US Politics: Portlandia

[The Mance]

I've been seeing a bit of interesting skepticism about these Portland kidnapping videos.  One incident in particular is broken down into all the ways it seems more like the extraction of an undercover plant than an actual arrest/kidnapping.  

Most telling is the fact that the arrestee is never searched for weapons, or handcuffed, before being placed in the unsecured back seat of a vehicle.  Which, I guess if you're conducting extra-judicial abductions, maybe you just don't follow legal processes re: arrest/detainment protocols.  But, still, would you really pass on making sure the ostensibly violent provocateur isn't carrying a concealed weapon of any kind, or at least that their hands are secured, before jumping into a van with them?

There's also the utter calmness of the whole operation.  Which, I guess is either chilling in its calculated flagrance of due process, and/or else weirdly anomalous given the casual violence in every other police interaction lately.  There's no shouting, protesting or resistance from the victim.  No overt violence from the police (or whatevs).  And, again, no searching or handcuffing of the victim, where normally (sad to say) we'd expect a violent subduing of the guy followed by him being zip-tied into a pretzel and then maced just for lulz.

[Zorral]

 

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

 

That is a stunning thread!

[DanteGabriel]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

 

This is the kind of shit that drives me bananas about this fucking country. This shit has been out there for years. Why do we need some random citizen to tweet this? The New York Times spent how many reporter hours on shit like Clinton's emails and "white working class" voter safaris but the shenanigans of Trump and his last-in-law-class  lawyer Michael Cohen went unseen under their noses for years, even decades?

[Ran]

28 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

This is the kind of shit that drives me bananas about this fucking country. This shit has been out there for years. Why do we need some random citizen to tweet this?

Davidson is a journalist currently working for NPR, and has written for The New Yorker. He and David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post, who also has been focusing his attention on the financial shenanigans at the Trump organization, discussed some related matter a couple of years ago (I believe it's connected to the all-cash spending spree that started around the same time).

28 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

The New York Times spent how many reporter hours on shit like Clinton's emails and "white working class" voter safaris but the shenanigans of Trump and his last-in-law-class  lawyer Michael Cohen went unseen under their noses for years, even decades?

They did do that massive exposé on the Trump taxes and inheritance issues, thanks to Mary Trump's documents. But yes, I'm baffled at why something so very obvious and public hasn't received more scrutiny. Are they hitting resistance somewhere on the UK side? 

[Larry of the Lawn]

53 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Could either go here or the police thread, but Ken Cuccinelli (I'd forgotten he's at DHS now) says they're taking this police tactic seen in Portland national.  

Is this kidnapping?  I mean it is, but I mean legally.  Paging board lawyers

[fionwe1987]

22 hours ago, DMC said:

Whether people felt there were some concerns doesn't make those concerns legitimate.  And I'm honestly not trying to be ornery.

The reason it may seem I have a bug up my ass about this is because it is indirectly attacking a huge part of almost the entire field of political behavior that a lot of my friends make a living doing.  Like, if a researcher wants to find out the effect of messaging, they may (and have) give certain advertisements to a certain amount of people then measure the outcomes of those against those they did not give the advertisement to.  There is no "informed consent" there because it's not necessary.  This is how a lot of the main research from Gerber, Maltzman, et al. that is now seminal to American political behavior, and that's how that data was acquired in the first place.  Using facebook as a tool for doing basically the same thing is not some type of huge ethical breach, and I don't care if The Guardian or whomever claims it is.  They're wrong.

We may have moved on from this topic but this is a highly disingenuous presentation of the research in that paper. They absolutely were not controlling what ads were being shown in the feed. They were controlling what posts from the actual social network of 700,000 odd Facebook users would show in their feed. With no information provided to those people that their feed, which is the product they pay for in exchange for all the personal information they give Facebook, would be working differently than normal in a very specific vector: how you feel after reading a post. 

For an analogy, imagine that in the days of telephone operators, someone said "calls don't go through all the time. So what we did was, we looked at which callers had positive information for their friends, which ones had negative information, scored it, and then randomly had the telephone operators deliberately not connect a subset of positive, negative, and in-between personal calls. We also tracked subsequent calls made by those who did and didn't receive these scored calls, and we can show that if you got positive information in a call, your subsequent call was likely to be positive too".

 

Would you be ok with that? Facebook and these researchers not only deliberately withheld personal communications (that they weren't direct one on one is beside the point) between people, they did so with no clue if any of their subjects were bipolar, or depressed or experiencing any other kind of stress. And if you think this isn't a relevant factor, consider the author's' own words in their paper:

These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks

 

While I'm not a behavioral neuroscientist, I worked in labs adjacent to them and well remember the outrage at perpetrating this experiment on such a large populace. Worse, while the overall effects observed were quite small, there's no guarantee that there weren't outliers who reacted particularly poorly to increased negativity or positivity in the posts they saw due to their priors. 

