#not trying to start a conspiracy this is a real problem with popular conception of therapy

[1000-silverfish-in-a-hoodie]

It’s really cool too see how Fear of Flying shows goal oriented therapy. I feel like a lot of modern depictions of therapy focus on long term therapy without a treatment plan, which usually just leads to you talking too a therapist who has incentive to treat you

[kick-a-long]

Hi I'm the previous anon and I have to say - everything you added was spot on!

I want to say something extra that has been bothering me for a long time.

I can't help but feel like there are specific (major) traits of antisemitism that always appear in every other form of bigotry. As a person of many different minority groups, I am not saying antisemitism is worst than all the other forms of hatred or downplaying the rest at all. But I see these traits that I feel like are inherently antisemitic appear everywhere else and I can't stop thinking "this shows bigotry starts and stops with jew hate"?

For example, I'm from country A (not saying where for personal reasons). In this country, (mainly) Arab Christians have moved here due to religious persecution. They are a very small group and have become wealthy due to 1) transferring of wealth or 2) they used their intelligence to make businesses. Due to assimilation into whiteness, they have become "white people" as well. As a result they are victims of the "they control the country and are behind everything bad" narrative. I would argue that "they control the world" is a uniquely antisemitic belief and it goes to show how people default to antisemitism to destroy any group. Additionally, I would argue antisemitism is truly people's map to the world and they use it to navigate. Moreover, Indians in Africa had also been accused of doing the same "controlling". Now there is a lot to be said about assimilation and doing anything for power and minorities being pit against each other for division but regardless of the nuance, these negative emotions (anger, frustration, sadness, etc) tend to lead back to antisemitism? Indians in Tanzania experienced random acts of mob violence in the 1920s/30s similar to pogroms (important to note: these were not common but their existence still highlights something).

Human beings love an easy, concrete group to hate and project onto hence the reason why the left loves nazis so much (they are their easy punching bags). As a result, the hatred stems from an antisemitic belief and morphs into anti- whatever the "nuisance" is, no matter how justifiable the hatred is.

Like when people hate immigrants and chant "they will not replace us and take our jobs", am I not supposed to think everything is a big antisemitic conspiracy?

!!!this this this^^^^ I agree so much!!!

antisemitism is older than racism, literally. it was around before the concepts of race or nationhood. it was around when feudalism and slave labor was the main economic system. jews were blamed for being poor and stupid just as often as for being smart and rich. jews have always been a convenient 'other' because we have always had to identify as a diasporic group from somewhere else with different customs based on living somewhere else.

antisemitism is in most other forms of bigotry imo because it's the prototype for it, since the roman empire and the destruction of the second temple. probably before.

I think it's pretty accurate to point to aspects of it in other bigotry because it's where hateful troupes were tested and popularized for thousands of years. what's wild is that people don't even realize what antisemitism does or how it's useful to maintain power structures. it's the most time tested way to scapegoat and distract from real problems and unite against real power structures that fuck up people's lives. you see antisemitism spike around economic crisis or huge cultural swings from liberal to traditional, but you never see the blame fall on changing the laws that caused the economy to crash or try to build bridges between liberal and traditional aspects of society. you just have the scapegoat of jews, or minority populations, or homosexuals, or X, or Y... but eventually the story is always explained with jews as architects of it.

conservative states could look at the successes of LGBTQ entertainers from those states and celebrate how their tradition bore that success (true or false) but instead they reject it. southern states could celebrate the black civil rights leaders from there and the parts of their culture that generated that rebelliousness (true or false) but they reject it. you can see it all over. jews are the only ones who are adopted as "from here" when they succeed and "jewish cabal" when the tide changes. it's the conditional oppression and conditional acceptance that alienates us from all other groups.

all bigotry is based on antisemitism but antisemitism is different than all other bigotry, imo.

[duhragonball]

‘21

Amidst all the popular hype for seeing the end of 2020, it didn’t hit me until about lunchtime what the real highlight is that I’ve been waiting for: For the first time since 1999, the year finally ends in “numberty-number” again.    It low-key irritated me that we had to call it “two thousand three” and I was relieved when “twenty-thirteen” caught on, but it still wasn’t right because it was too short, and now we’re back in the sweet spot, and I should be safely dead by 2100, so that’s one less thing I gotta deal with.

Really, even “numberty hundred” rings true to me.    “Nineteen hundred” sounds like a year.    “Twenty-one-oh-six” sounds like a futur-y year, which is even cooler.   So did “Two thousand five”, until I was actually living in it, and it sounds even worse now that it was a long time ago and adults will talk about their childhood happening in that year.    Daniel Witwicky would be old enough to get married and grow a fancier beard than me.    That’s nuts.    My point is that, honestly, it’s the year 3000-3019 that I have to worry about, so if I ever decide to go vampire, those will be the years I hide in the ocean or force society to reset the calendar, whichever’s easier.  

I spent New Year’s Eve finishing Superliminal, which I bought on Steam after I watched Vegeta play it on YouTube.  It has a similar look and feel to the Stanley Parable, so if you liked one you’d probably enjoy the other, although Superliminal has a different theme.  I kept hoping I’d find some secret passage that I wasn’t supposed to take, and a narrator would scold me for finding the “Chickenbutt Ending”, but it doesn’t work that way.    Superliminal’s all about puzzles and awesome visuals, but it does have the same soothing design aesthetics as TSP.   Honestly, I enjoyed just wandering around in Stanley’s office, and Superliminal does the same thing with a hotel and several other settings.   It’s nice.

This got me thinking about how I kind of did everything there was to do in The Stanley Parable, and I sort of wished they would add new stuff to the game, but I’m not sure there would be much point to that.    I could play the older version, but it presents the same message, just with different assets.   The Boss’s Office would look different, but it’d be the same game.   And this got me thinking about various “secret chapters” in pop culture.  Secrets behind the cut.

I first heard about this idea in the 2000′s, when fans invented this notion that there was a secret chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.    I read a website that tried to explain the concept, and of course it lauded J.K. Rowling with all this gushing praise for working an Easter egg into the book, a literary work of “well, magic.”  

That pretty well sums up my distaste for Harry Potter, by the way.    These days, JKR has thoroughly crapped all over her reputation and legacy, but in the 2000′s it felt like half the planet was in a mad rush to canonize her as a writing goddess, to the point where fans were congratulating her for writing secret chapters that didn’t actually exist.   The idea was based on lore from the books about Neville Longbottom’s parents.    They were patients in a mental hospital, and he’d go to visit them, and they would give him bubble gum wrappers, intended to demonstrate how far remove they’ve become from reality.   The secret chapter lies in those wrappers, which all read “Droobles Best Blowing Gum” or some such.    What if Neville’s parents were only pretending to be mentally ill, so as to throw off their enemies?   Naturally, they would want to stay in contact with their son, so the bubble gum wrappers would have to contain coded messages.    Said code involves unscrambling the letters on the wrappers to make new words, like “goblin” or “sword” or “Muggle” or “Dumbledore”.    The problem is that you can also use it to make other words like “booger” or “drool” or “booobbiess.”   Play with it enough, and you can make the code say anything you want it to say, which means it’s no code at all.   

But the idea was that the not-yet-published sixth HP book would reveal all of this gum wrapper nonsense, and Neville would decode the messages and discover all of his parents’ super-cool adventures.   I’m not sure why we needed a secret chapter if Book 6 was going to explain all of this anyway in several not-secret chapters, but that was the whole point.   Fans didn’t have Book 6 yet, and they were so desperate to read it that they started trying to extrapolate what would happen next based on “clues” from the previous five.    That’s like trying to figure out what Majin Buu looks like by watching the Androids Saga.   I guess some wiseguy would have guessed that he’d resemble #19, but that’d just be blind luck.  

And when you get down to it, this whole secret chapter business is really just a conspiracy.   This is literally how Qanon works.   Some anonymous jackass posted vague “hints” on an imageboard, and people went goofy trying to interpret them and figure out what would happen in the future.   They call it “research” because they spend a ton of time on this, but there’s no basis to any of it.    It took me a few minutes to figure out that you can spell “Muggle” with the words in “Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum”, but that’s not research and it doesn’t prove anything.   But all these guys keep looking for “Hilary Clinton goes to jail next week” and lo and behold that’s all they ever find.   

In the same vein, the gum wrapper thing was really a complaint disguised as a conspiracy, disguised as a “magical secret chapter”.   At least a few fans wanted to see more Neville in their Harry Potter books, they wanted Neville’s parents, or someone like them, to have cool spy adventures or whatever else.   The point is, they clearly weren’t getting what they wanted out of the printed works, but they didn’t want to turn against their Dear Beloved Author, so they started casting about for an alternative reality, one where J.K. Rowling wrote a cooler story and hid it in the pages of the one that actually went to press.    So instead of just saying “Hey, Order of the Phoenix was kind of a letdown, I hope there’s more ninjas in the next book,” they said “Rowling is a genius because I wanted ninjas and she’s definitely going to give them to me, I have the gum wrappers to prove it.”

The same thing happened all over again when the BBC Sherlock show took a turn for the nonsensical.    I don’t know from BBC Sherlock, but I watched the fascinating video critique by Hbomberguy, and it sounds like the show did tons of plot twists until it stopped making sense altogether in the fourth season.    If you skip to 1:09:00 in the video, you’ll hear about fan theories that suggested that season four was supposed to be crappy, as part of a secret meta-narrative plan that would be paid off in a secret, unannounced episode that would not only explain everything, but retroactively justify the crappy episodes that came before.    But it’s been a few years and it never came to pass, so I think we can call this myth busted. 

Most recently, I think we’ve all seen a lot of talk about the final season of Supernatural, where I guess Destiel sort of became canon but only one guy does the love confession and the other doesn’t respond.   But I guess he does say “I love you too”  in the Spanish dub, which means the English language version was edited for whatever reason.    It’s not exactly a secret episode, but the implication is that there’s more to this than what made it to the screen.    So the questions turn to what the screenplay said, what the writers and actors wanted to do, etc. etc.    My general impression is that SPN fans are a bit more used to crushing disappointment, so they’re not quite as delusional about this show being unquestionable genius, like Sherlock and Harry Potter.     Maybe this is an Anglophile thing?   Like, if you suck at something with a British accent, people will accept it more unconditionally?   

I had seen something on Twitter about how there should have been a secret Seinfeld episode in the 90′s.    Someone suggested it at the time, they tape a whole episode, then wait until 2020 to air it, because by then it would be worth a fortune.    But they didn’t do it, because it costs a lot of money to make a TV episode, and if you don’t air the show right away, you aren’t making that money back any time soon.    Yeah, you might recoup a fortune someday, but Seinfeld was making a ton of money then.    It exposes the fannish nature of the idea.    A fan would love to discover a cool secret chapter, but a content creator isn’t necessarily keen on making a cool thing and then hiding it where few people would find it.  

I thought about doing this myself recently.   Maybe Supernatural gave me the bug, but I thought “I’m writing this big-ass story, so what if I wrote me a secret chapter for it?   Wouldn’t that be cool?”     But no, it wouldn’t be cool, because it’d be the same work as writing a regular chapter, and the same stress I feel when I hold off on publishing it.    Except I’d just never publish it, I’d put it in some secret hole on the internet and hope that some superfan who might not even exist can decode whatever clues I leave.  

I mean, it’d be awesome if it got discovered and everyone loved it.    “Hey, I found this hidden chapter!   Mike’s done it again!”   And I could bask in the glory.   But what if no one finds it?  Then I just wasted my time, right?   I want people to read my work.   My monkey brain needs the sweet, sweet validation of those kudos and comments, folks.   Once I realized that, I understood why no one else would want to do a secret chapter either.    Easter eggs are one thing, but the bigger bonus features they put on DVDs were pretty easy to find, and with good reason.

I think that’s what made the Stanley Parable so appealing to play, because it teases you with the idea that you can “break” the game and find some extra content that you weren’t supposed to see, but as you go exploring all those hidden areas, it gradually becomes clear that this is just part of the game; you were meant to find all these things, and that’s why they were put here.      It’s hidden, but he secret aspect of it is just pretend.   

I suppose that what I like about games like TSP and Superliminal is the illusion of secrets more than the secrets themselves.    I like roaming through the hallways, having no idea what I might find ahead.    I kind of wish I could open all the doors, and not just the ones the game designers put stuff behind, but the reality is that there’s nothing on the other side.    I used a cheat code once  to explore the unused doors in TSP and it’s just a bright white field on the other side.   Interesting to look at, but not much of a reveal.   Honestly, the doors themselves are more appealing than anything that could lay behind them.  

And that’s probably what makes secrets so fun.   They could be almost anything, but once you open the present, the number of possibilities drops to one.   If they had ever made that Secret BBC Sherlock Episode, I doubt it would have lived up to expectations, but fans could amuse themselves by imagining what could have been in it.    In the end, though, things usually don’t justify the hype.  For every Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, there’s a Gobbledygooker debut at Survivor Series 1990.   It’s impossible to manufacture a secret with a guaranteed payoff.   

[altscifi]

Just When You Thought it Was Over: Fighting Back Against Bullying and Continued Harassment Across Social Media (on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Tumblr)

This story is worth telling because it just keeps getting better.

And by better, the meaning is "worse".

You might want to catch up on the 10 Everyday Information Warfare Tactics You've Already Fallen For - and the case of the AltSciFi zine project (the number has grown to 15 tactics, with examples illustrating how they're used).

