Bully for You
Those of you outside of the U.S. might be wondering what the heck is going on in our country; just peek at these headlines: "Conflicts over U.S. Military Interventionism, the Environment, and Immigration Dominate Public Debate;" "Massive Banks and Corporations Wield Disturbing Power;" and "The Huge Income Gap Between the 1% and the Other 99% Grows Visibly Wider." One thing I should point out is that those headlines are from U.S. newspapers printed over a century ago. The phrase "bully for you" has been attributed to that of former president Teddy Roosevelt whose meaning of the term initially meant "good for you, full speed ahead." His bully pulpit, a term he coined, seems to have now gone full circle or perhaps half-circle, and left much of the world (and our meek Congress) wondering if we may now have the more modern definition of a "bully" running the White House. But talk to his supporters and you'll find stern disagreement; the most recent Reuters poll shows that among those who voted for Trump, 88% (up from a few months ago) approve of the job he's doing and would vote for him again (by contrast, a Pew poll taken in the same month shows Trump's world approval down to 22%). Such antics and emotions are nothing new to this country, the divides exacerbated by the whims of presidents and Senators. Said TIME: If the current climate of grievance is of ancient origin, though, the
white supremacists' sense of urgency --indeed of increasing legitimacy--
seems new. Today's fringe sees itself not as a fringe but as the tip of
the spear for the incumbent President's nationalist agenda. The era of Teddy Roosevelt and the change the U.S. would then encounter during his time in office only added to the roller coaster ride that has been the history of this rather young nation, "growing pains" as some would say. But jump ahead a few decades and you have another Roosevelt saying that the Presidency is "...pre-eminently a place of moral leadership" (that would be Franklin Roosevelt, the only President to run for and serve a third & fourth term, although Trump has mentioned possibly doing away with the 2020 elections due to alleged voter fraud). So then why would the same magazine, TIME, make its cover story ask "Will the Nation Succeed Where the President Has Failed?"
Another article in the same magazine might have answered its own question: The emergence of a truly global middle class is one of history's great success stories: more than a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, literacy rates have surged, and access to education and health care is now widespread. But this vast rising tide did not lift all boats, and those left behind are not happy. The headlines have all been about reaction in the West, where globalized trade has hit manufacturing and technological changes have transformed the workplace. Jobs are being eliminated, and the world's original middle classes are shrinking. The native-born resent immigrants seeking work, and in Europe, the debt crisis plunged some countries into austerity and others into stagnation just as the surge of Middle Eastern refugees fed fears of crime, terrorism and loss of national identity...In short, nationalism is alive and well, partly because the problems that provoked it are still with us. One of their columnists, Susanna Schrobsdorff, added: Perhaps the only thing we can agree on at this painfully divisive moment in our national history is that all this anger and derision in which we're marinating isn't healthy. Not for us, not for our kids and certainly not for the country. But as a nation, we can't seem to quit. We're so primed to be mad about something every morning, it's almost disappointing when there isn't an infuriating tweet to share or a bit of our moral turf to defend waiting in our phones. Why single out the comments of TIME? Partially because a cover of the magazine now being displayed at several of President Trump's commercial properties shows a full profile of Trump and with words hailing his earlier television show, The Apprentice, as "a television smash." The cover is fake, something made up and something the magazine never printed or produced...it has asked Trump to take it down from his properties (he has so far refused).
Edward Luce, author of the recent book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, recommended that people read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, a: ...1951 classic (which) reads as even more incisive today. It charts why mass irrational movements attract people who feel they have been left by the wayside. It offers a timeless psychological study of the lure of the fanatic. Said a piece in Philosophy Now about the book: The main point Hoffer stresses in his book is that, for the ‘true believer’ (someone so committed to a cause that he or she is willing to unthinkingly die for it) ideologies are interchangeable. It is the frustrations of life which lead the believers to join a cause that gives meaning to their own existences, and the more frustrated they feel, the more attracted they are to extreme revolutionary solutions to their problems. Such frustrations can be the basis for positive social change, but usually mass movements have less beneficial effects. The message that self-sacrifice is needed for the good of a cause can often justify the most heinous of endeavors, and followers are treated as interchangeable cogs in a machine rather than as flesh-and-blood humans. Abstractions and atrocities often go hand-in-hand. Sound a bit absurd? Then ponder a review by Jackson Lears in The New York Review of Books on some of the views at the end of the Spanish-American war over a century ago: After the crushing American military victory over Spain, what were we to do with the “little brown brothers” placed under our care? Since the doctrine of consent of the governed “applies only to those who are capable of self-government,” said Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, we must continue to occupy the Philippines while we civilize the natives. We could not fly from a duty ordained by God, who “has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.” This was the exceptionalist position in its purest form. What?? I don't remember growing up with this version of history in my school days (growing up in Hawaii, I don't remember being taught that the entire archipelago of the Hawaiian islands were gained as but a small portion of, as the review claims, "an imperial land grab" at the end of that war).
