kicked off with the insertion of Marine reconnaissance via a military free-fall jump over Ie Shima Training Facility on Ie Jima Island, which is located off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, according to details in a command release.

Grunts with 1st Battalion, 4th Marines then carried out a long-range raid to seize the island’s airfield, moving nearly 600 miles by MV-22 Ospreys supported by KC-130 air refuelers, the command release detailed.

#journalism Apocalypse and Tech trends with Christina Warren of #microsoft
▻https://hackernoon.com/journalism-apocalypse-and-tech-trends-with-christina-warren-of-microsoft

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Journalism Apocalypse and Tech Trends with Christina Warren of MicrosoftEpisode 32 of the Hacker Noon Podcast: An interview with Christina Warren, former journalist at #mashable and #gizmodo, who currently works for Microsoft.Listen to the interview on iTunes, or Google Podcast, or watch on YouTube.In this episode Trent Lapinski Christina Warren discuss journalism, fake news, and what’s happening at the big tech companies.“This is what the news media struggles with, is that people don’t trust them, even though very often the mainstream media, in my opinion, isn’t out to mislead people and push an agenda. I think most working reporters are out to report the truth.”“Microsoft is evolving and understands that it is not the past anymore. We ultimately want to build tools that developers can use (...)

#hackernoon-podcast

1 Key Reason Crypto Startups Fail !
▻https://hackernoon.com/1-key-reason-crypto-startups-fail-793c30953e61?source=rss----3a8144eabfe

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/700/1*4k1jrUN42QboGZFq4-ZOeA.jpeg

Image Credit: PixabayThe first public blockchain -the #bitcoin network is a little over a decade old. Since 2009 after Bitcoin blockchain went live just less than a year after the global market crash, we have since been faced with a deluge of cryptocurrencies whether they are coins or tokens.Fast forward to 2019, barely 2 years later after Bitcoin attained its all-time high, there are well over 1600 cryptocurrencies many of which may never escape obscurity yet the list keeps growing.Before 2017, bitcoin experienced its fair share of bashings from mainstream media, big banks such as JP Morgan and central banks of nations. With its ability to facilitate monetary transactions in a trustless manner, the threat to conventional institutions that have since time immemorial fiercely fought to (...)

#cryptocurrency #blockchain-startup #startup #founders

Newspapers help to radicalise far right, says UK anti-terror chief
▻https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/20/newspapers-help-radicalise-far-right-uk-anti-terror-chief-neil-basu

Britain’s counter-terrorism chief has said far-right terrorists are being radicalised by mainstream newspaper coverage, while also criticising the hypocrisy of outlets such as Mail Online, which uploaded the “manifesto” of the gunman in the Christchurch terror attack.

Neil Basu, one of Britain’s top police officers, said it was ironic that while newspapers have repeatedly criticised the likes of Facebook and Google for hosting extremist content, sites including the Sun and the Mirror rushed to upload clips of footage filmed by the gunman as he attacked two mosques in New Zealand.

“The same media companies who have lambasted social media platforms for not acting fast enough to remove extremist content are simultaneously publishing uncensored Daesh [Islamic State] propaganda on their websites, or make the rambling ‘manifestos’ of crazed killers available for download,” Basu said in an open letter to the media on how to report terrorism.

#hollywood pushes fake news to the masses about #bitcoin
▻https://hackernoon.com/hollywood-pushes-fake-news-to-the-masses-about-bitcoin-a2d4a7f2bcb6?sour

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*X4ycRHXCYI6eLK2y.jpg

It would seem that nobody in Hollywood understands cryptocurrency, or Hollywood doesn’t care about what it says about cryptocurrencies, it just wants to make money, in dollars, not bitcoin.Why am I talking about Hollywood? Because Hollywood has just released the film “Crypto” starring Kurt Russell, who you may remember from “Escape from New York,” “The Hateful Eight” and a whole host of other box office favourites. Or, perhaps you think of him as the husband of Goldie Hawn!The film, which I have not seen yet as will only released in the US on 12th April, pushes a bitcoin for money laundering narrative. It is an approach that the mainstream media has been pushing to the public for some time. It’s that ‘only dodgy people use #crypto’ story. It is a bit of a tired story as well, but that didn’t stop (...)

#fake-news

Five Challenges of Permissioned #blockchain Solutions and the Tools and Protocols that can Help You…
▻https://hackernoon.com/five-challenges-of-permissioned-blockchain-solutions-and-the-tools-and-p

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*6QQM5_TFPN5fCq7UzXXL4g.jpeg

Five Challenges of Permissioned Blockchain Solutions and the Tools and Protocols that can Help You Solve ThemImplementing permissioned blockchain solutions is both equally fascinating and really challenging. Every day, there are new articles in mainstream media outlets claiming how blockchain technologies are going to transform many industries but the reality is not that glamorous. While blockchains bring tremendous value to established enterprise business processes, most permissioned blockchain implementations are not getting passed the pilot phase. After the initial excitement, most teams realize that implementing permissioned blockchain applications at scale require tremendous levels of technological skills and quite a bit of infrastructure building in order to integrate the new (...)

