Trump and the Russians: will the real news please stand up?

The New Neo Posted on by

That was a parody of a line from the old TV show “To Tell the Truth.”

It featured a person who had accomplished something but was not a well-known celebrity, plus two well-schooled imposters. The panel asked all of them questions about their alleged field of expertise and life history, and they answered. The group received points for each person on the panel that the imposters fooled into thinking they were the real deal.

And then at the end of the segment, the MC would say, “Will the real [fill in name] please stand up!” There was then a lot of fake standing and sitting, standing and sitting, until the real person finally was standing alone.

It was a fun show back in my youth. It’s not fun, though, when we can’t tell what news reports are real and what are fakes. I don’t just mean what stories are given a partisan spin and which are told straight; we can just assume that all of them are of the first variety nowadays, unless they’re about a subject so neutral that no one can make political hay of it (I’m not sure there is such a subject anymore). I’m talking about stories that are based on a premise that is false.

In other words, how to evaluate this set of lead stories on Memeorandum today? Good luck. What I do if I don’t have time to read everything (and who has time to read all of that?) is to go to my usually-trusted sources, or ones that seem to be most skeptical and reasonable about the story, and then read them and decide what I think about it.

And so we have this article from Lawfare. I’m not all that familiar with the blog although I’ve read it before, but the headline sounds reasonable and here’s some of the content, which also sounds reasonable and thoughtful:

This afternoon, CNN reported that President Barack Obama and President-Elect Donald Trump had been briefed by the intelligence community on the existence of a cache of memos alleging communication between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and the possession by the Russian government of highly compromising material against Trump. The memos were compiled by a former British intelligence officer on behalf of anti-Trump Republicans and, later, Democrats working against Trump in the general election…

This cache of memos has been kicking around official Washington for several weeks now. A great many journalists have been feverishly working to document the allegations within it, which are both explosive and quite various: some of them relate to alleged collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence, while others relate to personal sexual conduct by Trump himself that supposedly constitutes a rip-roaring KOMPROMAT file.

We have had the document for a couple of weeks and have chosen, as have lots of other publications, not to publish it while the allegations within it remain unproven…

First, we have no idea if any of these allegations are true. Yes, they are explosive; they are also entirely unsubstantiated, at least to our knowledge, at this stage. For this reason, even now, we are not going to discuss the specific allegations within the document.

Second, while unproven, the allegations are being taken quite seriously…

Third, precisely because it is being taken seriously, it is””despite being unproven and, in public anyway, undiscussed””pervasively affecting the broader discussion of Russian hacking of the election…

There’s much more at the link; well worth reading. But I’ve read enough about this to say the truth is unknown, but the general story of collusion is very useful to the anti-Trump forces. Trump and his people are vociferously and vehemently denying those reports, of course.

Of one thing I’m pretty sure, however—and that’s that attacks on Trump will continue unabated. They will be harsh, they will be dirty, and they will be relentless.

One thing I would also love to know is: if this report is true, what’s the remedy? Attempt to impeach Trump before he takes office? I think it is an attempt to “impeach” Trump, but in the general legal rather than constitutional sense: “to bring an accusation against…to cast doubt on…to challenge the credibility or validity of…”

Those attempts will not ever end. Be prepared for it.

ADDENDUM: More here about fakers and their fake faking. Or is the report about the fakes a fake? They report, you decide.

ADDENDUM II:

For those of you who would relish seeing Trump tell CNN off, here it is:

Hope it’s the real fix

The New Neo Posted on by

During this time of blog cache snafus, a couple of people wrote to ask if I was okay, because they hadn’t seen a new post here since last Friday. That’s how severe the cache problem was for a few people. But a lot more people had a more minor form of it, and couldn’t see new posts and/or comments to a certain extent, either.

Bummer.

Well, it’s nice to know I’ve been missed. But the situation on the blog was completely unacceptable. People need updates, but they kept seeing the old cache instead of the new entries and didn’t even know what if anything was missing.

Well, it’s a lot better now. Whether it’s all better I’m not 100% sure, but time will tell. Please report to me pronto if you have any problem with new comments not showing up, or if there are disagreements between how many comments are listed in the number at the end of each post and how many can actually be viewed on that post, or if there is any day when by evening there are no posts at all or just one post (except Sunday; I usually take that day off).

As for what happened and how it got fixed—if in fact it is totally fixed—I’ve been working on the problem for four days now, looking up possible solutions online and calling my host repeatedly. The host support people kept denying they had anything to do with it, and the first couple of people I spoke to (after the usual looong wait times) not only denied it was their fault but just shrugged it off and said I should put up a note on the blog that everyone who reads it should use a certain browser, a browser I’d determined didn’t have the problem.

