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Tag: politics

How to defang machine enhanced human trolls

Over at MoonofAlabama.org, the publisher b faces an ongoing battle with ever more sophisticated professional posters. These posters appear to be part of the (dis)information services of one government or another (US DoD, MI5 among others have openly advertised such vacancies over at least the last two years.

The rules over at MoA are fairly strict. Simple name calling or out and out falsehood or MSM appeals to authority (i.e. NY Times) won’t fly there. So visiting would-be trolls are always experimenting with new techniques.

The latest tactic is early thread jacking. There’s a character by the name of Paul who always posts an anti-Russia or anti-Putin diatribe, whatever the post subject. Defanging his venom always grabs the attention of a few of the keenest mind and any thread quickly goes off track. If the deliberate derailing wasn’t bad enough, “Paul” now posts first on a regular basis, killing every thread dead in his tracks. Whoever is posting as Paul is clearly using software to get new post alerts.

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Letter to a friend about the environment, leadership

The funny thing about those people favouring fracking and who don’t care about the plastic pollution in the oceans or the disappearing potable water is that the environment affects us all. More and more people die from cancer from our toxic environment and food. If we don’t wake up as a species, we will literally destroy our own habitat. There will be very little worth fighting over.

And none of it has to be this way if we were to reshape capitalism to make preservation and improvement of the environment our highest goal. Nothing to prevent us making health care and education a secondary priority. Particularly the second is very environmentally friendly. Young people reading books and improving their minds has very little carbon effect.

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Did Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump Campaign Collude with Vladimir Putin

There’s a great deal of noise right now about Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia and particularly a couple of emails his son Donald Trump Jr.’s interaction with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Those who should know better have suggested that Russia and its president Vladimir Putin were directly seeking to interfere with the US Presidential election. Remedies include Trump’s impeachment and some kind of war with Russia. This viewpoint strikes me as both highly naive not to mention deeply hypocritical.

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Ai Weiwei Never Sorry – Assange’s Chinese Shadow

Imagine being a world famous artist. Imagine designing national monuments. Imagine thinking that you are invulnerable to repression. Imagine speaking out against human rights abuses at your country’s Olympics (Olympics for which you designed stadiums). Imagine being warned to shut your fat trap. Imagine you keep talking. Imagine that a few months later they come to arrest you and lock you away for 81 days. Imagine you come back with the strict warning that if you continue to make an international media spectacle damaging to the regime which is buttering your bread, you will go away not for three months but forever.

If your imagination is rich, you will have just lived the three years of artist Ai Weiwei’s life who for many years had a blessed position as Lear’s fool in Beijing. His nonsense answers and ironic commentary on the regime probably even amused the higher party bosses. A useful fool.

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Marfa Girl review: Larry Clark’s bad kids visit the Mexican border

Larry Clark likes to make movies which shock. Particularly about teenagers. They fuck and swear and sometimes kill (Bully). On the other hand, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is on the reading list in most English language high schools around the world. Nothing Larry Clark has done can outdo the horror of those kids on an island.

Marfa Girl Adam Mediano Inez Mercedes Maxwell
Marfa Girl Adam Mediano with lovely Inez Mercedes Maxwell

Homo sapiens are a brutal and savage species, probably responsible for the elimination of Neanderthal man and since then we have sent thousands of species into extinction, from mammoths, to bison, to the dodo. If there’s a bad animal around, we’re it.

Clark like Golding is busy with representing the what is, ripping off of your rose-coloured glasses and then stomping on them to boot. Yes, your girlfriend in high school betrayed you. Deliberately. And your son’s girlfriend is probably betraying him now too. It’s just what people do. Your wife probably cheated on you at least once or twice too. Go and read Jane Goodall’s study of chimpanzees: how they mate and how they stalk their neighbours and kill.

Anyway back to Marfa Girl: it’s the same unlikeable group of teenagers smoking up and screwing as we’ve seen in other Clark movies. This time it’s on the US/Mexican border. There are some very dislikable adult border patrol officers and some slightly less dislikable promiscuous kids. It’s a film about ideas and loyalties. There are some extended Socratian dialogues between kids and cops, cops and cops.

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