Publically, AOC demanding that the Biden administration should engage in authoritarian behaviour provides very little use when she doesn’t think that Biden will actually engage in those behavior while at the same time eroding the standards. If a future Trump administration will call for ignoring court orders, you can count on Fox News to air AOC’s pronouncements that it’s an acceptable tactic.
Even when your ethical system says that sometimes it’s worthwhile to break rules because of utilitarian concerns, that doesn’t make cases where you call for rules to be broken when you don’t expect that actually happen okay. People who do find value in pushing the Overton window to allow for more authoritarian actions are rightfully seen as authoritarians.
Democrat side is overall way more divided on this and has some significant attempts at deescalation.
What do you see as notable attempts at deescalation?
When Trump spoke about putting Hillary in jail for mishandling classified documents, the left talked about it as a huge norm violation but Trump didn’t actually follow through.
On the other hand, Democracts are currently hoping pursuing a legal case against Trump for mishandling classified documents with the hope of putting him in jail. Even if you believe that politicians who mishandle classified documents should be prosecuted, that’s escalation.
When it comes to feedback, a Trump presidency that follows after Trump spending some time in prison is likely more unhinged and more dangerous than one where he enters office without having been in prison before.
Building up the censorship apparatus that managed to very effectively censor the lab leak hypothesis in 2021 and also other political speech was a strong move toward authoritarian opinion control.
When Trump spoke about putting Hillary in jail for mishandling classified documents, the left talked about it as a huge norm violation but Trump didn’t actually follow through.
On the other hand, Democracts are currently hoping pursuing a legal case against Trump for mishandling classified documents with the hope of putting him in jail. Even if you believe that politicians who mishandle classified documents should be prosecuted, that’s escalation.
Three points.
Point one: is the judiciary independent of the executive or not? Because it’s not the government who’s prosecuting Trump, it’s the judiciary. They might feel safer doing so under a Democrat president of course but that’s not the same thing.
Point two: the scale and severity if crimes is different. Clinton apparently stored emails on an unproperly secured server. Trump took secret documents at home, stored them in unsecured boxes, was repeatedly nicely asked to return them, lied that he had already, and showed the documents to his friends in order to brag like some twelve years old boy particularly proud of his porn stash. I don’t think things would have reached the point of indictment if he’d been a bit more compliant when things were still in the “asking nicely” stage. But at one point, an example must be made, or we’re just saying laws don’t exist at all.
Point three: there might be a bit of a “getting Al Capone for tax evasion” thing going on admittedly because I think the real escalation that Trump is suffering retaliation for, the thing where he truly broke precedent to a ridiculous extent and that everyone rightfully doesn’t want to repeat ever again but that’s apparently hard to nail him down for is his little 6 January stunt. Messing with peaceful transition of power that way is a big no-no, and while he wasn’t literally leading the mob he clearly did enough to purposefully inflame the situation instead of defusing it. I’d bet if he didn’t do that the judiciary would be less fixated on prosecuting him.
As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court. They had a chance to strategize when Obama was still President to hold control of it but didn’t do it, Trump packed it with friendly judges at every occasion, and now despite suggestions about how to retaliate against that existing they didn’t really do anything, despite this unelected organ having a disproportionate decisional power (which honestly from outside the US looks insane to me, as is to be fair the level of reliance on them).
Building up the censorship apparatus that managed to very effectively censor the lab leak hypothesis in 2021 and also other political speech was a strong move toward authoritarian opinion control.
I don’t like how the discourse around the possibility of a lab leak was handled, but how is that the Democrats’ fault? Lab leak was dismissed already back in 2020, and it was more ridiculed than censored, mostly by scientific authorities like the WHO. The world is larger than the US. Now do I think many scientists who made those appeals were probably biased, maybe because they thought the lab leak hypothesis dangerous, either geopolitically or to the funding of their field? Yes. But that doesn’t need to be even a conscious process, let alone one somehow motivated by allegiance to a specific US politics party that to most of the rest of the planet means very little.
As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court.
Not doing something to push an advantage is not automatically de-escalation. They didn’t push Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign for similar reasons they aren’t doing it with Dianne Feinstein. The principle seems to be something along the lines of “it should be every politician’s right to decide when they have to resign because they are too old or ill”. While that isn’t escalation I also don’t see that as deescalation. political
Point one: is the judiciary independent of the executive or not? Because it’s not the government who’s prosecuting Trump, it’s the judiciary. They might feel safer doing so under a Democrat president of course but that’s not the same thing.
Civics 101. The term judiciary refers to the courts. Courts don’t prosecute anyone. Prosecutors do. Prosecutors are part of the executive.
If you care about the threat of fascism, power that’s wielded without being democratically accountable, isn’t less problematic. If you have people who are not democratically accountable using authoritarian power to eliminate their political opponents that’s problematic even if it’s not along Blue vs. Red lines.
