Two Viral Diseases | For Zoom the Bell Tolls | Another One Bytes the Dust
August 17, 2020
The Good News
- Pelosi Calls Lawmakers Back To Vote On Postal Service (NPR). Congress is doing something! Read more about what’s happening to the USPS in today’s Pnut.
“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.”
“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
COVID + Conspiracy: Two Viral Diseases(John Rudoff via Getty Images)
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged “deep state” against President Trump and his supporters. The movement spawned from a series of posts that began appearing on social media during the 2016 election cycle that made outlandish, salacious, and false claims against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. After the election, posts on the anonymous imageboard 4chan were made by purported government insiders who professed to have information on wild plots against the incoming president. In October 2017, a post appeared from a user identifying himself as “Q Clearance Patriot” who claimed to have top level access to highly classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents. The original Q post was disseminated across multiple media platforms through a network of people wanting to build internet followings for profit.
2020 has seen peoples’ lives upended by COVID-19, and the president has exploited the crisis by purposefully eroding confidence in medical experts and science-based recommendations. The resulting confusion and fear has heightened divisive conspiracy theories, enabling QAnon to spread its cosmic web of baseless and unhinged precepts with vocabulary closely related to the religious concepts of apocalypticism and millenarianism. Experts who study radicalization say a distinct behavioral pattern has evolved during the pandemic: People with time on their hands, looking for answers, are led down a radical path by niche interests and the internet’s tendency to feed their darkest curiosities.
Shannon Foley Martinez is a reformed neo-Nazi who now works to deradicalize extremists. She has great insight into why so many people have climbed aboard the conspiracy train during this pandemic. “I believe that we actually are living amidst another pandemic — a trauma pandemic,” she said. “America right now is very unstable. It feels precarious. People are carrying huge amounts of stress, both financial, and personal.”
When overly-stressed people feel abjectly disempowered, Foley Martinez says, they yearn for a definitive path, a direction with “very clear rules [and] a very clear definition of enemies; friends and foes.” Finding a simplistic roadmap with clear direction creates order out of chaos, and gives traumatized people a sense of empowerment. “There’s an allure to it,” she added.
In a QAnon world, where those enforcing mask mandates are perceived as part of a movement that includes Satanic child sacrifices, that good-versus-evil narrative can provide a strange sort of comfort. Doing the opposite of public health advice can give conspiracy theorists a sense of control, especially when Facebook and Twitter groups reward them for throwing viral tantrums in public.
Additional Conspiracy Reads
- QAnon Promotes Pedo-Ring Conspiracy Theories. Now They’re Stealing Kids. (Daily Beast)
- The Week QAnon Went Mainstream (NYT, $)
- A Church. A Viral Video. A Campaign To Discredit Black Lives Matter. (Buzzfeed)
- A college kid created a fake, AI-generated blog. It reached #1 on Hacker News. (MIT Tech Review)
(Aris Messinis via Getty Images)
- Since 2015, European countries like Greece and Italy have mainly relied on proxies like Turkish and Libyan governments to head off maritime migration. Now Greece’s newly established conservative government is taking matters into its own hands. In recent months, the government has secretly expelled at least 1,072 refugees, often by a method illegal under international law.
- On dozens of occasions since March, Greek authorities have loaded asylum seekers onto crowded inflatable rafts, sailed them to the edge of Greek territorial waters, and abandoned them. A spokesman for the Greek government denied any illegality, saying “Greek authorities do not engage in clandestine activities.”
- But a 50-year-old Syrian teacher who survived one of the deadly episodes recounted that on July 26, masked Greek officials took her and 22 others, including two babies, under cover of darkness from a detention center on the island of Rhodes and abandoned them in a rudderless, motorless life raft before they were rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard. “It was very inhumane,” she said. Watchdog groups say some migrants have been forced onto leaky life rafts and left to drift at the border between Turkish and Greek waters, while others have been set adrift in their own boats after Greek officials disabled their engines.
- A former UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants said what the Greek government was doing was “illegal in all their aspects, in international law and in European law. It is a human rights and humanitarian disaster.” (NYT)
Another One Bytes the Dust
- President Trump issued an executive order Friday giving ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the short-video app, TikTok, 90 days to either sell or spin-off its TikTok business in the US. “There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance … might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States,” Trump wrote in the order.