Here's a timeline of the past year or so:

Our Tumblr blog reaches ~1,500 subscribers (unlike AltSciFi Twitter, the Tumblr follower count is not curated, so many followers are probably bots). The AltSciFi Tumblr blog has several hundred posts accumulated over at least four years.

A prototype of the AltSciFi gallery/store site is posted to GitHub. Four out of 15 pages have working PayPal links, but the site is obviously not complete. Hint: it's on GitHub -- a site for programming and web development, not e-commerce; 11 pages have no links at all.

The attack begins on Twitter. An artist finds the GitHub site. The artist (we'll call her "MiraKillian") does not contact AltSciFi, but instead creates a Twitter slander/libel attack about how AltSciFi is "stealing art". This attack spreads across social media. Many artists on Twitter use copyright-trolling this way to earn "clout". In this case, MiraKillian is a member of a gang called "The (Twitter) Artist Community" who obsessively Like and Retweet each other's posts to get more magical "clout". Ironically, the Like/Retweet game rewards the best narcisssists and biggest bullies who rise to become "Influencers", some of whom act like megalomanaical miniature Harvey Weinsteins lording their imaginary status over less-popular followers who beg for "signal boosts", prostrating themselves to win the Influencers' favour.

AltSciFi is accused of "promoting" the unfinished site via Tumblr. The Tumblr blog's homepage is the only one that links back to the Github site, since that page was used for testing Tumblr's layout. The Github pages that have PayPal links aren't connected anywhere on the homepage at all -- meaning that no one could find them in any case. (And in case you've ever tried to sell anything via social media, it's a complete waste of time unless you have an extremely specific niche, or ten of thousands of followers. AltSciFi had neither of those, since we haven't publicly marketed, promoted, or launched the zine yet.)

The slander/libel attack reaches GitHub. One sci-fi makeup artist whose work was posted to the AltSciFi Github test site submitted a mostly-false DMCA takedown notice. GitHub never investigates, but rather automatically posts all DMCA takedown notices. This creates the illusion of "guilt" -- but also puts the makeup artist in legal jeopardy for libel based on her own gullibility.

A few months later, MiraKillian's name appears above the title of a cyberpunk webcomic created by a popular artist (we'll call her "Miirai") who has been publicly scammed quite recently. Miirai has built a public persona around being shy and trusting, which makes her the perfect target for yet another scam. This time, MiraKillian has taken over drawing Miira's webcomic along with one other artist, while Miirai herself begs her followers on social media for money to "support" the comic due to repetitive-stress injuries (art is hard work). That is a well-known tactic called a "sympathy scam".

The slander/libel attack reaches Reddit. Nona goes on Reddit and creates a topic to ask, "would you raise funds to help Miirai get proper medical attention for her injuries?" One of Miirai's new "team" appears and lies that Miirai is still creating art for the cyberpunk webcomic herself, which contradicts what she wrote on recent entries of her own blog about being disabled due to her injuries.

The slander/libel attack poisons a Reddit community. A day later, Miirai herself shows up and defends MiraKillian, making up a conspiracy theory about how a fake Patreon account claimed to be her -- therefore it must have secretly been AltSciFi! And the idea about her being scammed is "fake news"! (Note: a key tactic in any scam, obviously, is to gain the confidence and complicity of a vulnerable person.)

The slander/libel attack poisons a subreddit's moderators. The subreddit in which this conversation takes place starts arbitrarily deleting Nona's posts about the topic. Nona quickly narrows down exactly which moderator was likely the culprit based on who was active on Reddit when the most recent post was taken down, and asks a different moderator to deal with it.

Instead of disciplining the culprit, the moderator starts bullshitting, trying to make the problem about Nona instead. Nona contacted the moderator using a relatively new account to create distance from the attackers who are on Reddit. The moderator used that as an excuse, saying "creating alt accounts and posting about the same thing repeatedly is 'suspicious'." The mod also lied that adding links to further information about the incident was "spamming", and intentionally misinterpreted Reddit's rules (do not post the same comment repeatedly) to mean, "do not post about similar topics more than once".

The Reddit admins do nothing. Nona messages the Reddit admins. A week passes. No response.

Note: on that same subreddit, Nona previously posted a topic about the zine, and a well-known copyright troll appeared, spamming the comments section. After Nona reported the troll's comments, Nona was banned for "spamming the moderators". So Nona wrote a blog entry about it, and two years later, another artist commented on the blog that they were dealing with the same idiot. It's been _two years_ and the moderators of that subreddit are still allowing the troll to use their sub as his personal toilet for trolling. So much for "just ignore the trolls."

So you can see that as this story unfolds, it shows how much of a sham the idea of "free speech" really is on social media. Tribalism by a small, aggressive group of motivated (and mostly illiterate) bullies (the "Artist Community" on Twitter, who are actually just a few hundred idiots who are heavy Twitter users) spreads into an internet-wide disinformation campaign.

TL;DR The fallacy of "free speech" on the modern internet is a question of what is deleted or people who are bullied into silence. You can't know what's missing if you never see it in the first place.

Sounds like the perfect starting point for a dystopian sci-fi story, doesn't it?

The AltSciFi project is now fully dedicated to the fight against misinformation, disinformation, internet bullying and copyright trolling. The AltSciFi concept is only the beginning. We are here especially to support members of maginalised communities online (nonwhite, women, LGBT as well as non-neurotypical and older users). A safe and empowering internet for marginalised users creates a better internet for everyone.

If you want more information about ongoing and upcoming efforts to help independent artists and fans like you to create a better internet, send a DM -- or email altscifi at tutanota dot com.

P.S. Keep fighting for net neutrality. If we stop fighting, copyright trolling will become multinational corporate law, and the open web will effectively cease to exist. In other words, welcome to a real cyberpunk dystopia. The only way to stop that from happening is to create a better future for ourselves, since no one else will do it for us.

[aion-rsa]

Dr. DisRespect’s Studio Seems Like the Last Thing Gaming Needs Right Now

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

An otherwise slow period for gaming (or at least new video game releases) was recently interrupted by reports that controversial streamer Dr. DisRespect may be helping to start a new video game studio that will focus on influencer-driven/supported projects.

Much of what we know about this story at the moment comes from this job posting on Dr. DisRespect’s website that reveals the streamer is looking for a “Gaming Studio Head.” Described as a “life-changing opportunity,” the job listing says that “Dr. DisRespect in partnership with BoomTV” is looking for someone to lead a studio that “plans to forge a partnership with a select list of mega influencers and then work closely with them to launch their dream gaming title.” The listing claims those titles will “either be incubated and developed OR partner/co-develop with existing indie game developers and launched as mega titles.”

The responsibilities/experience sections of the listing are about what you’d expect for such a position, but it certainly feels noteworthy that this listing emphasizes working with influencers in a way that similar job listings typically do not. For instance, one of the job’s responsibilities involves working “with the marketing team to have a go-to market strategy including influencer marketing.” The most noteworthy line, though, might be this note that the studio head will be asked to “work within a fast-paced environment spearheading design, art, core gaming loops, meta, viral and retention loops and iterate monetization, go to market, integrated esports and influencer marketing.”

The truth of the matter is that there is a lot we don’t know about this studio at the moment. For that matter, it’s entirely possible that nothing will come of this and “that time Dr. DisRespect thought about starting a video game studio” will just be a piece of trivia shared by the streamer’s fans. You also can’t overlook the obvious possibility that this studio could eventually release games that are worth playing. Stranger things have happened.

However, based on what we know about this studio’s mission and how the core components of this concept fit into the state of the modern video game development industry, it certainly seems like this has the potential to be a very bad idea.

First off, it must be said that Dr. DisRespect (real name Herschel “Guy” Beahm) has experience in the video game industry. Along with obviously being an incredibly popular video game streamer who rose to fame by developing an almost “pro wrestling-like” persona, Beahm previously worked for Call of Duty developer Sledgehammer Games and even helped design many of the multiplayer maps for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. More recently, he helped design a map for the competitive third-person shooter, Rogue Company. Furthermore, Beahm has previously shared video game concepts he’s thought of in the past, including one for a kind of vertical battle royale title that’s partially based on his considerable experience streaming games from that genre.

However, you may better know Dr. DisRespect for the various controversies he’s been involved in over the years that include accusations of racism and using his platform to spread Covid-19 conspiracy theories. While it’s still not clear why Dr. DisRespect was permanently banned from Twitch last year, he was previously suspended from the platform for live streaming from a men’s restroom at E3 2019.

It is impossible to ignore the ways that Dr. DisRespect’s toxically masculine character and “Un-pc” attitude/actions feel like a kind of unintentional parody of the personas and attitudes that contributed to the dangerous cultures of harassment and abuse that have impacted employees at major studios like Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Riot Games. At a time when a recent Bloomberg report suggests that some of Activision Blizzard’s biggest culture problems can be attributed to high-ranking members adopting rock star personalities and using their positions to fuel their egos at the expense of people just trying to do their jobs, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to use gaming’s embodiment of that very personality as the mascot for a studio. If it does make sense to those involved, then that may tell you quite a bit about what the studio is hoping to achieve and who they’re hoping to appeal to.

Even if you believe that Dr. DisRespect’s persona is an “act” (which is always shaky ground to stand on given how committed to the bit some “performers” seem to be), then there’s still the matter of whether or not Dr. DisRespect is in this position because of some unique vision and incredible structural ideas or whether it’s because he’s able to use his fame, wealth, and “brand” to justify such an endeavor.

We’re currently watching Amazon and Google struggle to make an impact in the game development industry largely because they too seemed to believe they could use their wealth and power to fill studios with industry veterans and hungry upstarts who would also focus on those same kinds of games built around monetization, gameplay loops, and influencers. There are reasons to be cynical about the greed of modern Triple-A studios, but as these major companies are learning, it’s harder to be greedy if you don’t at least have a solid idea made by the right team to charge people for in the first place.

The bluntness of this hypothetical studio’s influencer plans is also fascinating to see. Like it or not, there’s no denying that streamers and influencers play a major role in the video game industry at this time. From helping to shift the balance of power in the MMORPG genre to playing games that are at least partially designed to appeal to their unique positions and massive audiences, it’s pretty clear at this point that there’s no way to suddenly stop the industry’s focus on streamers, content creators, and influencers. That being the case, it’s only a matter of time until we see studios start to work more with streamers during even the earliest stages of the game development process.

Putting aside the quality of the average product designed around a celebrity (with due respect to the George Foreman Grill), it’s strange to think that you’d practically build a studio around the hypothetical input of influencers. Even if Dr. DisRespect has this great idea for a game that’s more than an elaborate version of the “we should buy a bar” conversation we’ve all had at one point, it’s hard to imagine that there’s a significant number of influencers out there that have put that much thought into their ideal video game projects. The more likely explanation is that influencers will be used as part of the branding/promotion for a game, which is, at best, putting the cart before the horse and, at worst, another example of exploiting celebrity obsession and cult of personality.

The video game industry is always in need of new voices, new studios, new ideas, and, now more than ever at a time when some truly incredible circumstances have led to multiple delays, new game releases. However, it’s clear that what the human beings in the video game industry need most right now are studios created to break the industry’s worst cultural habits and not embrace them in the way that this studio is seemingly interested in doing. What may have once been a curious case of the growth of gaming celebrities now feels like a reminder that the road towards a healthier video game industry is a long one indeed.

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The post Dr. DisRespect’s Studio Seems Like the Last Thing Gaming Needs Right Now appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3jPILjI

[gelderon52]

Consensus Building: an art that we are losing. The Case of Climate Science

by Ugo Bardi (from The Seneca Effect”)

In 1956, Arthur C. Clarke wrote "The Forgotten Enemy," a science fiction story that dealt with the return of the ice age (image source). Surely it was not Clarke's best story, but it may have been the first written on that subject by a well-known author. Several other sci-fi authors examined the same theme, but that does not mean that, at that time, there was a scientific consensus on global cooling. It just means that a consensus on global warming was obtained only later, in the 1980s. But which mechanisms were used to obtain this consensus? And why is it that, nowadays, it seems to be impossible to attain consensus on anything? This post is a discussion on this subject that uses climate science as an example.

You may remember how, in 2017, during the Trump presidency, there briefly floated in the media the idea to stage a debate on climate change in the form of a "red team vs. blue team" encounter between orthodox climate scientists and their opponents. Climate scientists were horrified at the idea. They were especially appalled at the military implications of the "red vs. blue" idea that hinted at how the debate could have been organized. From the government side, then, it was quickly realized that in a fair scientific debate their side had no chances. So, the debate never took place and it is good that it didn't. Maybe those who proposed it were well intentioned (or maybe not), but in any case it would have degenerated into a fight and just created confusion.

Yet, the story of that debate that was never held hints at a point that most people understand: the need for consensus. Nothing in our world can be done without some form of consensus and the question of climate change is a good example. Climate scientists tend to claim that such a consensus exists, and they sometimes quantify it as 97% or even 100%. Their opponents claim the opposite.

In a sense, they are both right. A consensus on climate change exists among scientists, but this is not true for the general public. The polls say that a majority of people know something about climate change and agree that something is to be done about it, but that is not the same as an in-depth, informed consensus. Besides, this majority rapidly disappears as soon as it is time to do something that touches someone's wallet. The result is that, for more than 30 years, thousands of the best scientists in the world have been warning humankind of a dire threat approaching, and nothing serious has been done. Only proclaims, greenwashing, and "solutions" that worsen the problem (the "hydrogen-based economy" is a good example).

So, consensus building is a fundamental matter. You can call it a science or see it as another way to define what others call "propaganda." Some reject the very idea as a form of "mind control," or practice it in various methods of rule-based negotiations. It is a fascinating subject that goes to the heart of our existence as human beings in a complex society.

