The other day,
this is what I was watching outside in downtown Seattle:
What was the
“official” weather data collection station at Sea-Tac Airport reporting?
“Factual” information
doesn’t always align with one’s experience; it may just mean different things
to different people, and just because you didn’t experience it doesn’t mean it
isn’t “true.” Seattle doesn’t have an “official” weather data reporting
station, although it should, since Sea-Tac’s “official” reporting has been
criticized for its accuracy. This was reported on April 25:
But something
got lost in the translation, and all the previous precipitation data was
removed and started from scratch the next day:
So we don’t really know what the “truth” of
the matter is, and the people who did the “compiling” of the data at the
University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences department did not respond to inquiries about the accuracy of the
data it was reporting.
Anyways, I couldn’t
decide if I wanted to do a post on “information” or “incompetence”--both applied here--but I think
what the latter is can be dispensed rather quickly with the latest story about
so-called “judge” Aileen Cannon from The
New York Times:
Reversing one of her own decisions, the
federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified
documents case granted his request on Monday to postpone the deadline for a
crucial court filing in the criminal proceeding, increasing the chance that any
trial would be pushed past the November election.
The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon,
was made in a bare-bones order that contained no factual or legal reasoning. It
did not schedule a new deadline but erased the one she had set almost a month
ago ordering Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file by Thursday a detailed list of the
classified materials that they intend to introduce at the trial, which is set
to take place at some point in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla…
…That Judge Cannon agreed to push back the
deadline suggests the extent to which she has given Mr. Trump’s legal team a
wide berth in their efforts to defend him. Over and over, Judge Cannon, who was
appointed by Mr. Trump, has treated seriously arguments that many, if not most,
federal judges would have rejected out of hand.
Of course words
like corruption and contempt (for the rule of law) also fit, but we are at the
point where we know that Cannon is probably paying more attention to the
hush money trial in New York than to her own case, which is of course fine with
Trump, who is after all her benefactor; thus we see this incompetent bungler merely
doubling-down in the face of media exposure. As such Cannon only proves that the
Federalist Society, which seemingly hand-picked all of Trump’s judicial
appointments, cares less about competency in the law than with slavering to an
extremist ideology. The hypocrisy and danger of the right cannot be more
apparent than this.
But back to
“information.” Last week I stumbled upon Netflix’s 2022 adaptation D.H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
and I have to say that it was the best film version of the story (certainly
better than the sex-challenged 2015 “re-imagined” version). I think this
because it had a more satisfying ending, much like the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice did over both the
book and 1995 BBC mini-series. Like nearly all of Netflix’s recent output it is
not yet out on video disc (likely never will be), but there is a website that
supplies HD and Blu-ray downloads for the price of premium service which I can
copy to BD-R, so Netflix is the loser there.
OK, big deal you
say. The British actress playing the title character, Emma Corrin, recently
came out as a “non-binary” lesbian. Oh great, what a letdown. But wait, she
currently is in a “romantic” relationship with American actor Rami Malek, who
at least looks more like a male than she does these days even with her semi-shaved
head (it's a close call, though). I sought out information asking the question of why if she is “gay” she
is in alleged relationship with a heterosexual man. Apparently no one else was interested in
asking for that information, as Google came-up with nothing.
It’s like asking
the question about why so many East Asians (especially new arrivals) are rude and
seemingly racist. I mean, didn’t Joe Biden just talk about how countries like
Japan and India have exclusionary, race-based immigration policies, which made
them “weaker” rather than “strong” like us? It was mostly recent immigrant Asian groups that fronted anti-affirmative action lawsuits at Ivy League schools, and stormed the
capital building in Olympia to protest the passage of lifting the
anti-affirmative action I-200, and who then supplied the deciding vote in a narrow initiative over-turning the over-turning of the previous
racially-motivated initiative. All this despite the fact they are vastly over-represented in colleges and universities to eventually take mostly office jobs that a high school graduate can do.
You Google “Asian racism” and all the "information" you get is
pages and pages of stories about “racism” against Asians—which basically means
if you want to talk to Asians about racism in their community, they call you a
“racist” for asking the question. Does the fact that convenience stores operated by Indians only hire other Indians discriminatory and break anti-discrimination laws? If so, why are they allowed to ignore the law? This given the fact that most recent immigrants bring
that anti-immigrant (or caste) attitude in their home countries with them to the U.S., to
use against other minority groups who have been fighting racism for centuries,
only now to see it “imported” back.
And while we are at it, why should we trust any information coming out of China or from its leaders these days, who refuse to come clean about or provide relevant data concerning Covid? Under dictator-for-life Xi the country acts like a put-upon-child (much like Russia under Putin), and it only puts out information for its own public consumption, and then expects the rest of the world to buy this misinformation (or disinformation). India, of course, could also be accused of the same thing, such as in reporting only a tiny fraction of its actual pandemic deaths while bodies are thrown in rivers or bonfires.