#cryptocurrency #ethereum #invector-labs #hyperledger

The Washington Post’s ‘three Pinocchios’ for AOC shows how incoherent mainstream ‘fact-checking’ really is – Alternet.org
▻https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/the-washington-posts-three-pinocchios-for-aoc-shows-how-incoherent-mainstr

https://www.alternet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Ocasio-Cortes.jpg

But there’s something more complex happening here too, that’s probably best understood in terms of press scholar Daniel Hallin’s three-sphere model of how the media functions, from his 1986 book The Uncensored War. At the center is the sphere of consensus, mom-and-apple-pie country. Surrounding that, like a donut, is the sphere of legitimate debate, where journalists’ attention is usually focused, where there are two sides to every story and a need for objectivity and balance to be maintained.

Beyond that, though, is the sphere of deviance, the outer darkness in which dwell “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” The shoddy fact-checking directed at Ocasio-Cortez reflects a boundary-policing instinct, and an outdated one, considering that the entire political landscape has been irrevocably changed.

To understand how shoddy it is — and the unspoken agenda involved — we need to take a closer look at the totality of what went down. Kessler was quoting from a snippet of AOC’s response to a question by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an MLK Day interview. The context is important, because context is everything in political discourse: What’s radical in one context is mom-and-apple-pie material in another.

King, paradoxically, is both. The question asked and the answer given were both in King’s spirit — but not the mom-and-apple-pie version of him the media (and much of America) loves to celebrate. It more reflected the actual, radical Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism,” and said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

So, read in context, everything AOC said was true, even if we accept Kessler’s factual counterclaims! The entire fact-checking ritual was a charade. As I suggested earlier, it was really a boundary-policing episode, meant to keep her “radical” ideas outside the sphere of legitimate debate by portraying her as untrustworthy. Further, it was meant to deter others from similar infractions while trying to break through the barriers excluding them from legitimacy. (See AOC’s related Twitter thread on “gravitas” here.)

But the problem is that Kessler’s implied boundaries are not worth policing, or even recognizing. The whole system is in crisis, and the mainstream media’s assessment of what is deviant, what reflects normative consensus and what represents legitimate debate bears little or no relationship to reality. Take two other examples AOC has been associated with — raising top marginal tax rates to 70 percent and a Green New Deal. The first idea drew immediate majority support — 59 percent in a poll for the Hill, including 56 percent of rural voters and 45 percent of Republicans—and scorn from the 1 percent at Davos.

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell laughed at the idea (video here), and said he thought it would be bad for economic growth. “Name a country where that’s worked,” he responded. “Ever.” Sitting there with him was MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who supplied the example: the United States, throughout most of its post-World War II expansion. It was a rare, Marshall McLuhan-in-“Annie Hall” moment. Usually, when the super-rich or their sycophants spout off like that, truth does not intrude. Certainly not from the fact-checking media.

But the media’s failure is even more striking when it comes to climate change and the Green New Deal. It’s still a rarity for the media to treat climate science as firmly within the sphere of consensus, where all reputable researchers say it belongs.

#Fact_checking #Médias

Revealed : how Italy’s populists used Facebook to win power
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/17/revealed-how-italy-populists-used-facebook-win-election-matteo-salvini-

Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio eclipsed rivals in online election battle, data shows The domination of Facebook by Italy’s two populist political leaders, Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, is revealed in previously unseen data that shows how they exploited video and live broadcasts to bypass the mainstream media and foment discord during the country’s general election. The data, reviewed by the Guardian, reveals how the leaders massively expanded their reach with inflammatory and visually (...)

#Facebook #élections #manipulation

▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7df5f5cbdb0d07f16004cf838911a28eb13a485e/0_0_2585_1551/master/2585.png

Americans Are Increasingly Critical of Israel – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/11/americans-are-increasingly-critical-of-israel

The firing of Professor Marc Lamont Hill as a CNN contributor after his speech at a United Nations event commemorating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People has generated considerable debate about free speech that goes beyond the case itself—what is legitimate criticism of Israel, and what constitutes anti-Semitism. A recent University of Maryland public-opinion poll indicates that many aspects of Hill’s views are widely shared among the American public—and that these views are not reflective of anti-Semitic attitudes, or even of hostility toward Israel as such. On these issues, there is a gap between the mainstream media and U.S. politicians on the one hand, and the American public on the other.

While many issues were raised about Hill, the part of his speech that received the most criticism was his call for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” which was seen by some as calling for the end of Israel. Hill himself clarified almost immediately that “my reference to ‘river to the sea’ was not a call to destroy anything or anyone. It was a call for justice, both in Israel and in the West Bank/Gaza.” In an op-ed he penned later, he acknowledged that the language he chose may have contributed to the misperception that he was advocating violence against Jewish people—and apologized for that.

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But, perceptions aside, are Professor Hill’s views exceptional?

The first issue to consider is advocacy for a one-state solution, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, with equal citizenship for all, which would in effect threaten Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority state, as Arabs might soon outnumber Jews on that territory. In fact, this solution has considerable support among the American public, as revealed in a University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, fielded by Nielson Scarborough, which was conducted in September and October among a nationally representative sample of 2,352 Americans, with a 2 percent margin of error. When asked what outcome they want U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to seek in mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Americans are split between one state with equal citizenship and two states coexisting side by side: 35 percent say they want a one-state solution outright, while 36 percent advocate a two-state solution, 11 percent support maintaining the occupation, and 8 percent back annexation without equal citizenship. Among those between 18 and 34 years old, support for one state climbs to 42 percent.