Here, instead of tackling the issue from a general viewpoint, I'll discuss a specific example: that of "global cooling" vs. "global warming," and how a consensus was obtained that warming is the real threat. It is a dispute often said to be proof that no such a thing as consensus exists in climate science.  

You surely heard the story of how, just a few decades ago, "global cooling" was the generally accepted scientific view of the future. And how those silly scientists changed their minds, switching to warming, instead. Conversely, you may also have heard that this is a myth and that there never was such a thing as a consensus that Earth was cooling.

As it is always the case, the reality is more complex than politics wants it to be. Global cooling as an early scientific consensus is one of the many legends generated by the discussion about climate change and, like most legends, it is basically false. But it has at least some links with reality. It is an interesting story that tells us a lot about how consensus is obtained in science. But we need to start from the beginning.

The idea that Earth's climate was not stable emerged in the mid-19th century with the discovery of the past ice ages. At that point, an obvious question was whether ice ages could return in the future. The matter remained at the level of scattered speculations until the mid 20th century, when the concept of "new ice age" appeared in the "memesphere" (the ensemble of human public memes). We can see this evolution using Google "Ngrams," a database that measures the frequency of strings of words in a large corpus of published books (Thanks, Google!!).

You see that the possibility of a "new ice age" entered the public consciousness already in the 1920s, then it grew and reached a peak in the early 1970s. Other strings such as "Earth cooling" and the like give similar results. Note also that the database "English Fiction" generates a large peak for the concept of a "new ice age" at about the same time, in the 1970s. Later on, cooling was completely replaced by the concept of global warming. You can see in the figure below how the crossover arrived in the late 1980s.

Even after it started to decline, the idea of a "new ice age" remained popular and journalists loved presenting it to the public as an imminent threat. For instance, Newsweek printed an article titled "The Cooling World" in 1975, but the concept provided good material for the catastrophic genre in fiction. As late as 2004, it was at the basis of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

Does that mean that scientists ever believed that the Earth was cooling? Of course not. There was no consensus on the matter. The status of climate science until the late 1970s simply didn't allow certainties about Earth's future climate.

As an example, in 1972, the well-known report to the Club of Rome, "The Limits to Growth," noted the growing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it did not state that it would cause warming -- evidently the issue was not yet clear even for scientists engaged in global ecosystem studies. 8 years later, in 1980, the authors of "The Global 2000 Report to the President of the U.S." commissioned by president Carter, already had a much better understanding of the climate effects of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, they did not rule out global cooling and they discussed it as a plausible scenario.

The Global 2000 Report is especially interesting because it provides some data on the opinion of climate scientists as it was in 1975. 28 experts were interviewed and asked to forecast the average world temperature for the year 2000. The result was no warming or a minimal one of about 0.1 C. In the real world, though, temperatures rose by more than 0.4 C in 2000. Clearly, in 1980, there was not such a thing as a scientific consensus on global warming. On this point, see also the paper by Peterson (2008) which analyzes the scientific literature in the 1970s. A majority of paper was found to favor global warming, but also a significant minority arguing for no temperature changes or for global cooling.

Now we are getting to the truly interesting point of this discussion. The consensus that Earth was warming did not exist before the 1980s, but then it became the norm. How was it obtained?

There are two interpretations floating in the memesphere today. One is that scientists agreed on a global conspiracy to terrorize the public about global warming in order to obtain personal advantages. The other that scientists are cold-blooded data-analyzers and that they did as John Maynard Keynes said, "When I have new data, I change my mind."

Both are legends. The one about the scientific conspiracy is obviously ridiculous, but the second is just as silly. Scientists are human beings and data are not a gospel of truth. Data are always incomplete, affected by uncertainties, and need to be selected. Try to develop Newton's law of universal gravitation without ignoring all the data about falling feathers, paper sheets, and birds, and you'll see what I mean.

In practice, science is a fine-tuned consensus-building machine. It has evolved exactly for the purpose of smoothly absorbing new data in a gradual process that does not lead (normally) to the kind of partisan division that's typical of politics.

Science uses a procedure derived from an ancient method that, in Medieval times was called disputatio and that has its roots in the art of rhetoric of classical times. The idea is to debate issues by having champions of the different theses squaring off against each other and trying to convince an informed audience using the best arguments they can muster. The Medieval disputatio could be very sophisticated and, as an example, I discussed the "Controversy of Valladolid" (1550-51) on the status of the American Indians. Theological disputationes normally failed to harmonize truly incompatible positions, say, convincing Jews to become Christians (it was tried more than once, but you may imagine the results). But sometimes they did lead to good compromises and they kept the confrontation to the verbal level (at least for a while).

In modern science, the rules have changed a little, but the idea remains the same: experts try to convince their opponents using the best arguments they can muster. It is supposed to be a discussion, not a fight. Good manners are to be maintained and the fundamental feature is being able to speak a mutually understandable language. And not just that: the discussants need to agree on some basic tenets of the frame of the discussion.  During the Middle Ages, theologians debated in Latin and agreed that the discussion was to be based on the Christian scriptures. Today, scientists debate in English and agree that the discussion is to be based on the scientific method.

In the early times of science, one-to-one debates were used (maybe you remember the famous debate about Darwin's ideas that involved Thomas Huxley and Archbishop Wilberforce in 1860). But, nowadays, that is rare. The debate takes place at scientific conferences and seminars where several scientists participate, gaining or losing "prestige points" depending on how good they are at presenting their views. Occasionally, a presenter, especially a young scientist, may be "grilled" by the audience in a small re-enactment of the coming of age ceremonies of Native Americans. But, most important of all, informal discussions take place all over the conference. These meetings are not supposed to be vacations, they are functional to the face-to-face exchange of ideas. As I said, scientists are human beings and they need to see each other in the face to understand each other. A lot of science is done in cafeterias and over a glass of beer. Possibly, most scientific discoveries start in this kind of informal setting. No one, as far as I know, was ever struck by a ray of light from heaven while watching a power point presentation.

It would be hard to maintain that scientists are more adept at changing their views than Medieval theologians and older scientists tend to stick to old ideas. Sometimes you hear that science advances one funeral at a time; it is not wrong, but surely an exaggeration: scientific views do change even without having to wait for the old guard to die. The debate at a conference can decisively tilt toward one side on the basis of the brilliance of a scientist, the availability of good data, and the overall competence demonstrated.

I can testify that, at least once, I saw someone in the audience rising up after a presentation and say, "Sir, I was of a different opinion until I heard your talk, but now you convinced me. I was wrong and you are right." (and I can tell you that this person was more than 70 years old, good scientists may age gracefully, like wine). In many cases, the conversion is not so sudden and so spectacular, but it does happen. Then, of course, money can do miracles in affecting scientific views but, as long as we stick to climate science, there is not a lot of money involved and corruption among scientists is not widespread as it is in other fields, such as in medical research.

So, we can imagine that in the 1980s the consensus machine worked as it was supposed to do and it led to the general opinion of climate scientists switching from cooling to warming. That was a good thing, but the story didn't end with that. There remained to convince people outside the narrow field of climate science, and that was not obvious.

From the 1990s onward, the disputatio was dedicated to convincing non-climate scientists, that is both scientists working in different fields and intelligent laypersons. There was a serious problem with that: climate science is not a matter for amateurs, it is a field where the Dunning-Kruger effect (people overestimating their competence) may be rampant. Climate scientists found themselves dealing with various kinds of opponents. Typically, elderly scientists who refused to accept new ideas or, sometimes, geologists who saw climate science as invading their turf and resenting that. Occasionally, opponents could score points in the debate by focusing on narrow points that they themselves had not completely understood (for instance, the "tropospheric hot spot" was a fashionable trick). But when the debate involved someone who knew climate science well enough the opponents' destiny was to be easily steamrolled.

These debates went on for at least a decade. You may know the  2009 book by Randy Olson, "Don't be Such a Scientist" that describes this period. Olson surely understood the basic point of debating: you must respect your opponent if you aim at convincing him or her, and the audience, too. It seemed to be working, slowly. Progress was being made and the climate problem was becoming more and more known.

And then, something went wrong. Badly wrong. Scientists suddenly found themselves cast into another kind of debate for which they had no training and little understanding. You see in Google Ngrams how the idea that climate change was a hoax lifted off in the 2000s and became a feature of the memesphere. Note how rapidly it rose: it had a climax in 2009, with the Climategate scandal, but it didn't decline afterward.

It was a completely new way to discuss: not anymore a disputatio. No more rules, no more reciprocal respect, no more a common language. Only slogans and insults. A climate scientist described this kind of debate as like being involved in a "bare-knuckle bar fight." From there onward, the climate issue became politicized and sharply polarized. No progress was made and none is being made, right now.

Why did this happen? In large part, it was because of a professional PR campaign aimed at disparaging climate scientists. We don't know who designed it and paid for it but, surely, there existed (and still exist) industrial lobbies which were bound to lose a lot if decisive action to stop climate change was implemented. Those who had conceived the campaign had an easy time against a group of people who were as naive in terms of communication as they were experts in terms of climate science.

The Climategate story is a good example of the mistakes scientists made. If you read the whole corpus of the thousands of emails released in 2009, nowhere you'll find that the scientists were falsifying the data, were engaged in conspiracies, or tried to obtain personal gains. But they managed to give the impression of being a sectarian clique that refused to accept criticism from their opponents. In scientific terms, they did nothing wrong, but in terms of image, it was a disaster. Another mistake of scientists was to try to steamroll their adversaries claiming a 97% of scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Even assuming that it is true (it may well be), it backfired, giving once more the impression that climate scientists are self-referential and do not take into account objections of other people.

Let me give you another example of a scientific debate that derailed and become a political one. I already mentioned the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth." It was a scientific study, but the debate that ensued was outside the rules of the scientific debate. A feeding frenzy among sharks would be a better description of how the world's economists got together to shred to pieces the LTG study.  The "debate" rapidly spilled over to the mainstream press and the result was a general demonization of the study, accused to have made "wrong predictions," and, in some cases, to be planning the extermination of humankind. (I discuss this story in my 2011 book "The Limits to Growth Revisited.") The interesting (and depressing) thing you can learn from this old debate is that no progress was made in half a century. Approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication, you can find the same criticism republished afresh on Web sites, "wrong predictions", and all the rest.

So, we are stuck. Is there a hope to reverse the situation? Hardly.

The loss of the capability of obtaining a consensus seems to be a feature of our times: debates require a minimum of reciprocal respect to be effective, but that has been lost in the cacophony of the Web. The only form of debate that remains is the vestigial one that sees presidential candidates stiffly exchanging platitudes with each other every four years. But a real debate? No way, it is gone like the disputes among theologians in Middle Ages.

The discussion on climate, just as on all important issues, has moved to the Web, in large part to the social media. And the effect has been devastating on consensus-building. One thing is facing a human being across a table with two glasses of beer on it, another is to see a chunk of text falling from the blue as a comment to your post. This is a recipe for a quarrel, and it works like that every time.

Also, it doesn't help that international scientific meetings and conferences have all but disappeared in a situation that discourages meetings in person. Online meetings turned out to be hours of boredom in which nobody listens to anybody and everyone is happy when it is over. Even if you can still manage to be at an in-person meeting, it doesn't help that your colleague appears to you in the form of a masked bag of dangerous viruses, to be kept at a distance all the time, if possible behind a plexiglass barrier. Not the best way to establish a human relationship.

This is a fundamental problem: if you can't build a consensus by a debate, the only other possibility is to use the political method. It means attaining a majority by means of a vote (and note that in science, like in theology, voting is not considered an acceptable consensus building technique). After the vote, the winning side can force their position on the minority using a combination of propaganda, intimidation, and, sometimes, physical force. An extreme consensus-building technique is the extermination of the opponents. It has been done so often in history that it is hard to think that it will not be done again on a large scale in the future, perhaps not even in a remote one. But, apart from the moral implications, forced consensus is expensive, inefficient, and often it leads to dogmas being established. Then it is impossible to adapt to new data when they arrive.

So, where are we going? Things keep changing all the time; maybe we'll find new ways to attain consensus even online, which implies, at a minimum, not to insult and attack your opponent right from the beginning. As for a common language, after that we switched from Latin to English, we might now switch to "Googlish," a new world language that might perhaps be structured to avoid clashes of absolutes -- perhaps it might just be devoid of expletives, perhaps it may have some specific features that help build consensus. For sure, we need a reform of science that gets rid of the corruption rampant in many fields: money is a kind of consensus, but not the one we want.

Or, maybe, we might develop new rituals. Rituals have always been a powerful way to attain consensus, just think of the Christian mass (the Christian church has not yet realized that it has received a deadly blow from the anti-virus rules). Could rituals be transferred online? Or would we need to meet in person in the forest as the "book people" imagined by Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel "Fahrenheit 451"? We cannot say. We can only ride the wave of change that, nowadays, seems to have become a true tsunami. Will we float or sink? Who can say? The shore seems to be still far away.

h/t Carlo Cuppini and "moresoma"

[mineofilms]

The Diet of an Alien

It was an Alien Invasion / Aliens Trying to Eat You / Time Travel movie sort of weekend.

SPOILERS AHEAD…

Tomorrow War - Aliens invade Earth, eat humans, humans’ time travel to the past to gather troops to fight back.

A Quiet Place Part 2 – Aliens crash land on Earth via Meteors, try to eat humans.

Edge of Tomorrow - Aliens invade Earth, more time travel involved. I didn’t see any humans get eaten in this one.