What's especially pernicious is seeing this kind of crap being defended right alongside genuine alarm over conspiracies like QAnon which clearly show the perils of attempting to manipulate emotions online. 

And please don't defend this along the lines of stating that informed consent sometimes defeats the point of an experiment. That can be used to justify not explaining the purpose of the research to the subjects. But the moment you're manipulating subjects normal life, you are obliged to inform them you are doing so.

Your research is such that this kind of information will transform the results? Tough beans. Research elsewhere. 

[DMC]

1 hour ago, fionwe1987 said:

they did so with no clue if any of their subjects were bipolar, or depressed or experiencing any other kind of stress.

Gonna stop right there.  Now researchers are supposed to be aware of their subjects' mental state?  Obviously, just based on percentages, some subjects are gonna be bipolar, more will be depressed, and most are going to be experiencing some kind of stress.  Your line of reasoning lost me here.

[karaddin]

3 minutes ago, DMC said:

Gonna stop right there.  Now researchers are supposed to be aware of their subjects' mental state?  Obviously, just based on percentages, some subjects are gonna be bipolar, more will be depressed, and most are going to be experiencing some kind of stress.  Your line of reasoning lost me here.

According to the ethics lessons I was taught in psychology subjects within the last 5 years, yeah? You're supposed to take into account that some participants will have personal issues that you can't account for which may make them more susceptible to harm from the experiment and you need to take measures to make assistance available to them if required. It's also a big part of why consenting to be in the experiment was treated as important, even if the experiment sufficiently justifies the need for deception as to its aim and what its testing.

[ThinkerX]

Team Trump is at it again - seeking to withhold money for corona virus testing and tracing.  Even some GOP senators seem ticked off.  The official line is 'states should bear more of the burden.'  Yet, at the same time, Trump is sending large numbers of federal agents into Portland, apparently to cause havoc.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-administration-pushing-to-block-new-money-for-testing-tracing-and-cdc-in-upcoming-coronavirus-relief-bill/ar-BB16UnyK?ocid=ob-fb-enus-580&fbclid=IwAR3iCUV_CTExzP-DlT7hgADbh6LEKn5gdw0ZTVbr6GvYoZtoZhV8jDSEIuo

 

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

 

The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.

 

The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations, cautioned that the talks were fluid and the numbers were in flux.

[Martell Spy]

14 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Team Trump is at it again - seeking to withhold money for corona virus testing and tracing.  Even some GOP senators seem ticked off.  The official line is 'states should bear more of the burden.'  Yet, at the same time, Trump is sending large numbers of federal agents into Portland, apparently to cause havoc.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-administration-pushing-to-block-new-money-for-testing-tracing-and-cdc-in-upcoming-coronavirus-relief-bill/ar-BB16UnyK?ocid=ob-fb-enus-580&fbclid=IwAR3iCUV_CTExzP-DlT7hgADbh6LEKn5gdw0ZTVbr6GvYoZtoZhV8jDSEIuo

 

 

 

Perfectly logical. He is just treating the states like he treats NATO members.

 

Cuccinelli defended the legality of his department’s actions.

“With as much lawbreaking is going on, we’re seeking to prosecute as many people as are breaking the law as it relates to federal jurisdiction,” he said on NPR.

DHS has outlined dozens of incidents in Portland to justify the presence of federal forces ― including damage to federal buildings by fireworks and many instances of graffiti.

Speaking to The New York Times, unnamed officials claimed that legal authority for the response comes from a section of U.S. law that allows DHS to recruit federal officers to help the Federal Protective Service, an agency it oversees that is charged with protecting federal property.

The aggressive response from DHS has sown worries that the department could soon start sending unidentified officers to other cities around the country where anti-racism protests have marched on since the late-May killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minnesota police officer.

Cuccinelli seemed to confirm those fears, telling NPR, “This is a posture we intend to continue not just in Portland but in any of the facilities that we’re responsible for around the country.”

Homeland Security Official Defends Portland ‘Kidnappings’ Amid Calls For Investigation
Unidentified federal agents in military-style gear are jumping out of unmarked vans to detain protesters, according to videos and personal accounts.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/homeland-security-portland-protests-investigation_n_5f132a53c5b6d14c3367c824

[DMC]

34 minutes ago, karaddin said:

You're supposed to take into account that some participants will have personal issues that you can't account for which may make them more susceptible to harm from the experiment and you need to take measures to make assistance available to them if required.

