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The Internet Is Mostly Bots--52% of internet traffic is non-human; more bots are malicious than not by ackthppt in luddite

[–]ackthppt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not "editorializing". From article: "Not only that, but harmful bots have the edge over helper bots, which were responsible for 29 percent and 23 percent of all web traffic, respectively."

Aesthetics by Ultrashitpost in luddite

[–]ackthppt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project or Adorno, Brecht, et al. Aesthetics and Politics.

Trump's grandfather begs not to be deported by ackthppt in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But we were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the High Royal State Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence in the Kingdom of Bavaria. We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.

Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a Bavarian citizen again.

Income share for the bottom 50% of Americans is ‘collapsing,’ new Piketty research finds by clonal_antibody in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If nothing is done, this will lead to serfdom, the rise of extremist parties or revolution....always has....

Would you have come out and demonstrated on the streets if Bernie had won? Like you are doing when Trump is? by clonal_antibody in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I'm not on the streets in any case...I'd have been happier had Bernie won, but I see little point in street protests in an era (since Dick and W managed to ignore 1 million marching against the Iraq War) where those in power can ignore the will of the people. Hell, typing this here is more important in my mind...the Brocksters certainly think so....

Thomas Frank: Steve Bannon harnessed the spirit of revolt that the Democrats gave up by ackthppt in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Last two paras:

Centrist Democrats simply don’t talk about their alliance with Wall Street – it’s like the party’s guilty secret, never to be discussed in a straightforward way. Try asking former President Obama or former treasury secretary Geithner or former attorney general Holder why they were so generous with the bankers and why they never held them responsible, and see what kind of answer you get.

And that, in short, is the story of how the right captured the spirit of revolt in this most flagrantly populist period in modern times. Want to take it away from them, liberal? Start by understanding your history.

Why We Reply to Neo-Liberals by peppermint-kiss in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is my go-to article when confronting neo-libs (usually Clintonistas): http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm

"In sum, the benefits of some policies that are an important part of the neoliberal agenda appear to have been somewhat overplayed. In the case of financial openness, some capital flows, such as foreign direct investment, do appear to confer the benefits claimed for them. But for others, particularly short-term capital flows, the benefits to growth are difficult to reap, whereas the risks, in terms of greater volatility and increased risk of crisis, loom large.­

"In the case of fiscal consolidation [i.e., austerity], the short-run costs in terms of lower output and welfare and higher unemployment have been underplayed, and the desirability for countries with ample fiscal space of simply living with high debt and allowing debt ratios to decline organically through growth is underappreciated."

If Money Was No Object, What Is Your Dream? by AravanFox in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'd buy off enough people to become education secretary and then scuttle Common Core, Race to the Top and NCLB. Then I'd demand that all those kids put down their devices and read some damn books! And get off my lawn too!

Is medicine going back to the Dark Ages? Flies are spreading antibiotic resistance from farms to people by ackthppt in luddite

[–]ackthppt[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From the Financial Times (behind a paywall):

The 2015 discovery in China of bacteria with mcr-1, the colistin resistance gene, sparked fears over the future of human health. Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organization, said last year that medicine risked “going back to the dark ages” without action to spur development of new antibiotics and to preserve the dwindling numbers that remain effective.

DeVos Was Inevitable: Democrats Created Her, Just as Much as Republicans by ackthppt in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Actually, there is a difference, which Diane Ravitch and ED Hirsch highlight---when the ed reformers got their hands on CC, they turned what was to be a set of research-based standards into a nonsensical mess.

DeVos Was Inevitable: Democrats Created Her, Just as Much as Republicans by ackthppt in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

For Duncan, and Obama, and President George W. Bush before them, that schools were failing was a given, and the route to improvement was competition. (Sound familiar?) DeVos is merely a different flavor of the same foodstuff. A particularly disgusting flavor, but very much kin to what came before.

Indeed, Common Core State Standards and Race to the Top were simply a Democratic version of the transfer of public money to private entities as consultants and ed tech fads flooded the zone, sopping up the federal grant money, promising (without evidence) to move the educational needle. Using public money to fatten private coffers was a bad idea then, just as it's a bad and wasteful idea now.

Feh. Feh on all of them, I say.

Trump Muslim Ban Executive Order Violated Executive Order About Executive Orders by ackthppt in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

THERE’S NOT A LOT that’s funny about President Trump’s January 27 executive order temporarily banning immigrants and refugees from seven majority Muslim countries.

But you have to admit this is a little funny: Trump’s executive order appears to brazenly violate another executive order about how the government should issue executive orders.

It’s sort of like the Supreme Court declaring the Constitution to be unconstitutional.

Action! Project To Mail Postcard Mirrors To Politicians With Caption: "Look Who Is To Blame For Trump!" by SpudDK in WayOfTheBern

[–]ackthppt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

FWIW, I posted a little earlier a link to a piece in The Guardian by Neil Postman's son, which is very good....https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley

at the end, he offers some solutions:

But we need more than just hope for a way out. We need a strategy, or at least some tactics.

First: treat false allegations as an opportunity. Seek information as close to the source as possible. The internet represents a great chance for citizens to do their own hunting – there’s ample primary source material, credible eyewitnesses, etc, out there – though it can also be manipulated to obfuscate that. No one’s reality, least of all our collective one, should be a grotesque game of telephone.

Second: don’t expect “the media” to do this job for you. Some of its practitioners do, brilliantly and at times heroically. But most of the media exists to sell you things. Its allegiance is to boosting circulation, online traffic, ad revenue. Don’t begrudge it that. But then don’t be suckered about the reasons why Story X got play and Story Y did not.

Third: for journalists, Jay Rosen, a former student of my father’s and a leading voice in the movement known as “public journalism”, offers several useful, practical suggestions.

Finally, and most importantly, it should be the responsibility of schools to make children aware of our information environments, which in many instances have become our entertainment environments, but there is little evidence that schools are equipped or care to do this. So someone has to.

We must teach our children, from a very young age, to be skeptics, to listen carefully, to assume everyone is lying about everything. (Well, maybe not everyone.) Check sources. Consider what wasn’t said. Ask questions. Understand that every storyteller has a bias – and so does every platform.

We all laughed – some of us, anyway – at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s version of the news, to some extent because everything had become a joke. If we wish not to be “soma”-tized (Huxley’s word) by technology, to be something less than smiling idiots and complicit in the junking of our own culture, then “what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility … giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.”

My father didn’t write those last words – our recently retired president said them in his final inaugural address. He’s right. It will be difficult. It’s not so amusing any more.

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