One now hears terms circulating, terms such as "hate" and "toxic masculinity" and "alt-right" and "jingoism." But wait, how are we to know if all or any of this is truly the real history or the actual mood of the majority and not simply a bit of generated "fake" news. After all, the war on drugs in the U.S. has a broad and sometimes not-so-honest history, from a planned and set-up drug bust near the White House (so that then-President George H. Bush could make a speech about the "epidemic" of crack cocaine) to the recent almost-zealous reporting of heroin busts (as the progressive In These Times reported about a city in New York: In 2012, Jamestown police seized 119 bags of heroin...). I purposely cut the headline there to give you a moment to let that sink in, that 119 bags of heroin, the amount seeming rather large as if cocaine-sized bricks; here's the rest of that headline: ...which amounts to a little less than half an ounce. Wait, 119 bags of heroin came to weigh under half and ounce? (a recent federal government study gives a clearer picture of drug usage in the U.S. by age group) News and reporting in each country is generally that targeted and that audience-specific as exemplified by the terrible flooding and disruption caused by hurricane Harvey in parts of Houston and other cities in Texas, all of which has been heavily covered by the news here in the U.S. (stories less covered about the disaster are the resulting toxic gases being released into the air and water by the failing refineries). But jump across the world to parts of eastern Asia and the monsoons which occurred there in the same time period and you'll discover that floods there have already caused 10 times more deaths and about that same percentage in economic damage. Coverage of that disaster here in the U.S. is almost non-existent. Or one could take the war in the Congo. What? Haven't heard of that one, ongoing for ten years now, a civil war that has sent more people fleeing this year alone than both the wars in Syria and Iraq (the Congo is laden with minerals from "blood diamonds" to key natural elements which are needed to make smartphones and laptops).
The point is that we are now drowning in information and yet we seem to want more (the CEO of Apple reports that Siri gets daily requests from over 375 million devices), all to the delight of data drivers who can track and target our wants and curiosities to waiting advertisers (and election committees). Not worried because you delete your cookies and browser history prior to logging off each day (you do do that, don't you?). Turns out that it might not make that much of a difference, as explained by John Lanchester in The London Review of Books as he talked about the shift of advertising dollars from desktops & laptops to mobile devices: Facebook solved the problem by means of a technique called ‘onboarding’. As Martínez (author of the book Chaos Monkeys) explains it, the best way to think about this is to consider our various kinds of name and address. For example, if Bed, Bath and Beyond wants to get my attention with one of its wonderful 20 per cent off coupons, it calls out: Antonio García Martínez - 1 Clarence Place #13 - San Francisco, CA 94107...If it wants to reach me on my mobile device, my name there is:38400000-8cfo-11bd-b23e-10b96e40000d. That’s my quasi-immutable device ID, broadcast hundreds of times a day on mobile ad exchanges. On my laptop, my name is this: 07J6yJPMB9juTowar. AWXGQnGPA1MCm Thgb9wN4vLoUpg.BUUtWg.rg.FTN.0.AWU xZtUf...This is the content of the Facebook re-targeting cookie, which is used to target ads-are-you based on your mobile browsing. Though it may not be obvious, each of these keys is associated with a wealth of our personal behaviour data: every website we’ve been to, many things we’ve bought in physical stores, and every app we’ve used and what we did there...The biggest thing going on in marketing right now, what is generating tens of billions of dollars in investment and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, is how to tie these different sets of names together, and who controls the links. That’s it. Facebook already had a huge amount of information about people and their social networks and their professed likes and dislikes...After waking up to the importance of monetisation, they added to their own data a huge new store of data about offline, real-world behaviour, acquired through partnerships with big companies such as Experian, which have been monitoring consumer purchases for decades via their relationships with direct marketing firms, credit card companies, and retailers. There doesn’t seem to be a one-word description of these firms: ‘consumer credit agencies’ or something similar about sums it up. Their reach is much broader than that makes it sound, though. Experian says its data is based on more than 850 million records and claims to have information on 49.7 million UK adults living in 25.2 million households in 1.73 million postcodes. These firms know all there is to know about your name and address, your income and level of education, your relationship status, plus everywhere you’ve ever paid for anything with a card. Facebook could now put your identity together with the unique device identifier on your phone...That was crucial to Facebook’s new profitability. On mobiles, people tend to prefer the internet to apps, which corral the information they gather and don’t share it with other companies. A game app on your phone is unlikely to know anything about you except the level you’ve got to on that particular game. But because everyone in the world is on Facebook, the company knows everyone’s phone identifier. It was now able to set up an ad server delivering far better targeted mobile ads than anyone else could manage, and it did so in a more elegant and well-integrated form than anyone else had managed. So Facebook knows your phone ID and can add it to your Facebook ID. It puts that together with the rest of your online activity: not just every site you’ve ever visited, but every click you’ve ever made – the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user, whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this means that Facebook sees you, everywhere. Still not worried since you rarely, if ever, use Facebook? Then take this number...198 million. That's the number of American voters whose data got exposed when the information was sent to the cloud by Deep Root Analytics, all without password protection.
Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump. Our country has had quite the variety of personalities run the country, each with his own agenda and style. One difference today seems to be simply the amount of tracking involved. Facts and data are easily recovered and easily displayed to our waiting eyes and ears. And sometimes all of this is or isn't what we want to see or hear. We have a choice, or somewhat of a choice since buttons and cameras and links now seem ubiquitous; we can read the views we want to absorb or change channels if we don't agree. We can love and we can hate...or perhaps that is simply too strong a word. Hate makes the news but the swell of goodness, the outpouring of help during a disaster, easily overrides that. Here's one view* as expressed by state representative, Ilhan Omar: Take a good look, America; this is real, and it is not going away...We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone under-reported...we are fighting over human rights. So the solution is not compromise. The solution is to educate. It is imperative we collectively overcome and make amends with history. We must confront that our nation was founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves, that we maintain global power with the tenor of neocolonialism. Our failure to reconcile these facts and our failure to take covert action to correct mistakes further deepens the divide. Our national avoidance tactic has been to shift the focus to potential international terrorism. With constant misinformation and fearmongering, it is easy to exacerbate external threats while avoiding our internal weaknesses. Our apathy has placed immense strain on society, making it difficult to move forward...The path ahead: Step out of your comfort zone, engage with your enemies and make them your friends. When we interact with those we fear and hate, we will find commonality. Hope will be found by understanding that diversity is the essence of the American Dream and why we need each other to fulfill it.
One final thought, in a few days you can listen to the moth Podcast by Martha Ruiz Perilla...do so. Faced with helping others and risking her life (she was heading into doing medicine in the midst of violent rebel fighting in Columba during the 90s) she asked her father for advice. His response: If the good people don't stay and serve, then the bad people take over. Added Ilhan Omar: No one has the privilege of inaction. No one has the privilege of saying this is not their battle. If we are not actively fighting against regressive ideologies, we are contributing to their growth. We must be courageous. We must spread a radical vision of love and unity...It is possible, but it will take a long time -- we are trying to undo centuries of institutional and personal hatred and exclusion. This is a generational project; do not underestimate the power of human connection.
*This was part of a series of interviews, again from TIME, in a cover story titled Hate in America.
Another article in the same magazine might have answered its own question: The emergence of a truly global middle class is one of history's great success stories: more than a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, literacy rates have surged, and access to education and health care is now widespread. But this vast rising tide did not lift all boats, and those left behind are not happy. The headlines have all been about reaction in the West, where globalized trade has hit manufacturing and technological changes have transformed the workplace. Jobs are being eliminated, and the world's original middle classes are shrinking. The native-born resent immigrants seeking work, and in Europe, the debt crisis plunged some countries into austerity and others into stagnation just as the surge of Middle Eastern refugees fed fears of crime, terrorism and loss of national identity...In short, nationalism is alive and well, partly because the problems that provoked it are still with us. One of their columnists, Susanna Schrobsdorff, added: Perhaps the only thing we can agree on at this painfully divisive moment in our national history is that all this anger and derision in which we're marinating isn't healthy. Not for us, not for our kids and certainly not for the country. But as a nation, we can't seem to quit. We're so primed to be mad about something every morning, it's almost disappointing when there isn't an infuriating tweet to share or a bit of our moral turf to defend waiting in our phones. Why single out the comments of TIME? Partially because a cover of the magazine now being displayed at several of President Trump's commercial properties shows a full profile of Trump and with words hailing his earlier television show, The Apprentice, as "a television smash." The cover is fake, something made up and something the magazine never printed or produced...it has asked Trump to take it down from his properties (he has so far refused).
