Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 158, Issue 22

On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 1:45 PM <nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org> wrote:

Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
nettime-l@mail.kein.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
nettime-l-owner@mail.kein.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."

Today's Topics:

1. Re: Stop the Steal (Flick Harrison)
2. Re: nettime-l Digest, Vol 158, Issue 20 (Eric Kluitenberg)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 10:22:37 -0800
From: Flick Harrison <flick@flickharrison.com>
To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
<nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Stop the Steal
Message-ID: <EEC47D72-7881-40E3-9FDA-FE9750435846@flickharrison.com" target="_blank">EEC47D72-7881-40E3-9FDA-FE9750435846@flickharrison.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

What seems the most dangerous and mysterious to me is that Trumpism?s instincts for combative messaging and incoherence-as-a-strategy seems to have almost out-performed the focus-group politics developed so painstakingly across the 20th century. Despite ignoring the experienced election hands, the sober thinking of the party machines, and the broad consensus of elected Republicanism, Trump?s votes were not only way up from 2016, but he was strategically placed to come fairly close to winning in the places where it counts. This seems like a pretty huge achievement for someone who doesn?t listen to detailed data briefings or really know or care anything about geography or demographics, other than the broad strokes or embracing racism and misogyny.

It?s interesting that he was able to look out across a sea of faces, shout out awful slogans, and read the crowd more effectively than the opinion polls or the experienced party strategists. His instincts as a board-game player were better than the bean-counters'.

BUT: The biggest crisis in all this is that the critical media literacy of the last 50 years has been straight-up weaponized by capital and the right. All the instincts to ?follow the money,? ?follow the class identity? in the media ecosystem, hammered home by Chomsky and the like, have been turned in on themselves - so that ?Big Science? is held criminally responsible for lies - automatic to the fact that they receive money from somewhere to do research, and therefore can be assumed to bend all data to their own selfish ends. This pollutes the discourse on vaccines, Covid, climate change, hell anything that can be clearly explained by a huge consensus of scientists is instantly suspect by the very fact of its ideological coherence and hegemony.

This isn?t limited to Big Right discourse but is fuelled by Youtube hucksters and scammers of all kinds, polluting everything? bad education and suspicion of officialdom are twin cancers on progress. British Columbia, for instance, has discussed universal dentalcare as a progressive goal, but what point is free dental care when there?s mass delusional suspicion of flouride in the water? The right thinks it?s a form of mind control and the left thinks it?s Big Pharma making money off of polluting our bodies. So where is the constituency for evidence-based public health?

The number of left anti-vaxxers I?ve encountered lately is indeed disheartening. A feminist woman I know weaves her critique of the patriarchal medical system seamlessly towards the conclusion that vaccines are a form of assault on women.

The major disrupter of the 2016 US election, Brexit, and anti-populist organizing generally has been ?Fake News?? from rogue bloggers all the way up to Fox and OANN?. but even as this concept was catching on in the mainstream, it was immediately weaponized by Trump and his ecosystem as a term for anything critical of him. It was emblematic of their black belt in discourse judo, taking the most vital idea of the critical discourse moment and utterly flipping it into a right-wing weapon. How can we tackle the problem of massive disinformation if the terms are constantly hijacked by the very people we?re trying to protect ourselves from.

The right is able to use very broad strokes to argue that all mass media is biased towards the left, using a sort of dolt?s version of critical media theory - if they?re disagreeing with us, there must be sinister structural biases, and because hey presto, we just proved sinister structural bias, therefore everything they say must be a lie. And so this 1-2 punch creates the motto: ?Everyone who disagrees with us is a liar.? Ipso Facto.

We can be a little bit cheered by the collapse of the alliance between Trumpism and Fox News - caused by Fox?s sticking to the reality around the election outcome - - but it is too early to trust that this schism will last.

So while we?re struggling to create a movement whose ideology we can be proud of, and which has clear coherent principles, the other side is spending all their time destroying us while marching in lockstep to whatever tune is the most useful at the moment.

> On Nov 14, 2020, at 08:06 , Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Turns out, not only is Stop the Steal a pure creation of Republican operatives, but it DOES go back to the criminally convicted and Trump-pardoned granddaddy of all right-wing goons: Roger Stone, he of the Brooks Brothers Riot, who invented the slogan in 2016 and is pandering it today along with a phalanx of loosely aligned haters:
>
> https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs/index.html <https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs/index.html>
>
> Those who want to agonize about the role of the Internet in undermining democracy and sparking civil conflict, well, I think you should investigate this. It's ripe for journalistic exposure, activist counter-efforts, and some quantitative social science too.
>
> We're not out of the woods yet.
>
> Brian
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mx.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/attachments/20201116/91aa7ae9/attachment-0001.html>

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 19:42:44 +0100
From: Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl>
To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
<nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 158, Issue 20
Message-ID: <C36F5CB5-D853-448B-9F23-8CDE52C1C4E8@xs4all.nl" target="_blank">C36F5CB5-D853-448B-9F23-8CDE52C1C4E8@xs4all.nl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hi Lucia,

Yes that was exactly my point - change the system.

bests,
-e.

