Trump's America (Casino & Slots!)

[Reginald McGraw]

So let's talk protests...

I'm fine with kids wanting to skip school to protest Trump. Doesn't bother me in the least, and it's sure better than skipping school to, say, make out with Teresa Jones from homeroom in her parents' basement. (Then again, is it?)

It isn't. I agree with all the rest.

[RottingCorpse]

All this Muslim registration talk is super-1938. Then again, it' not like Trump is springing it on people now.

Is this really what people want? Have we failed this mightily at properly teaching history? I mean, forget the education system. There's 3,000 WWII movies out there!

[nacho]

All this Muslim registration talk is super-1938. Then again, it' not like Trump is springing it on people now.

Is this really what people want? Have we failed this mightily at properly teaching history? I mean, forget the education system. There's 3,000 WWII movies out there!

If you polled Americans in November of 1941, a majority would have said Hitler was good for Europe. He declared war on us, and we were famously pro-Nazi up till then (which is why we didn't get into the war until we were pushed into it and, even then, many from that generation think of it as "the Pacific War").

Glorifying the noble American cause in Europe was 100% propaganda and, now, is 100% nostalgia for that propaganda.

So, historically speaking, we're behaving normally. In response to the forced emigration of Jews from German-held territory, we immediately closed our borders to them and other victims of the emigration programs. Something like 300,000 applicants for refugee visas in the US were rejected (and around 80% of those subsequently vanished into the camps). 

[nacho]

PS -- being responsible for nearly half a million Holocaust victims shouldn't surprise you, either. After all, this nation was founded on a rather dirtily-fought revolution, after which we actively and rather cheerfully engaged in a massive genocidal pogrom against the native population for 130 years.

Even when it came to ending slavery, it took us just over 100 years to even begin to embrace the idea.

When you look at the bigger picture of who we are, as a people, it's actually quite distressing. We're not only reluctant to accept change, but we're bloodthirsty when it comes to material gain and expansion. We're also a sharply divided people in a way that goes well beyond race, class, and creed. We're split along regional lines in a way that almost seems feudal. The more sedentary we become the more we're all starting to die at the same hospital where we were born. The result is closed communities that may be larger than a 12th century village, sure, but still behave and react in the same sort of way. You see this in how we talk about various regions (e.g. "Inside the Beltway," "The Other Coast," etc.).

Even the educated and traveled fall prey to this. Generally speaking, the London of PBS and BBC America is more familiar to an urban American than, say, Ames, Iowa.   

[RottingCorpse]

That's depressing. And terrifying. And undoubtedly true.

Blah.

[nacho]

One thing's for sure: Brooker's Yearly Wipe is going to be fucking epic.

[RottingCorpse]

I don't know if I'll be able to watch it without sobbing.

[RottingCorpse]

Apparently, this is real. Either Snopes has been hacked, we're living in a Twilight Zone episode, or my midlife crisis has infected the entire world.



http://www.snopes.com/russian-billboard-features-trump-and-putin/

[nacho]

If everyone boycotts Hamilton, I might actually be able to get a ticket!

[RottingCorpse]

Fun Times!

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/11/22/new-website-seeks-register-professors-accused-liberal-bias-and-anti-american-values

Being Watched

A new website is asking students and others to “expose and document” professors who “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The site, called Professor Watchlist, is not without precedent -- predecessors include the now-defunct NoIndoctrination.org, which logged accounts of alleged bias in the classroom. There's also David Horowitz's 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. But such efforts arguably have new meaning in an era of talk about registering certain social groups and concerns about free speech.

At the same time, the new list has attracted Twitter jokesters under the hashtag #trollprofwatchlist, with complaints about Indiana Jones, Professor Plum of "Clue University," and Gilderoy Lockhart from Harry Potter's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, among others.

Professor Watchlist, launched Monday, is a project of Turning Point USA. The group’s mission is to “identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government.” Its national college and university field program works to “identify young conservative activists, build and maintain effective student groups, advertise and rebrand conservative values, engage in face-to-face and peer-to-peer conversations about the pressing issues facing our country,” according to its website.

The group’s founder, Charlie Kirk -- a millennial who has emerged in some conservative political circles as a major player -- did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Professor Watchlist, but he promoted it on social media.

