Linkage

For ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership.

But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all.

"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."

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Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments.

The political stoking of the spate of antisemitic hate crime scenario, which was concurrently being debunked by admissions from law enforcement in the same reports, staff at the Daily Telegraph concocted the idea for a report that it had entitled “Undercover Jew” in its internal documentation, and it involved a man wearing an Israeli flag cap being sent into various situations.

Israeli Australian man Ofir Birenbaum was employed by the Murdoch rag to be the undercover Jew, wearing a Star of David on his cap, as well as video glasses to record the incident, although the known provocateur has since denied he was recording footage. And what occurred in Enmore at the Cairo Takeaway was set to be repeated in various suburbs throughout Greater Sydney.

The idea was simple, send Birenbaum into the café to provoke an antisemitic response, as the Cairo Takeaway openly displays its support for Palestine on the side of its building, via a Scott Marsh mural.

So, the Jewish man entered the café, ordered at the counter and then received no derision or ridicule, although a staff member did follow him out of the premises as he left, only to find a Daily Telegraph journalist and two camerapeople waiting outside.

This discovery has only served to support suspicions that these incidents are being manufactured to convey a community riddled with antisemitism. The Murdoch scenario serves as a domestic example of what the federal police consider may be orchestrated by foreign actors paying locals to commit the crimes. And it further serves to leave the public suspicious of the authorities.

The stupid use cases for AI just keep coming:

Human capital---encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits---is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel ``Photo Big 5'' predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes. Unlike traditional survey-based personality measures, the Photo Big 5 is readily accessible and potentially less susceptible to manipulation, making it suitable for wide adoption in academic research and hiring processes. However, its use in labor market screening raises ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy

Certain industries—e.g., adult websites, guns-and-ammo, gaming, bail bonds, and lawyers (!)—tend to have higher chargeback rates. These industries are often served by a subset of banks that specialize in high-risk payment processing. Crypto companies also fall into that category of having high chargeback rates, but the chargeback risk posed by crypto is fundamentally different.  Chargeback risk is manageable when it is predictable, but that requires that it be uncorrelated. Lots of happily married men might claim they did not authorize that purchase OnlyFans subscription, but they aren't all making that claim suddenly and at the same time. The chargeback level if high, but basically static and predictable.

Crypto doesn't work like that. Although there is probably always a relatively high baseline level of chargebacks for crypto, the chargebacks are also likely to be highly correlated whenever there is a market crash or allegations of fraud about a particular coin. If the market goes up, everyone is happy with their transactions, but when it falls, customers try to get out of their losses by claiming that the purchase was never authorized in the first place. Now Visa has a 120 day time limit for issuers to chargeback transactions to acquirers, so the acquirer has to worry about market movements in a completely unpredictable market for the next four months.  If say, Bitcoin crashes, chargebacks are going to soar at the very time when the risk of the crypto company customer going bankruptcy rises. So the scenario that the payment processor is facing is that it will be hit with a tidal wave of chargebacks and that it will not be able to recover them from the crypto company, but will instead just have an unsecured claim in the crypto company's bankruptcy.

Google continues to show us why it chose to abandon its old motto of “Don’t Be Evil,” as it becomes more and more enmeshed with the military-industrial complex. Most recently, Google has removed four key points from its AI principles. Specifically, it previously read that the company would not pursue AI applications involving (1) weapons, (2) surveillance, (3) technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and (4) technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and  human rights.

Those principles are gone now.

In its place, the company has written that “democracies” should lead in AI development and companies should work together with governments “to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.” This could mean that the provider of the world’s largest search engine–the tool most people use to uncover the best apple pie recipes and to find out what time their favorite coffee shop closes–could be in the business of creating AI-based weapons systems and leveraging its considerable computing power for surveillance. 

While the opponents of Reconstruction were painting themselves as staid and respectable fiscal conservatives, they were simultaneously engaged in a radical plan to subvert democratic elections across the South. In principle, the Redeemers’ open campaign of voter suppression, political intimidation, and violence risked further federal intervention, but the North was losing the will to defend black political freedom. In fact, wealthy Northerners—even those who had been strongly anti-slavery—began doubting the logic of universal male suffrage as it empowered the immigrant working class in their cities. The political identity of the “taxpayer” was born in this reaction to black freedom and working-class political power, and it has existed ever since to oppose the specter of a multiracial working-class alliance.