Edward Luce, author of the recent book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, recommended that people read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, a: ...1951 classic (which) reads as even more incisive today. It charts why mass irrational movements attract people who feel they have been left by the wayside. It offers a timeless psychological study of the lure of the fanatic. Said a piece in Philosophy Now about the book: The main point Hoffer stresses in his book is that, for the ‘true believer’ (someone so committed to a cause that he or she is willing to unthinkingly die for it) ideologies are interchangeable. It is the frustrations of life which lead the believers to join a cause that gives meaning to their own existences, and the more frustrated they feel, the more attracted they are to extreme revolutionary solutions to their problems. Such frustrations can be the basis for positive social change, but usually mass movements have less beneficial effects. The message that self-sacrifice is needed for the good of a cause can often justify the most heinous of endeavors, and followers are treated as interchangeable cogs in a machine rather than as flesh-and-blood humans. Abstractions and atrocities often go hand-in-hand. Sound a bit absurd? Then ponder a review by Jackson Lears in The New York Review of Books on some of the views at the end of the Spanish-American war over a century ago: After the crushing American military victory over Spain, what were we to do with the “little brown brothers” placed under our care? Since the doctrine of consent of the governed “applies only to those who are capable of self-government,” said Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, we must continue to occupy the Philippines while we civilize the natives. We could not fly from a duty ordained by God, who “has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.” This was the exceptionalist position in its purest form. What?? I don't remember growing up with this version of history in my school days (growing up in Hawaii, I don't remember being taught that the entire archipelago of the Hawaiian islands were gained as but a small portion of, as the review claims, "an imperial land grab" at the end of that war).
One now hears terms circulating, terms such as "hate" and "toxic masculinity" and "alt-right" and "jingoism." But wait, how are we to know if all or any of this is truly the real history or the actual mood of the majority and not simply a bit of generated "fake" news. After all, the war on drugs in the U.S. has a broad and sometimes not-so-honest history, from a planned and set-up drug bust near the White House (so that then-President George H. Bush could make a speech about the "epidemic" of crack cocaine) to the recent almost-zealous reporting of heroin busts (as the progressive In These Times reported about a city in New York: In 2012, Jamestown police seized 119 bags of heroin...). I purposely cut the headline there to give you a moment to let that sink in, that 119 bags of heroin, the amount seeming rather large as if cocaine-sized bricks; here's the rest of that headline: ...which amounts to a little less than half an ounce. Wait, 119 bags of heroin came to weigh under half and ounce? (a recent federal government study gives a clearer picture of drug usage in the U.S. by age group) News and reporting in each country is generally that targeted and that audience-specific as exemplified by the terrible flooding and disruption caused by hurricane Harvey in parts of Houston and other cities in Texas, all of which has been heavily covered by the news here in the U.S. (stories less covered about the disaster are the resulting toxic gases being released into the air and water by the failing refineries). But jump across the world to parts of eastern Asia and the monsoons which occurred there in the same time period and you'll discover that floods there have already caused 10 times more deaths and about that same percentage in economic damage. Coverage of that disaster here in the U.S. is almost non-existent. Or one could take the war in the Congo. What? Haven't heard of that one, ongoing for ten years now, a civil war that has sent more people fleeing this year alone than both the wars in Syria and Iraq (the Congo is laden with minerals from "blood diamonds" to key natural elements which are needed to make smartphones and laptops).
