We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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I hear the faint chink of the penny dropping at Guardian. This profile of misinformation specialist – read that job description as you will – Kate Starbird is predictably fawning, but they seem distinctly anxious to get across the idea that she and other misinformation specialists are no longer going to behave in the way they did in the last few years: ‘Stakes are really high’: misinformation researcher changes tack for 2024 US election
A key researcher in the fight against election misinformation – who herself became the subject of an intensive misinformation campaign – has said her field gets accused of “bias” precisely because it’s now mainly rightwingers who spread the worst lies.
Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, added that she feared that the entirely false story of rigged elections has now “sunk in” for many Americans on the right. “The idea that they’re already going to the polls with the belief that they’re being cheated means they’ll misinterpret everything they see through that lens,” she said.
Starbird’s group partnered with Stanford Internet Observatory on the Election Integrity Partnership ahead of the 2020 elections – a campaign during which a flood of misinformation swirled around the internet, with daily claims of unproven voter fraud.
Starbird and her team helped document that flood, and in return congressional Republicans and conservative attorneys attacked her research, alleging it amounted to censorship and violated the first amendment.
Starbird, a misinformation researcher, herself became the subject of an ongoing misinformation campaign – but said she would not let that deter her from her research. Her team wasn’t the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research, she noted: researchers across the country have received subpoenas, letters and criticism, all attempting to frame misinformation research as partisan and as censorship.
Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, served as the ringleader of this effort in Congress, using his power to investigate groups and researchers that work to counter misinformation, particularly as it related to elections and Covid-19. One practice that especially upset Jordan and his colleagues was when researchers would flag misleading information to social media companies, who would sometimes respond by amending factchecks or taking down false posts entirely.
That is censorship. One can argue that it is justified censorship, but it is censorship.
Nor is it just Congress attacking anti-misinformation work. A federal lawsuit from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech.
The Guardian’s writer, Rachel Leingang, has phrased that last sentence so that it could easily be read as saying the whole of the phrase “the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech” has the status of a mere allegation, a question yet to be decided. I hope Ms Leingang will forgive me if I clear up that potential ambiguity. The U.S. courts may or may not rule that the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the censorship happened.
A new lawsuit from the state of Texas and two rightwing media companies takes aim at the Global Engagement Center, a state department agency that focuses on how foreign powers spread information.
The pressure campaign has chilled misinformation research just ahead of the pivotal 2024 presidential election, as some academics switch what they focus on and others figure out ways to better explain their work to a mixed audience. One thing they will probably no longer do is flag posts to social media companies, as the practice remains an issue in several ongoing court cases.
Hear that? They’ve changed now. Censorship was so 2020. They aren’t going to do that any more. Probably.
“Alex Salmond given part of the Stone of Scone by son of student who stole it”, reports the Telegraph:
Alex Salmond was given part of the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, by the son of one of the students who stole it from Westminster Abbey, newly released Scottish Cabinet papers have disclosed.
Prof Sir Neil MacCormick presented the then First Minister with part of the stone, on which kings and queens of Scotland were traditionally crowned, in 2008.
Sir Neil’s father, John MacCormick, advised and bankrolled the Glasgow University students who took the 150kg stone from the Abbey on Christmas Day 1950.
So Professor Sir (note the Sir!) Neil MacCormick felt free to give away this historic artefact because he inherited it from his father, who stole it while it was on display to the public. And Mr Alex Salmond, presumably on the strength of then being First Minister of Scotland, felt free to take an object of significance in Scottish history into his personal possession as if it were a mere curio. Nice to see the right of conquest and the hereditary principle being reaffirmed in this day and age.
“I stayed up last night… Not so much to welcome the new year, but to make sure the old one leaves…”
– Ben David, in the comments to the previous post.
Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. 2024, here we come.
…real pain for my sham friends. Bring consternation to your enemies by having a splendid and productive New Year.
This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (Double Down News) by a person I do not trust (Dr Susan Michie, adviser to the SAGE committee and literal communist) on a topic (the Israel-Hamas war) where AI-generated fakery is rampant. Remember the six-fingered Palestinian child?
Closer examination give yet more causes for doubt – the bizarrely elongated finger on the left hand of the soldier second from the left, the way that, perhaps in compensation, the right hand of the rightmost man seems to have no fingers at all. There is something wrong about the bipod of his rifle, too. The angle of the windows on the left of the picture looks off. The flame coming out of the window is too neatly defined.