- Friday’s order gives the company until November 12th, whereas the president’s original order on August 6 gave ByteDance a September 20th deadline. At a press conference Saturday, Trump said he was looking into other Chinese-owned companies he could ban, like technology giant Alibaba.
- TikTok is primarily used by teenagers to send silly videos. A technology policy expert said there is “no information captured from TikTok that would be useful to Chinese intelligence.” A rival video app called Triller, launched in 2015, has seen a sharp uptick in users.
- The president has joined; his Triller account has about 3,500 followers. The company’s co-owner says Triller sees itself as the “adult version” of TikTok, with content that’s “a little more risque.” (The Verge, NYT)
Additional World News
- A new diplomatic era: Israel’s New Peace Deal Transforms the Middle East (New Yorker, $)
- Why the UAE Made Peace With Israel (Atlantic, $)
- The Israel-U.A.E. Deal and the Beirut Blast Both Box in Iran (NYT, $)
- The Corrupt Political Class That Broke Lebanon (Foreign Affairs). The blast was the symptoms, but Lebanon’s sectarian system was the sickness.
- Why the Mauritius oil spill is so serious (BBC)
- BLM goes global: ‘No Slavery in Australia’? These Pacific Islanders Tell a Different Story (NYT, $)
- Japan’s unknown indigenous cuisine (BBC)
- In hot waters: U.S., South Korea to begin scaled back military drills amid coronavirus spike (NBC)
- Applying Cold War Analogies to the US-Chinese Relationship Is a Misuse Of History—and Shows a Misunderstanding of the Present (Foreign Policy, $). How USSR talking points distort our perception of China.
- Former Deputy Mayor of Paris Accused of Sexual Abuse (NYT, $)
COVID-19
- Obesity Raises the Risk of Death From COVID-19 Among Men (NYT, $)
- Serum Institute of India Is Ready to Produce a Coronavirus Vaccine (Bloomberg)
- What Contact Tracing Data Is Telling Us About How COVID-19 Spreads (NPR)
- COVID-19 symptoms often appear in this order, according to a new study (CBS)
- A Coronavirus Vaccine Requires Medical Essentials Like Vials and Needles (Bloomberg)
- Clorox wipes shortage: The best disinfecting wipe alternatives (Quartz)
- In the Wake of COVID-19 Lockdowns, a Troubling Surge in Homicides (NYT, $)
We’ve Gotta Sort This Out
- Internal US Postal Service (USPS) documents show that 15 percent of all letter sorting machines — 502 — were targeted for removal from post offices around the country, a move that would hamper the agency’s ability to sort mail. These changes were in the works shortly before Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor and Republican fundraiser, became postmaster.
- The documents, which make no mention of moving machines to other locations, undermine the agency’s narrative that the equipment is simply being relocated around the network to optimize processing. Multiple sources say they witnessed the machines, which cost millions of dollars, being destroyed or thrown in the dumpster.
- Other documents laid out detailed plans to reroute mail to sorting facilities further away in order to “centralize” mail processing, even if it moves mail across further distances. Union officials said the result of the plans was clear: “This will slow mail processing.”
- West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said “The Trump administration is launching an all-out war on the US Postal Service. Several weeks ago we learned they had unexpectedly announced closures of several West Virginia post offices. Then we learned of their plans to change regulations surrounding the first class and election mail. Now we’re hearing reports that the post office is removing sorting machines and reducing capacity before an election where we’ll see more mail-in ballots than ever before. This is insane.” (Vice)
For Zoom the Bell Tolls
- Many colleges around the nation are moving classes online in an effort to safely operate during the pandemic. But as they do so, they’re facing rising demands for tuition rebates, increased aid, and leaves of absence from families and students already rebelling against the high cost of a bachelor’s degree.
- One parent, whose child attends a California college with a $65,000 tuition fee, wants a discount now that her child won’t be attending in-person classes. “We are paying a lot of money for tuition and our students are not getting what they paid for,” she said.
- A petition started by Rutgers students in July, calling for an elimination of fees and a 20 percent tuition cut, has more than 30,000 signers. More than 40,000 have signed a plea for the University of North Carolina system to refund housing charges to students in the event of another COVID-19 related campus shutdown.