I watched all these back to back to back... I just zoned out and watched...

So, there are a lot of conspiracy people out there, I refuse to call them “theorist,” as a real theory can be grounded in some sort of hypothetical situation based on some fact.

Simply making claims about dragons, the moon being a hologram and the Earth being a flat disc with no real science of fact to demonstrate does not consist as a “real theory.”

Sketchy YouTube videos using pseudo-science as your best attempts at fact gathering; where the popular definition of pseudo is fake and/or made up. So yeah, we are not going there. There are whole websites dedicated to nonsense thinking like that.

Go there… SPOILERS AHEAD…

“Tomorrow War” has a lot of holes in it. The movie attempts to tell their story in a way to make it appear it is grounded in some sort of modern day Earth reality, but it fails in that respect and badly at that.

If you seek a good action packed, popcorn, alien invasion flick then this works. It was a good watch, but at the same time I laughed a lot out loud at the absurdity of the science being thrown out there and it is supposed to be grounded in a modern Earth civilization. They just brush over creating artificial wormholes and time travel.

However, how they actually explained how the time travel worked, would have been a nice little thing to dig a little deeper in. Without getting crazy technical and sending you all to more YouTube videos, they explain time travel that they created or don’t explain it as there is a whole separate story as to what is actually happening at this point.

The way it works is they flip the switch on their prototype time machine in present day and then the future can travel back to the time period where the machine was switched on. So in that respect they are trying to ground time travel in a plausible reality.

This is currently the more popular form of time travel in popular culture over saying their time travel has something to do with FTL travel or a MacGuffin - an object, device, or event that is convenient and necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters to get to the next level of their story.

At the first moment when the future comes back in time to meet the past is when the machine on present day Earth’s side was switched on. The machine is in the middle of the ocean. Same place on Earth but 30 years apart.

How they just brushed over this with just a few fragments of exposition dialog is what started the laughter for me. Didn’t ruin the movie, but it was a big deal for me. One of the main reasons why this ruined the movie for me was all the other things that happened to Future Earth.

They say there were around 500,000 humans left on the whole planet, yet their technology is roughly the same, no real advancements. As far as weapons go, machine guns were still used and slightly better than our own current technology. That does make sense, but it doesn’t fit “that” nicely.

Future Earth has very limited knowledge about their enemy, where they came from and how they were able to overrun all of Earth, by foot, no technology, in only a few years.

The weapons they give to the Past Earth Freedom Fighters are basically bows and arrows to fight a fighting force that would have our current technology. The only thing that seemed to work effectively were 50 Cal and bigger.

So to sum up. Earth of 2052, travels back to 2022 to recruit bodies to just throw at the enemy with the hopes that would work. Huh; that was the same approach they took when the invasion first happened the first time and that didn’t work. They state in the film that only 30% of all the soldiers sent to the future returned. So, yeah, that didn’t work. At no time did the past dictate policy.

We humans are one stubborn race. If you think we would just stand there and allow someone else just hand us little tiny bits of data about a future alien invasion and just throw bodies at the problem we would not obey.

Humans of the past would immediately take charge. We would demand both data and technology and from that moment Earth would be building up its defenses for the fight in the future. It would not send people to the future to be killed off like Vietnam.

That would destroy any future as it was from the perspective of the future. This opens up so many paradoxes that my head is already spinning. I did like the movie. It was a good popcorn, shoot’em up alien movie. I’d watch it again. Just don’t expect to get any big brain teasers with the plot.

This movie makes people ask far more questions as to why this could be a possible reality than just enjoying the movie. I thought people bitched about Battleship not making much sense. This is far worse in that respect.

“A Quiet Place Part 2” I thought was much more a cohesive film than “Tomorrow War.” Part 2 starts with a flashback of day 1 of the alien invasion. Where the first film we start and the invasion already happened and we do not know much outside of what is happening in the world outside of this family the first film focuses on. In Part 2 we get a lot more information.

I almost feel like the opening to Part 2 was a deleted scene from the first film. It doesn’t feel forced, it fits nicely, but just feels like it could be from the cutting room floor of the 1st film.

Part 2 is not a clone of the first film. There are 2 main plots going on and the end leaves it open for a 3rd. I will just leave it at that. I enjoyed both Quiet Places. They are good creature feature flicks with plenty of tension and gore. I think the deaf element of the girl and the creatures happen to be blind and use their hearing to track its prey is pretty cool and they still do a lot of that in this one, like the first one.

We only get a glimpse of how low humanity has fallen as how other humans treat other survivors. I wish we could have seen a little more of that, but ultimately we got a pretty good movie here. I would love to see a 3rd film.

“Edge of Tomorrow” I decided to watch this one again because I felt like this and “Tomorrow War” had so much in common. The only thing it was missing was Emily Blunt.

That wasn’t why I watched A Quiet Place Part 2. I wanted to see it because I was a big fan of the 1st film. Once I watched both films, “Edge of Tomorrow” was easy to follow up with those 2 previous films. It’s just a coincidence Emily Blunt was in 2 of the 3 films.

The few science fiction films Tom Cruise has been in over the years. I tend to like. I don’t have a lot of problems with this one. I was so fascinated by the “resetting the day” or “Groundhog Day” of having to relive that one day over and over.

From a GOOGLE search; “There is no number given in the movie. In the book, it was all over after 160 days of Cage reliving everything, and Rita spent 211 (300 in the movie) during her turn.” To me, it seems like a lot more. I would think it would take longer to know all those details about each character in depth that way.

I have seen other data on the subject that suggest Cage was stuck in a loop for 34 years. It’s not really important, but I just find it interesting. I like stuff like this. I was really into “Happy Death Day” and its sequel, but I feel they went too far into the fiction and claiming it being science in the second film.

Some things do not always have to be explained. Actually, they did a good job in “Tomorrow War” when they finally explain how the aliens got to Earth in the first place. So one could explain something, but be vague about it in the explanation and that is fine by me.

It doesn’t always have to be a full explanation. However, why brush over creating artificial wormholes and then try to explain the Aliens’ origins? Sometimes studio heads need to leave movies alone and let the story tellers just tell their story. If they do their job, get this. People will pay money to see your movie. I don’t know, right…

So now the meat and potatoes of why I wrote 2200+ words about Aliens eating humans and time travel being involved.

We have to go back to where I make mention of “conspiracy theorists” thinking what they think about Hollywood; besides Hollywood being pedophiles, rapists and phony human beings. Some will tell you that Hollywood style movies like this are to desensitize “us” to these concepts so that when it really happens humans are used to this so we might be more easily controlled.

I don’t know about all that. I can see it as plausible… Does that make me someone that believes in conspiracies? Not so much. I believe in common sense, logic, critical thinking and the scientific method. If something seems plausible I have to see where that data about said subject originated from.

If it came from Joe Schmo on YouTube, who isn’t a scientist and is making outrageous claims; where are the facts? A fact is generated when the scientific community cannot prove said statement to be wrong/incorrect.

1+1=2… You add 1 of something to another 1 of something, you now have 2 of something. You test that. How many different ways can you test the adding 1 of one something to another 1 of something to get 2 of something is/isn’t correct?

So once you have done all that and the answer is 2, every time. You can now say 1+1=2 is a fact and it is. You cannot say 1+1= anything other than 2…

Granted facts for bigger problems/concepts are not this easy. It isn’t supposed to be. I just wanted to show the process. This simple translation has been lost against the backdrop of “Cancel Culture” and whatever other groups that tend to do this with the dummying down of facts and making fun of groups of people who will have great sense to spread only to be laughed at on national TV because the powers that be want to force their narrative as a fact when in-fact isn’t even close. You cannot just “make-up-a-fact…”

Sure this blog is about movies and movie logic; but you can apply this style of critical thinking to a lot of things in our reality. Don’t let “Cancel Culture” win battles they have no business fighting.

If you believe in something, don’t let someone tell you it isn’t true without a fight and by fighting I mean, thoroughly research it. Not just on Google. Look it up in books. Use real research materials.

Anyways… So from Hollywood’s point of view. We are all gonna die by mutated alien creature thingy monster that want to eat us.

Heyyyyyyyy…

So how did they build ships to get here? Did they have FTL travel? If they are literally creature monsters. How did they use tools and make technology? It’s ok to make movies like this. They are fun and sometimes really good. I actually enjoyed watching all 3 of these.

Just when I tell story the details cannot just be MacGuffins and expect me not to get lost when I want to know the hows/whys in a story.

What are some of your favorite Alien invasion films? My actual personal favorite is John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982). To me, a paranoid, shapeshifting alien that cannot just copy a human, but absorb the body, the mind, memory, fantasies of the victim is terrifying.

An alien that eats you by absorption and becomes something only from your imagination. Be it from a nightmare, a movie you saw. Perhaps a combination of things you saw for real and imagined.

Even the Borg, Predator, Jason, Freddy, a Terminator (any model), Neo would have an issue fighting a “Thing.”

All butt probes aside. Hollywood wants people to believe Aliens are coming to Eat us. We better invent Time Travel to save the day. Ha… If I could time travel I’d be outta here. Not sure when. Probably somewhere in the past where I can live and let live with minimal praying to a being that may not exist.

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." Doc Brown, Back to the Future 1985…

 The Diet of an Alien By David-Angelo Mineo 7/5/2021 2,266 Words

[ettadunham]

do you listen to a lot of podcasts? which ones do you recommend? i'm just finishing listening to ars paradoxica and i need something to fill the gape it'll leave lmao thanks!

Hey you!!! I probably don’t listen to all that much compared to the more hardcore listeners, but I did manage to find a bunch of cool stories relevant to my interests if I do say so myself :P

I actually made a podcast page listing them all out, and I also put links in the pictures to each of their official sites. I would probably recommend any of those, but I’ll also try to give a quick rundown on each, just because I love talking about them.

(Also, please hit me up if you’re looking for some specific content or filter options relating to these or some other podcasts I may be familiar with enough to answer ;) )

Now, since aP is the reference point you gave me (my kind of anon ;) ), I’ll start with some ensemble sci-fis right out of the gate, from the plot heavy to the character-centric:

Marsfall - intense space drama about a Mars expedition crew. There’s only one season out yet, but it’s real strong right out the gate, and I’m already in love with Jacki and ANDI (the commander and the AI of the ship, respectively).

Wolf 359 - starts off more as a space sitcom, but then shit eventually gets pretty real and intense. Already finished with over 60 episodes and all sort of additional content available, so the perfect binge material. (Also, bonus cameo by the ars crew at some point.)

The Strange Case of Starship Iris - this one had a long hiatus after its first 5 episodes, but it’s coming back, so now is the perfect time to start. It has a bit of Firefly vibe to it (bunch of misfit smugglers in space on the run from a totalitarian government), but a lot more diverse.

Station to Station - leaving space for a bit, S2S is taking place on a research ship, where our scientist protagonist is looking for her missing lab partner. Weird shenanigans and memory problems ensue. (Season 1 is complete as of now.)

What’s the Frequency - aptly titled, WTF is a period detective noir story with some pretty weird shit going on connected to radio dramas, which I still don’t quite understand? Is it the devil? Is it even sci-fi? Who knows, not me.

The Bridge - there are sea monsters, a Transcontinental bridge, and watchtowers to keep an eye on things. The show follows the crew of one such watchtower. This is also where my plot-heavy -> character-centric concept kind of falls apart, because the show does a slightly different thing. In every episode, there’s a separate story narrated by one of the characters (usually Etta, the protagonist) about the lore of the Bridge, while the plot slowly moves along. Some of these stories of course involve the characters themselves, but you often don’t actually know for sure. Also, a pretty dope intro (ta-da-dam-ta ta-ta-da-damm ta-da-dam-dam ta-ta-da-dam DAM DAM TA-DAM TA DA DAM TA DAM TA DA DA TA-DA DAM DAM TA DA DA DAM DAM TA TASJGFKADFJ;DAL - anyway, it’s great :P).

The Bright Sessions - a show about people with abilities in therapy. There’s an overarching plot, but even once that unfolds, it still relies much more heavily on the characters, and what they’re going through in each episode. An excellent gateway podcast altogether, that is soon coming to an end.

Non sci-fi ensemble shows:

Under Pressure - also featuring ships and sea monsters like some of our previous entries, but now it’s a drama about a scholar joining a submarine science expedition to write a philosophy paper... but in reality, is there to deal with her grief.

Homecoming - about a program that’s supposed to re-integrate veterans back into society with some shady methods. Overall, this story wasn’t really in my wheelhouse, but it’s one of those high profile podcasts that have people like Oscar Isaac and David Schwimmer voicing characters, so that’s nice.

Okay, so I left shows relying on one or two people’s narration for last, but these are actually some of my faves, so I hope you got this far. Pretty much all of these have some sort of fantastic elements, but I will try to put them in an order of plot-reliance:

Alice isn’t Dead - a truck driver is looking for her missing wife who isn’t dead. There’s also a conspiracy and serial killer monsters lurking on the roads. Podcasts in general have a lot of good horror to offer, but I just... can’t do them. AiD is my exception, and it’s narrated by Jasika Nicole, so... how could i say no?

The Far Meridian - an agoraphobic young woman wakes up every day to find that her home (a lighthouse) turns up at a different place. There may also be additional mysteries. Lots of magical realism, and shit getting weirder and weirder as the episodes progress. Created by one of the ars writers, it’s a gentle balm for your soul. Season 1 is already out in full.

Girl In Space - this one is about a girl in space. Shocking, right? She loves cheese and Jurassic Park, and is totally alone on her space station... until she’s not. Technically might qualify more as an ensemble at this point but... eh.