Not in the way this was portrayed.  Researchers cannot verify the mental state of their subjects.  Hell, THAT would be invasive and unethical.  Researchers are supposed to ensure their experiment will not - or is at least as unlikely as possible to - inflict psychological damage on subjects.  But what we're talking about here [ETA: that's wrong, what I should say here is what I am specifically concerned about in terms of the implications] is "negative" and "positive" political messaging that facebook users are going to be exposed to already.  If that's "unethical" to you then you're really tying the hands of political behavior researchers behind their back.

[GrimTuesday]

8 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Team Trump is at it again - seeking to withhold money for corona virus testing and tracing.  Even some GOP senators seem ticked off.  The official line is 'states should bear more of the burden.'  Yet, at the same time, Trump is sending large numbers of federal agents into Portland, apparently to cause havoc.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-administration-pushing-to-block-new-money-for-testing-tracing-and-cdc-in-upcoming-coronavirus-relief-bill/ar-BB16UnyK?ocid=ob-fb-enus-580&fbclid=IwAR3iCUV_CTExzP-DlT7hgADbh6LEKn5gdw0ZTVbr6GvYoZtoZhV8jDSEIuo

 

 

 

The worst part about that is most states can't afford to take on more of the burden. Many states balanced budget laws where they can't run a deficit, so the more they have to pay for coronavirus related stuff, the worse their budget cuts are going to become. I know in my state we are already looking at a 7-8 billion dollar budget shortfall that has to be reconciled one way or another. The federal government has no such constraint, they literally print the money. If the feds don't bail us out, there is going to be mass layoffs and cuts to many important programs and services that people depend on in normal times, and even more in times like these. The virus is a disaster, but there is another crisis looming and it is going to be brutal.

14 minutes ago, DMC said:

Not in the way this was portrayed.  Researchers cannot verify the mental state of their subjects.  Hell, THAT would be invasive and unethical.  Researchers are supposed to ensure their experiment will not - or is at least as unlikely as possible to - inflict psychological damage on subjects.  But what we're talking about here [ETA: that's wrong, what I should say here is what I am specifically concerned about in terms of the implications] is "negative" and "positive" political messaging that facebook users are going to be exposed to already.  If that's "unethical" to you then you're really tying the hands of political behavior researchers behind their back.

I would actually say that researchers specifically excluding those who may be more susceptible to disinformation and may have psychological issues would actually taint their research. While it might present some ethical questions, the fact remains that those people still exist and you can't ignore that. So long as your sample is not over representative of that, I think that is the right way to go.

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, GrimTuesday said:

I would actually say that researchers specifically excluding those who may be more susceptible to disinformation and may have psychological issues would actually taint their research.

Yep.  In terms of a random sample, the objective is to get the same percentage of people as the overall population.  Obviously, in the overall population, there's plenty of people that have plenty of certain distinctive characteristics.  It's hard to capture all of them, but you certainly don't want to weed out those that have - shocker - anxiety, depression or any other mental issues.  If that was the case I could never be a subject.

[Kalbear]

I think you're probably both right. Most experimentation (on the web at least) doesnt involve things like emotional reaction and manipulation - they involve measuring things like user engagement and impact and clicks. If your goal is specifically emotional impact it's hard to say that you shouldnt start taking major precautions for your subjects, especially if you're doing it without expressed inclusion or opting in. 

I dont know how much facebook must be responsible, but (as an example) there is nothing that stops them from putting you specifically in an experiment that shows you some of the most horrific images that they regularly have to scrub, the kinds of things that cause their admins PTSD. That they wouldn't have some responsibility for the harm they cause in that case is obviously wrong, so I think we are simply now saying " how much"?

[DMC]

15 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I dont know how much facebook must be responsible, but (as an example) there is nothing that stops them from putting you specifically in an experiment that shows you some of the most horrific images that they regularly have to scrub, the kinds of things that cause their admins PTSD. That they wouldn't have some responsibility for the harm they cause in that case is obviously wrong, so I think we are simply now saying " how much"?

Of course, sure, there are limits on how horrific the "messaging" or images are.  I just haven't seen any evidence that was the case.  And if it was, I suspect that'd be the first thing mentioned.