Called together by the Charleston Chamber of Commerce and the Charleston Board of Trade, the Tax-Payers’ Convention of South Carolina met in Columbia in May 1871 and again in February 1874 to seek, “for the holders of property and the payers of taxes, a voice and a representation in the councils of that State.” They had a duty to speak up, the Tax-Payers argued, because the state of South Carolina was suffering from “the fearful and unnecessary increase of the public debt”; “wild, reckless and profligate” spending; and “excessive taxation.”

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Emphatic color-blindness was, to say the least, a recent development in the public rhetoric of South Carolina’s white elite. As recently as 1868, a number of Tax-Payers had signed a petition to the U.S. Congress, entitled a “Respectful Remonstrance on Behalf of the White People of South Carolina,” that opposed black male suffrage because “the superior race is to be made subservient to the inferior.” Porter himself had argued that black people had “traits, intellectual and moral,” and “credulous natures” that left them with an “incapacity” to rule.

At their Tax-Payers’ Conventions, however, these same men, despite sporadic remarks on the “negro character,” no longer officially identified themselves as advocates on behalf of the white race; they were simply representatives of the “over-burthened tax-payers.” This self-appointed role was ironic: as slaveholders, the Southern elite had done everything in their power to cripple the tax capacity of both their states and the federal government. Now, the South Carolina Tax-Payers called into question the right of black people and poor whites to govern because they believed these voters did not pay a substantial amount of taxes. “They who lay the taxes do not pay them, and that they who are to pay them have no voice in the laying of them,” Porter asserted, wondering if “a greater wrong or greater tyranny in republican government” could be conceived.

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It is no coincidence that when the Jim Crow laws were finally dismantled, the reaction to the civil rights movement once again featured paeans to “the taxpayer” and a new wave of tax limitations. The rhetoric of the taxpayer is readymade to call into question the right of black and poor Americans to participate in or benefit from their government. The taxpayer was the foil to Reagan’s welfare queen, who he claimed had a “tax-free cash income” of $150,000 a year. Reagan’s story was a fiction—he’d change the numbers from speech to speech—but that hardly mattered. Talking about taxes allowed voters to put a dollar figure on their resentments, and to experience the poverty of others as persecution.

For over half a century, Trump has operated within a transnational organized crime network whose goal is to strip the US down and sell it for parts, much like the oligarch raids after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have been aided in this endeavor by institutions, in particular the DOJ, which has long protected Trump, and by members of the Democratic Party serving as controlled opposition.

Many Americans did not want to believe this final twist. It is harder to reckon with betrayal than with a straight liar.

But the footage of a grinning Joe Biden with Donald Trump — the man who Biden claimed is a fascist who will destroy America and then handed the keys to the country, promising to accommodate him — seems to have finally woken folks up.

I warned you for nine years, because I wanted you to be prepared. Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned.

That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you don’t hate them first.

They want you to buy into every cheap cliché and every manipulated poll. They want you to hate each other so much, you agree to their plan of tearing this country into warring fiefdoms for oligarchs to plunder. They want you to prey on the vulnerable, even though you are vulnerable too, so that the powerful can escape scrutiny.

They want you to cheer your own demise, mistaking it for someone else’s.

Wanted to share something very important and personal to raise awareness and hopefully help someone who’s struggling with similar feelings I felt back when I was diagnosed as intersex.

Nazism is a kind of “authoritarian populism.” Populism is a political ideology that posits that politics is a conflict between two kinds of people: a real people whose concerns and beliefs are legitimate, moral, and true; a corrupt, out-of-touch, illegitimate elite who are parasitic on the real people. Populism is always anti-pluralist: there is only one real people, and they are in perfect agreement about everything. (Muller says populism is “a moralized form of antipluralism” 20).

Populism become authoritarian when the narrative that the real people have become so oppressed by the “elite” that they are in danger of extermination. At that point, there are no constraints on the behavior of populists or their leaders. This rejection of what are called “liberal norms” (not in the American sense of “liberal” but the political theory one) such as fairness, change from within, deliberation, transparent and consistent legal processes is the moment that a populist movement becomes authoritarian (and Machiavellian). 

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Authoritarian populism always has an intriguing mix of victimhood, heroism, strength, and whining. Somehow whining about how oppressed “we are” and what meany-meany-bo-beanies They are is seen as strength. And that is what much of Hitler’s rhetoric was—so very, very much whining.

And that is something else that authoritarian populism promises: a promise of never being held morally accountable, as long as you are a loyal (even fanatical) member of the in-group (the real people).

In authoritarian populism, the morality comes from group membership, and the values the group claims to have—values which might have literally nothing to do with whatever policies they enact or ways they behave.