Xi recently brought up old information like the "accidental" strike on its Belgrade embassy in 1999 (China will never "forget" or "forgive"), conveniently forgetting that in its aftermath, the US foolishly permitted China to enter the WTO as an "act of friendship"-- or "atonement"--something of which the rest of the world is regretting because of China's bad neighbor trade activities, foreign policy and intellectual and industrial theft.
Not to be outdone,
if you Google about domestic violence by women, don’t expect to find any easy
“information” about that either. But according to the CDC, lesbian couples report
50 percent higher incidents of domestic violence than gay men couples; whether
or not that suggests something about the dynamics in heterosexual
relationships, we leave that information to "speculation."
Other information you may not be aware even exists follows you everywhere. TikToc has been accused of being a Chinese espionage app, but unbeknownst to many people is the Google's Maps tracking device can record your every movement. In the "notifications" on my cell phone I discovered this...
...and this:
Note that this tracks where I've "been" for the past seven years. Of course it isn't completely "accurate" information, listing places I allegedly "visited" that I probably only just happened to walk past. Last month a Federal judge ordered Google to settle a $62 million lawsuit for failing to remove such "information" after users turned off the program or even to stop the tracking, which was an unnecessarily complicated procedure and usually didn't work. That such "information" could used by law enforcement or spy agencies is obvious.
But “information”
of a particular evil and dangerous sort has gone “mainstream” for many years,
and has merely accelerated in the era of Trump, where conspiracy theories, no
matter how ridiculous or how often proven to be false, are accepted as “fact.”
Even the right-wing of the US Supreme Court seems confused, for example, on
what exactly happened on January 6; hell, nobody even talks about how people died as a result of the insurrection anymore. That isn’t “misinformation”
or a conspiracy theory—just factual information that gets in the way of the fake
news about the insurrectionists being "peaceful patriots":
In his recent TIME interview, which to many observers confirmed his cruel and inhuman nature, Trump demonstrates that like all
cowardly bullies, he needs vulnerable people to take out his frustrations
on—in his case, mainly migrants. He says he if he is elected again, he is going to
“militarize” National Guards all over the country to conduct mass arrests of
millions of “illegals.” I can’t wait for the civil rights lawsuits from illegal
detainment of the 82 percent of Hispanics in this country who are US citizens (What? Is that
new “information” to you?).
Of course
migrants are not “civilians,” just “vermin” who are “poisoning” the country.
And did he just say that the Chinese are establishing its own “army” of
“fighting age” males in this country? Is he suggesting that they can be deployed on the border too?
Sir, the Posse Comitatus Act says that you
can't deploy the U.S. military against civilians. Would you override that?
Trump: Well, these aren’t civilians. These
are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our
country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before. They're
coming in by the millions. I believe we have 15 million now. And I think you'll
have 20 million by the time this ends. And that's bigger than almost every
state.
So you can see yourself using the military
to address this?
Trump: I can see myself using the National
Guard and, if necessary, I'd have to go a step further. We have to do whatever
we have to do to stop the problem we have. Again, we have a major force that’s
forming in our country, when you see that over the last three weeks, 29,000
people came in from China, and they're all fighting age, and they're mostly
males. Yeah, you have to do what you have to do to stop crime and to stop
what's taking place at the border.
We can’t say that this guy is
merely coo-coo; he is much more dangerous than that. An editorial in the San Antonio Express-News wondered if this information means anything "important":
Americans who voted for
Trump in 2016 could perhaps be excused for not grasping what a Trump
presidency would look like, for underestimating his lack of interest in policy,
for not taking him seriously about meaning what he said, and for not having the
clairvoyance to predict two House impeachments, an insurrection and
four criminal trials. But voters in 2024 have no excuse for not knowing what a
second Trump presidency would look like. Past is prologue, and Trump has also
told us what is to come.
Trump asserts
that there will be no violence by his supporters because he is “way ahead” and
of course this means he can’t lose the election. But what if he does?
Mr. President, in our last conversation you
said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the
November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be
violence.” What if you don't win, sir?
Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win.
We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did
the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many
different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed
to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite
them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going
to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it
depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe
they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think
they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in
record-setting fashion.
“Record-setting
fashion.” This man is completely demented. Trump is not merely a pathological
liar, he is well beyond that. He is a psychopath, which according to the NIH is
defined thus:
Psychopathy is a personality disorder
characterized by deficits in personality and behavior. Personality deficits are
marked by interpersonal and affective facets, including pathological lying,
grandiose sense of self-worth, lack of remorse and callousness. Behavioral
deficits are defined by lifestyle and antisocial deficits, including
impulsivity, parasitic lifestyle and poor behavioral controls.
