SpinnyNuNu

Donald Trump has given another radically right-wing evangelical Christian a position of power in his administration.

Pastor Ted Haggard mocked liberal outrage on Facebook today with what I assume was supposed to be a joke. It's a strange way to show empathy for the people already suffering (or about to suffer) under Donald Trump's administration.

Former first daughter Jenna Bush Hager is registering her opinion on Trump's immigration executive order

A Tennessee knitting store owner is refusing to do business with anyone who comes to her shop for "pussyhat" pink yarn -- or other supplies to be used in support of the "vulgarity, vile and evilness" of the feminist movement.

While I left evangelicalism and the Republican Party over half a decade ago, this election has stripped away the last of my willingness to give individuals in these institutions the benefit of the doubt. Even James Dobson jumped on the Trump bandwagon, after arguing during the Clinton administration that a president must show integrity in his personal life. Everything about prominent evangelicals' lock-stepping behind Trump felt like a betrayal of what I was taught as a child.Click through to read more!

In May of 2015, the brilliant and acerbic Andy Borowitz wrote a piece for The New Yorker entitled "Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans."  Borowitz wrote:

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them. 

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said.  “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.” 

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.”

I wonder if Borowitz realizes how literally accurate his satirical piece is.   Because Brian Schaffner, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, has just published research showing something that even given humanity's fact-resistance, is kind of mind-blowing.

In the first, and less surprising part of the research, Schaffner showed the now-famous aerial photographs from Obama's and Trump's inaugurations to 1,388 people, and asked them which was which.  Unsurprisingly, given the claims by Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, and others, a significant percentage of Trump voters thought the Obama photograph (clearly showing more people) was Trump's, and vice versa.

Of course, all that shows is that people believed what Spicer said, and/or that the photograph itself had been misrepresented in the press.  So far, nothing too shocking.  But the amazing -- and alarming -- piece of Schaffner's research is best described in his own words:

For the other half, we asked a very simple question with one clearly correct answer: “Which photo has more people?”  Some of these people probably understood that the image on the left was from Trump’s inauguration and that the image on the right was from Obama’s, but admitting that there were more people in the image on the right would mean they were acknowledging that more people attended Obama’s inauguration. 

Would some people be willing to make a clearly false statement when looking directly at photographic evidence — simply to support the Trump administration’s claims? 

Yes.

In fact, about 15% of the Trump voters responded, with no apparent hesitation, that the photograph containing fewer people actually had more.  (I'm not sure if I find it heartening that 85% of Trump voters correctly identified the photo with the bigger audience, however, given that 41% still thought it was from Trump's inauguration.)

As Alan Levinovitz of Slate wrote:

The process of embracing a charlatan’s empowering vision is not rational, which means that rational arguments are unlikely, in isolation, to dispel it.  Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people cling tenaciously to their worldviews, and conflicting data may actually strengthen their beliefs.  (Just look at this family who thinks Trump is “a man of faith who will bring Godliness back.”)  To renounce Trump would mean admitting that one’s worldview—of a country wracked by carnage, as the president put it in his inaugural address, and a truth-telling hero who can heal it—is fundamentally mistaken.  And that can also mean confronting existential panic without a panacea.  It is much easier to forgive Trump for not locking her up than to wrestle with such truths...  It’s also much easier to convince yourself that a crowd is larger than it appears, particularly when the man you’ve put your faith in is arguing the same thing.  And in the case of the photographs, it didn’t take much to come up with an explanation for the apparent discrepancy.  Trump himself supplied it: Mainstream media manipulated both images to make it appear as if Obama’s had more.

Okay, I know I have biases just like everyone, and (like everyone) am probably wrong about some of my beliefs.  But what I completely do not get -- to the point of complete and utter bafflement -- is how people could be so wedded to their own biases that they would take incontrovertible hard evidence that they were wrong, and instead of changing their beliefs, disbelieve the evidence.

"No," they seem to be saying.  "I can't possibly be wrong.  It must be what I'm seeing right in front of me that is a lie."

Bill Nye compares this sort of thing to a belief in astrology, which persists despite huge amounts of evidence against it.  "For example, if somebody believes in astrology, it takes them about two years to get over it," Nye said.  "You have to show them over and over there’s no such thing as astrology, it doesn’t really work, and then they let go.  But everybody’s expectation that you’ll let go in a week is not going to met...  So we have to work, I think, diligently in the science community to fight back.  Of course there are the facts, we start with those.  But there’s this human nature thing on both sides to fight back.  We have our bubble over here, they have their bubble over there."

All of which means that rationalists have their work cut out for them.  I've seen over and over the extent to which humans react to new information primarily from an emotional, not a logical, standpoint; but over and over I'm astonished at how deep this tendency runs.  Andy Borowitz's quips about "fact-resistant humans" made me laugh, but I'm afraid in the last week or so my laugh has rung rather hollow.  Because the people currently in charge of the United States seem hell-bent on using this avoidance of the facts to their benefit, in terms of consolidating power and silencing the opposition.

And if it works, I'm afraid we're in for a really, really rough few years.

I am so disgusted by my government, and the cowards in Congress who refuse to stand up to the popular vote losing madman who currently sits in the White House, so profoundly out of his depth, he can be controlled by a neonazi and sent off to watch a children’s movie while thousands upon thousands of my fellow Americans take to the streets to challenge and resist his deplorable, unconstitutional, Fascist actions.