Mabel - haunted house, mythical creatures, and a caretaker leaving voice messages for her charge’s missing(?) granddaughter. Gets gradually weirder, gayer and more poetic as it progresses.

Within the Wires - I LOVE THIS SHOW SO MUCH!!! I’ll start with that, because I should probably also confess that after listening to the first episode, I was convinced that it wouldn’t be my thing. The first season is told through these weird relaxation tapes, that you’re probably only half-listening to at the beginning. But things do become much clearer by the 3rd-4th episode or so, and by then it’s much easier to follow. It also has an anthology structure, where each season tells a different story with a different narrator, but it’s still connected and takes place in the same universe. Anyway, let’s just say that it’s probably my second favorite show after ars at this point.

Investigative fiction podcasts, which is sort of a very specific subgenre with plenty of content, I’m guessing:

Limetown - 10 years ago the people of Limetown disappeared overnight, and now a radio host is set to solve the mystery. Season 2 is coming this year, which is great, because S1 ended on a cliffhanger in fucking 2015.

Rabbits - a radio host is looking for her missing best friend, who disappeared playing a weird, ancient game, probably. Also by the same people who did popular shows like Tanis or The Black Tapes - but overall I heard mixed things about those, especially in the long run. I liked Rabbits though.

[glittergummicandypeach]

In the Name of the Father, Son, and Q: Why It’s Important to See QAnon as a ‘Hyper-Real’ Religion | Religion Dispatches

In a May 13th article published in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance offers her readers a deep dive into the QAnon movement. The article argues that when surveying QAnon, we’re not only examining a conspiracy theory, we’re observing the birth of a new religion. LaFrance underscores this argument by highlighting the apocalypticism found in QAnon; its clear-cut dualism between the forces of good and evil; the study and analysis of Qdrops as sacred texts, and the divine mystery of Q. 

Following the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown in 1978, historian Jonathan Z. Smith wrote an essay locating the study and definition of religion within an academic context, where he highlights that “almost no attempt was made to gain any interpretative framework” of what occurred at Jonestown by academics. Adrienne LaFrance’s article on QAnon makes clear that the movement and its believers demand to be taken seriously. Her piece acts as a springboard to ask the question: Can QAnon be considered a religion? 

Though many enjoy mocking the QAnon conspiracy theories and those who profit from them, it’s important to note that the movement’s adherents firmly believe in the theories—even to the detriment of their families and communities. Therefore, in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the past and to better understand the movement as it continues to grow and evolve, I suggest that we view QAnon as a “hyper-real religion.” Sociologist Adam Possamai, who coined the term, defines it as “a simulacrum of a religion created out of, or in symbiosis with, commodified popular culture which provides inspiration at a metaphorical level and/or is a source of beliefs for everyday life.” Or, to put it more simply, a religion with a strong connection to pop culture. Based on Jean Baudrillard’s work on hyper-reality and simulations, hyper-real religion is based on the premise that pop culture shapes and creates our actual reality, with examples including, but not limited to: Heaven’s Gate, Church of All Worlds, Jediism, etc. As a movement in a constant state of mutation, QAnon clearly blurs the boundaries between popular culture and everyday life.

What this means is that technology and the marketplace of ideas have inverted the traditional relationship between the purveyors of religion and the consumers of religion. Thus, we see religious doctrinal authority (that is, those who can contribute to the religion’s teaching) being created by popular culture. 

For example, the QAnon cosmology (how the world/universe appears; what it looks like; its characteristics, and types of creatures that populate it) and anthropology (ideas about human beings, their origin and destiny) are rooted in conspiracy theories, historical facts, and mythical history from film and popular culture. As such, Terry Gilliam’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is recommended by QAnon followers as evidence of the effects of Adrenochrome; The Matrix’s blue pill/red pill scene is used to frame the choice to either be a part of the Great Awakening or to remain “asleep”; and the slogan “Where We Go One, We Go All” is from the film White Squall, whose official YouTube trailer’s comments section is filled with QAnon followers (the top-rated comment, with over 5,000 up-votes, reads “Thumbs up if Q sent you here”). The prophetic figure of the movement, known only as ‘Q’ , also regularly references movies in their QDrops, as demonstrated from the screenshots below:

The QAnon theology (conceptions of the sacred, gods, spirits, demons, the ancestors, culture heroes and/or other superhuman agents) is rooted in American evangelicalism and neo-charismatic movements developed in the 1970s and 1980s—specifically theology involving a worldwide cabal that controlled governments and aimed to control the freedoms of people through technology, medicine, and liberalism. For example, QAnon reworked elements of the Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) panic (aka “satanic panic”)that originated in the U.S. in the 80s. SRA was the belief that a global network of elites was breeding and kidnapping children for the purposes of pornography, sex trafficking, and Satanic ritual sacrifice. 

Furthermore, QAnon adopts the language of spiritual warfare found in many neo-charismatic movements. Based on some of the data analytics work I’ve done, Ephesians 6:11-18 is the most shared verse among QAnon adherents. Given the verse’s apparent condemnation of governments, the reaction of QAnon to the pandemic is rooted in the language of spiritual warfare, especially when addressing conspiracy theories surrounding 5G, ID2020, Bill Gates and vaccines, HR 6666, etc. Since the start of the pandemic, QAnon have spread a false racist theory that Asians were more susceptible to the coronavirus and that white people were immune to COVID-19; they’ve promoted drinking bleach to cure the virus; that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon and that the virus release was a joint venture between China and the Democrats to stop Trump’s re-election by destroying the economy. If that weren’t enough, they also played a key role in promoting the Plandemic video and the ObamaGate and #FilmYourHospital hashtag; and forced Oprah Winfrey and Hilary Duff to come out with statements declaring that they are not pedophiles.

When taking into account how much neo-charismatics, American evangelicalism, theological conspiracy theories, and spiritual warfare is influenced by the distrust of the everyday reality as being false (with their reality being ‘true’), one could make the argument that QAnon theology is not only influenced by pop culture, but is in fact, deeply rooted in the conception of the sacred within a hyper-real world.  

Some might argue that a hyper-real religion isn’t a “real” religion because it’s invented, but scholars of religion don’t validate or discredit claims of what constitutes ‘true’ religion, because it’s true to the people we study. As a scholar of religion I study what people do when dealing with the sacred, rather than try to validate the religious message or experience. What people do when dealing with the sacred is routinized over time as believers construct their religion. All religions, hyper-real ones included, are socially constructed and are thus invented. QAnon is blatantly invented as it openly uses works of popular culture, media, entertainment, American evangelicalism and conspiracy theories at its basis, that have been organically developed across time and space by a community of believers. Belief in QAnon reflects a created hyper-real world based on such theories. 

This is unsurprising, as Travis View stated on PBS’s The Open Mind “we’re living in an age where conspiracy theories are promoted at the highest levels of power, when it wasn’t that long ago conspiracy theories were the pastime of the powerless.” Similarly in 2018, Joseph Uscinski stated that QAnon is different from normal conspiracy theories. “Conspiracy theories are for losers,” he told the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, “you don’t expect the winning party to use them.” 

By framing QAnon as a hyper-real religion, it can offer insight into the confusion that people feel when discussing the movement, which is critical for observers, scholars, and decision-makers who need to take QAnon seriously. The past months have highlighted how QAnon is a public health threat, a threat to national security, and a threat to democratic institutions.

The essence of conspiracy beliefs like QAnon lies in the attempts to delineate and explain evil; it’s about theodicy, not secular evidence. QAnon offers comfort in an uncertain—and unprecedented—age as the movement crowdsources answers to the inexplicable. QAnon becomes the master narrative capable of simply explaining various complex events and providing solace for modern problems: a pandemic, economic uncertainty, political polarization, war, child abuse, etc. 

The result is a worldview characterized by a sharp distinction between the realms of good and evil. The movement accomplishes this by purporting to be empirically relevant. That is, they claim that QDrops are testable by the accumulation of evidence about the observable world in fighting evil. Those who subscribe to QDrops are presented with elaborate productions of evidence in order to substantiate QAnon’s claims, including source citation and other academic techniques. 

However, their quest for decoding QDrops masks a deeper concern: the more sweeping a conspiracy theory’s claims, the less relevant evidence becomes—notwithstanding the insistence that QAnon is empirically sound. At its heart, QAnon is non-falsifiable. No matter how much evidence journalists, academics, and civil society offer as a counter to the claims promoted by the movement, belief in QAnon as the source of truth is a matter of faith rather than proof.

Therefore, rather than ask questions like, How can people believe in QAnon when so many of its claims fly in the face of facts?, we should instead ask What are QAnoners doing with their belief system? QAnon believers have committed acts of violence in response to QAnon conspiracy theories. Elected officials or those campaigning for elected office have campaigned on QAnon. Those studying and combating the movement need to move beyond viewing it as a mere conspiracy theory; QAnon has grown beyond that. We are, as Adrienne LaFrance asserted, witnessing the birth of a religious movement. QAnon as a belief system only appears to be dependent on Donald Trump’s presidency and his ability to remain in power. Whether we will be speaking of future or former President Trump, the person known as Q will likely fuel the movement for a long time to come. Q will continue to claim special insights, knowledge, and frame things for their followers in terms of their enemies’ alleged ambitions. 

If Donald Trump wins in November, QAnon will be vindicated in their beliefs and say this is what God has mandated, reinforcing the belief that they are right. If Trump loses, it will be attributed to the Deep State Luciferian cabal and they will have a role to play in fighting against the fake government that’s replaced Donald Trump. 

QAnon has become a hermeneutical lens through which to interpret the world. Already we’ve seen a formalized QAnon religion at Omega Kingdom Ministries (OKM). OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube. At OKM, QAnon is a hermeneutic by which the Bible is interpreted; and the Bible, in turn, serves as an interpretive lens for QAnon. Furthermore, QAnon is built into their evangelical Christian rituals. OKM may be a sign for what’s to come in terms of QAnon’s proximity to evangelical and neo-charismatic movements in the U.S.

In categorizing QAnon as a hyper-real religion rather than a decentralized grouping of conspiracy theorists, it provides an analytical framework to quantify and qualify QAnon-inspired acts of violence as ideologically motivated violent extremism. Furthermore, there’s an increasing overlap between QAnon and the far-right/Patriot movements on Telegram, a messaging app that has attracted extremists because due to its privacy protections. From the perspective of national security, we need to be prepared for more acts of violence by QAnon believers as it’s proven to be a catalyst for radicalization to violence, terrorism and murder.

By considering QAnon as a hyper-real religion, it becomes possible to frame how QAnon has found resonance not only within the American electoral system, but with populists around the globe. This is especially important not only in the context of elections, but also when framing the global response to the pandemic and public health. Policy makers at all levels need to take the QAnon ideology seriously when planning strategies to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.

QAnon may not be a recognized religion, a tax exempt 501c3 institution, or the kind of traditional brick-and-mortar religion most are familiar with. However, by framing QAnon as a religion—in particular, a hyper-real religion—we create a framework that helps us better study, report and understand QAnon. More importantly, it demonstrates that the movement needs to be taken seriously and has the socio-political and behavioral impacts that other religions have. In doing so, it provides a pathway to protecting our societies and institutions from the public health, democratic, and national security threat that QAnon potentially poses.

This content was originally published here.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Blame v. Responsibility in the Fall-out from the FFWPU and Sun Myung Moon

I thank the folks who made comments on my posting.  In this response, I will talk about the terms, “blame,” “responsibility,” or “judgment,” all of which have broad meanings. Let’s focus on the main definition as meant in the context, and postpone other definitions of each word for future discussion.

▶

# Let’s say Mary is another victim of Rev. Moon and his church. They pretty much ruined her life. She is too old now to do anything in her life to start over. Seeking her damage at court was impractical and she has given up on that. Thanks to help from her friends and the government, she is now able to make a living.

What is the right thing for her to do about Rev. Moon and the church?  This is the ethical question that we are now inquiring about.

1. The most popular thing to do would be to blame the offender and keep holding him responsible to undo the damage done to Mary. Both blame and responsibility must go to the offender.  That is the perfect justice.

The crucial problem with this idea of perfect justice is that we are living in a less-than-perfect world.  All right, a FAR less-than-the perfect world. Perfect justice is impossible in this world. If you think otherwise, I think you are still unfortunately caught up in the cult mentality. Rev. Moon is dead and the church is now free from the liability for Mary’s damage. What can we do?

I guess the second best we can try is to ruin the social reputation of the offender. But, how does that work for Mary personally? That was my point. The damage done to Mary was real and practical, but social reputation is a mental and emotional effect. The invisible solution does not add up to compensate the materialized damage done to Mary.  Mary knows it subtly, and this unsatisfactory result only frustrates her and amplifies her anger. She suffered enough when serving the cult, and after leaving it. She has now entered into another stage of suffering with her anger and frustration. Pursuit of perfect justice usually ends up with a prolonged state of individual suffering. That was the Jesus’s insight and he gave us the warning, “do not judge.”  In this case, yes, the concept of perfect justice is a bitch.

2. The person whom I will call Andrew is also a victim of the Church. Andrew was one of the early quitters from the church, with much less damage than Mary’s. He moved on with his life and is now living fine.  When seeing Mary’s suffering, Andrew feels both sympathy and frustration. “Why is she stuck in the unfortunate past? Yes, it happened, but it has gone now. Move on. Be responsible for your life and do something for yourself.”

