In a new poll, half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it

What a sensational headline, (and I don't mean good or true.)  I would remind the reader that a study is not a fact.  Although I do think that it is entirely possible for us to have a coup in this country (indeed probable), I doubt that Trump is the one to lead it. Although I am not suprised by the study results, I agree with the commenter below that this study does not mean much, and as Noam Chomsky has recently noted, the one to fear is the young, truly charismatic and intellectually coherent fascist that replaces him.  That is certainly the authoritarian direction we have been going toward for many years.  Combine this with the seemingly unstoppable bi-partisan militarization of police, the exponential increase in domestic surveillance and use of military grade drones at home over time-- we have grounds to be very worried -- Just not necessarily about Trump.  The devil is in the details.  The neoliberal establishment for decades has given the executive branch unprecidented tools while eroding trust in the house and senate. Elections are a farse in too many ways to count in these comments and a majority of statehouses and governerships are even worse. Corrections to this undemocratic drift in course that makes a coup possible will be connected to many thousands of nooks and crannies of law and administration that will still be there after Trump is gone unless changed.

Comment by Tim Willoughby
8/15/2017 3:35 AM PDT
I'm surprised by the results of this survey. Appreciated getting as much detail as we did on methodology behind it, but would love to know some more details of how the results were weighted. If you weight on age, gender, race, and education, and do so to match the population, that could be a lot of weighting! I hope these results were weighted to represent the Republican population, and that it worked out that none of the weighting factors were especially high.

If you had only a sample that began skewed, then weighting could send those results in all sorts of crazy directions.

Additionally, 52% agreement, while surprising, is unlikely to be a significant difference against disagreement (i.e. if you ran the exact same study again, it wouldn't consistently be higher than disagreement), with the sample size you're talking about.

While the headline numbers here are certainly concerning, I'm not convinced that the stats really mean much here."

The the original Washington Post article here if you wish to read it.

In a new poll, half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it - The Washington Post:



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Indivisible Guide - A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda

This is just a link. go here and look at their ideas for action



Indivisible Guide - A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda:



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Who Owns the Internet?

I found this article on the Media Ecology Facebook page together with the following comment. Well, what do you think?

     Last fall, some Times reporters went looking for the source of a stream of largely fabricated pro-Trump stories that had run on a Web site called Departed. They traced them to a twenty-two-year-old computer-science student in Tbilisi named Beqa Latsabidze. He told the Times that he had begun the election season by pumping out flattering stories about Hillary Clinton, but the site hadn’t generated much interest. When he switched to pro-Trump nonsense, traffic had soared, and so had the site’s revenues. “For me, this is all about income,” Latsabidze said. Perhaps the real problem is not that Brand’s prophecy failed but that it came true. A “computer bum” sitting in Tbilisi is now so “empowered” as an individual that he can help turn an election halfway around the world.
     Either out of conviction or simply out of habit, the gatekeepers of yore set a certain tone. They waved through news about state budget deficits and arms-control talks, while impeding the flow of loony conspiracy theories. Now Chartbeat allows everyone to see just how many (or, more to the point, how few) readers there really are for that report on the drought in South Sudan or that article on monopoly power and the Internet. And so it follows that there will be fewer such reports and fewer such articles. The Web is designed to give people what they want, which, for better or worse, is also the function of democracy"...Alexander Kuskis in Media Ecology.

This from the new New Yorker

Thirty years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales. Such dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown), is essentially monopolistic.  Elizabeth Kolbert - New Yorker

Who Owns the Internet? | The New Yorker:







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Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection

Neil Postman had the best take on bullshit and crap detection:

As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit. I will ask only that you agree that every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure, and that if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good. - "Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection", by Neil Postman

Why bullshit is no laughing matter | Aeon Ideas:

The book list for Postman is well worth reviewing.  Much of our current debate about culture, causes of malaise and collapse of education have been known, studied and advocated for many, many years.  But, of course we have no memory of history here in America so it is not surprising that we just react.

• Television and the Teaching of English (1961).
• Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching, with Charles Weingartner (Dell Publishing, 1966).
• Teaching as a Subversive Activity, with Charles Weingartner (Delacorte Press, 1969)
• "Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection" — speech given at National Convention for the Teachers of English (1969)^[12]
• The Soft Revolution: A Student Handbook For Turning Schools Around, with Charles Weingartner (Delacorte Press, 1971).
• The School Book: For People Who Want to Know What All the Hollering is About, with Charles Weingartner (Delacorte Press, 1973).
• Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves By the Way We Talk and What to Do About It (1976). Postman's introduction to general semantics.
• Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979).
• The Disappearance of Childhood (1982).
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985).
• Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education (1988).
• How to Watch TV News, with Steve Powers (1992).
• Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992).