In a write-up of the project, Kirk said, “It’s no secret that some of America’s college professors are totally out of line” and that he often hears stories about “professors who attack and target conservatives, promote liberal propaganda and use their position of power to advance liberal agendas in their classroom. Turning Point USA is saying enough is enough. It’s time we expose these professors.”

Professor Watchlist

While the project invites readers to submit “tips” and “evidence” of bias, it already has profiles on scores of academics. Many of them are known for opinions that the site opposes. David Guth, an associate professor of mass communications at the University of Kansas, for instance, tweeted after the 2013 Navy Yard shooting, “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be your sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.” Saida Grundy, an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University, faced criticism in 2015 for some of her tweets about race, including, “Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?” Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, has promoted campaign finance reform, and Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is a vocal critic of income inequality.

Others appear to have been singled out merely for their academic work. Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, for example, co-wrote the critically acclaimed Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Her Professor Watchlist profile says she “believes scientists funded by Big Oil skewed information on global warming, much like tobacco smoking, acid rain and the ozone hole were misrepresented. Interestingly, Oreskes is not eager to adopt the low-carbon lifestyle she pushes on others.” The page links to a Breitbart.com story criticizing her work and a 2014 tweet in which Oreskes said she likes to ski in Utah (presumably she’d have to fly there). Most of the profiles thus far are similarly sourced from politically oriented blogs or Fox News.

While the views of professors on the list skew overwhelmingly to the political left, a few cut across ideological lines. Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting denier James Tracy is profiled, for example.

Some include alleged errors of fact or interpretation. Deandre Poole's profile, for example, says that the instructor of communications at Florida Atlantic University told students to "stomp" on a piece of paper on which they'd written "Jesus." Yet Poole has said the 2013 exercise came from a popular textbook manual and that the point was not for students to step on the paper, but to think about why they wouldn't want to.

Shannon Gibney, a professor of English and African diaspora studies at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, was accused of racism by two white students after talking about structural racism in class, also in 2013. She received a letter of reprimand but said the letter was later removed from her file and destroyed. Her Professor Watchlist profile says “she is a repeat offender” who “now been formally reprimanded multiple times for racial harassment.”

Gibney said via email, “If sites like this are going to promote this kind of targeting information about faculty -- particularly those who are already vulnerable, coming from historically marginalized groups in the academy -- they should at least get their facts straight. … Professor Watchlist has chosen to promote a false narrative of guilt on my part, rather than the true narrative, in which lead institutional actors realized that they had no basis on which to support the claims of racial harassment, and therefore chose to rescind them rather than face more public embarrassment.”

She added, “Many of us, particularly outspoken, progressive women of color professors, have known for quite some time now that there is an organized conservative online apparatus in place to discredit and impugn those in the academy who dare to challenge institutional racism and its ongoing corrosive legacies. This watch list is just the latest example.”

Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary for tenure, academic freedom and governance at the American Association of University Professors, said the site was concerning.

“The AAUP has spoken out against organizations that conduct these kinds of activities going back to the 1920s, when it was the American Legion, through the 1980s, when it was an organization that called itself Accuracy in Academia,” he said.

The association issued a statement against the latter organization in 1985 that said, in part, “External monitoring of in-class statements not only presents the prospect that the words uttered will be distorted or taken out of context; it is also likely to have a chilling effect and result in self-censorship. … The monitoring of classrooms for an outside organization which arrogates to itself the prerogative of determining accuracy from what is reported to it … can only inhibit the process through which higher learning occurs and knowledge is advanced.”

[nacho]

Yeah. One of my authors hit by this. It's a...problem.

[monkey!]

We live in a post-truth society.

[RottingCorpse]

So... Trump is obviously getting all his policy ideas from a dystopian "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, right?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/11/22/we-dont-need-the-fcc-a-trump-advisers-proposal-to-dissolve-americas-telecom-watchdog/

‘We don’t need the FCC’: A Trump adviser’s proposal to dissolve America’s telecom watchdog

A top adviser to Donald Trump on tech policy matters proposed all but abolishing the nation's telecom regulator last month, foreshadowing possible moves by the president-elect to sharply reduce the Federal Communications Commission's role as a consumer protection watchdog.