Andrew has an attitude problem. He slightly blames Mary for what happened. “If she were a bit smarter, she would’ve left the church much earlier and got much less damage. Then she could forget about it and move on.” He is ignoring or putting way less weight on what the offender did to Mary. He ends up sending both blame and responsibility to the victim. Andrew is a victim blamer and he is a fool with this issue. He is so confused that he cannot see who the offender was.

3. Despite the stark differences in their attitudes, the ideal moralist and the victim blamer have one thing in common.  Both believe, “blame and responsibility must go hand in hand.” The former believes that the blame and the responsibility must go to the offender; the latter, to the victim.

Most of us know better – Blame and responsibility can separate from each other.  Especially in Mary’s case, they must separate for Mary’s own emotional well-being.

Conclusively, in my humble opinion, the right thing to tell Mary is – “Blame Rev. Moon, and be responsible for your own life.” (Don’t say it verbatim. Say it nicely with compassion.) As an adult, Mary must be responsible for everything that happens to her life.

It is a shitty deal because of the unfairness, but it is the way of all life forms on the earth that has so many limitations. Even the God is not taking care of Mary’s emotion; who are we?

Damage was done to the victim personally, but she cannot punish the offender personally, at least physically or financially. If she does not obey the at-least rule, she now becomes the offender and the Leviathan (government) will punish her. Instead, Mary should petition the community (if organized well), the government, or the God to punish the offender. Then, she needs to forget about it. Punishment is not her job. No point to judge Rev. Moon from this point on. She needs to move on with her life. She is also responsible to work on her emotions and to heal her wounds by whatever means that work, with or without help.

A commenter mentioned about Matthew 18:15-17 as a dissent to my argument. The Gospel verse commented applies only when you belong to a well-organized community with right rules. That doesn’t work for Mary, because she left the UC community, let alone questioning if the community is well organized with right rules. Besides, her old-time community loves the offender (because he was the parent who gave birth to the community) much more than Mary. They will not honor her demands. In the particular section, Jesus was talking about something different from the subject of his teaching “Do not judge” which I was discussing.

4. Mary now wishes to expose to the public Rev. Moon and his church’s immoral or unethical behaviors. She can help protecting potential victims that way. This is probably the best thing Mary could do about her damage. Her effort has a practical benefit for lessening the potential damage to innocent people. It is also a good thing that could please Mary, and in turn it could help to heal her emotional wounds.

For people like Mary, I suggested that they do the work without negative emotions (including anger) as much as possible, because the negative emotions quickly becomes a burden on others, and it will work against her efforts for good.

5. Lastly, Mary needs to know her target audience for her community awareness mission.

(a) First, the die-hard church members are not her target. She cannot change a thing about the church’s legitimate membership. Both the church and the public know enough by now how weird and bad Rev. Moon was. Exposing further information about Rev. Moon’s fault would sound like, “we initially thought Rev. Moon stole about $1 billion, but we recently found out that the amount was close to $1.5 billion.” Do you think the new information would change anything significant in the readers’ mind, those who already know how bad he was?

The core members know how bad Rev. Moon was – but it does not change their faith, because they value the underlying cause more than his revealed superficial behavior. They will ask you back, “why do you think he did such bad things?” Regardless of how bad the exposed morality of Rev. Moon was, to the members the information would just be about the means that he utilized to achieve the end – God’s providential goal that the members value much more than Mary’s emotional well-being. Here, Mary is practicing the Kantian ethics treating means as ends in themselves, and the church members are practicing the Utilitarian ethics that allows sacrificing people and things to achieve a higher goal, whatever that is. The Unificationists have one of the highest goals on earth, and they will consider Mary as a sacrifice. Again, the morality is a bitch. Don’t play with it.

(b) The only group or audience in which Mary’s contribution would be significant is that of skeptics. Those who already have some doubts about their faith in Rev. Moon. They are the target audience Mary needs to focus on.

How many are there? Nobody knows for sure, but I could show a snapshot of the reality on this particular forum ‘What is on the Moon’ (WIOTM): A couple of years ago, I included an outside link in my posting to show a picture, and the outside server computer was counting (without prior notice to me) how many readers clicked my link – not one by one, but roughly by an increment of 50, like “50 people clicked your link.” My posting was rather controversial and I believe most of the readers clicked on my link out of curiosity. The final count was less than 200.  And we know the absolute majority of readers on this forum are the ones who already left the church and do not need Mary’s help. One of my 2nd Generation friends benefited from the exposed information about Rev. Moon posted here, and has stopped practicing his worship. But he is still staying with people in the community. Well, it’s been a couple of years now and the readership could have increased significantly. I don’t know, but I think this shows a picture of the reality. Not that the number is of the utmost importance, but I simply point out that Mary is facing a big challenge in her mission. It will be beneficial for her not to expect too much.

© For other groups than this target – like the die-hard, those who left, and the public – Mary’s informational exposure is mostly a sort of entertainment. A means to kill the boredom of mundane life. I think Frank contributes a lot for this function. Personally, I am not interested in the conspiracy kind of politics or behind-politics stories. However, his postings should entertain many. Rev. Moon and his church is an interesting subject for a tiny segment of the population on earth. But it works for me because it is more fun than the usual chatting with the colleagues in my office. I once was a Moonie.

This is the reality as I see it.

– Kenneth

http://whatisonthemoon.tumblr.com/post/165741281557/blame-v-responsibility

Kenneth’s earlier post: Do Not Judge Rev Moon

A response to Kenneth: Thankfully, Kenneth gets it.

[whatisonthemoonarchive]

All hail Kennith because as he says, "This is the reality as I see it. – Kenneth". I think the man has a serious "Moon" complex. He has spoken, all must obey.

Blame v. Responsibility in the Fall-out from the FFWPU and Sun Myung Moon I thank the folks who made comments on my posting. In this response, I will talk about the terms, “blame,” “responsibility,” or “judgment,” all of which have broad meanings. Let’s focus on the main definition as meant in the context, and postpone other definitions of each word for future discussion. ▶ # Let’s say Mary is another victim of Rev. Moon and his church. They pretty much ruined her life. She is too old now to do anything in her life to start over. Seeking her damage at court was impractical and she has given up on that. Thanks to help from her friends and the government, she is now able to make a living. What is the right thing for her to do about Rev. Moon and the church? This is the ethical question that we are now inquiring about. 1. The most popular thing to do would be to blame the offender and keep holding him responsible to undo the damage done to Mary. Both blame and responsibility must go to the offender. That is the perfect justice. The crucial problem with this idea of perfect justice is that we are living in a less-than-perfect world. All right, a FAR less-than-the perfect world. Perfect justice is impossible in this world. If you think otherwise, I think you are still unfortunately caught up in the cult mentality. Rev. Moon is dead and the church is now free from the liability for Mary’s damage. What can we do? I guess the second best we can try is to ruin the social reputation of the offender. But, how does that work for Mary personally? That was my point. The damage done to Mary was real and practical, but social reputation is a mental and emotional effect. The invisible solution does not add up to compensate the materialized damage done to Mary. Mary knows it subtly, and this unsatisfactory result only frustrates her and amplifies her anger. She suffered enough when serving the cult, and after leaving it. She has now entered into another stage of suffering with her anger and frustration. Pursuit of perfect justice usually ends up with a prolonged state of individual suffering. That was the Jesus’s insight and he gave us the warning, “do not judge.” In this case, yes, the concept of perfect justice is a bitch. 2. The person whom I will call Andrew is also a victim of the Church. Andrew was one of the early quitters from the church, with much less damage than Mary’s. He moved on with his life and is now living fine. When seeing Mary’s suffering, Andrew feels both sympathy and frustration. “Why is she stuck in the unfortunate past? Yes, it happened, but it has gone now. Move on. Be responsible for your life and do something for yourself.” Andrew has an attitude problem. He slightly blames Mary for what happened. “If she were a bit smarter, she would’ve left the church much earlier and got much less damage. Then she could forget about it and move on.” He is ignoring or putting way less weight on what the offender did to Mary. He ends up sending both blame and responsibility to the victim. Andrew is a victim blamer and he is a fool with this issue. He is so confused that he cannot see who the offender was. 3. Despite the stark differences in their attitudes, the ideal moralist and the victim blamer have one thing in common. Both believe, “blame and responsibility must go hand in hand.” The former believes that the blame and the responsibility must go to the offender; the latter, to the victim. Most of us know better – Blame and responsibility can separate from each other. Especially in Mary’s case, they must separate for Mary’s own emotional well-being. Conclusively, in my humble opinion, the right thing to tell Mary is – “Blame Rev. Moon, and be responsible for your own life.” (Don’t say it verbatim. Say it nicely with compassion.) As an adult, Mary must be responsible for everything that happens to her life. It is a shitty deal because of the unfairness, but it is the way of all life forms on the earth that has so many limitations. Even the God is not taking care of Mary’s emotion; who are we? Damage was done to the victim personally, but she cannot punish the offender personally, at least physically or financially. If she does not obey the at-least rule, she now becomes the offender and the Leviathan (government) will punish her. Instead, Mary should petition the community (if organized well), the government, or the God to punish the offender. Then, she needs to forget about it. Punishment is not her job. No point to judge Rev. Moon from this point on. She needs to move on with her life. She is also responsible to work on her emotions and to heal her wounds by whatever means that work, with or without help. A commenter mentioned about Matthew 18:15-17 as a dissent to my argument. The Gospel verse commented applies only when you belong to a well-organized community with right rules. That doesn’t work for Mary, because she left the UC community, let alone questioning if the community is well organized with right rules. Besides, her old-time community loves the offender (because he was the parent who gave birth to the community) much more than Mary. They will not honor her demands. In the particular section, Jesus was talking about something different from the subject of his teaching “Do not judge” which I was discussing. 4. Mary now wishes to expose to the public Rev. Moon and his church’s immoral or unethical behaviors. She can help protecting potential victims that way. This is probably the best thing Mary could do about her damage. Her effort has a practical benefit for lessening the potential damage to innocent people. It is also a good thing that could please Mary, and in turn it could help to heal her emotional wounds. For people like Mary, I suggested that they do the work without negative emotions (including anger) as much as possible, because the negative emotions quickly becomes a burden on others, and it will work against her efforts for good. 5. Lastly, Mary needs to know her target audience for her community awareness mission. (a) First, the die-hard church members are not her target. She cannot change a thing about the church’s legitimate membership. Both the church and the public know enough by now how weird and bad Rev. Moon was. Exposing further information about Rev. Moon’s fault would sound like, “we initially thought Rev. Moon stole about $1 billion, but we recently found out that the amount was close to $1.5 billion.” Do you think the new information would change anything significant in the readers’ mind, those who already know how bad he was? The core members know how bad Rev. Moon was – but it does not change their faith, because they value the underlying cause more than his revealed superficial behavior. They will ask you back, “why do you think he did such bad things?” Regardless of how bad the exposed morality of Rev. Moon was, to the members the information would just be about the means that he utilized to achieve the end – God’s providential goal that the members value much more than Mary’s emotional well-being. Here, Mary is practicing the Kantian ethics treating means as ends in themselves, and the church members are practicing the Utilitarian ethics that allows sacrificing people and things to achieve a higher goal, whatever that is. The Unificationists have one of the highest goals on earth, and they will consider Mary as a sacrifice. Again, the morality is a bitch. Don’t play with it. (b) The only group or audience in which Mary’s contribution would be significant is that of skeptics. Those who already have some doubts about their faith in Rev. Moon. They are the target audience Mary needs to focus on. How many are there? Nobody knows for sure, but I could show a snapshot of the reality on this particular forum ‘What is on the Moon’ (WIOTM): A couple of years ago, I included an outside link in my posting to show a picture, and the outside server computer was counting (without prior notice to me) how many readers clicked my link – not one by one, but roughly by an increment of 50, like “50 people clicked your link.” My posting was rather controversial and I believe most of the readers clicked on my link out of curiosity. The final count was less than 200. And we know the absolute majority of readers on this forum are the ones who already left the church and do not need Mary’s help. One of my 2nd Generation friends benefited from the exposed information about Rev. Moon posted here, and has stopped practicing his worship. But he is still staying with people in the community. Well, it’s been a couple of years now and the readership could have increased significantly. I don’t know, but I think this shows a picture of the reality. Not that the number is of the utmost importance, but I simply point out that Mary is facing a big challenge in her mission. It will be beneficial for her not to expect too much. © For other groups than this target – like the die-hard, those who left, and the public – Mary’s informational exposure is mostly a sort of entertainment. A means to kill the boredom of mundane life. I think Frank contributes a lot for this function. Personally, I am not interested in the conspiracy kind of politics or behind-politics stories. However, his postings should entertain many. Rev. Moon and his church is an interesting subject for a tiny segment of the population on earth. But it works for me because it is more fun than the usual chatting with the colleagues in my office. I once was a Moonie.

This is the reality as I see it. – Kenneth

[ziracona]

I wish people were more careful about parasocial relationships. Like yeah you probably never will meet Chris Evans and feeling like you have a personal relationship with him and know way more about him than you possibly truly could doesn’t make you bad or anything but like, it’s not great for you? And it’s a slippery slope in more ways than people even think about. It’s dangerous to invest your own self in someone you don’t know, for one. You see a lot of cult and hivemind mentalities with singers and actors and youtubers and podcasters, where even when like, a writer is outed as a child molester or active racist some people will write 4 page essays 14 times a day to defend their guilty conscience and their fave’s pride trying to convince everyone and their dad actually it’s a conspiracy or it’s ok somehow or it’s not a big deal. And you see a lot of people not only support terrible things and people, but actively become worse to make doing that okay to themself. If you delude yourself into thinking a person you never met is not only your best friend or loves you, but that you know them? It suddenly becomes very personal when you find out they did something that sucked or they do suck, and also it’s so easy to convince yourself everyone else is wrong bc you pretend you know them and kind of believe it to truly do. And start defending them like you would your childhood best friend you actually know would never commit murder or condone slavery or something: There is no part of that that is healthy or good for you.