[GrimTuesday]

Whenever one of the left leaning board members gets a bug up their asses about how weak the Democrats have been as of late, we are told that it is just something you have to accept in a situation when you only hold one chamber and the president is of the other party. This mentality absolves the failure of the Democrats when they do have power, telling us not to look back at how Democrats have failed to push their advantages in the past because all that matters is now or how we have to look at the climate they were operating in. People like Bernie Sanders (and John Lewis) have always existed, and but the party did not elevate them because they thought that it would lose them donors and elections. Progress take political will to pull off, and the Democratic party has had the political will to do anything truly, unequivically good exactly once since LBJ. Too many times they have simply been content to hold a seat down and pay empty lip service to the suffering that plagues this country. John Lewis got his skull fractured to make a difference, what have the rest of us done?

Think of the progress we could have made if we had just been willing to fight, and then look at the people who now hold the reigns of power within the party, and you will see the same people who stood against that progress at the helm. I see Nancy Pelosi saying that she longs for a pre-Trump Republican as if the Bush administration did much in the early days of the financial collapse towards the latter part of his time in office.

I know it is harder to build than destroy, but it feels like the Democrats have simply made sure that the Republicans had a slightly smaller hammer.

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

"And so that, along with these calls for justice and equity around the country, really brought into focus the fact that what's what's being asked for is finally some priority in our African American communities. So while our goal is to sign everyone up for some form of health care coverage, we are starting with our Black communities."

Beshear told Salon that the state has identified about 20,000 Black residents who lack health care coverage.

"The easiest means to, at least initially, provide that coverage … is through the pandemic Medicaid program," he said. "That right now in COVID-19 is a one-page form, and that's the way to get people into the system."

The pandemic Medicaid program is a temporary measure intended to provide free health care to eligible applicants. The state plans to reach out to churches and community leaders to help with the sign-ups and has approved a budget for a direct marketing campaign to reach residents who lack coverage. The marketing will also target the state's Hispanic residents, who have also been disproportionately affected.

 

Gov. Andy Beshear wants to give Black Kentucky residents health coverage — but there’s a catch
The effort is already underway, Beshear told Salon. State Rep. Attica Scott says it's just a "short-term Band-aid"

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/18/gov-andy-beshear-wants-to-give-black-kentucky-residents-health-coverage--but-theres-a-catch/
 

[Paladin of Ice]

8 hours ago, Ran said:

Davidson is a journalist currently working for NPR, and has written for The New Yorker. He and David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post, who also has been focusing his attention on the financial shenanigans at the Trump organization, discussed some related matter a couple of years ago (I believe it's connected to the all-cash spending spree that started around the same time).

They did do that massive exposé on the Trump taxes and inheritance issues, thanks to Mary Trump's documents. But yes, I'm baffled at why something so very obvious and public hasn't received more scrutiny. Are they hitting resistance somewhere on the UK side? 

NYT, NPR, WaPo, etc., post stories like this and people are like "So what else is knew? Tell me something I didn't know."

The same people see the same info on social media and are like "Why doesn't the media run these stories?!?!!?!1?"

[Ran]

2 hours ago, GrimTuesday said:

Whenever one of the left leaning board members gets a bug up their asses about how weak the Democrats have been as of late, we are told that it is just something you have to accept in a situation when you only hold one chamber and the president is of the other party.

I mean, you do. There's literally nothing you can do but attempt some bipartisan efforts where possible, message about how things should be, and obstruct.

Quote

This mentality absolves the failure of the Democrats when they do have power, telling us not to look back at how Democrats have failed to push their advantages in the past because all that matters is now or how we have to look at the climate they were operating in.

You're talking about that very brief window in the Obama administration, and I think any competent congressional history will explain things pretty well, and they weren't about a lack of fight but rather disarray in the ranks that limited the scope of vision.

Quote

People like Bernie Sanders

He's not a Democrat. Why would the party elevate an independent to a leadership role?

Quote

(and John Lewis)

His run at Minority Whip was poorly organized and ineffective... and then he made the decision to support Steny Hoyer over Pelosi for whatever reason, to the surprise of many since Hoyer was decidedly more conservative than either Lewis or Pelosi.

The history of the party leadership in that brief era is that Pelosi worked her way through the ranks and ultimately defeated Steny Hoyer, which was a victory for the more liberal wing, and then she fought off another attempt by the moderate and conservative wing to wrest it back. But there were still some very conservative members of the party in Congress at that time, and marshaling them all together was a huge challenge in that era. It's easier now.

Quote

because they thought that it would lose them donors and elections.

I mean, yes, putting up an independent as party leader would lose donors and elections. As to Lewis, the fact that he was on the more liberal end would certainly hurt, and the fact that he didn't do a great job in his campaign did not encourage the thought that he was going to be able to marshal a cohesive party support. A failure in results would lead to losses from donors and elections.

Quote

Think of the progress we could have made if we had just been willing to fight,

This is a nice thought for an ahistorical version of reality.