Inane, to say the least. I had patiently explained it was a problem on all browsers. But even if there had been an unaffected browser, can you imagine a blog that can only be viewed on one browser? Only the most faithful readers would stay, and new readers wouldn’t even find it in the first place.

After a lot of research on my part I kept coming up against the idea that it had to be a hosting problem, or at least mainly a hosting problem. I’ll skip the reasons why I concluded that. And so, after several more calls and many hours spent each day in this endeavor (by me, not by the host), they finally found a weird piece of code they had inadvertently and mistakenly inserted that was causing cached versions of my blog to “stick.”

I think it’s fixed now. At least, it’s fixed on my computer and on the computers of several friends I asked to check. The situation has been extremely frustrating, though. Please bear with me if it needs a bit more fine-tuning, and let me know how it’s going for you.

UPDATE 3:30 PM

From what I’ve heard from readers, most are experiencing marked improvements. Great! Some, however, still are having problems. I don’t know the ratio of the latter to the former, but I think it’s pretty low. Keep letting me know what’s happening in your case.

But I don’t want anyone to be having cache problems. Keep informing me, and I’ll keep working on it with the host. I could ultimately end up switching hosts, but until now they’ve been pretty good, and I’ve heard people complain about other hosts, too. So I’m hoping this was just a single error, never to be repeated, and I’m very much expecting it to be 100% fixed pretty soon.

In the meantime, keep refreshing if you think things may not be loading properly.

Things I’m grateful for: the last speech of President Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

What a long strange trip it’s been.

Eight years of speeches that I mostly haven’t listened to; I read them instead. And I certainly didn’t listen to Obama’s farewell speech tonight. I relied on others to do it for me.

And why should I listen to it, or even read it (although I may do the latter)? These eight years are almost, almost over. One thousand six hundred and six Obama posts (counting this one) later, I’ve done my time. I’ve paid my dues.

And we won’t have Obama to kick around anymore.

As with Nixon, of course—who said that famous line (which was actually “you don’t…, not you won’t…), I bet Obama will continue to claim the spotlight. But unlike Richard Nixon, who became president just six short years after delivering that speech in his supposed “last press conference,” Obama will not be coming back as president.

This post prompted me to watch a brief clip of Nixon’s “kick around” speech, made on the occasion of his losing the California governor’s election in 1962 after losing the presidency in 1960 by a hair. I was surprised at the combination of politeness and the obvious intensity of the unsuccessfully veiled pain and bitterness:

Torture in Chicago: the group effect and the risky shift

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t yet read Heather Mac Donald’s City Journal article on the Chicago torture case and how it relates to the larger culture, but a lot of people have recommended it. I’ve only had time to very briefly skim it, but I agree that “racial victimology, inner-city gang culture, and black anti-white animus” were contributing factors in the genesis of this crime.

But I want to add something, and that is the effect a group can have on members who egg each other on to riskier and more violent behavior in order to prove themselves. Sometimes the crimes committed by such groups would not have been committed by its individual members if they hadn’t been acting in concert. Almost certainly, in addition to everything else motivating the perpetrators in this crime, was the desire to show themselves to be more bad-ass than thou.

That also at least partly explains the otherwise-inexplicable act of these perpetrators in placing the video of their crime on Facebook for all to see.

I’m not denying the racial aspect of this case; I’ve written about it before. But I’m pointing out the universal aspect of it, which is that there is sometimes a Lord of the Flies effect in groups.

When I heard of the Chicago case, for example, one the first things I thought of was the Bobby Kent murder, which featured a white victim and white perpetrators, with the group of young people committing a murder that each person probably wouldn’t have committed on his/her own. In many of these cases, by the way—including Chicago as well as Bobby Kent—girls or women (often girlfriends) are involved as perpetrators.

This is not any form of excuse. It’s merely another element of what may lead to crimes like this.

When I was in college long ago, I studied psychology and sociology, and I had to design and perform a research project. Mine was on a phenomenon known as the “risky shift,” and so the topic has stuck in my mind. The risky shift isn’t about crime specifically; it’s about how groups generally make decisions:

When people are in groups, they make decision about risk differently from when they are alone. In the group, they are likely to make riskier decisions, as the shared risk makes the individual risk less…

There are a number of reasons as to why this might happen. Theories have included:

—Wallach, Kogan, and Bem (1964) proposed that greater risks are chosen due to a diffusion of responsibility, where emotional bonds decrease anxieties and risk is perceived as shared.
—Collins and Guetzkow (1964) suggested that high risk-takers are more confident and hence may persuade others to take greater risks.
—Brown (1965) indicates that social status in groups is often associated with risk-taking, leading people to avoid a low risk position.
—Bateson (1966) suggests that as people pay attention to a possible action, they become more familiar and comfortable with it and hence perceive less risk.