Furthermore, most of those who advocate a two-state solution tend to choose one state with equal citizenship if the two-state solution were no longer possible; the last time the survey asked this question, in November 2017, 55 percent of two-state solution backers said they would switch to one state in such circumstances. Bolstering this result is Americans’ views on the Jewishness and democracy of Israel: If the two-state solution were no longer possible, 64 percent of Americans would choose the democracy of Israel, even if it meant that Israel would cease to be a politically Jewish state, over the Jewishness of Israel, if the latter meant that Palestinians would not be fully equal.

When one considers that many Israelis and Palestinians, as well as many Middle East experts, already believe that a two-state solution is no longer possible, especially given the large expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, it’s not hard to see why more people would be drawn to a one-state solution—or see the advocacy for two states as legitimizing the unjust status quo through the promise of something unattainable.

Second, while most Americans have probably never heard of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that Hill backs, our poll shows that a large number of Americans support imposing sanctions or more serious measures if Israeli settlements in the West Bank continue to expand: 40 percent of Americans support such measures, including a majority of Democrats (56 percent). This comes as senators, including Democrats, are proposing, despite continued ACLU opposition, to delegitimize and criminalize voluntary boycotts of Israel or settlements through the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, while not differentiating between Israeli settlements in the West Bank from those in Israel proper.

Third, there is a growing sense that the Israeli government has “too much influence” on U.S. politics and policies: 38 percent of all Americans (including 55 percent of Democrats, and 44 percent of those under 35 years old), say the Israeli government has too much influence on the U.S. government, compared with 9 percent who say it has “too little influence” and 48 percent who say it has “about the right level of influence.” While the number of Jewish participants in the sample (115) is too small to generalize with confidence, it is notable that their views fall along the same lines of the national trend: 37 percent say Israel has too much influence, 54 percent say it has the right level, and 7 percent say it has too little influence.

These results indicate neither a rise in anti-Semitism nor even a rise in hostility toward Israel as such. As analysis of previous polls has shown, many who espouse these opinions base them on a principled worldview that emphasizes human rights and international law.

Keep in mind that, in a polarized America with deep political antagonism, it’s hardly surprising that Americans would have sharply divided views on Israelis and Palestinians. What many read as a rising anti-Israeli sentiment among Democrats is mischaracterized; it reflects anger toward Israeli policies—and increasingly, with the values projected by the current Israeli government.

On the question of whether Americans want the Trump administration to lean toward Israel, toward the Palestinians, or toward neither side, there is a vast difference between Republicans and Democrats in the new poll: While a majority of Republicans want Washington to lean toward Israel outright (57 percent), a substantial majority of Democrats (82 percent) want it to lean toward neither side, with 8 percent wanting it to lean toward the Palestinians and 7 percent toward Israel. Still, it’s inaccurate to label the Democrats’ even-handedness as “anti-Israel.”

The Three Barriers to Mainstream #blockchain Adoption We Need to Be Talking About Now
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-three-barriers-to-mainstream-blockchain-adoption-we-need-to-be-talki

With growing attention on blockchain technology, more people are developing opinions about what the future of the technology will really look like. Skeptics often cite a few core barriers to blockchain adoption. For example, you can pretty regularly find issues and theories around blockchain energy, regulation, and scaling in the headlines.But these barriers are actually common problems to new technology. And while there’s no guarantee that these challenges will resolve themselves, I think solutions will be found. I’ve seen how the blockchain community is eager to tackle these high-profile issues and move the technology forward.Alongside these “big” issues are others that are sometimes overlooked, at least by more mainstream media. These “other” barriers have held back blockchain adoption (...)

#cryptography #cryptocurrency #decentralized #dapps

EXCLUSIVE : Meet the Reporters Whose Pages Were Shut Down By Facebook - Sputnik International
▻https://sputniknews.com/us/201810121068814924-Reporters-Pages-Shut-Down-By-Facebook

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C’est mon beau-frère américain qui m’a transmis l’info : sous couvert de lutte contre les #fake_news, les réseaux sociaux des #GAFA (Facebook et Twitter, notamment) ont fermé des centaines de pages et de comptes appartenant à des journalistes indépendants ou juste plutôt critiques sur la société américaine. À l’approche des #élections de mi-mandat, il s’agit d’une #censure brutale et inquiétante.

Signalons que mon beau-frère est un Républicain plutôt progressiste, mais un Républicain quand même, même s’il n’a jamais pu blairer Trump.

Facebook purged hundreds of pages from its platform on Thursday. But instead of the usual targets - namely Russia and Iran - Thursday’s ban shut down accounts operated by independent American reporters and activists, Sputnik News has learned.

Facebook said the pages were “working to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing,” but the co-founder of one of the pages, The Free Thought Project, tells Sputnik News Facebook’s claim couldn’t be further from the truth.

Most of the pages that were banned and viewed by Sputnik News were independent media outlets and pages that advocated for marijuana legalization or shined a light on police brutality.
Anti-Trump Facebook event posted by the Resisters page, which has been accused of being set up by the alleged Russian troll farm Internet Research Agency.
Facebook
The Kremlin Line? Facebook’s Latest Ban Nets Resistance Pages, Anti-Trump Events

In total, Facebook removed 559 pages and 251 personal accounts “that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the social media giant said. “Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action,” Facebook said, going on to accuse the accounts of manipulating the platform to make their content appear more popular, hawking fake products or functioning as ad farms that tricked “people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”

— Jon Ziegler “Reb Z” (@Rebelutionary_Z) October 12, 2018

The founder of one of the pages — The Anti-Media — said he had no knowledge of his page engaging in any such behavior. The Free Thought Project co-founder similarly denied Facebook’s accusations. Rachel Blevins, a reporter for RT America whose personal journalism page was nixed, also denied inauthentic behavior.