I think you can make an argument that the Trump prosecution is justified, but I don’t think that changes the fact that it creates a precedent that moves the whole system in the direction of being more authoritarian.
I don’t like how the discourse around the possibility of a lab leak was handled, but how is that the Democrats’ fault?
They built up what’s called the Disinformation Industrial Complex. They put pressure in various ways on tech companies to censor and funded many institutions to get speech that goes against the official narrative censored as misinformation.
Without that groundwork, the WHO would not have been able to get Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak claims in 2021.
But that doesn’t need to be even a conscious process
We have the emails. “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this”
let alone one somehow motivated by allegiance to a specific US politics party
I agree that virologists were not driven by allegiance to a US political party but by their own interests and geopolitical considerations. Farrar’s self-description of not having slept enough might also account for part of why the thinking went poorly.
That doesn’t change the fact that the censorship wouldn’t have worked without the structures of the Disinformation Industrial Complex for which Democrats are responsible.
I don’t think the extent of how those structures are currently utilized means that the US is an authoritarian government. On the other hand, Lula’s attempts to use those structures to fight his political opposition might be a move toward authoritarianism.
Civics 101. The term judiciary refers to the courts. Courts don’t prosecute anyone. Prosecutors do. Prosecutors are part of the executive.
I’m not from the US so never realised that DAs could get apparently replaced with the administration. Sorry for the mistake.
They built up what’s called the Disinformation Industrial Complex. They put pressure in various ways on tech companies to censor and funded many institutions to get speech that goes against the official narrative censored as misinformation.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Let’s not forget that other nuggets of wisdom that were (not particularly successfully) suppressed included “COVID is not real” or “ivermectin cures COVID”, stuff that actively could and surely did get people killed. And many of these were explicitly manipulated for political purposes, in fact Trump was part and parcel in polarizing the issue and thus crippling the US’ first response to COVID simply because it allowed him to score easy points.
Without that groundwork, the WHO would not have been able to get Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak claims in 2021.
Twitter and Facebook made a fortune off enabling automated propaganda in the first place. This is kind of like the AI situation: we may have been better off without altogether, but then companies went and created it anyway, and at some point someone tried to recover some lost ground by forcing them to try and align their product. I don’t think the methods have been successful, if you ask me the one thing Trump was ever right about is that Twitter is editorializing. My approach though would be “just force Twitter to be transparent about its algorithms and ban using anything that personalises content”. Just give me chronological timelines and good search tools.
We have the emails. “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this”
What’s that from?
That doesn’t change the fact that the censorship wouldn’t have worked without the structures of the Disinformation Industrial Complex for which Democrats are responsible.
I honestly don’t know if Twitter/Facebook corrections here were necessarily the main factor. And anyone saying “this claim is not backed by any scientific authority/peer reviewed paper” would have been technically correct. The problem was simply whether the scientists themselves were fair; non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly. If all the experts also have competing interests, then it’s a problem, but that doesn’t magically confer domain knowledge to everyone else so they can double check their work.
Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.
Publically, AOC demanding that the Biden administration should engage in authoritarian behaviour provides very little use when she doesn’t think that Biden will actually engage in those behavior while at the same time eroding the standards. If a future Trump administration will call for ignoring court orders, you can count on Fox News to air AOC’s pronouncements that it’s an acceptable tactic.
Even when your ethical system says that sometimes it’s worthwhile to break rules because of utilitarian concerns, that doesn’t make cases where you call for rules to be broken when you don’t expect that actually happen okay. People who do find value in pushing the Overton window to allow for more authoritarian actions are rightfully seen as authoritarians.
What do you see as notable attempts at deescalation?
When Trump spoke about putting Hillary in jail for mishandling classified documents, the left talked about it as a huge norm violation but Trump didn’t actually follow through.
On the other hand, Democracts are currently hoping pursuing a legal case against Trump for mishandling classified documents with the hope of putting him in jail. Even if you believe that politicians who mishandle classified documents should be prosecuted, that’s escalation.
When it comes to feedback, a Trump presidency that follows after Trump spending some time in prison is likely more unhinged and more dangerous than one where he enters office without having been in prison before.
Building up the censorship apparatus that managed to very effectively censor the lab leak hypothesis in 2021 and also other political speech was a strong move toward authoritarian opinion control.
Three points.
Point one: is the judiciary independent of the executive or not? Because it’s not the government who’s prosecuting Trump, it’s the judiciary. They might feel safer doing so under a Democrat president of course but that’s not the same thing.
