This kind of formulation works the other way as well: meanwhile the not-so-left are calling for the abandonment of the working class because apparently they are irredeemably racist and always have been. The future of progress is to be found in the heroic battles waged in the upper middle class suburbs of the coastal states. That’s a formula which has the Dems today savouring electoral victory right across the country.
Arguing with straw men.
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
One of the most tiresome trends since the election is the endless bad-faith advice offered by educated white leftists about how to recover from the Trump election. Because that ideological orientation has an unbroken, century-long batting average in statewide and national electoral politics of precisely .000, and proposes that we discard the voters already open to the left and instead convince the rural poor to support socialism via endless didactic lectures on what leftists perceive to be their own best interests.
This mechanism of control is being actively pursued by all governments. The Chinese have learned that the best way to control public discourse is to distract rather than censor.
Originally shared by John Baez
448 million distracting social media posts per year
No, I’m not talking about Facebook! I’m talking about posts put out by the Chinese government.
They’re often called 50c posts, since rumors say people are paid 50 cents for each post. There’s a huge army of people writing these posts! I learned about them from this new paper, which did a lot of experiments to study them:
How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument
The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called “50c party” posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of the vast majority of posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet, almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime’s strategic objective in pursuing this activity.
In the first large scale empirical analysis of this operation, we show how to identify the secretive authors of these posts, the posts written by them, and their content. We estimate that the government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We infer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime. We discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinese censorship program, and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of “common knowledge” and information control in authoritarian regimes.
The conclusion is spelled out in more detail near the end:
Distraction is a clever and useful strategy in information control in that an argument in almost any human discussion is rarely an effective way to put an end to an opposing argument. Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone’s back up (as new parents recognize fast).
It may even be the case that the function of reasoning in human beings is fundamentally about winning arguments rather than resolving them by seeking truth. Distraction even has the advantage of reducing anger compared to ruminating on the same issue. Finally, since censorship alone seems to anger people, the 50c astroturfing program has the additional advantage of enabling the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise.
The paper is here:
• Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument, American Political Science Review, 2017. Copy at http://j.mp/1Txxiz1
The people who write these social media posts are often called the 50c army – but I doubt most of them wear uniforms as in this picture!
Manning deserves a medal for ending the US occupation of Iraq.
A leaked diplomatic cable provided evidence that during an incident in 2006, U.S. troops in Iraq executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. The disclosure of this cable was later a significant factor in the Iraqi government’s refusal to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution beyond 2011, which led to U.S. troops withdrawing from the country.
It’s like liberals simultaneously dismiss ideology, institutional effects & morality on political behavior. Do they even believe in politics?
Short answer: No.
Brilliant tweet thread about the apolitical politics of the liberal faction of the ruling class. This makes a lot of sense. It also speaks to my contention (shared some time ago) that the prime directive of centre left politics is to prevent any genuine leftist policy from ever being implemented.
Never Stop Posting 