Just hours after its ban from Facebook, Twitter suspended Anti-Media from its platform, following a pattern of social media companies successively banning users that has been demonstrated in the past. For example, Facebook, YouTube and Apple all banned the far-right conspiracy theory site InfoWars around the same time. And after the CIA-funded cybersecurity firm FireEye contacted Facebook, Google and Twitter, each company banned a number of accounts allegedly linked to Iran.

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) September 6, 2018

In the case of InfoWars, Twitter eventually followed suit.

While many warned that the ban of InfoWars from social media would establish a slippery slope, they were often mocked and ridiculed. Thursday’s onslaught on independent media appears to have confirmed their suspicions, however.

— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) August 6, 2018

Facebook has been partnering with the Digital Forensics Lab, an arm of the Atlantic Council think tank — a neoconservative group funded by Gulf monarchies and defense giants like Raytheon — to weed out inauthentic users from its platform. Similarly, it has been partnering with the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine to fact check so-called fake news.
Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
© AP Photo / Ben Margot
Facebook Bans Russia-Linked Social Media Firm for Alleged ’Scraping’ of Users’ Data

Journalist Abby Martin, who hosts “The Empire Files” on TeleSur English, told Sputnik News after TeleSur’s page was temporarily removed from Facebook, “The shuttering of progressive media amidst the ‘fake news’ and Russiagate hysteria is what activists been warning all along — tech companies, working in concert with think tanks stacked with CIA officials and defense contractors, shouldn’t have the power to curate our reality to make those already rendered invisible even more obsolete.”

Sputnik News contacted a number of journalists caught up in the ban. Below is what they had to say, edited extremely lightly for clarity.

Independent reporter John Vibes, who contributes to The Free Thought Project and other websites:

This signifies a re-consolidation of the media. Cable news media controlled the narrative for most of modern history, but the internet has lowered that barrier to entry and allowed the average person to become the media themselves. This obviously took market share and influence away from the traditional media, and it has allowed for a more diverse public conversation. Now it seems the platforms that have monopolized the industry are favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices. So now, instead of allowing more people to have a voice, these platforms are creating an atmosphere where only powerful media organizations are welcome, just as we had on cable news.

People think that we are just providing an activist spin on the news, but they don’t see the families struggling to have their voice heard. For example, when someone is shot by police, mainstream media sources often just republish the press release from the police department, without presenting the victim’s side of the story. We give the victims and their families a voice, which is essential to keep power in check. This also goes for bigger issues like foreign policy as well; multiple full-scale invasions of Syria have been prevented because of information that the alternative media made viral.

“Information exchange” activist Jason Bassler, who co-founded The Free Thought Project and solely founded Police the Police, both of which were banned:

We were verified by Facebook with a little check mark next to our name, so they know we are a legitimate organization/outlet. They have seen our “Articles of Organization” which was issued by the state of Louisiana, which is where my partner and The Free Thought Project co-founder lives.

We have even paid Facebook to boost our posts and for likes in the past, meaning they gladly took our money for a product that they ended up manipulating and backing out on. It wasn’t much, maybe $1,200 over the past 6 years. Do we get that money back now?

We have already had the lawyers at Rutherford Institute (a nonprofit civil liberties organization) send them a letter late last month about unfair treatment by third-party “fact checkers,” which they ignored and never responded to.

I was motivated [to start The Free Thought Project] by the injustices I saw on social media during Occupy Wall Street in 2011. I knew I had an obligation to get involved somehow and to share information critical for liberty and peace. I never thought I would have built fan pages of 5 million fans, nor did I ever think we would employ and give jobs to nine other activists (at one point), but I was inspired to do what I could to plant seeds and combat the mainstream media’s bullsh*t narratives, to keep police and government accountable, to make sure people knew their rights and how to interact with police.

All that’s gone now with a click of a button. Six years of hard work, literally seven days a week, working our as*es off finding stories, researching them, writing them, making thumbnails and titles for them, making graphics and videos for them, sharing them on various social media outlets.

What’s next? I will fight this until I am utterly exhausted. We will fight back tooth and nail. I don’t care if that means protesting in front of Facebook headquarters (which I’ve already considered doing many times in the past two years), I will make sure people know how corrupt and untrustworthy Facebook is if it’s the last thing I do. You can’t just steal years of hard work from someone and not expect there to be consequences. I will do everything I can to make their lives miserable. That’s a promise.

Rachel Blevins, a correspondent for RT America:

Today I was locked out of my Facebook account for four hours, and my public page was “unpublished.” There appears to be no explanation for this other than the vague claim from Facebook that my page was taken down because it was “administered by a fake account, misleading users or violating the Facebook spam policies.” I am the only person who publishes posts on my page; the only posts I publish are articles I have written or videos of my reports, and I only post one or two times a day — which rules out all of the claims that I have violated Facebook’s policies.

My page had nearly 70,000 followers before it was taken down. I have poured the last four years into building my page as a journalist, and I have noticed recently that the reach seems to have been stifled and that the engagement on my posts was down significantly. I know that I am not the only one who has become a victim of this purge, and there are hundreds of other pages — many of which had millions of followers — that have been taken down with no warning and no explanation.