> On 16 Nov 2020, at 19:20, Lucia Sommer <sommerlucia@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Eric, re: "Where the f. is the Green Party or something like that in the US???" the short answer is that the system is structured so as to make a third party effectively impossible. We would need to adopt a different electoral system for it to be feasible.
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 6:00 AM <nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org <mailto:nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org>> wrote:
> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
> nettime-l@mail.kein.org <mailto:nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l <http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l>
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org <mailto:nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org>
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> nettime-l-owner@mail.kein.org <mailto:nettime-l-owner@mail.kein.org>
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: why is it so quiet (in the US) (Eric Kluitenberg)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 10:50:25 +0100
> From: Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl <mailto:epk@xs4all.nl>>
> To: nettime-l <nettime-l@mx.kein.org <mailto:nettime-l@mx.kein.org>>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> why is it so quiet (in the US)
> Message-ID: <34DBCC00-702A-4E31-803B-89EC4876EDE2@xs4all.nl" target="_blank">34DBCC00-702A-4E31-803B-89EC4876EDE2@xs4all.nl <mailto:34DBCC00-702A-4E31-803B-89EC4876EDE2@xs4all.nl" target="_blank">34DBCC00-702A-4E31-803B-89EC4876EDE2@xs4all.nl>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> HI Ted, all,
>
> Fascinating discussion in ominous times..
>
> > On 16 Nov 2020, at 04:02, tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com <mailto:tbyfield@panix.com>> wrote:
> >
> > The US is breaking down, so it's not at all surprising that some of its language for describing the world would as well.
>
> From a continental European perspective I?m watching this spectacle (don?t know what else to call it, without immediately invoking Debord and beyond), and I?m not well enough informed to have any definite reading, but my impression is not that the US is ?breaking down?. Much rather it seems that the US is embroiled in a profound political crisis that plays out on many different levels.
>
> For non-UK Europeans this whole electoral system tied to voting districts and the ?first-past-the post? principle does not make much sense, nor does the two party (Republicrat) party system, where none of the other political parties that do exist across the US get represented in the legislature.
>
> Despite the important consideration that much of ?democracy? happens outside the formal legislative institutions (i.e. issue-based displacement of politics, freedom of assembly, the right to strike, referenda, and more spontaneous and/or affect driven forms of assembly), implying that we should not get trapped in a hyper-focus on the formal institutions, still at the moment when these formal institutions enter into a state of crisis, as is apparent now in the US, this warrants attention. At the very least these formal institutions should be able to guarantee these other ?democratic? or civil rights to be exercised extra-institutionally.
>
> What this signals to me, from my limited Eurocentric (male / straight, etc.) perspective is an urgent need for institutional reform. At the very least some form of proportional representation in the voting system and a much lower threshold for different collective political actors to enter the legislature. Just to ask the most obvious question: ?Where the f. is the Green Party or something like that in the US???
>
> It would also allow the so-called ?populists? to enter on their own terms, which is a good thing because then they can be confronted head on. Europe has its own severe problems with those kinds of political movements and it forces the mainstream to acknowledge that and do something with it before they become a MEGA* type of movement. In NL we have seen a persistent presence for the last 20 or so years of political actors (the biological and political bodies changing and morphing all the time) of about 20% of the vote of people who simply want nothing (they don?t want immigrants, they don?t want environmental protective policies, they don?t want taxes, the don't want lefties, they don?t want the EU, they don?t want globalisation, they don?t want other people parking in the parking lot in front of their house, etc etc..).
>
> Maybe Germany can serve as a model for the US? It also has a federal structure and a 5% threshold for parties to enter parliament. That all seems to work reasonably well (at least for the last 70 years).
>
> The other thing is this presidential system. That just does not make any sense to me at all anymore - what is this some 21st century Leviathan? Get rid of that, appoint some symbolical nobody and let the country be run by a coalition of differential political groupings who can work out the best way forward together (harmonically if possible, contestationally if necessary).
>
> Please people across the great pond, get your act together!
>
> all bests,
> Eric
>
> p.s. - * MEGA - Make Europe Great Again
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: <http://mx.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/attachments/20201116/456228bb/attachment-0001.html <http://mx.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/attachments/20201116/456228bb/attachment-0001.html>>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l <http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l>
>
> End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 158, Issue 20
> ******************************************
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mx.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/attachments/20201116/fe230cc0/attachment.html>

------------------------------

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l

End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 158, Issue 22
******************************************