Oppressive Precedents Used Against Nazis Will Be Used Against the Left | Ian Welsh

I have to agree that the decision to cut someone or some group off from the Internet or phones or banking or credit should not be in the hands of private industry -- a very dangerous precedent.

On the other hand I would applaud efforts illegal or not to disrupt, misdirect and destroy such sites and organizations by any means necessary by individuals and organized groups.  I am proposing a sort of anarchy of the narrow sort often associated with Anonymous and Antifa.  This all seems very messy but it is a necessary part of a broad platform to resist oppression and mobilize for progressive change.

Read comments by the service providers here on ZDNet



Oppressive Precedents Used Against Nazis Will Be Used Against the Left | Ian Welsh:



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Dark Age America -- a blog

An expatiate's point of view


An astute social critic for many years Morris Berman recently had this to say:

I have to admit to my own lack of imagination. When I wrote Twilight (2000), or DAA (2006), or WAF (2011), the 2017 scenario of the endgame never once entered my mind. Maybe it would have, if I had written a book of cartoons. There are a number of ways a civilization can collapse, of course, but death by absurdity was one I just never thought of.

I found the following blog entry very insightful and motivated me to look at this book again as I did not really pay attention to it at the time.

  
    I've been rereading a book I 1st read many years ago, "The Denial of Death," by Ernest Becker. His argument is that we take on symbolic 'immortality projects'--for example, the American Dream--in order to hide from our mortality; to deny death. This project gives people the feeling that there is meaning in their lives. But because the project is essentially arbitrary, and sits on a volcano (the fear of death), it is endowed with a kind of ferocity. He thus writes that we "wheel and deal in an idiot frenzy"--a perfect description of hustling America. All of this, he says, explains the phenomenon of depression. People start to feel that their immortality project is false, that they've been sold a bill of goods; or they feel that they cannot be successful, be a 'hero', in terms of that immortality project. (I would add, they can probably feel both emotions at the same time.) The result is that they are reminded of their mortality, and their feelings of worthlessness.
     This goes a long way to explaining Trump--an illusory life-raft against the collapse of the American Dream, the promise to restore it--and also, the genocide we visit on other peoples, and the rage we see at home. Police are mowing down unarmed civilians at an alarming rate, and civilians are mowing down each other. The degree of all this was dramatically lower 20 years ago. At that time, it would be unthinkable that someone would be so offended at an oversight of not receiving bacon on their cheeseburger, that they would return to McDonald's with a machine gun and hose the place down. This would seem to be the stuff of (surreal) comedy, yet it happens all the time. Americans are depressed, bitter, and spiritually lost as a result of their immortality project having failed them--or of them, having failed it--and are going over the top on a daily basis as a result. (The stats: there is now more than one massacre a day in the US, now, defined as the killing and/or maiming of 4 or more individuals.) We are, to quote Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of the light. There are of course better ways of reacting to our individual and national decline, but neither the country nor its inhabitants are likely to find them. All we have ever known, in America, is blind impulse, and all indications are that that is not going to change.

Morris Berman is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/

Charlottesville: far-right crowd with torches encircles counter-protest group

And do you still say that this is protected speech and not a Klan rally? I strongly disagree. These marches will intimidate other community opinion and chill the peaceful voices that simply want to protect the religious and ethnic minorities that are the focus of these marchers' hate. Right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities I only wish the Anti-Fa were there in numbers that could have successfully confronted the march with force. Fascist success here will breed more and bigger hate marches and the collateral damage of attacks and murders at the hands of white nationalist hate group. Those 254 fatalities will certainly escalate and become lynchings. Don't be such a fucking mamby pamby liberal. They will come for you next.


In a White House statement yesterday the Trump administrate gave what amouts to support to the marchers.

 Yet, yesterday, Trump’s deputy assistant and counterterrorism adviser, Sebastian Gorka, ridiculed the idea of lone-wolf terrorists and played down the threat of white supremacist violence.
     Not surprisingly, Gorka made his comments on the Breitbart News Daily radio show. Under the leadership of President Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, Breitbart became the platform for a new form of white supremacy called “the alt-right.”
     It says something about Trump that Gorka and Bannon are members of his administration. And what it says is quite disturbing. -- Sothern Law Povery Center

This is no candle light march.  It is truly disturbing. "Jews will not replace us" is just one of the slogans. They mean everybody who does not agree will be subjected by force.

Charlottesville: far-right crowd with torches encircles counter-protest group | World news | The Guardian:



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