Ford Fischer, the founder of the media startup News2Share, had a number of his live streams removed during the purge, although they were later restored:

This attack was a long time coming. Facebook has been slowly clamping down on independent media. First, they removed more extreme pages and made it harder for the surviving ones to make a living by hurting their algorithms (unless they paid, of course!). Then they started purging those that didn’t quickly respond to their ID requests. Today, hundreds of pages belonging to the family of independent media, especially those that question state authority, were removed without explanation. This is just one step further toward the total state and corporate takeover of what you’re allowed to think.

Nicholas Bernabe, founder of The Anti-Media:

Our approach generally is to cover stories and angles that corporate media underreport or misreport and to amplify activist and anti-war voices and stories. All of our content is professionally fact-checked and edited.

I got into this line of work because I felt there was a need for media that challenged mainstream assumptions and biases in politics. I wanted to shed light on corruption and wrongdoing against oppressed peoples and cover the harsh truth about American foreign policy.

Over the last 28 days, we reached 7,088,000 people on Facebook.

The timing of this purge is rather dubious in my view, coming shortly before the midterm elections. This could be an attempt by Facebook itself to affect the outcome of the coming elections. The Twitter suspension caught me by surprise. I can only speculate that these suspensions were a coordinated effort to stifle our message ahead of the coming elections.

By Alexander Rubinstein.

#démocratie

I am German when we win, but an immigrant when we lose
▻https://africasacountry.com/2018/09/i-am-german-when-we-win-but-i-am-an-immigrant-when-we-lose

The mainstream media narrative following Germany’s woeful performance in the recent Fifa World Cup in Russia

Autour des #gardes-côtes_libyens... et de #refoulements en #Libye...

Je copie-colle ici des articles que j’avais mis en bas de cette compilation (qu’il faudrait un peu mettre en ordre, peut-être avec l’aide de @isskein ?) :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/705401

Les articles ci-dessous traitent de :
#asile #migrations #réfugiés #Méditerranée #push-back #refoulement #externalisation #frontières

The Myth of Russia’s Arctic Rule
▻https://mailchi.mp/9cdcff7c73de/taming-bureaucratic-beasts-in-china-1650757?e=752ba5eff2

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/russia-maritime-choke-points-globe.jpg

It’s clearly visible from this bird’s-eye view of the Arctic region.
 
You can see here that Russia’s vast holdings of Arctic territory do not mitigate its lack of access to the world’s other oceans.
 
Russian ships cannot get to the Pacific Ocean without passing the Chukchi Sea and the Bering Strait – both of which are off the coast of Alaska and thus securely under U.S. control.
 
While the U.S. has only two icebreakers, it could shut down this shipping lane at will because it’s easily the world’s pre-eminent naval power.
 
It’s more of the same for Russia with access to the Atlantic Ocean. To get to the Atlantic from the Arctic, Russian ships have to traverse waters between Iceland and Greenland, or between Iceland and the United Kingdom.
 
Either way, it’s the same story – they are still susceptible to blockades from anti-Russian forces.
 
These uncomfortable geopolitical realities make Russia’s position in the Arctic something of a trap. To make matters worse, with the accelerating Arctic ice melt, Russia’s geopolitical strategy in Europe is melting right along with it.
 
The core of that strategy has been to establish buffer zones between Moscow and the North European Plain. This strategy is based in part on the idea that Russia has never had to worry about a potential threat to its Arctic coastline, as the Arctic Ocean has always been impossible for its enemies to traverse.
 
But if Arctic ice melts enough to allow trade in the Arctic Ocean year round – as appears inevitable – that also means enemy navies would have much more room to operate.
 
This explains why Russia has assumed a defensive posture when it comes to the Arctic.
 
It also explains why Russia has been relatively cooperative in the region diplomatically.

#arctique #Russie

Ukie: WHO gaming disorder diagnosis is based on “highly contested evidence”
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-06-20-ukie-gaming-disorder-who

Ukie CEO Dr Jo Twist OBE on the risks posed by the World Health Organisation’s proposed definition, and the “irresponsible” reaction of mainstream media

#Politics #Legal

How the #blockchain Eliminates Fraud in #gaming
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-the-blockchain-eliminates-fraud-in-gaming-283e79536093?source=rss---

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How the Blockchain Eliminates Fraud in GamingThe gaming industry is going through a period of exponential growth and is expected to be worth over $230 billion by 2022. There are approximately 2.2 billion gamers in the world and as much as one billion of them spend their hard earned money on in-game purchases.With so much money flowing into various gaming platforms, it has certainly attracted the attention of bad actors. However, if you pay attention to mainstream media, you will only hear about major data breaches like the one that targeted the Sony PlayStation Network last year.In reality, the gaming industry has been plagued by fraud for years with smaller insidious forms of attacks. According to Into the Web of Profit, a landmark research study conducted by Dr. Mike McGuire, (...)

#fraud-in-gaming #blockchain-fraud #blockchain-gaming

He’s pro-incest, pedophilia, and rape. He’s also running for Congress from his parents’ house. - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/06/01/hes-pro-incest-pedophilia-and-rape-hes-also-running-for-congress-fro

He believes in instituting a patriarchal system, with women under the authority of men; he supports abolishing age restrictions for marriage and laws against marital rape; he believes that white supremacy is a “system that works,” that Hitler was a “good thing for Germany,” and that incest should be legalized, at least in the context of marriage. And at one point in a conversation with The Post, he seemed to express admiration for the system run by the Taliban in Afghanistan, noting that the country’s birthrate fell as a consequence of increased opportunities for women after the United States’ more than decade-long intervention.