The point is that we are now drowning in information and yet we seem to want more (the CEO of Apple reports that Siri gets daily requests from over 375 million devices), all to the delight of data drivers who can track and target our wants and curiosities to waiting advertisers (and election committees). Not worried because you delete your cookies and browser history prior to logging off each day (you do do that, don't you?). Turns out that it might not make that much of a difference, as explained by John Lanchester in The London Review of Books as he talked about the shift of advertising dollars from desktops & laptops to mobile devices: Facebook solved the problem by means of a technique called ‘onboarding’. As Martínez (author of the book Chaos Monkeys) explains it, the best way to think about this is to consider our various kinds of name and address. For example, if Bed, Bath and Beyond wants to get my attention with one of its wonderful 20 per cent off coupons, it calls out: Antonio García Martínez - 1 Clarence Place #13 - San Francisco, CA 94107...If it wants to reach me on my mobile device, my name there is:38400000-8cfo-11bd-b23e-10b96e40000d. That’s my quasi-immutable device ID, broadcast hundreds of times a day on mobile ad exchanges. On my laptop, my name is this: 07J6yJPMB9juTowar. AWXGQnGPA1MCm Thgb9wN4vLoUpg.BUUtWg.rg.FTN.0.AWU xZtUf...This is the content of the Facebook re-targeting cookie, which is used to target ads-are-you based on your mobile browsing. Though it may not be obvious, each of these keys is associated with a wealth of our personal behaviour data: every website we’ve been to, many things we’ve bought in physical stores, and every app we’ve used and what we did there...The biggest thing going on in marketing right now, what is generating tens of billions of dollars in investment and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, is how to tie these different sets of names together, and who controls the links. That’s it. Facebook already had a huge amount of information about people and their social networks and their professed likes and dislikes...After waking up to the importance of monetisation, they added to their own data a huge new store of data about offline, real-world behaviour, acquired through partnerships with big companies such as Experian, which have been monitoring consumer purchases for decades via their relationships with direct marketing firms, credit card companies, and retailers. There doesn’t seem to be a one-word description of these firms: ‘consumer credit agencies’ or something similar about sums it up. Their reach is much broader than that makes it sound, though. Experian says its data is based on more than 850 million records and claims to have information on 49.7 million UK adults living in 25.2 million households in 1.73 million postcodes. These firms know all there is to know about your name and address, your income and level of education, your relationship status, plus everywhere you’ve ever paid for anything with a card. Facebook could now put your identity together with the unique device identifier on your phone...That was crucial to Facebook’s new profitability. On mobiles, people tend to prefer the internet to apps, which corral the information they gather and don’t share it with other companies. A game app on your phone is unlikely to know anything about you except the level you’ve got to on that particular game. But because everyone in the world is on Facebook, the company knows everyone’s phone identifier. It was now able to set up an ad server delivering far better targeted mobile ads than anyone else could manage, and it did so in a more elegant and well-integrated form than anyone else had managed. So Facebook knows your phone ID and can add it to your Facebook ID. It puts that together with the rest of your online activity: not just every site you’ve ever visited, but every click you’ve ever made – the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user, whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this means that Facebook sees you, everywhere. Still not worried since you rarely, if ever, use Facebook? Then take this number...198 million. That's the number of American voters whose data got exposed when the information was sent to the cloud by Deep Root Analytics, all without password protection.
Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump. Our country has had quite the variety of personalities run the country, each with his own agenda and style. One difference today seems to be simply the amount of tracking involved. Facts and data are easily recovered and easily displayed to our waiting eyes and ears. And sometimes all of this is or isn't what we want to see or hear. We have a choice, or somewhat of a choice since buttons and cameras and links now seem ubiquitous; we can read the views we want to absorb or change channels if we don't agree. We can love and we can hate...or perhaps that is simply too strong a word. Hate makes the news but the swell of goodness, the outpouring of help during a disaster, easily overrides that. Here's one view* as expressed by state representative, Ilhan Omar: Take a good look, America; this is real, and it is not going away...We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone under-reported...we are fighting over human rights. So the solution is not compromise. The solution is to educate. It is imperative we collectively overcome and make amends with history. We must confront that our nation was founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves, that we maintain global power with the tenor of neocolonialism. Our failure to reconcile these facts and our failure to take covert action to correct mistakes further deepens the divide. Our national avoidance tactic has been to shift the focus to potential international terrorism. With constant misinformation and fearmongering, it is easy to exacerbate external threats while avoiding our internal weaknesses. Our apathy has placed immense strain on society, making it difficult to move forward...The path ahead: Step out of your comfort zone, engage with your enemies and make them your friends. When we interact with those we fear and hate, we will find commonality. Hope will be found by understanding that diversity is the essence of the American Dream and why we need each other to fulfill it.
One final thought, in a few days you can listen to the moth Podcast by Martha Ruiz Perilla...do so. Faced with helping others and risking her life (she was heading into doing medicine in the midst of violent rebel fighting in Columba during the 90s) she asked her father for advice. His response: If the good people don't stay and serve, then the bad people take over. Added Ilhan Omar: No one has the privilege of inaction. No one has the privilege of saying this is not their battle. If we are not actively fighting against regressive ideologies, we are contributing to their growth. We must be courageous. We must spread a radical vision of love and unity...It is possible, but it will take a long time -- we are trying to undo centuries of institutional and personal hatred and exclusion. This is a generational project; do not underestimate the power of human connection.
*This was part of a series of interviews, again from TIME, in a cover story titled Hate in America.
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