Right Wing Terror Goes Global

Islamic terrorists have used the Internet for recruitment and the dissemination of their toxic hatred.  Now, it appears the same phenomenon is taking place with far right and white supremacy.  How else to explain the horrific murder of 49 at a mosque in New Zealand, hardly a nation known for racial strife and a flood of non-white immigrants.  The Washington Post looks at the slaughter:

Forty-nine people are dead and scores more are injured after a heavily armed gunman clad in military-style gear opened fire during prayers at a mosque in the center of Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday. A second mosque was also targeted in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a well-planned “terrorist attack,” making for “one of New Zealand’s darkest days.”

Authorities said they had four people in custody — three men and one woman — but later clarified that only three were believed to have been involved in the violence. One man in his late 20s, whom the authorities declined to name, was charged with murder and was expected to appear in court on Saturday morning. The suspects had not been on security watch lists, officials said.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said 41 people were killed at Al Noor Mosque on Deans Road, opposite a large downtown park. Seven more were fatally shot about three miles away at a mosque in Linwood, an inner suburb of Christchurch, and another person died at the hospital.

Health officials said 48 patients, including both young children and adults, were being treated for gunshot wounds at Christchurch Hospital, while additional victims were seeking medical treatment elsewhere. Around 200 family members were at the hospital awaiting news about loved ones.

Portions of the ghastly attack at the downtown mosque were broadcast live on social media by a man who police confirmed had also released a manifesto railing against Muslims and immigrants. The 74-page document states that he was following the example of notorious right-wing extremists, including Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.

The manifesto, littered with conspiracy theories about white birthrates and “white genocide,” is the latest sign that a lethal vision of white nationalism has spread internationally. Its title, “The Great Replacement,” echoes the rallying cry of, among others, the torch-bearing protesters who marched in Charlottesville in 2017.

The digital platforms apparently enlisted in the shooting highlight a distinctly 21st-century dimension of mass gun violence — one sure to put more pressure on social media companies already under scrutiny about how they police their services.

An editorial in the New York Times further looks at the toxic poison being spread by far right extremists.  Here are excerpts:

On Friday, a man in his late 20s strapped on a helmet camera, loaded his car with weapons, drove to a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and began shooting at anyone who came into his line of vision. He broadcast the act of mass terror live for the world to watch on social media.

A 17-minute video of a portion of the attack, which leapt across the internet faster than social media censors could remove it, is one of the most disturbing, high-definition records of a mass casualty attack of the digital age — a grotesque first-person-shooter-like record of man’s capacity for inhumanity.

Videos of attacks are designed to amplify the terror, of course. But what makes this atrocity “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence,” as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, is both the methodical nature in which the massacre was conducted and how it was apparently engineered for maximum virality.

[T]he Christchurch shooting feels different, in part due to its perpetrator’s apparent familiarity with the darkest corners of the internet. The recording contains numerous references to online and meme culture, including name-checking a prominent YouTube personality shortly before beginning the attack.

The digital trail the shooter left behind appears to depict a white supremacist motivation for the attack. There is much, at this early date, that is unknown despite what’s been posted online. The 87-page manifesto, for instance, is filled with layers of ironic, self-referential commentary, apparently written to specifically enrage the communities that appear to have helped radicalize the gunman in the first place.

As terrifying as the violence itself is how well the online community worked in the gunman’s favor and the sinking notion that this may be our new reality. Not only has conspiratorial hate spread from the internet to real life, it’s also weaponized to go viral.

Meanwhile, here in the USA we have an occupant of the White House who fans white supremacist hate, rage and resentment daily. Will something like this soon happen in America with ts ridiculous gun culture?  Be very afraid. 

Can the Internet Defeat Vladimir Putin?

Russian dictator Vladimir "Adolph Hitler" Putin continues to mimic the tactics of Adolph Hitler in the 1930's and Joesph Stalin from the mid-1930's through the date of his death.  These tactics include controlling the news media, shutting down opposition news outlets and kangaroo trials for political opponents.  The one factor that has changed the playing field is the Internet.  Yes, it can be blocked for a time, but as China has discovered, for every effort to shut out news and the truth, there are computer geeks who will quickly devise a work around.  A column in the New York Times ponders whether the Internet will lead to Putin's eventual undoing.  If it does, it will have done Russia and the world a huge favor.   Here are some article excerpts:

ON Tuesday, a court in Moscow convicted Russia’s top opposition blogger, Aleksei A. Navalny, of criminal fraud. Mr. Navalny, who has been under house arrest for nearly a year, was given a suspended sentence and spared jail time. His younger brother Oleg, however, was sentenced to serve three and a half years. Aleksei Navalny is an anti-corruption activist and outspoken critic of President Vladimir V. Putin, and the verdicts were seen as a cynical strategy to punish him without turning him into an imprisoned martyr.