But what interests me is that I thought “AI-generated” before I looked closely enough to see any of that. Possibly the thing that tipped me off, if I am right at all, was that all the elements of the alleged photograph looked exposed to the same degree, when one would think that the glow of the flames would dominate. Even that form of words, which I got from my husband, is more explanatory than whatever it was that screamed “fake” to me.
That said, this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer.
To say our elites have a blindspot where anti-Semitism is concerned is a grotesque understatement. Having spent years obsessing over fantasy forms of racism and fascism, having spent years soberly telling us that Boris Johnson was Eton’s answer to Hitler, the great and good look upon Jew-hating marches, attacks and even terror plots… and it barely registers.
Whether these people are ignoring anti-Semitism, making excuses for it, or participating in it, the story remains the same. Our supposedly ‘anti-racist’ betters, people who during the Black Lives Matter uprising just two years ago were taking knees and ‘doing the work’ and tweeting #SilenceIsViolence from their £4million townhouses, are so marinated in a divisive identity politics and a demented ‘anti-imperialism’ that they see Jews as ‘white’ oppressors, even when they’re being beaten up, and Israel as the aggressor, even when it is under attack.
The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ over the barbaric rise of anti-Semitism reminds us that these people were never anti-racists at all.
– Tom Slater
We also visited the sense-dulling intersection of sports, wokeness, and science journalism, via the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, in which we were told, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences, but of biases in how they are treated in sport.” That such male-female differences and their implications for athletes have been widely studied and quantified seemed somehow to have escaped detection. That Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic track and field medallist, would place six hundred and eighty-ninth on a ranking of high-school boys was one of many details carefully avoided. And which again suggests that wokeness is actively stupefying, a kind of rapid-onset morony.
– David Thompson, presenting us with a roundup of 2023’s lunatic antics. Read the whole thing and prepare to be stupefied by the cavalcade of idiocy.
“Anglis adhuc mundum regit, sed id necessario OK non est. Tempus est vim suam cohibere?”, writes Michele Gazzola in the Guardian.
Pro disertis, clara sunt beneficia — aliis, sunt ingentia gratuita. Hic viae sunt nonnullae ad boost iustitiam linguisticam
I’ll start.
Javier Milei.
Lots of space launches.
And?
Taking a Christmas break from my customary snarkiness, I mean this without irony. I would like to make one of those motivational posters with an inspirational quotation or slogan on it. The slogan would express an idea that I already believe strongly, only I have not yet found the best way to express it.
The starting point is a slogan that has many variants, but the version I saw first and like best is:
“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was always yours. If it does not, it never was.”
Knowing my audience, I shall link to the demotivational version as well. It’s a quote from B.J. Novak, who was probably a ray of sunshine until he played the temp in the American version of The Office.
So, the slogan for which I reach is similar to that one (the motivational version, not Novak’s), but is about acceptance rather than love. Something like:
“If you seek acceptance, don’t demand it, ask for it. If the other person says yes, you know you are truly and freely accepted. If they say no,
Then what? I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure if it’s even a good idea to mention the consequences of the other person saying “no”. I suppose I could say “better to be aware they do not accept you than to be deceived by them feigning acceptance out of fear, which will probably lead to them stabbing you in the back whenever they get the chance”, but that one’s a bit of a downer to put on a poster. The point I really want to make is that true acceptance cannot be had if the person being asked to do the accepting does not have the option to say “no”.
The reason I seek a more pithy way to express this sentiment than anything I have come up so far is that, as I said a few years back in a post called “To knock on the door is better than booting it in”, “Like some warrior cultures of old, the grievance culture holds getting what you want by asking or peaceably trading to be fit only for slaves. The superior person does not ask for what they want; they demand it.” This attitude is culturally dominant in both senses.
I can see why this disastrous misapprehension arose. There are circumstances where the only moral course is to demand one’s just rights as rights, with not the slightest hint of pleading. But there can be no right to be accepted, just as there can be no right to be loved.
Javier Milei gave a speech:
He says a lot of good things of the sort that have been said on this blog: socialism causes economic failure and costs lives; the individual is more important than the state; it is better if everything not forbidden is permitted than if everything not permitted is forbidden; politicians are not God; fiscal deficit is bad.
I hope that he means it, and that he can do it, and that he is not undermined by the civil service, or by whatever Argentina has in the way of a “deep state”. It would be good to see Argentina getting wealthy again. It would be bad if there are further disasters and they can be conveniently blamed, by those with bad ideas, on these good ideas that Milei is talking about.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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