- 20 percent of Harvard’s first-year class deferred admission when faced with the possibility of spending part of the year online. Universities have been divided in their response, with some offering discounts and others resisting, arguing that remote learning and other virus measures are making their operations more, not less, costly.
- Adding to the dilemma is a growing roster of colleges rescinding plans to reopen their classrooms. In the last two weeks the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Southern California, Virginia, and a host of others, have announced plans to hold all or most of their classes online.
- The shift online is accelerating fundamental questions about the future of higher education, with parents and students considering the true value of school if they can’t set foot on campus. For many colleges that were struggling financially before the pandemic, survival now may not be possible at all. (NYT)
Additional USA News
- Joe Biden and the Leaders of 2020: Educated by Public Universities (NYT, $). In dark days for higher learning, a reminder of who and what they can produce.
- Trendy and expensive: Families Priced Out of ‘Learning Pods’ Seek Alternative (NYT, $)
- Co-opt & Corrupt: How Trump Bent and Broke the GOP (NY Books)
- More literature from a former Trump associate: In Tell-All Foreword, Cohen Promises Sordid Tales Trump ‘Does Not Want You to Read’ (NYT, $)
- Top Spy Sue Gordon Spills Her Views On A President Who Passed Her Over (NPR)
- Inside the Mind of the MAGA Bomber, the Trump Superfan Who Tried to Wreak Havoc on the Last National Election (Washingtonian)
- Paint the town blue: The Republican Senate nightmare is coming true (CNN)
- Senate committee sought investigation of Bannon, raised concerns about Trump family testimony (LA Times)
- Financial disclosures reveal postmaster general’s business entanglements and likely conflicts of interest, experts say (CNN). DeJoy’s of being a Trump appointee.
- ‘Do you regret all your lying?’ White House reporter’s question startles Trump (Guardian)
- What do we call this duo, Kushye? Inside Kanye West’s “Almost Daily” Chats With Jared Kushner (Forbes)
- Car salesman adjust to selling automobiles in a souring economy and raging COVID-19 pandemic (WaPo, $)
Exploration is the Reward
- A new study out of Ohio State suggests young children will pass up rewards they know they can collect in order to explore other options. Researchers found that when adults and children ages four to five played a game where certain choices earned them rewards, both adults and children quickly learned what choices would give them the biggest returns.
- But while adults used that knowledge to maximize their prizes, children continued exploring the other options, just to see if their value may have changed. “Exploration seems to be a major driving force during early childhood — even outweighing the importance of immediate rewards,” said a psychologist and co-author of the study. “We believe it is because young children need to explore to help them understand how the world works.”
- Furthermore, the children’s search for new discoveries wasn’t random, but systematic, in an effort to make sure they didn’t miss anything. Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology who helped conduct the study, said: “The children were not motivated by achieving the maximum reward to the extent that adults were. Instead, children seemed primarily motivated by the information gained through exploring.”
- Perhaps this anecdotal finding can prompt us to enter the week with our eyes set on exploration over immediate gratification. Re-engage with your inner-child, and maybe you’ll discover something new. (Technology Networks)
Additional Reads
- Here’s how Robinhood is raking in record cash on customer trades — despite making it free (CNBC). Why steal from the rich, when you can invest?
- Take frozen curry, buy a blackout tent: 16 expert tips for the perfect camping trip (Guardian)
- Wifi from the skies: SpaceX Starlink speeds revealed as beta users get downloads of 11 to 60Mbps (Ars Technica)
- Are You Overpraising Your Child? (NYT, $)
- The big picture: Catastrophe drives evolution. But life resides in the pauses (Aeon)
- ‘We Are the Guinea Pigs’: Hollywood Restarts Its Blockbuster Machine (NYT, $)
- “Do You Get Shit for Your Name?” (Long Reads). Having the wrong name at the wrong time.
- Trying to Make It Big Online? Getting Signed Isn’t Everything (NYT, $)
- A true clash royale: Apple has finally met its Fortnite match (Verge)
- College Football Is Falling Apart (Atlantic)
- Underwater giraffe-necked reptiles: Making Sense of ‘One of the Most Baffling Animals That Ever Lived’ (NYT, $)
- Boeing 747s still get critical updates via floppy disks (Verge)
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