Monthly Archive: May 2017

Why the ‘alt-left’ will succeed where centrists fail | Bhaskar Sunkara | Opinion | The Guardian

The “alt-left” label is simply meant as a slur, a way to associate America’s most consistent foes of oppression and exploitation with those who mean to shred whatever social and civil rights we still have. But it does connote a real style and temperament – a willingness to speak to an anti-establishment mood, to break with “politics as usual” in a far more fundamental way than Trump did.

Of course, in a time of rising authoritarianism, it’s understandable that liberal commentators would be wary of certain forms of anti-establishment populism. The collapse of an unjust order doesn’t mean that something better will take its place. But the political figures often brought up in conjunction with the “alt-left” are far from vengeful internet trolls.

Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon all have wide bases, built through campaigns around a social-democratic program in favor of worker protections, a social safety net, and more popular engagement in the decisions that affect ordinary people’s lives. That’s not extreme politics; it isn’t demagogic politics. It’s politics that can win over tens of millions who feel like politics hasn’t been working for them and might otherwise be won over to the populist right.

From: Why the ‘alt-left’ will succeed where centrists fail | Bhaskar Sunkara | Opinion | The Guardian

Someone Is Trying to Use Email to Blackmail Paul Berman. Nothing Can Be Done About It. [+1]

“Dear Paul Berman,

“Like you, I enjoyed our conversation of the other night but I thought it ended uncompleted.” He explained that I should write a self-denunciation in the style of Augustine or Alexander Hamilton.

“Since you already have a column in Tablet, that would be a great place for it to appear.

“It would also be a good career move. Right now, you are best known to the world for having pimped for George Bush’s disastrous war.”

But this sin was going to seem as nothing, compared to the erotic correspondence.

“My guess is that you will end up being known for this anyway, so it would be best for you to put your own self-interested, spin on this….”

He compared me to Norman Podhoretz, the retired editor of Commentary. “I’m sure you know that you already have a lot in common with Podhoretz, who also pimped for right-wing Republican presidents and foolish, destructive wars, and also shared with you a roguish reputation with the ladies. So there’s a useful precedent.

“To be sure, since you raised the issue, I am not threatening you with anything. I just think that the truth has a way of coming out given how interesting people find gossip relating to”—and here he pointed to the frisk in the frisky correspondence. “There’s a whole industry that makes its living off of it, after all.”

This last point seemed to me all too accurate.

A week later came another letter:

“Still…

“looking forward to your public confession in Tablet. My guess is that this will work out best [he meant “better”] for you than any imaginable alternative.”

From: Someone Is Trying to Use Email to Blackmail Paul Berman. Nothing Can Be Done About It. – Tablet Magazine

Fake football website reveals what makes us become nasty trolls | New Scientist

To investigate further, Leonie Rösner and Nicole Krämer at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany created a fake website for German football fans, and recruited users from a local university.

They then planted a false news story on the site stating that people would no longer be allowed to stand up at football matches. At the time, the idea of banning standing terraces in stadiums was a hot discussion topic in Germany. The researchers then let participants loose on the site’s forum.

Half of these could comment without registering, whereas the others had to use their Facebook accounts to do so. To some participants, all commenters appeared anonymous, while others saw Facebook profiles for everyone.

The forum was also manipulated so that some saw a civil discussion, whereas others were greeted with an atmosphere rich in offensive words, sarcasm, insults and slander – and many exclamation marks.

Rösner and Krämer found that language used by people who were anonymous was not necessarily more aggressive than with people who could be identified. On its own, anonymity is not usually enough to turn people into trolls.

What does seem to make people mean, though, is the behaviour of those around them. The tone set by other commenters was linked to the likelihood that a participant would use aggressive language to support their points

From: Fake football website reveals what makes us become nasty trolls | New Scientist

Meet the Young Billionaire Who’s Exposing the Truth About Bad Science | WIRED

And those are just a few of the people who are calling out iffy science with Arnold funding. Laura and John Arnold didn’t start the movement to reform science, but they have done more than anyone else to amplify its capabilities—typically by approaching researchers out of the blue and asking whether they might be able to do more with more money. “The Arnold Foundation has been the Medici of meta-research,” Ioannidis says. All told, the foundation’s Research Integrity initiative has given more than $80 million to science critics and reformers in the past five years alone.

Not surprisingly, researchers who don’t see a crisis in science have started to fight back. In a 2014 tweet, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert referred to researchers who had tried and failed to replicate the findings of a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge as “shameless little bullies.” After Nosek published the results of his reproducibility initiative, four social scientists, including Gilbert, published a critique of the project, claiming, among other things, that it had failed to accurately replicate many of the original studies. The BMJ investigation, in turn, met with angry denunciations from nutrition experts who had worked on the US Dietary Guidelines; a petition asking the journal to retract Teicholz’s work was signed by more than 180 credentialed professionals. (After an external and internal review, The BMJ published a correction but chose not to retract the investigation.)

The backlash against Teic­holz also furnished one of the few occasions when anyone has raised an eyebrow at the Arnolds’ funding of science critics. On the morning of October 7, 2015, the US House Agriculture Committee convened a hearing on the controversy surrounding the dietary guidelines, fueled by the BMJ article. For two and a half hours, a roomful of testy representatives asked why certain nutrition studies had been privileged over others. But about an hour in, Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern leaned into his microphone. Aiming to defend the science behind the guidelines, McGovern suggested that the doubts that had been cast over America’s nutrition science were being driven by a “former Enron executive.” “I don’t know what Enron knows about dietary guidelines,” McGovern said. But “powerful special interests” are “trying to question science.”

From: Cancer Studies Are Fatally Flawed. Meet the Young Billionaire Who’s Exposing the Truth About Bad Science | WIRED