Earth-to-anyone-still-supporting-Trump:
this defines Trump in every way possible—and the loyal drones who plan to help him carry
out his orders if he is elected again are psychopaths as well. Although Trump seems to
be having not too friendly relations with the Senate candidate from Arizona, Kari
Lake, this seems more likely because she is out-doing him in psychopathy:
That’s why they’re coming after us with
lawfare; they’re going to come after us with everything. That’s why the next
six months is going to be intense. We’re going to put on our helmet or your
Kari Lake ball cap. We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on
a Glock on the side of us, just in case.
Is this for
real? Are voters in Arizona listening to this? Enough of them did to prevent
Lake from becoming governor, and Sen. Mark Kelly warned that Lake’s violent
rhetoric could lead to people getting killed. That is just like the new breed
of Republicans these days: if you can’t be lawful or don’t like the law, then
fight the law with violent action.
Of course that is just "talk" for the moment. But in Florida, as Rolling Stone has noted, Ron DeSantis continues his campaign of cruelty without a purpose. Well, actually there is a "purpose" to his latest stunt, which is to sign a law passed by an equally inhuman Republican legislature to ban water and heat breaks for outdoor workers. Most observers say this is nuts, but that is what a state under fascism looks like. Most of these workers are apparently Hispanic, and many of those are immigrants who cannot vote.
We don't need anymore "information" to know that DeSantis is an ignorant bigot in every possible way, so why would voters in the state condone this? Because they think they way he does? Do you think if most outdoors workers were white and could vote that DeSantis would dare be this inhuman? Hispanics, apparently, are not human to him and to most of the people who vote for him.
TIME did a
fact-check on Trump’s interview, and it found that virtually everything that
came out of his mouth were lies and misinformation. Even Trump’s repeated claim
that “his” economy was the “greatest ever” was subverted by the fact that his
mass attack on Chinese imports did not result in more jobs in this country, but
fewer (300,000 fewer jobs) and contributed to inflation due to American
consumers paying for the tariffs, not China. Mark Zandi of Moody’s told TIME
that
The economy was weakening in 2019 going into
2020 under the weight of the higher tariffs. Manufacturing and agriculture
were contracting. The yield curve had inverted, suggesting 2020 would be an
even tougher year even if the pandemic had not hit. And inflation was
sub-optimal at the time, as the Fed was working hard to lift inflation. So, I
would not characterize it as “the greatest economy of all time.”
Compare this
with the Biden economy, when with the help of those migrants, millions more
jobs than expected were filled to expand the economy greater than what would
have been expected if Trump and his mass deportations of workers had occurred.
If Trump is elected again and does what he says he will do, that recession that
we have avoided to date will indeed come.
The website Liberty Street Economics tells us that
misinformation requires two actors, “producers” and “users,” and the choices
they make at “verification” of the information they either provide or consume.
Producers of misinformation have learned that there is a “market” for it,
especially given the divisive nature of political, social and “cultural” discourse
today:
When encountering a news item, a user can choose to
determine its veracity at a cost (of time and effort, for example) before
deciding whether to share it or not. The decision to pursue verification thus
involves weighing the cost of achieving certainty (by consulting a fact-check
article, for example) against the risk of sharing misinformation. The probability
of the latter is determined by the prevalence
of misinformation on a given platform, which is determined by supply and demand
forces. Specifically, producers of fake content benefit when users share such
information without first bothering to verify it. As the fraction of these
users increases, so does the pass-through of misinformation, thereby
incentivizing the production (and hence prevalence) of false content, resulting
in an upward-sloping “supply curve” of misinformation.
Liberty
notes that many users who recognize obvious misinformation tend to simply avoid
the producers of such. Although this theoretically reduces the number of people
exposed to misinformation, it is noted that if "verification" was easier, “non-aligned” users who might
normally pass on producers of misinformation if the “cost” of verification is
high (meaning some level of ‘study”), would be more likely to pass on such information to their friends, exposing more
people to misinformation who might become “interested” in it:
A reduction in verification costs has the “unintended” effect of inducing
verification by users who were not originally sharing content, but not by those
who were already sharing unverified information. Put differently, such a policy
induces “entry” by users who originally found it too risky to share when
verification was prohibitively costly for them—but since their sharing
decisions are driven purely by the possibility of verifying news, the
pass-through of misinformation is unchanged.
Interestingly, Liberty’s research suggests that efforts at reducing the “supply” of
misinformation online may have the effect of convincing users that those
producing fake information are in fact “verified” if they do somehow pass the checkpoints, or are not caught in time:
However, the pass-through of fake content increases because users’
verification incentives are weakened in the process, as news items become more
likely to be truthful. The diffusion rate of misinformation—prevalence times
pass-through—captures the chance that misinformation is shared among users.