But Larson, 37, is hoping to take his views toward the mainstream by mounting a campaign for a congressional seat in Virginia, running as an independent libertarian for the state’s 10th district, a swath of land across three counties in Northern Virginia outside the Washington suburbs. The seat is currently held by Republican Barbara Comstock, but has attracted strong Democratic interest; Hillary Clinton won the district by 10 percentage points in 2016.
[…]
The HuffPost reported this week that Larson had created two websites that catered to the furthest fringes of the Internet: suiped.org and incelocalpse.today, information that Larson confirmed in an interview with The Post.

Both websites have since been removed by their domain hosts. Suiped or Suicidal Pedophiles, was a site and self-described organization created to lobby for pedophiles and other convicted or potential sex offenders to be able to kill themselves at clinics legally, according to cached images.

According to a cached image, Incelocalypse was created to “serve as both headquarters and casual hangout for the hardest core of the hardcore incels,” the small but vocal community of “involuntary celibates” online who rage against feminism and a system of female empowerment that has deprived them of sexual gratification, an Internet subculture that has begun to draw some attention by mainstream media outlets.

Larson said he considers himself to be part of the “#incel movement” and said his views took a turn for the more extreme after an acrimonious divorce.

Why do mobile games get a ’free’ pass ?
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-05-04-why-do-mobile-games-get-a-free-pass

The mainstream media launches attacks on Fortnite’s business model, but ignores more egregious behaviour in mobile - does this reflect a bias?

Do We Have the Right to Financial Rebellion? a Conversation With Enric Duran
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/do-we-have-the-right-to-financial-rebellion-a-conversation-with-enri

It’s not easy to get in touch with Enric Duran. Dubbed the ‘Robin Hood of the Banks’ by the mainstream media, the Catalan activist defrauded the Spanish banking system of nearly half a million...

Seven things you need to know about Israel’s latest attack on #Gaza
▻http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/things-israels-latest

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1. Israel’s killings were premeditated.

2. Israeli violence had nothing to do with “security.”

3. There were no “clashes.”
Again, I defer to Israeli propaganda. How many injuries to Israeli soldiers have even been claimed in the tsunami of apologetics pouring out of Tel Aviv this week? Zero. How much damage to Israeli property? Zero. How many Israeli civilians threatened? Zero. How many breaches in that precious “security fence”? Zero.

4. Israel targeted its victims for political reasons.
And yes, Virginia, there is a name for that sort of lethal conduct: the name is terrorism. Israel directed deliberate, deadly violence at Gaza’s civilians with the express goal of intimidating potential dissenters. It requires astonishing #chutzpah for the orchestrators of terrorism on such a scale to accuse their victims of being terrorists. But chutzpah is one thing Israel seldom lacks.

5. Israel commits its crimes because the U.S. lets it.
Like other bullies, Israel fights only where it cannot lose.

6. Mainstream media, and Jewish organizations, assist in the cover-up.
The proliferation of apologetics in mainstream media for Israel’s deadly violence has been so instantaneous, and so nauseating, that I will only sample the field briefly. Sticking to the liberal end of the spectrum, one finds Ha’aretz‘s #Amos_Harel lamenting that “Hamas…has found a more effective way of creating friction with the #Israel Defense Forces than firing rockets and carrying out attacks through its tunnels.” (How nasty of those Palestinians to get themselves killed just to ruin the mornings of some IDF brass!) In fact, Harel notes, the Gazans have proved so treacherous that “despite the large number of Palestinian casualties not a single rocket has been fired into Israel from the Strip.” What’s a besieger to do? The more lopsided its violence, the easier it is to hurt poor Israel’s feelings.

7. Israel’s #crimes will continue until we make it stop.

#terrorisme

India makes U-turn after proposing to punish ’fake news’ publishers - CNN
▻https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/03/asia/india-fake-news-intl/index.html

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(CNN)The Indian government is shelving a rule to punish journalists for publishing “fake news” just 48 hours after its introduction.
The proposed order would have given the government the authority to strip individuals and media organizations of their accreditation — which is needed to go to government functions and makes access to government offices easier — if they received a complaint of reporting so-called fake news, a term that was not specifically defined.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government said the measure was meant to help stop the spread of misinformation throughout the country, but critics swiftly condemned it as an attack on free speech in the world’s most populous democracy.
“Make no mistake: (T)his is a breathtaking assault on mainstream media,” Shekhar Gupta, one of India’s most prominent journalists, tweeted to his nearly 2 million followers. He is the editor-in-chief of ThePrint, an Indian website focusing on politics and policy.