Makes sense to me as a phenomenon working in the Chicago case. Again, it doesn’t matter in terms of responsibility or guilt/innocence or sentencing; each member of a group is fully responsible for his/her own actions. But I find the phenomenon interesting, and I suspect it was operating here.

The fight against Sessions

The New Neo Posted on by

The confirmation hearings of Trump appointees—as the WSJ delicately puts it—are “likely to generate significant resistance from Democrats.” In Jeff Sessions’ case, some ancient accusations against him of being a racist have been trotted out, and he is denying them:

Mr. Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, said allegations that he is sympathetic to groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or is otherwise racially biased are “damnably false.” The issue of race has hovered over the selection of Mr. Sessions to be the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, in part because his 1986 nomination to be a federal judge was rejected amid racial concerns.

Mr. Sessions, like virtually all Mr. Trump’s nominees, is expected to be confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate. But the hearings provide Democrats a platform to try to elicit commitments in various policy areas and to express their displeasure.

It’s all about the venting. “Failure theater,” indeed—but propaganda is not failure, even if Sessions is confirmed. Many people who probably never heard of Sessions before now believe him to be a racist (of course, many of those people also believe all Republicans are racists, but it’s still nice to have a graphic example now and then).

The charges? Ludicrous (as Sessions says):

Mr. Sessions, rather than waiting for pointed questions on the racial issue, took the initiative in his opening statement, saying that as a state prosecutor he had forcefully pushed the prosecution of KKK members accused of killing a young black man, successfully advocating the death penalty for one of them. The KKK has been an issue for Mr. Sessions because at his 1986 hearing, he was asked about allegations that he had told a black federal prosecutor in Alabama who had worked for him that the group “was O.K. until I found out they smoked pot.”

Mr. Sessions suggested at that 1986 hearing that his comment wasn’t meant to be taken seriously and that it was “ludicrous” to think he supported the group.

It’s come down to this as accusations of racism go. Surely there are many racists in the world, but Sessions is not one of them, and a joke is a joke—a thirty-plus-year-old joke.

Oh, and there were the obligatory KKK-garbed protestors at the hearing to add to the drama.

Progress, but not a complete fix

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an update on my blog and what I now have come to call the caching problem.

I’ve been working on a fix—talking to various people at my host, Googling the situation and seeing what people on the Web have suggested—and at this point various solutions seem to have caused an improvement but not a complete solution.

Right now the most common form it seems to be taking is that recently-cached versions of the blog—or incompletely-updated versions–keep show, particularly with the comments section.

For example, a post might say it has 10 comments. But when the viewer clicks on the comments to read them, it then lists 14 and shows the contents of the full 14. But if the viewer clicks on the “refresh” arrow-icon, the counter gets up to speed with 14 and stays that way without reverting.

So the blog is essentially usually all here, there’s just a time lag with the counter and sometimes also with the display, although the latter is less common.

Things like this drive me nuts, because the blog is precious to me and a functioning comments section is precious to me. This has been going on for quite a few days now. Fortunately it’s not a serious problem—like, for instance, if the blog were down entirely (perish the thought!).

So I’m asking for your patience, and strongly suggest that you refresh every now and then. And don’t refrain from commenting—your comment will show up sooner or later, usually sooner. The counter might not acknowledge it right away, though.

One hint at what’s going on is that my host said they slipped in some cache plug-in about a month ago (without telling me), and the plug-in seems not to be compatible with the blog. So last night they removed it. I thought that would be the complete fix, but unfortunately there are still lingering issues.

My apologies for any inconvenience, and rest assured that I’m still working hard on it.

[ADDENDUM: For example, after I wrote and published this post, it didn’t show on the blog until I clicked on “refresh” and then it showed up immediately. But it should be showing up right away without the need to refresh.]

The quest for knowledge, leftist-style

The New Neo Posted on by

Not.

This isn’t just a case of political correctness run amok. It’s a case of academic censorship in the name of race redress, and of a purposeful historic revisionism and willful drive towards ignorance.

But isn’t that where the left has always been heading?

The story (no, this is not The Onion, nor does it appear to be “fake news”):

…[S]tudents at a prestigious London university are demanding that figures such as Plato, Descartes and Immanuel Kant should be largely dropped from the curriculum because they are white.