But that’s the side people talk about more. What people talk about less is that this is also a big problem within fandoms and for small content creators. While your parasocial relationship with Chris Evans is your problem and the people you harass on his behalf’s (note: I picked Chris bc I know of absolutely no scandal abt him so it seemed he’d be a clear ‘this is not targeted at all’ choice but if it wasn’t I like Evans; I know little abt him but he seems cool and this is not at all abt him or anything), because Chris is safely up in his huge house with his bodyguards and several levels of separation. He’ll probably never have to know you exist even if you try to stalk him. But in a fandom and with small content creators, there’s an added layer, which is when you read a web comic or fic or see a small group’s original animated series, a lot of people come up with a like parasocial-lite idea of who that person is, and bring it with them to meeting that person directly. I’ve seen a similar thing happen with people really big in fandoms, where they’re so well known people expect them to be a certain way just because of their content. And sometimes that means you get the YouTube white man treatment and the ‘fandom mom’ exerts really creepy hive mind influence (especially over smaller and very interconnected fandoms), and sometimes it means a popular artist or writer gets harassed because a fan meets the real person and realizes they’re not the idealized version they already invented, and take that personally. Which is really not cool, and depressing at best to chilling at worst. It should be a simple concept that just because you read someone’s web comic you don’t know them, and that they’re going to be a living breathing human with complexity and also existence and interest outside of that comic, and not everything about them will be the way you guess or want, and the idealized version of them you have in your head is not their responsibility or fault or problem, but most people don’t seem to get it. I’ve met a lot of super cool people through various aspects of fandom stuff from fan, to artists, projects, games, to writer, and some are normal and great, even if they met me because of my work, but there’s also been a disturbing number who approach me excitedly with this idea of me they made up, who are repulsed violently the second they see even a minute divergence from it, and seem to take that as some personal betrayal, or failure, and can’t handle the fact that I am in fact not a celebrity, but just another person trying to make sense of life and do the right thing and look out for the people I love and the ones I don’t know. It’s. Something. Alienating maybe. How many people seem to handle even tiny content creators that way. It’s certainly not pleasant.

Anyway, I’m only writing this because I’ve seen more parasocial posts tonight than like, ever before, because of to the best of what I can gather something happened on YouTube? And I figure while it’s temporarily in the public consciousness, if you see this, please consider how you treat big name fandom members and small content creators, and think of us. Even positive dehumanizing (as in idealization) is still dehumanizing and not actually positive at all or enjoyable and it does hurt people. And we are...people. So. Yeah, that’s all.

[automatismoateo]

How Jordan Peterson uses logical fallacies to manipulate his base via /r/atheism

Submitted July 14, 2019 at 06:16PM by Railroadjinn (Via reddit https://ift.tt/2XQyDKP) How Jordan Peterson uses logical fallacies to manipulate his base

A friend of mine is a huge JP fan and kept trying to get me into him, so I finally read one of his interviews. Oh lord. The most useful thing I got was practice identifying logical fallacies, and more subtle manipulation strategies, so I guess I'll share them here.

Interview link

Early on in the interview, Jordan Peterson seems to play a middle-of-the-line position.

“I think the right errs in the same way that the left does, when they play identity politics… Insofar as the left-wingers and the right-winger are collectivist, then they’re wrong.”

There’s really no support for this statement, but at the very least it would seem as if he’s playing hardball with both sides.

Then, the interviewer asks Peterson to describe the alt-right. He responds

“The thing is, there’s a lot of noise in the press, especially as you move towards the radical left, about the alt-right. But I have a hard time putting my finger on who, exactly, these alt-right people are. If you look at the radical left, it’s obvious that they have a stranglehold, I would say, on the universities, and especially the humanities and social sciences. One of the consequences of that is that the doctrine that those entities have been producing is spilling over into society, to a large degree. There’s a lot of noise about the alt-right, but I can’t figure out who the alt-right people are.”

As a man with a Ph.D., he should at least have SOME idea of who the alt-right are. But instead, what he’s done is made it appear that he’s giving equal treatment to the alt-right and the “radical left.” In reality, he’s singularly disparaged the left while completely avoiding the issues of the right altogether.

On Trump’s election:

"The Americans have been split 50 per cent Democrat and 50 per cent Republican—like, as close to 50 per cent as it can possibly be—for four decades. So I don’t see that the election of Trump indicates the rise of something approximating, even, right-wing populism in the United States.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. What, exactly, is populism? From Wikipedia— “Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against ‘the elite’… populism refers to popular engagement of the population in political decision making.” A populist president could easily be elected by 50% of the population. Why not? Peterson doesn’t give any defense of his definitions or his statement.

Next, the interviewer says,

“One of the strange things about the whole alt-right thing is the extent to which it’s a way to avoid facing up to the reality that half the country voted for Donald Trump.”

Fact check: only 27% of eligible voters voted for Donald Trump, and 19% of the total American population (including ineligible voters, who poll/vote disproportionately democratic). This actually casts a new light on what Peterson said earlier, although he fundamentally does not understand what a populist is. But according to his own logic, those types of polling numbers could very easily indicate a populist. How does someone with a Ph.D. not know the basic stats of the election he’s covering, nor understand the definition of a populist?

Jordan Peterson says Trump won the election

“partly because they [the Right] were so disenfranchised by the identity politics that the Democrats have descended into. They have nothing else to offer, the Democrats. It’s identity politics, or nothing.”

This is a textbook example of the False Dilemma (false dichotomy/black-or-white fallacy) – “two alternative statements are held to be the only possible options when in reality there are more.” There are tens of millions of Democrats, and I would be willing to bet that there are at least a few that do not participate in identity politics.

Then, Peterson gets into IQ and the Jews.

“But then, if you reverse it, you see the reverse problem emerging with the issue of Ashkenazi Jews, because they’re overrepresented in most positions of competence, let’s say, and authority—radically overrepresented, especially at the top. Unless you’re willing to posit something like IQ differential that will account for it, you have to come up with a conspiratorial theory.”

This is a subtle argumentative strategy, but I’ve bolded the words and phrases that are used to twist a listener into thinking something pretty extreme. Peterson gets the chance to introduce the idea of a Jewish power conspiracy without actually attaching to it. But he said the phrase, loud and clear. “You have to come up with a conspiratorial theory” if you are not willing to embrace IQ differences. His word choices are incredibly careful— you wouldn’t dare accuse him of supporting that conspiracy, and yet, now all of a sudden you are thinking that it might be a valid choice. This is an attempt to shift the Overton Window towards extremism, but it’s hard to pin Peterson down because he speaks in a vague enough way that racists and alt-righters can hear what they want to hear.

Another Trump-esque fallacy:

“The problem on the left is that clearly, clearly, absolutely, indisputably, if the right can go too far—and the evidence for that is the catastrophe of Auschwitz, the catastrophe of the Nazis. All that death and suffering is evidence of wrong, which is accepted by the left—then equal evidence exists that that can happen on the left. In fact, perhaps even more evidence. If you don’t think the evidence is credible, then there’s something wrong with you.”

If you don’t think the evidence is credible that there is more evidence of the left going too far than of the right going to far, there is something wrong with you. Weird. That doesn’t seem like something an academic would insinuate. This is an example of an Ad Hominem– attacking the arguer instead of the argument.

And finally, the crowning glory of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here logic.

“Well, I think it’s partly because intellectuals tend to be left leaning. The best predictor for leaning left is a trait called openness, which is associated, to some degree, with cognitive ability, but more importantly with creativity. Left-leaning people don’t like boundaries between things, which is also why I think the left-leaning people can’t draw boundaries within their own domain. They don’t like borders, as we can certainly tell. They’d rather have the borders open. Why? Because the more open the borders are between things, the more opportunity there is for information flow.

Left-leaning open people like information flow. They think, "well, the net benefit of free information flow is positive." It’s like, "fair enough. But that doesn’t mean that there should be no barriers between things," which is the conservative perspective. It’s not only information that flows across open borders. All sorts of things flow across open borders. Things get muddy and confused, if there’s no conceptual differences between people. So there’s an argument between the right and the left about where the borders should be, and how porous they should be. That’s an argument that always has to occur.”

This is a Red Herring– ("where a speaker attempts to distract an audience by deviating from the topic at hand by introducing a separate argument the speaker believes is easier to speak to"). It is also dog-whistling ("employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup").

Peterson originally starts talking about creativity and intellectual boundaries, and then seems to transition to a veiled commentary on border control. This is very, very weird to see in an argument. He never explicitly says he’s transitioning, but it’s clear that he’s trying to appeal to emotions and conflate two unrelated concepts. Notice the coded language here— “All sorts of things flow across open borders. Things get muddy and confused…” It’s just vague enough that Peterson can deny anti-immigration and overtly racist accusations, but specific enough that one would get a sense that “muddy” and dirty “things” are “flow[ing]” across borders. This should remind you of Trump’s rhetoric in his speech about migrants sending rapists, thugs, etc.

Peterson is brilliant, there is no doubt about it. His mastery of fallacies and emotionally-manipulative rhetoric have given him a strong pulpit and made him very useful as a gateway to the alt-right. If you try to pin him down on any of these tactics, he could very easily worm his way out. That’s part of why he’s so effective. He can’t really be argued with, because he never explicitly endorses far-right beliefs, and can always claim that an opponent is misrepresenting him. His real goal is to advance the cause of radical white Christendom, and he serves as a gateway to that cause.

[hitachihanoi]

The Ultimate Maker Education Trick

The Ultimate Maker Education Trick

Why every little thing you have discovered Maker Education Is incorrect

it is important of preparing a learning environment influenced by the principles typically linked to making is that learner voice and option is improved. Flow could get often become addicting. If you should be passionate concerning the Maker motion, now’s a time that is wonderful become involved! Therefore manufacturer tasks might have a part that is good training.

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Maker Education – the Conspiracy

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What Exactly Is Therefore Fascinating About Maker Education?

Please click the links to realize the papers if you are thinking about reading more. YouTube and cellular applications can really help such academic fantasy characters to access the entire world at a instead good deal label. At any time you artwork essay writer service an instrument which allows individuals to be inventive, you will find those that will start to be inventive because of the device. It is generally difficult to produce the most suitable mixture of games and training. In certain sectors, such as the automotive industry, items are developed by integrating modular components along with a provided platform. For that reason, companies are changing whatever they do therefore the real means they are doing it. Manufacturers of most types are appearing in every four corners of planet.

Individuals usually think a Maker area is mostly about technology, but nevertheless, it’s in realityn’t. Maker areas had been a portion that is huge of want to create that happen. You don’t have to discover how to try everything when you look at the makerspace. The concepts of constructivist teaching upon which they’re based has been in existence for over 100 decades while the expression Maker space could possibly be a new thing in the school world. Perhaps the home towards the class room had been transformed to check as being a drawbridge. E-credentials, including badges, hold the opportunity to disrupt credentialing that is traditional. UTeach would be in a place to provide you with the instructors for those brand new manufacturer spaces.

The educator and manufacturers can select be it a pick that is blind one where in actuality the manufacturers see their alternatives. Also if some instructor want to use the famous transmedia characters for training lawfully they will likely be indulging in copyright infringement. The student gets highly motivated to do something linked to education for long stretches of time in nearly the other instances it’s good in the event. Manufacturer education assumes on forms that are several. It’s presently a trend that is major training. Transmedia training works extremely well at all ages however it is extremely designed for training upto the level that is key. The ideal manufacturer Education programs attempt to add each one of these factors.

The post The Ultimate Maker Education Trick appeared first on Hitachi Hà Nội.

[marilynngmesalo]

’Misinformation’ and ‘toxic’ top word of the year lists

’Misinformation’ and ‘toxic’ top word of the year lists ’Misinformation’ and ‘toxic’ top word of the year lists https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

NEW YORK — Misinformation, as opposed to disinformation, was chosen Monday as Dictionary.com‘s word of the year on the tattered coattails of “toxic,” picked earlier this month for the same honour by Oxford Dictionaries in these tumultuous times.

Jane Solomon, a linguist-in-residence at Dictionary, said in a recent interview that her site’s choice of “mis” over “dis” was deliberate, intended to serve as a “call to action” to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits.

It’s the idea of intent, whether to inadvertently mislead or to do it on purpose, that the Oakland, California-based company wanted to highlight. The company decided it would go high when others have spent much of 2018 going low.

The truth is, the #WordOfTheYear2018 is misinformation. Because words matter.https://t.co/g928wHdtdU

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) November 26, 2018

“The rampant spread of misinformation is really providing new challenges for navigating life in 2018,” Solomon told The Associated Press ahead of the word of the year announcement. “Misinformation has been around for a long time, but over the last decade or so the rise of social media has really, really changed how information is shared. We believe that understanding the concept of misinformation is vital to identifying misinformation as we encounter it in the wild, and that could ultimately help curb its impact.”

In studying lookups on the site that trended this year, Dictionary noticed “our relationship with truth is something that came up again and again,” she said.

For example, the word “mainstream” popped up a lot, spiking in January as the term “mainstream media,” or MSM, grew to gargantuan proportions, wielded as an insult by some on the political right. Other words swirling around the same problem included a lookup surge in February for “white lie” after Hope Hicks, then White House communications director, admitted to telling a few for President Donald Trump.