The measure’s introduction was troubling to some who saw it as the latest effort among powerful leaders of Asian democracies to target the free press under the guise of combating so-called fake news, a term popularized by President Donald Trump in his effort to fight negative press coverage.
Malaysia’s Upper House passed a bill criminalizing the spread of fake news this week, the first step in it becoming law. Singapore is also planning legislation to tackle online misinformation. Journalists in Myanmar and Cambodia — two countries the West has invested heavily in to ensure successful transitions to democracy — have been arrested in recent months.
And Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has railed against the media by employing the term on a regular basis. His government has come under fire for reportedly targeting the online news site Rappler over its negative coverage of the Duterte administration’s bloody war on drugs. A presidential spokesman denied the allegations.
India appears to be following a similar path, said Prem Panicker, a prominent journalist who used to be Yahoo India’s managing editor
“There is a worldwide leaning toward hard-right governing style and hard-right leaders, and the corollary to that is that there’s increasing stresses on the press,” Panicker told CNN.
“The single biggest problem is that this is when you want a very free, very vibrant press.”
Despite the fierce criticism of New Delhi’s proposed rule, some of its opponents do believe there’s a need for either more regulation or greater responsibility on the part of publishers.
India has one of the world’s most saturated and fastest-growing media markets, boasting thousands of options in print, television and online journalism.
With that freedom and booming market has come a thriving tabloid culture, which has frustrated mainstream journalists who get lumped in with those peddling misinformation and flouting common standards.

#Fake_news #Asie #Censure

Deeply Talks: Picturing Refugees

In our latest Deeply Talks we explored why images of refugees and migrants are dominated by “boats and camps.” Award-winning photographer #Kalpesh_Lathigra and researcher #Jelena_Jovicic talk to our senior editor, Daniel Howden, about shifting dominant perceptions.

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#photographie #réfugiés #migrations #asile #représentations #image #perceptions #camps #bateaux

Page internet de Jelena Jovicic (doctorante), Université de Stockholm:

My PhD project explores the criminalization of certain forms of migration through visual framing.

By looking at the developments in the mainstream media discourses – I deconstruct the images that frame the prison-like conditions in which many people fleeing find themselves on their journeys. While photography in the journalistic and activist context can be a highly powerful tool for addressing the inhumane conditions of strandedness and flight, I move beyond the mere content and point to the intersections of racialized and gendered imagery often constructing what the audience makes of the visual information and who a ‘refugee’ might be.

▻https://www.su.se/english/profiles/jjovi-1.291842
#médias #discours_médiatique

Jackson Lears · What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking : #Russiagate · LRB 4 January 2018
►https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking
La pensée unique aux États Unis de plus en plus sectaire et pesante

Jackson Lears

American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.

A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind.

Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. ‘fake news’) as a tactic for advancing one administration or another’s political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, ‘almost genetically’ diabolical.

It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials.

Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors’ lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it’s the greatest country in the world, Albright because it’s an exceptional force for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trump’s desire for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the official position of the Democratic Party. What is unprecedented about Trump is his offensive style: contemptuous, bullying, inarticulate, and yet perfectly pitched to appeal to the anger and anxiety of his target audience. His excess has licensed overt racism and proud misogyny among some of his supporters. This is cause for denunciation, but I am less persuaded that it justifies the anti-Russian mania.

Besides Trump’s supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. The second provides the emotional charge for the first. Both seem to me problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that the NSA ‘probably knows quite well who the invaders were’. And yet ‘it has not presented any evidence, although I suspect it exists. The question is: why not? … I suspect it discovered other attackers in the systems, maybe there were six or seven groups at work.’ He also said in July 2016 that ‘even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, ‪#XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.’ The NSA’s capacity to follow hacking to its source is a matter of public record. When the agency investigated pervasive and successful Chinese hacking into US military and defence industry installations, it was able to trace the hacks to the building where they originated, a People’s Liberation Army facility in Shanghai. That information was published in the New York Times, but, this time, the NSA’s failure to provide evidence has gone curiously unremarked. When The Intercept published a story about the NSA’s alleged discovery that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack into US state and local election systems, the agency’s undocumented assertions about the Russian origins of the hack were allowed to stand as unchallenged fact and quickly became treated as such in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, there has been a blizzard of ancillary accusations, including much broader and vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a dragnet came up empty-handed, and the arrests have already begun. But what is striking about them is that the charges have nothing to do with Russian interference in the election. There has been much talk about the possibility that the accused may provide damaging evidence against Trump in exchange for lighter sentences, but this is merely speculation. Paul Manafort, at one point Trump’s campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty to charges of failing to register his public relations firm as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian government and concealing his millions of dollars in fees. But all this occurred before the 2016 campaign. George Papadopolous, a foreign policy adviser, has pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his bungling efforts to arrange a meeting between Trump’s people and the Russian government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy that routinely occurs during the interim between one administration and the next. It is not a sign of collusion.

So far, after months of ‘bombshells’ that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. (There are members of VIPS who dissent from the VIPS report’s conclusions, but their arguments are in turn contested by the authors of the report.) The VIPS findings received no attention in major media outlets, except Fox News – which from the centre-left perspective is worse than no attention at all. Mainstream media have dismissed the VIPS report as a conspiracy theory (apparently the Russian hacking story does not count as one). The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record.

Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the theft of their emails. Alperovitch is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian Washington think tank. In its report Crowdstrike puts forward close to zero evidence for its claim that those responsible were Russian, let alone for its assertion that they were affiliated with Russian military intelligence. And yet, from this point on, the assumption that this was a Russian cyber operation was unquestioned. When the FBI arrived on the scene, the Bureau either did not request or was refused access to the DNC servers; instead it depended entirely on the Crowdstrike analysis. Crowdstrike, meanwhile, was being forced to retract another claim, that the Russians had successfully hacked the guidance systems of the Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainian military and the British International Institute for Strategic Studies both contradicted this claim, and Crowdstrike backed down. But its DNC analysis was allowed to stand and even become the basis for the January Intelligence Community Assessment.