In an Oct. 21 blog post, Mark Jamison, who on Monday was named one of two members of Trump's tech policy transition team, laid out his ideal vision for the government's role in telecommunications, concluding there is little need for the agency to exist.

"Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away," Jamison wrote. "Telecommunications network providers and ISPs are rarely, if ever, monopolies."

The FCC declined to comment for this story.

But the FCC's current leadership has disagreed strongly with that analysis. Its Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, has spoken of an Internet service "duopoly" in much of the country that limits competition. And he has compared telecommunications to the rail and telegraph networks of the 19th century, calling for new rules of the road as the Internet becomes the dominant communications platform of the 21st century.

Trump may gut some of the most significant tech policies of the 21st century

Wheeler has used his agency to go after allegedly misbehaving companies, proposing record-setting fines against companies for slowing down "unlimited" data plans and for billing consumers for content and services they didn't ask for. He passed proactive regulations such as net neutrality to prohibit anticompetitive behavior. And, in an unprecedented step, Wheeler forced Internet providers to obey the same privacy rules that legacy phone companies must abide by when handling customer data.

Critics of the FCC have accused Wheeler of political favoritism, passing rules that appear to disproportionately benefit newer Internet companies and disadvantage big incumbent industries such as cable and telecoms. With Trump in the White House, Republicans are expected to roll back many of Wheeler's policies. In an interview Tuesday, Jamison said Wheeler has allowed politics to "infiltrate the FCC a lot more than is necessary."

"I teach regulation all over the world," said Jamison, who directs the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida. "The biggest fight is always to keep politics out of what's supposed to be an independent agency."

Jamison — along with Jeffrey Eisenach, the other member of Trump's tech transition team — both share ties to the American Enterprise Institute, an elite conservative think-tank in Washington. As part of the transition team, the two men are expected to meet for briefings with the FCC's current leadership. Jamison declined to comment on his role in the transition team, which began its outreach to the FCC on Monday. Eisenach, whose previous clients have included Verizon, is viewed by policy analysts as an advocate of deregulation and a proponent of large mergers in the media and telecommunications industries.

"I think both Jeff and Mark envision a significantly pared-down agency," said Hal Singer, an economist at the George Washington University's Institute for Public Policy. "In their minds, proponents of regulation must demonstrate a market failure… This is a 180-degree turn from Wheeler's FCC, which began with a presumption that markets failed."

Jamison has argued that the FCC could be replaced by a much smaller agency charged with handing out licenses for wireless airwaves — essentially acting as a traffic cop for the spectrum over which cellphone calls, mobile data and TV signals travel.

Many of the FCC's existing functions could be farmed out, Jamison wrote in the blog post. Subsidies for phone and Internet service could be handled by state governments, while the Federal Trade Commission could handle consumer complaints and take action against abuses by companies. There are some details that were not addressed in the blog post due to time constraints, Jamison said Tuesday, such as the possible need for new state-level powers to address broadband monopolies.

In another blog post last week, Jamison acknowledged that dissolving an entire federal agency would likely take "strong leadership" to overcome bureaucratic inertia and political opposition to the plan.

With the looming prospect of a 3-2 majority in favor of Republicans at the FCC, and in light of Republicans' many objections to Wheeler's tenure, it isn't hard to imagine the GOP moving swiftly to limit the FCC's authority in 2017, tweeted Berin Szoka, president of the right-leaning think tank TechFreedom.

Republicans at the commission "will absolutely rule 706 isn't a grant of authority," Szoka said, referring to Section 706, one of the FCC powers the agency used to justify its net neutrality rules.

[nacho]

That'll totally change the end of Pump Up The Volume...

[nacho]

Well... The recount is such a sad pipe dream, but it'll be interesting. It's possible that Michigan could swing over to Hillary...but that's about it.

Meanwhile, one elector from Texas has resigned. Though the remaining electors get to choose his replacement so that won't mean anything. It is interesting to see the stress getting to the Electoral College, though. I wonder if we'll see more resignations, and even a few flips, on the 19th. Strange times.

So Trump stands at 306 Electoral votes currently. Let's see what that becomes a month from now.

Meanwhile, he continues to be Trump on Twitter and everywhere else. Sigh.