Point two: the scale and severity if crimes is different. Clinton apparently stored emails on an unproperly secured server. Trump took secret documents at home, stored them in unsecured boxes, was repeatedly nicely asked to return them, lied that he had already, and showed the documents to his friends in order to brag like some twelve years old boy particularly proud of his porn stash. I don’t think things would have reached the point of indictment if he’d been a bit more compliant when things were still in the “asking nicely” stage. But at one point, an example must be made, or we’re just saying laws don’t exist at all.
Point three: there might be a bit of a “getting Al Capone for tax evasion” thing going on admittedly because I think the real escalation that Trump is suffering retaliation for, the thing where he truly broke precedent to a ridiculous extent and that everyone rightfully doesn’t want to repeat ever again but that’s apparently hard to nail him down for is his little 6 January stunt. Messing with peaceful transition of power that way is a big no-no, and while he wasn’t literally leading the mob he clearly did enough to purposefully inflame the situation instead of defusing it. I’d bet if he didn’t do that the judiciary would be less fixated on prosecuting him.
As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court. They had a chance to strategize when Obama was still President to hold control of it but didn’t do it, Trump packed it with friendly judges at every occasion, and now despite suggestions about how to retaliate against that existing they didn’t really do anything, despite this unelected organ having a disproportionate decisional power (which honestly from outside the US looks insane to me, as is to be fair the level of reliance on them).
I don’t like how the discourse around the possibility of a lab leak was handled, but how is that the Democrats’ fault? Lab leak was dismissed already back in 2020, and it was more ridiculed than censored, mostly by scientific authorities like the WHO. The world is larger than the US. Now do I think many scientists who made those appeals were probably biased, maybe because they thought the lab leak hypothesis dangerous, either geopolitically or to the funding of their field? Yes. But that doesn’t need to be even a conscious process, let alone one somehow motivated by allegiance to a specific US politics party that to most of the rest of the planet means very little.
Not doing something to push an advantage is not automatically de-escalation. They didn’t push Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign for similar reasons they aren’t doing it with Dianne Feinstein. The principle seems to be something along the lines of “it should be every politician’s right to decide when they have to resign because they are too old or ill”. While that isn’t escalation I also don’t see that as deescalation. political
Civics 101. The term judiciary refers to the courts. Courts don’t prosecute anyone. Prosecutors do. Prosecutors are part of the executive.
If you care about the threat of fascism, power that’s wielded without being democratically accountable, isn’t less problematic. If you have people who are not democratically accountable using authoritarian power to eliminate their political opponents that’s problematic even if it’s not along Blue vs. Red lines.
I think you can make an argument that the Trump prosecution is justified, but I don’t think that changes the fact that it creates a precedent that moves the whole system in the direction of being more authoritarian.
They built up what’s called the Disinformation Industrial Complex. They put pressure in various ways on tech companies to censor and funded many institutions to get speech that goes against the official narrative censored as misinformation.
Without that groundwork, the WHO would not have been able to get Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak claims in 2021.
We have the emails. “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this”
I agree that virologists were not driven by allegiance to a US political party but by their own interests and geopolitical considerations. Farrar’s self-description of not having slept enough might also account for part of why the thinking went poorly.
That doesn’t change the fact that the censorship wouldn’t have worked without the structures of the Disinformation Industrial Complex for which Democrats are responsible.
I don’t think the extent of how those structures are currently utilized means that the US is an authoritarian government. On the other hand, Lula’s attempts to use those structures to fight his political opposition might be a move toward authoritarianism.
I’m not from the US so never realised that DAs could get apparently replaced with the administration. Sorry for the mistake.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Let’s not forget that other nuggets of wisdom that were (not particularly successfully) suppressed included “COVID is not real” or “ivermectin cures COVID”, stuff that actively could and surely did get people killed. And many of these were explicitly manipulated for political purposes, in fact Trump was part and parcel in polarizing the issue and thus crippling the US’ first response to COVID simply because it allowed him to score easy points.
Twitter and Facebook made a fortune off enabling automated propaganda in the first place. This is kind of like the AI situation: we may have been better off without altogether, but then companies went and created it anyway, and at some point someone tried to recover some lost ground by forcing them to try and align their product. I don’t think the methods have been successful, if you ask me the one thing Trump was ever right about is that Twitter is editorializing. My approach though would be “just force Twitter to be transparent about its algorithms and ban using anything that personalises content”. Just give me chronological timelines and good search tools.
What’s that from?
I honestly don’t know if Twitter/Facebook corrections here were necessarily the main factor. And anyone saying “this claim is not backed by any scientific authority/peer reviewed paper” would have been technically correct. The problem was simply whether the scientists themselves were fair; non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly. If all the experts also have competing interests, then it’s a problem, but that doesn’t magically confer domain knowledge to everyone else so they can double check their work.
Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Afterward, Farrar speaks more with Fauci and Farrar writes an email to Tedros who heads the WHO to propose how to move forward. That’s one of the bullet points from that email. https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/ gives you a lot of details about what happened in that week.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.