The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russians in September 2016 would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials. Flynn’s post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear unremarkable. Trump’s cronies’ attempts to do business in Russia would become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jr’s meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors – with the candidate’s son expecting to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.

Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the Russians hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by California and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a mere whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The rush to publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point: the false accusation has done its work.

The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?

The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘#the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.

For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)

that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.

Before the primaries had even begun, the supposedly neutral DNC – which had been close to insolvency – had been bought by the Clinton campaign.

Another recent revelation of DNC tactics concerns the origins of the inquiry into Trump’s supposed links to Putin. The story began in April 2016, when the DNC hired a Washington research firm called Fusion GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The Clinton campaign tried to persuade established media outlets to publicise the Steele dossier, but with uncharacteristic circumspection, they declined to promote what was plainly political trash rather than reliable reporting. Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment.

The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was stripped of my clearance and later honourably discharged when I refused to join the Sealed Authenticator System, which would have authorised the launch of those allegedly non-existent nuclear weapons. The tree of smoke has only grown more complex and elusive since then. Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society.

I thought of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on black militants, draft resisters, deserters and antiwar activists. Amid the paintings, collages and assemblages there was a single Confederate flag, accompanied by grim reminders of the Jim Crow past – a Klansman in full regalia, a black body dangling from a tree. There were also at least half a dozen US flags, juxtaposed in whole or in part with images of contemporary racial oppression that could have occurred anywhere in America: dead black men carted off on stretchers by skeletons in police uniform; a black prisoner tied to a chair, awaiting torture. The point was to contrast the pretensions of ‘the land of the free’ with the practices of the national security state and local police forces. The black artists of that era knew their enemy: black people were not being killed and imprisoned by some nebulous foreign adversary, but by the FBI, the CIA and the police.

The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless.

Having come of age during the Vietnam War, a calamitous consequence of that inflated definition of national interest, I have always been attracted to the realist critique of globalism. Realism is a label forever besmirched by association with Henry Kissinger, who used it as a rationale for intervening covertly and overtly in other nations’ affairs. Yet there is a more humane realist tradition, the tradition of George Kennan and William Fulbright, which emphasises the limits of military might, counselling that great power requires great restraint. This tradition challenges the doctrine of regime change under the guise of democracy promotion, which – despite its abysmal failures in Iraq and Libya – retains a baffling legitimacy in official Washington. Russiagate has extended its shelf life.

We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate, and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war – a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by America’s combative stance towards Russia. The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington’s ways than their president will ever be.

It is not the Democratic Party that is leading the search for alternatives to the wreckage created by Republican policies: a tax plan that will soak the poor and middle class to benefit the rich; a heedless pursuit of fossil fuels that is already resulting in the contamination of the water supply of the Dakota people; and continued support for police policies of militarisation and mass incarceration. It is local populations that are threatened by oil spills and police beatings, and that is where humane populism survives. A multitude of insurgent groups have begun to use the outrage against Trump as a lever to move the party in egalitarian directions: Justice Democrats, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a host of local and regional organisations. They recognise that there are far more urgent – and genuine – reasons to oppose Trump than vague allegations of collusion with Russia. They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton’s defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. This is the real resistance, as opposed to ‘#theresistance’.

On certain important issues – such as broadening support for single-payer healthcare, promoting a higher minimum wage or protecting undocumented immigrants from the most flagrant forms of exploitation – these insurgents are winning wide support. Candidates like Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who is running in the Democratic primary for nomination to the US Senate, are challenging establishment Democrats who stand cheek by jowl with Republicans in their service to concentrated capital. Swearengin’s opponent is Joe Manchin, whom the Los Angeles Times has compared to Doug Jones, another ‘very conservative’ Democrat who recently won election to the US Senate in Alabama, narrowly defeating a Republican disgraced by accusations of sexual misconduct with 14-year-old girls. I can feel relieved at that result without joining in the collective Democratic ecstasy, which reveals the party’s persistent commitment to politics as usual. Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. Jess King – a Mennonite woman, Bard College MBA and founder of a local non-profit who is running for Congress as a Justice Democrat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – put it this way: ‘We see a changing political landscape right now that isn’t measured by traditional left to right politics anymore, but bottom to top. In Pennsylvania and many other places around the country we see a grassroots economic populism on the rise, pushing against the political establishment and status quo that have failed so many in our country.’

Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire.

This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. ‘The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,’ Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, ‘the wisdom of continual war’ – what Clinton calls ‘global leadership’ –

was far clearer to the party’s standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston University analysed election results in three key states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and found that ‘even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may want to ‘re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war’. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It’s a long shot, but there is something happening out there.

#USA #cuture #politique

Palestinian Girl Praised as Hero After Confronting Soldiers - The #New_York_Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/12/20/world/middleeast/ap-ml-israel-palestinians-soldiers-kicked.html

Le soit-disant #journalisme soit-disant « objectif » non seulement ne trouve rien à redire à un appel au #viol de mineure, mais le qualifie de #représailles.

Ben Caspit, a journalist for the Maariv daily, [...] called for retaliation against the Tamimi family.

“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras,” he wrote.

Et après ça crie au scandale quand #Russia_Times fait de l’audience.

#Israel #Associated_press #Etats-Unis #sans_vergogne