The word “Orwellian” surfaced in heavy lookups in May, after a statement attributed to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the Chinese government of “Orwellian nonsense” in trying to impose its views on American citizens and private companies when it declared that United Airlines, American Airlines and other foreign carriers should refer to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as part of China in public-facing materials, such as their websites.

Misinformation, Solomon said, “frames what we’ve all been through in the last 12 months.” In that vein, the site with 90 million monthly users has busied itself adding new word entries for “filter bubble,” “fake news,” “post-fact,” “post-truth” and “homophily,” among others. Other word entries on the site have been freshened to reflect timely new meanings, including “echo chamber.”

The company’s runners-up for the top honour include “representation,” driven by the popularity of the movies “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” along with wins during the U.S. midterm elections for Muslim women, Native Americans and LGBTQ candidates.

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But the rise of misinformation, Solomon said, stretches well beyond U.S. borders and Facebook’s role in disseminating fake news and propaganda in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The use of Facebook and other social media to incite violence and conflict was documented around the globe in 2018, she said.

“Hate speech and rumours posted to Facebook facilitated violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, riots started in Sri Lanka after false news set the country’s Buddhist majority against Muslims, and false rumours about child kidnappers on WhatsApp led to mob violence in India,” Solomon said.

Is disinformation or misinformation at play in terms of the year’s most prominent conspiracy theories? Solomon noted proliferation on social media over students in the Parkland school shooting being crisis actors instead of victims of violence, and over a group of migrants from Honduras who are making their way north being funded by “rich liberals.”

Elsewhere in the culture, countless podcasts and videos have spread the absurd notion of a global coverup that the Earth is flat rather than round. The idea of “misinfodemics” has surfaced in the last several years to identify the anti-vaccination movement and other beliefs that lead to real-world health crises, Solomon said.

There are distinctions between misinformation and disinformation to be emphasized.

“Disinformation would have also been a really, really interesting word of the year this year, but our choice of misinformation was very intentional,” she said. “Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behaviour of others. It’s sort of like pointing at behaviour and saying, ‘THIS is disinformation.’ With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behaviour, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation. It’s a word of self-reflection, and in that it can be a call to action. You can still be a good person with no nefarious agenda and still spread misinformation.”

She pointed to “Poe’s law” in slicing and dicing “misinfo” and “disinfo.” The term, dating to 2005, has become an internet shorthand to sum up how easy it is to spread satire as truth online when an author’s intent isn’t clearly indicated.

The phrase is based on a comment one Nathan Poe posted on a Christian forum during a discussion over creationism, in which he commented: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is uttrerly (sic) impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone (italics used) won’t mistake for the genuine article.”

Dictionary.com chose “complicit” as last year’s word of the year. In 2016, it was “xenophobia.”

//<![CDATA[ ( function() { pnLoadVideo( "videos", "-QuckfyD-Pc", "pn_video_768471", "", "", {"controls":1,"autoplay":0,"is_mobile":""} ); } )(); //]]> Click for update news Bangla news https://ift.tt/2FH0xox world news

[businessweekme]

Saving Snap

On the second floor of the new headquarters of Snap Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., is a room dedicated to helping ­employees open up. It’s round and lined with potted plants. “Speak from the heart,” reads a framed sign on the wall. “Listen from the heart.” Employees show up in groups of about a dozen, sit cross-legged on black cushions, and take turns with the “talking piece,” a heart-shaped purple geode that gives the bearer the right to confidentially share deep thoughts.

This is the inner sanctum for what Snap calls “Council,” a sort of New Age corporate retreat that uses a technique Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel learned in childhood. It was also where I found myself on a Friday morning in July. Council meetings, I’d been told by the company’s communications chief, are “sacred.” They’re also a real-life example of what Spiegel wants people to do with his smartphone app, Snapchat: share intimately, without fear of judgment from the outside world.

As an app, at least, it’s a compelling idea. Snapchat’s disappearing posts, Stories, as they’re known, are wildly popular with teenagers, especially in the U.S.—so popular that Facebook Inc. has made the concept a core part of its own services, most notably Instagram. Unfortunately, Snap is having trouble capitalising on the opportunity.

This should be Spiegel’s moment. Facebook is in the middle of a series of ­privacy-related scandals. Twitter and YouTube, Snapchat’s other big competitors, have seemed overrun by some combination of Russian bots, ISIS recruiters, and/or conspiracy theorists. In this context, Snapchat would appear to be well-positioned as an alternative. There’s no fake news, and the company’s emphasis on disappearing content means it stores much less data than its ­competitors do.

And yet, daily usage has started to decline. Late last year, Spiegel redesigned Snapchat to get people to spend more time on it. Users hated it. In early August, Snap reported that its audience had fallen from 191 million daily users in the first quarter to 188 million in the second. That’s alarming because Facebook, which is more than seven times bigger, is still growing. Instagram Stories, essentially a copy of Snapchat, has more than 400 million daily users.

Investors have come to see Snap as a smaller, unprofitable Facebook rather than a new idea that should be judged on its own merits. Spiegel says these problems have been caused in part by lack of communication, which has created confusion inside and outside the company. “If you don’t share who you are with people, you can’t be upset when they have misperceptions,” he says.

That’s why Spiegel, 28, agreed for the first time to let an ­outsider into Council. He learned about the concept while attending Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, a prep school in Santa Monica. Today, Snap has six full-time and eight part-time Council facilitators among its 3,000 employees. They presided over 785 sessions during the first half of 2018. All employees do Council on their first day of work; Snap’s directors do it before quarterly board meetings.

The meeting I attended started with an employee lighting a candle in the centre of the circle to dedicate the session to a cause, and then proceeded with a series of free-­association prompts. A moderator asked us to tell a story about our names or a memory related to summer. Outside the round room, morale at Snap has been low recently. Inside it, employees were connecting with each other, at times emotionally, about their childhoods, hopes, and fears.

Council etiquette prohibits me from telling you what ­others shared, but during one of my turns with the geode, I told the group an embarrassing childhood story about getting sick during a family beach vacation. They also now know a legend about my great-grandmother slaughtering a rooster.

Council itself is a bit like Snapchat in that it’s all about sharing personal thoughts privately. But a compelling concept is not the same as a successful business. Spiegel knows this and says he’s willing to let go of some of his quirks. That will mean unreservedly embracing the basics of running a ­public company.

Much of the blame for Snapchat’s troubles has fallen on Spiegel. For four of the six quarters since its March 2017 initial public offering, Snap has missed on revenue estimates. In that time, Spiegel has also lost or replaced his heads of ­engineering, finance, hardware, legal, product, and sales.

Snap employees complain about his dictatorial management style and penchant for secrecy. In January the company’s chief counsel sent around a memo threatening jail time for employees who leaked proprietary information to the press. It was a strange threat because, according to several Snap employees, the bigger problem was that they didn’t have much information in the first place. That same month, workers were told they wouldn’t be receiving cash bonuses because the company didn’t meet its goals. They hadn’t been told what the goals were.

To turn all this around, Spiegel has embarked on a self-­improvement project. A little more than a year ago, he hired a well-known management coach, Stephen Miles. Spiegel also conducted an anonymous survey of employees that included a question asking how he, as their leader, could better serve them. The responses were brutally honest. Overwhelmingly, they asked for one thing: to know what was going on.

“Each team had their own verticalised set of goals,” Spiegel says. In other words, members of different teams rarely talked to one another, a reality that had been built into Snap’s anti-­corporate culture. When the company went public at the beginning of 2017, its headquarters was spread out over two dozen small buildings and houses scattered around Venice, Calif. (Some of the Snap offices had beds in them to comply with zoning laws, contributing to an atmosphere that could feel unprofessional.) There were no companywide gatherings, except for social functions such as lavish parties for Halloween and New Year’s Eve, which came with their own code of secrecy: no photos.

Spiegel pins all this on his own shyness. He says he feels “uncomfortable or intimidated speaking to large groups.” Miles told Spiegel, in effect, to grow up.

Last December, for the first time, Spiegel gathered his senior managers to discuss priorities, which were printed in large font and arranged on the floor of a conference room. The company also started a channel on Snapchat for ­employees to update them about changes. In March it began hosting monthly all-staff meetings.

During a meeting in July, with five executives onstage, employees asked what Snap would do to retain people after recent cuts of hundreds of jobs. Jason Halbert, Snap’s head of human resources, said the company was getting better at measuring and rewarding the best employees. Tim Stone, the new chief financial officer, reiterated the need to motivate staff to “bleed Snapchat yellow.” Improving employee performance is the top priority for 2018, staff were told, followed by boosting daily users, revenue growth, and time spent on the app. Priority No. 5: building a ­sustainable business.

In that meeting, Spiegel let his executives do most of the talking, but he piped up when someone inquired about Snap’s mission statement, which is to “contribute to human progress by allowing people to express themselves.” “What do we mean by ‘human progress’ in our mission?” an employee asked. “How do we explain this externally?”

Spiegel flopped his microphone back and forth as he gathered his thoughts. “I think one of the things that’s been really helpful in maybe the past six months or so is that the contrast is starting to become more clear between our company and the other companies in technology,” he said. “What I think that people are starting to see is that other companies really are trying to make as much money as possible and really don’t care how that happens.”

He didn’t say the word “Facebook,” but the reference was obvious. Snap employees see Mark Zuckerberg’s social network as the villain in their virtuous fight against vanity and virality. Unlike Facebook, nothing on Snapchat needs to be polished. You can take a selfie without makeup or, even better, turn your face into a cartoon animal.

And yet part of Spiegel’s growing up has been about showing advertisers his company can perform many of the same functions as Facebook and Google—for instance, targeting users by their locations and interests—more cheaply. During the employee Q&A, Spiegel said he was willing to “sacrifice short-term results to try to make a positive impact in the world.” But sooner or later, Snap will need to make money.

Spiegel works in a Santa Monica business park overlooking the municipal airport. On the wall by his desk is a framed motivational quote from the spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson: “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.”

Spiegel says the words—a gift from his wife, supermodel Miranda Kerr, when he turned 25—hit home last year, when he was watching a livestream of the commencement ceremony at Stanford, his alma mater. The speaker was actor Sterling K. Brown, an alumnus who starred in the TV drama The People v. O.J. Simpson. Brown spoke about overcoming fears of inadequacy. “What the guy at Stanford said was, by you shining your light, you give other people the permission to shine theirs,” Spiegel says. “I was like, Oh, my God, that’s really the journey that I went through as a leader.”

Asked why he was so reluctant to shine, he pauses for a few beats. “I had a pretty serious Christian upbringing. I remember growing up I was taught to be small, be a turtle,” he says. “I remember thinking, Why would I go around the company and just chat with people? Like that would be so awkward. Now I go walk around the office and get a ton of emails like, ‘Oh, my God, that was awesome you came by.’ ”

A more serious problem for Spiegel besides his shyness, at least in the eyes of his employees, is his aversion to ­criticism. “No exec challenges Evan—no exec who lasts over a month, anyway,” a former employee says. When he’s challenged, Spiegel tends to ignore warnings. After Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories, he refused to believe that was contributing to a slowdown in growth, according to several people familiar with Snap’s operations. (Snap disputes this, pointing to its IPO prospectus and internal documents that show that Spiegel discussed competition from Instagram with at least some employees.) Spiegel also pushed for last year’s redesign even after he was presented with data that predicted the changes would turn away users. In this sense, one employee says, declines in the price of Snap’s stock, which is trading 31 percent below its IPO price, have been a blessing in disguise, a persistent reminder to Spiegel that what he’s doing isn’t working.

He argues that ignoring critics has served Snap well. Disappearing stories seemed silly in a world where every photo can be saved, except that was exactly what made them cool. Letting people turn their faces into bunnies wasn’t a good business, and then revenue started flowing. “Over and over again, everyone told us that our company was going to fail,” he says. “We worked against all odds, especially in this landscape with tech giants.”

For better or worse, the team that took Snap public last year mirrored Spiegel’s lack of experience. In their prior jobs, few on the leadership team had experience as public company executives. Halbert, the head of human resources, for instance, was a military officer. Earlier this year, the Information reported that during a training session, he told stories of violent encounters in Mexico and described a sort of orgasmic meditation strategy he’d used during deployments. After complaints, an outside law firm investigated Halbert’s behaviour. Unlike most of the 2017 team, he’s still on the job, but he reports to Stone, Snap’s CFO, instead of directly to Spiegel.

As the executives have cycled through, one bright spot has been Stone, a former Amazon.com Inc. executive who’s getting praise from analysts. Some investors hope for another seasoned leader to come aboard and do what Sheryl Sandberg has done for Facebook. Not that shareholders opinions matter. Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy hold all voting power. The company’s first annual meeting, held on Aug. 2, involved no public questions. It lasted 2 minutes and 46 seconds.

For now, Spiegel is focused on improving the company from within. He’s putting executives through coaching sessions with Miles, reading management books, and spending more time with board members such as A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble Co. Miles says the most important development from their work is that Snap has gone from a “hub-and-spoke” model, with Spiegel in the middle, to something more “distributed,” with “less special people and less ­special information.”

Ultimately the trick for Spiegel will be to ­professionalise his company, the way Facebook did years ago—without ­becoming too much like it. Lafley says he considers the Snap brand 10 years behind Facebook’s, at a point where it hasn’t broken its users’ trust yet. “You don’t want to get swept into the problems of others in the industry that are not your problems,” Lafley says. “But you want customers to understand how you’re different and why you’re different.” <BW>

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