On another disinformation front, Kirk’s groups have been busy this year promoting falsehoods on campuses and in social media about vaccine mandates, efforts that the groups have used to raise funds and which have sparked criticism from health experts.
Kirk wrote false text messages charging that Biden has sent “goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a covid-19 vaccine”, as the Washington Post first reported.
Further, a Kirk non-profit ran alarmist and erroneous Facebook ads, which were seen millions of times, stating that the government has “NO RIGHT to force you to inject yourself with an experimental vaccine,” and warning that in response to advice about shots “LOCK YOUR DOORS, KIDS!!”
As documented by legal scholar Ian Haney López and others, the Democrats do not consistently use a narrative frame that effectively combines messaging about both race and class inequality, and how they overlap and reinforce one another. Democrats lack a simple, straightforward narrative — a big story to tell voters about what their party represents.
By comparison, the Republicans have a far more effective propaganda machine. They have branded themselves as “patriots” who love America and are “defending” it against those others — sometimes specifically named and identified, and sometimes not — who are not “real” Americans and are said to hate the country and its so-called traditions.
Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook, told members of a Senate subcommittee that her former employer bears some of the blame for the growing conflict in Ethiopia. More than once, Haugen accused Facebook's algorithms of “literally fanning ethnic violence” in Ethiopia.
“My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning,” Haugen said. “What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the beginning chapters of a story so terrifying no one wants to read the end of it.”
Freelance journalist Zecharias Zelalem is one of the people attempting to document that story in real time. He reports extensively on Ethiopia and agrees with Haugen's assessment.
“Just looking at the instances of documented evidence over the course of the past three years in which prominent Facebook posters would post unverified, often inflammatory posts or rhetoric that would then go on to incite mob violence, ethnic clashes, crackdowns on independent press or outspoken voices,” Zelalem said.
In one recent instance, Zelalem saw an inflammatory Facebook post from a media outlet that falsely blamed members of an ethnic minority group for carrying out murders and kidnappings that took place on Sept. 27.
The post quickly got hundreds of shares and likes. A day later, on Sept. 28, Zelalem said the village cited in the post was ransacked, burnt to the ground and the inhabitants were murdered.
“Despite multiple efforts to report the post, it remains up and live as of this moment,” he said.
There are two key reasons that the distinction between maker and manager schedules matters for each of us and the people we work with.
First, defining the type of schedule we need is more important than worrying about task management systems or daily habits. If we try to do maker work on a manager schedule or managerial work on a maker schedule, we will run into problems.
Second, we need to be aware of which schedule the people around us are on so we can be considerate and let them get their best work done.
I was thinking about what it means to honor the word habit, and I realized: I honor the word habit not on the days when it’s easy, when I feel energetic, or inspired, or whatever. I honor the word habit on the days that it is hard, but I show up anyway.
Ancient wisdom, in other words, doesn’t so much prescribe that we follow our passion, as it does that we approach with passion the trials and responsibilities placed before us.
We think of the “homeless person” and the “moved to North Carolina to be closer to family and also to afford more space for the kids” as two entirely different types of people. But it’s a single underlying phenomenon. And who ends up in which category will come down to a mix of luck, whether or not you do in fact have family in North Carolina, and whether or not the forces pushing you out of the high-cost area come up on you slowly so you have time to plan.
The fact that the new buildings are not “affordable housing” in the regulatory sense doesn’t mean that they have no impact on affordability. Nor does the fact that a person existing on the margins of homelessness would be unable to live in such a building change the fact that allowing their construction reduces homelessness by increasing the affordability of other units.
The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era. Making conclusions about a book’s quality from a 175-word review is hard work for artificial intelligences, whereas star ratings are ideal for them.
Image: Woman, who is my wife, walking with small dog, on a red rock Utah trail. She is wearing hiking shoes, a brimmed hat, and holding the dog on a short leash. The dog is white, with red ticking scruffy. And, despite his looks, has no terrier in him at all.
