Rad Geek People's Daily

There is no crisis on the border that is not the obvious and direct result of the crisis of the border. There is no social, economic or humanitarian problem that would not be immediately, near-instantaneously and forever wiped away just by letting people out, letting them be and letting them pass. There is no heavy-fisted enforcement measure, no clever technical fix or gracefully-executed political or diplomatic pirouette that can fix the disastrous consequences of the past decade of rock-headed, mean-hearted, senseless and shambolic attempts at locked-down border policing and restrictive immigration policy. There is no policy solution to the crisis except for the urgent, simple, utterly obvious solution of allowing for massive, order-of-magnitude increases to the numbers of people legally allowed to immigrate openly to live, work or study in the United States, regardless of their nation of origin. That’s all.

Instead, Congress has spent years debating bipartisan compromise bills to further fund border policing, and the Biden administration, whatever liberal sentiments it may preen itself for, has actually spent years now perpetuating and institutionalizing the most destructive features of Trump-era border enforcement and asylum policy. This has been utterly shameful in its conception and multidimensionally disastrous in its execution. The Harris campaign’s open and utterly cynical embrace of this record, and promises to escalate it with more and more of the same, is despicable and appalling.

Around 4:40 am on Friday, a national power outage hit Venezuela. More than ten hours later, electricity is still out in most of the country. After a small surge, the average nationwide connectivity levels have fallen to 17.9% according to VE Sin Filtro, a digital rights watchdog of NGO Conexión Libre y Segura. The situation feels eerily similar to March 2019, when the country was plunged into darkness for a week amidst a political struggle for the presidency—traumatic days for many Venezuelans. While a short-timed outage had hit the country on Tuesday night, the reasons and geographic origin of this outage are not clear yet.

Yet, according to experts, it was a matter of time before another nationwide blackout in Venezuela following years of disrepair, lack of maintenance and investment that destroyed the power grid—alongside repressive management, terrible wages, and unsafe working conditions.

. . . Following a decade-and-a-half long Chavista tradition of blaming adversaries when facing power grid failures, Nicolás Maduro blamed the national power outage on a fascist attack. His Minister of Communications, Freddy Ñanez, had previously described it as an electric sabotage led by the opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González. Diosdado Cabello, who is debuting as Minister of the Interior, also said that the culprits will face justice. González had been summoned for today, a third time this week, by General Prosecutor Tarek W. Saab as part of the case against the opposition’s dispute of the results. The summons threatened González if he tried to “run away” or obstruct justice.

Amidst the outage, Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López says that the Armed Forces are being deployed along the entire border of the national territory and they are in perfect civic-military and police union. Padrino said military tactical and non-tactical vehicles are being deployed to transport and mobilize citizens as part of Plan Centella.

— Caracas Chronicles, Another Nationwide Blackout In Venezuela
August 30, 2024

Que se vayan todos.

See also:

• GT 2023-07-24: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): There Is Not Enough Functioning Equipment To Convert The Gas Into Fuel
• GT 2019-03-07: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): 900
• GT 2017-07-08: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): Pro-government militias wielding wooden sticks and metal bars stormed congress on Wednesday

The whole notion of misinformation as conventionally construed has taken some blows lately, including scandals in the misinformation research field and, more importantly, some great work from Brendan Nyhan, Emily Thorson, and co-authors showing that in our review of behavioural science research on online misinformation, we document a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information.

From where I sit, that’s all to the good — I’ve been complaining for years about the problems with this framework as an explanation for political outcomes. It is true that there is fringe content circulating on the internet and also that some of your political enemies probably believe some of it, but there’s little reason to believe that such content exerts an important causal influence on American politics.

That said, one complaint I still have about the misinformation paradigm is that even in its debunking forms, it uses a generic term in a highly specific and somewhat peculiar way.

People have a lot of erroneous beliefs about the policy status quo in the United States, and that seems to matter. These beliefs are normally not formed via exposure to some kind of social media misinformation; they’re just about things that aren’t in the news very much and that people misunderstand. Which is to say that people having information that is not correct is absolutely a huge deal in politics… it’s just not necessarily misinformation in the sense that the misinformation police intend. In Dylan Matthews’ profile of the State Department’s small but very successful intelligence bureau, for example, one thing that comes through is that the bulk of American intelligence agencies genuinely believed that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program. This erroneous information had a huge impact on the media, on the mass public understanding of political debates 2002-2003, in decision-making in Washington, and on the broad trajectory of American politics.

And I think erroneous ideas that are perpetrated by mainstream institutions — what I’m going to call elite misinformation — are a really big deal in an underrated way. . . .

— Matt Yglesias, Elite misinformation is an underrated problem
Slow Boring, June 26, 2024

RIP Kinky Friedman (1944-2024).