Yet I am also proud, inspired, and comforted by the millions of people not just in America, but around the world, who are standing up and declaring that we will fight this despicable scourge, this illegitimate, incompetent, corrupt, hateful, bigoted, petty tyrant, and everything he stands for. We will fight him until he is defeated, and we will never forget the appeasers and cowards who did nothing to stop him. Those who stand by silently, or offer empty words are no better than the evil men and women who enable this would-be dictator.

This is a binary moment in history, and all of us must make a choice that we will live with for the rest of our lives: you may choose to stand with Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and the racist white nationalists who support them, or you may choose to stand on the side of justice, equality, and the rule of law.

Choose wisely.

 

 

 

The acting Attorney General Sally Yates has told Justice Department lawyers not to make legal arguments defending President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration and refugees, according to sources familiar with the order.

Arizona Sen. John McCain has broken with President Donald Trump's on more than one issue.

Vets: Trump's travel orders blocked visas for Iraqi interpreters

I'm certainly no expert in online data analysis, but those seem to me to be obvious attempts to get people to click or respond for some purpose other than the (stupid) stated one.  People still share these things all over the place, much to my perplexity.

What I didn't realize is how deep this particular rabbit hole can go.  Until I read an article that came out last week in Motherboard called "The Data That Turned the World Upside Down," by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, that illustrates a far darker reason for worry regarding where we place our online clicks.

The article describes the science of psychometrics -- using patterns of responses to predict personalities, behaviors, even things like religious affiliation and membership in political parties.  Psychometric analysis used to rely on test subjects filling out lengthy questionnaires, and even then it wasn't very accurate.

But a psychologist named Michal Kosinski found a better way to do it, using data we didn't even know we were providing -- using patterns of "likes" and "shares" on Facebook.


Kosinski had discovered something groundbreaking -- that although one person's "likes" on Facebook doesn't tell you very much, when you look at aggregate data from millions of people, you can use what people click "like" on to make startlingly accurate predictions about who they are and what they do.   Grassegger and Krogerus write:

Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan.  Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts.  While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

By 2012, Kosinski and his team had refined their model so well that it could predict race (95% accuracy), sexual orientation (88% accuracy), political party (85% accuracy), and hundreds of other metrics, up to and including whether or not your parents were divorced.  (I wrote about some of Kosinski's early results in a post back in 2013.)

The precision was frightening, and the more data they had access to, the better it got.  A study of Kosinski's algorithm showed that ten "likes" were sufficient to allow the model to know a person better than an average work colleague; seventy, and it exceeded what a person's friends knew; 150, what their parents knew; and 300, what their partner knew.  Studies showed that targeting advertisements on Facebook based on psychometric data resulted in 63% more clicks than did non-targeted ads.

So it was only a matter of time before the politicians got wind of this.  Because not only can your data be used to predict your personality, the overall data can be used to identify people with a particular set of traits -- such as undecided voters.

Enter Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, an online data analysis firm, and one of the big guns with respect to both the recent U.S. election and the Brexit vote.  Because Nix started using Kosinski's algorithm to target individuals for political advertising.

"Only 18 months ago, Senator Cruz was one of the less popular candidates," Nix said in a speech political analysts in June 2016.  "Less than 40 percent of the population had heard of him...  So how did he do this?  A really ridiculous idea.  The idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender—or all African Americans because of their race."

Who knew rednecks and radical Muslims had so much in common?

Trump officials are discussing the possibility of asking foreign visitors to disclose all websites and social media sites they visit, and to share the contacts in their cell phones.

Pseudo-historian David Barton thinks Christians not getting special treatment under the law is the same as Christians having fewer rights than everyone else.

Trump defends immigration restrictions, denies they represent 'a Muslim ban'

In a normal year, the activist group makes about $4 million a year in online donations

The 'Harold and Kumar' star turned an act of bigotry into a positive.

Key officials for billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are criticizing the president's temporary travel ban.

The lawsuit says more than 30 football players raped women 52 over a four-year period.

A lack of boundaries and any rulebook in cyberspace has increased the threat and leveled the playing field today.

Mississippi State Senator Chris McDaniel lived up to every stereotype of Republicans in his state when he reacted to the weekend's Women's March with this display of ignorance and sexism.

Anti-abortion leader Kristan Hawkins doesn't just want to save the babies who haven't been born yet. She wants to save ones who haven't even been conceived.

On Sunday, the day after the Women's March, Carlsbad City (NM) Councilor J.R. Doporto went on Facebook and posted this message, which I guess he thought was entertaining:

In Elgin, Illinois, a board member of School District U-46 voted against a digital literacy curriculum because she thinks facts are part of some left-wing conspiracy.

Televangelist Jim Bakker says that anyone who opposes Donald Trump -- we're so mean to the President -- must be possessed by demons. Even the Republicans.

If someone tweets about lying being a sin, and you immediately assume they're talking about Donald Trump, maybe he's the problem...

Here's some unsolicited advice: If you market yourself as a family values Christian conservative, don't go on a profane rant against a reporter who asks you a question you don't like.

Is it legal for taxpayers to fund a homeless shelter that includes a chapel? The Freedom From Religion Foundation says no. It's an unpopular stance, but they're absolutely right.

A father and son charged with rape, kidnapping, and endangering children were found guilty yesterday on all counts and given the maximum possible prison sentences. Looks like the Bible they requested in court didn't help them one bit.

Belladonna is an extremely toxic plant that contains tropane alkaloids, chemicals that can cause psychoactive effects.