The student union at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) insists that when studying philosophy “the majority of philosophers on our courses” should be from Africa and Asia…

The student union at SOAS, a leading centre for the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, stated that “decolonising” the university and “confronting the white institution” is one of its priorities for the academic year.

It said that “white philosophers” should be studied only “if required”, adding that their work should be taught solely from a “critical standpoint”. “

Note that this university is in London. I suggest, if the students really want to make an anti-colonial stand, that they attend a university in some third-world country in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. My guess is that, not only will they be supporting said countries, but they might find to their surprise that Kant and Plato are actually taught there.

Just a guess. [*see NOTE below]

But such men are part of the tradition of philosophy that belongs to what used to quaintly be called the human race.

The sort of thing going on at SOAS has its roots in the 60s (although the real roots are even earlier), in particular in a crisis at Cornell which I’ve written about several times (see this post especially). The students back then were demanding that courses in areas such as Black Studies be instituted or expanded, and they sometimes used violence to get their way. The guilt-ridden adminstrations mostly capitulated, and so the fields of special studies were born. But what was initially a demand for inclusion of the history of racial minorities has now become a demand for exclusion of members of an influential majority, merely by virtue of race.

[*NOTE: I wrote “just a guess,” but then I decided to look up an example in order to check it out. Sure enough, on my first try (University of Nairobi philosophy department), I struck pay dirt (see this). Most people trying to get a degree in a third-world country aren’t into playing PC games. That’s just a guess, too, but I bet I’m correct.]

CBS deceives about the racial angle of the Chicago torture story

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s not even subtle about it. An error of this magnitude and type is no “error’ at all:

A CBS Radio News report on the horrific black-on-white torture case in Chicago falsely implied that the victim was black and his attackers were white, Mediaite reported.

The viral video of a beating and knife attack in Chicago suggests the assault had racial overtones. CBS’s Dean Reynolds tells us the victim is described as a mentally-challenged teenager.

In the video he is choked and repeatedly called the n-word. His clothes are slashed and he is terrorized with a knife. His alleged captors repeatedly reference Donald Trump. Police are holding four people in connection with the attack.…

As Alex Griswold at Mediaite noted, the report, while technically correct, was very misleading.

The n-word was indeed used to refer to the victim, but only in the more neutral sense that is often used in black vernacular. Omitted from the report are details that would [have] corrected that misapprehension. Most obviously, the report could have simply stated the attackers’ and victim’s races. But it also neglected to clarify that the “reference” to Donald Trump was “F*** Donald Trump,” and neglected completely the fact that the attackers yelled “F*** white people.”

Here’s the audio.

Golden Globes 2017: speeches and fashion

The New Neo Posted on by

First, the “speech” part.

Apparently some remarks by Meryl Streep about Donald Trump have caught fire on social media, and everyone is weighing in pro and con.

Well, maybe I should turn in my blogging badge, because I find I just don’t care. Meryl Streep, Little Bo Beep, or some other liberal or conservative actor or celebrity—why would I care?

More importantly, who does care? Well, it seems a lot of people, from the amount of chatter and jabber about it. Maybe it’s just a slow news day. Maybe since Trump is a celebrity, it matters what another celebrity says about him (at least, in the minds of celebrity-followers).

For many decades, Hollywood actors and actresses have been giving self-important speeches about Weighty Subjects. I suppose I do the same thing, and I’m not even a celebrity, but I didn’t interrupt an awards ceremony to do it. And I think my opinion should stand and fall on the worth of the arguments I present—good thing, because I have no built-in celebrity audience to draw on.

If you want to read a thousand and one opinions about Streep vs. Trump and Trump vs. Streep, with side trips about MMA, violence, and mocking the disabled, by all means go here and read to your heart’s content.

All I’ll say right now about it is that I agree with Donald Trump that Streep is on “overrated actress.” And that I think “overrated” is the perfect word, because she’s not a bad actress, she’s a pretty good actress.

Not that I think he should waste time dealing with her, or with any other celebrity who wants to diss him. But he’s not taking my advice, either.

Do I think Streep is overrated because I don’t agree with her politics? No. There are plenty of actors and actresses I disagree with but admire greatly, and vice versa. I have always tried to separate the two issues. Even back when I was a liberal Democrat I just didn’t get the hype about Streep, though. I could recognize that she could act—she could act up a storm. The problem was that it was only on the surface, although that surface went a lot deeper, and was a lot more polished, than most people’s surfaces. But nothing she did made me believe that her heart was involved—or rather, almost nothing. Every now and then I believed her, but mostly in her very early work.