We can imagine how the "producers" of fake news will run with
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson using his sudden increase in “cred” to make the
false claim that “we all know” illegal aliens are voting in our elections,
which according to the Associated Press is in fact “incredibly rare,” and such instances of “illegal” voting are
often by legal residents who mistakenly believe they can vote.
A Texas law
similar to what Johnson is proposing “flagged” tens of thousands of legal
voters (mainly those with Spanish names) before a judge invalidated the law,
leading to the secretary of state’s resignation. This is just one of many fake
conspiracy theories thrown around by the far-right that is only interested in
power and not how to use it to actually help “the people” they claim to “represent”;
Johnson doesn’t want people to vote who won’t vote for himself or his "Christian" ilk, so he is now
proposing a federal law whose intent is to make it more difficult for legal
voters to vote--which isn't "Christian" at all.
Many users prefer “monopolistic”
producers of “information,” meaning from one source (i.e. Fox News). Everyone
in my family (who I have not communicated with in many years, as they live in “red”
states on the other side of the country) is “conservative” save me, and when I
was exchanging letters with Dad, it was a continual source of frustration that
he assumed that everything he was told on Fox News was “fair and balanced” when
it has been years since Fox abandoned that charade. The fact that Fox News paid
out $800 million in a defamation case involving dissemination of false claims
about the Dominion voting machines probably is just a simple “mistake.”
Nature also published a study on the prevalence of misinformation. “Misinformation
is problematic because it leads to inaccurate beliefs and can exacerbate
partisan disagreement over even basic facts. Merely reading false news
posts—including political posts that are extremely implausible and inconsistent
with one’s political ideology— makes them subsequently seem more true. In
addition to being concerning, the widespread sharing of misinformation on
social media is also surprising, given the outlandishness of much of this
content.”
Nature found that while “accuracy” is technically "important" to a user, it is
not as important a consideration when information is being shared if it
furthers a political position—in which case, “accuracy” is defined by its alignment
with ideology and prejudices. This was offered as an example:
To illustrate the disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing
intentions, consider, for example, the following headline: ‘Over 500 ‘Migrant
Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests’. This was rated as accurate by 15.7%
of Republicans in our study, but 51.1% of Republicans said they would consider
sharing it. Thus, the results from study 1 suggest that the confusion-based
account cannot fully explain the sharing of misinformation: our participants
were more than twice as likely to consider sharing false but politically
concordant headlines.
One possible explanation for this
dissociation between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions is offered by
the preference-based account of misinformation sharing. By this account, people
care about accuracy much less than other factors (such as partisanship), and
therefore knowingly share misinformation. The fact that participants in study 1
were willing to share ideologically consistent but false headlines could thus
be reasonably construed as revealing their preference for weighting
non-accuracy dimensions (such as ideology) over accuracy.
Nature
found that those users of the most frequently criticized for producing fake news
or misinformation were the least “attentive” to the veracity of the information
they consumed, even when test subjects were given headlines that were clearly
meant to be ridiculous. Nature,
however, suggests that in many cases “inattentiveness” to a story’s accuracy
may merely reflect one’s ignorance about a subject or are too “distracted” to
discover its accuracy; however, it cannot escape the fact that fake news and
misinformation is being disseminated
by people who either believe it or don’t care about its accuracy.
Of course information can remind of us why we can't afford to be oblivious; sure, Stormy Daniels testimony about her night out with Trump might make people nauseous, but in a way that we hope people will react to it--like, say vote for Biden, not at all, or for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from whom we have gotten all the information we need to know he is not a serious alternative, unless Republican voters think is he a more "intellectual" alternative to Trump.
In the end, most people
just want to believe what they want to believe, and it soon becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Did you ever see the 1988 film Stand and Deliver about the sudden
success of Garfield High School in Los
Angeles producing supposedly “dumb” minority students passing a college-level
advanced calculus test? That was back
when Hispanic actors like Edward James Olmos actually had enough clout (and will) to convince Hollywood
to make films that dispelled with the usually negative stereotypes.
The story
behind it is instructive. Most of what the film portrayed was true, but the
Hispanic students who were treated as if they were too “dumb” did not learn calculus
in a year, but after the school was persuaded by a new teacher, Jaime
Escalante, to offer the appropriate preparatory classes beginning with the
freshman year.
Escalante’s math classes became so popular with students
that his fellow teachers became jealous, particularly because of his celebrity
status. He received hate mail and death threats, and colleagues groused
about how his classes were overflowing and theirs were mostly empty—suggesting that
his classes were for students who actually wanted to learn, and the other, less
competent, teachers got the leftovers.
When Escalante and his teaching
disciples left Garfield, it was treated as “good riddance” and the school subsequently
went from a high of 83 students passing the calculus test to 2 in a matter
of years. Sometimes the “truth” is only what people believe it to be--and sometimes it is what people want it to be. That is "information" we should become more "attentive" too.