That has zero to do with her remarks about Trump. But I thought I’d get it off my chest.

Now for the important part of the 2017 Golden Globes—the fashion. I was surprised, when I looked the dresses over (and let’s face it, fashion is about women’s fashion in this case), to discover that I liked the majority of them. Or at least, I didn’t dislike most of them. That’s a first.

The gowns seemed to be, for the most part, rather flattering and not too insanely revealing. Yes, there were exceptions. But I was pleasantly surprised.

However, I did notice a rather odd trend towards the Victorian or Edwardian costume type of dress. Also, for what I’d call the fallen sleeve (it may have a more technical name, but if so I’m not aware of it).

So, without further ado (by the way, I’ve never heard of most of these people)—

From Blake Lively, one of my favorite dresses of the evening. I’m extremely partial to pockets:

At first I thought this one, from Chrissy Teigen, was way too fussy and busy. But then I decided I rather like it. It reminds me of the dresses my cousin used to draw for our paper dolls, back in the late 50s. My cousin missed her calling when she didn’t go into the field of costume design:

Now, Meryl Streep (I had chosen this photo before I knew a thing about her speech, by the way). I’ve long noticed that Streep’s fashion sense leans a bit towards the dowdy. This gown seems to be caught in a timewarp involving the shoulder-padded 80s. Or maybe she’s actually trying for the shoulder-padded 30s/40s. I just don’t get it, though, and the color does nothing for her either:

Here’s another one that I originally thought was too over-the-top weird. But this woman (Olivia Culpo) pulls it off perfectly. There are only about three people in the world who could wear this successfully, and she happens to be one of them:

The rest of them demonstrate that period-piece costume-y fallen-shoulder look I already described. It was seen over and over—particularly among actresses past the full flush of youth, and it doesn’t suit them. It’s supposed to make the wearer look softly romantic, but after a certain age it has a tendency to make the wearer look both hard and a bit droopy/faded. However, this type of thing is a whole lot better than the see-through reveal-all dresses that have been in Hollywood vogue recently.

Drew Barrymore:

Nicole Kidman, dance hall hostess of the Wild West (but in a more spectral color):

Lily Collins is far more successful with this sort of thing, but still looks as though she stepped out of a costume drama:

And here’s one of the few dresses of the evening that seems to have no redeeming qualities, except that it’s not peek-a-boo. But on looking at all the photos, it occurs to me that some dresses just might not photograph well but might look good in person, maybe because of the texture of the fabric or the way it flows or the statuesque height of the wearer. This could be one of those dresses (Felicity Jones):

The situation so far: improved, but a few glitches remain

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been working on fixing the “comments not showing up” problem, and I think I’ve made progress.

But some things remain to be solved. So I’m going to describe some of the details, and maybe some of you brilliant, brilliant tech-savvy people out there might be able to suggest some steps to eliminate the remaining glitches.

As far as I can see, these problems started in a mild fashion maybe a week ago, but then a few days ago they got quite noticeable. I’ve newly-updated the blog and now have all the newest versions of the blog and the spam filter, so needing to update either is not the problem.

Can anyone make sense of the following set of symptoms?:

(1) There is sometimes a delay between the time a person posts a comment and the time the comment becomes visible to the public and reflected in the comments count.

(2) A similar delay sometimes takes place when I publish a post.

(3) The delays are generally worse when viewed on a cell phone. I don’t know about tablets. But laptops and desktops seem to do better at catching up, although I don’t know if that’s a general rule.

(4) If a person manually refreshes the blog, that often corrects the problem and everything suddenly shows up properly. But not always. Particularly on cell phones, the problem can be a bit more “sticky.”

(5) I don’t know whether the following is related, but I suspect it may be. I used to get tons and tons of spam that was caught by the spam filter. It wasn’t a problem when the spam filter was working, which was virtually always. So every day I’d clear the spam filter, which usually had caught many thousands of spam comments—ordinarily between 2,000 and 10,000 spam comments a day. But then, just a little while ago—I don’t know exactly when, but it predated my noticing this “comments not displaying properly” problem by a few days—suddenly the flow of spam comments nearly stopped. Since then I’ve been getting maybe 100 spam a day caught in the filter. And it’s not that other spam is getting through, either; very little spam seems to be coming to the blog in the first place. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem; it would be great to get so little spam. But it’s curious to me that the reduction in spam roughly coincided with this comment-display change that is a problem.

Any theories on any of this? Thanks!