Mr. Navalny responded furiously, rallying protests in Moscow’s Manezh Square. He even defied his house arrest to attend the demonstrations himself, which led swiftly to his detention and a return to his home.

Mr. Navalny, a 21st-century Russian dissident, presents a new kind of threat to the Putin regime. He was the first Russian activist to have used the Internet as an effective tool of political resistance. In the past, he and his followers have demonstrated that Russia’s opposition activists are not simply “virtual,” but are also capable of getting people onto the streets.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon. For a long time, the Internet didn’t matter in Russia, at least as a weapon of the opposition. . . . . The Internet just reflected offline realities. Most Russians didn’t think they had any impact on their political situation. Elections were viewed as predetermined. Opposition protests were sparsely attended, and often ended with protesters’ being rounded up by the police. The Internet, simply by existing, was not going to change this overall picture.

Enter Mr. Navalny, who understood that his countrymen were tired of pointless street demonstrations. He decided to show Russians that they could make a difference, from the comfort of their homes. . . .  He didn’t ask people to revolt, he just called on them to file online complaints. He provided detailed instructions for appealing to the authorities, and asked his supporters to report everything from unrepaired potholes to suspicious government contracts. Success is a powerful antidote to apathy. Years of these campaigns showed individual Russians that together, they could get things done.

[T]he Kremlin didn’t really worry about online activism until late 2011 and early 2012, when tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in antigovernment protests that were largely organized on social media. This finally got Mr. Putin’s attention.  . . . . Moscow was facing the largest demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Now, Russian authorities have greater powers to block sites, allegedly in an attempt to protect children from harmful content. Popular bloggers are required to register with the government. Facebook and Twitter could be blocked entirely if they refuse to comply with a new law that requires them to keep data on their Russian users on local servers. Mr. Putin also passed a law to criminalize street protests.

The opposition’s main obstacle will continue to be public apathy, which is an authoritarian government’s best protection. The Internet alone is not enough to overcome it.

But something else could: the flailing Russian economy. An economic crisis caused by declining oil revenue, Western sanctions and a plummeting ruble could make Mr. Putin more vulnerable and eventually spark a mass uprising. And thanks to the Internet, Mr. Navalny and his supporters will have the tools to take advantage of a revolutionary situation if it does arise.

I am currently reading a book on the daughters of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II.  Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, were clueless and in way over their heads when it came to running a sprawling empire.  Moreover, much of their ill-advised political motivations came from religious brainwashing - brainwashing that focused on maintaining the political/religious status quo, especially for the Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoyed immense privileges and shook down the ignorant  for money that they could ill-afford to give to the Church.  In contrast, Putin is motivated by personal greed and megalomania.  The man is despicable.

The Internet: Bad for Institutional Religion

Over at Civil Commotion Bob Felton raises an interesting question:

I’ve wondered through the years if the clergy’s hostility to the Internet was really about porn and online-dating and -gaming, or if they sensed the danger to them of easy information sharing — about their own misbehaviors, about life outside the church bubble.

A new study described in MIT Technology Review suggests that thatthe answer is the latter.  The that more information is available through a medium that the"godly folk" cannot censor or restrict, the harder it is to maintain religious based myths and outright untruths.  Here are highlights from the review:

Back in 1990, about 8 percent of the U.S. population had no religious preference. By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That’s a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion.

That raises an obvious question: how come? Why are Americans losing their faith?

Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.

Downey’s data comes from the General Social Survey, a widely respected sociological survey carried out by the University of Chicago, that has regularly measure people’s attitudes and demographics since 1972.

He finds that the biggest influence on religious affiliation is religious upbringing—people who are brought up in a religion are more likely to be affiliated to that religion later.

However, the number of people with a religious upbringing has dropped since 1990. It’s easy to imagine how this inevitably leads to a fall in the number who are religious later in life. In fact, Downey’s analysis shows that this is an important factor. However, it cannot account for all of the fall or anywhere near it. In fact, that data indicates that it only explains about 25 percent of the drop.

He goes on to show that college-level education also correlates with the drop. Once it again, it’s easy to imagine how contact with a wider group of people at college might contribute to a loss of religion. . . . . But although the correlation is statistically significant, it can only account for about 5 percent of the drop, so some other factor must also be involved.

That’s where the Internet comes in.  In the 1980s, Internet use was essentially zero, but in 2010, 53 percent of the population spent two hours per week online and 25 percent surfed for more than 7 hours.

This increase closely matches the decrease in religious affiliation. In fact, Downey calculates that it can account for about 25 percent of the drop.

That’s a fascinating result. It implies that since 1990, the increase in Internet use has had as powerful an influence on religious affiliation as the drop in religious upbringing.

“For people living in homogeneous communities, the Internet provides opportunities to find information about people of other religions (and none), and to interact with them personally,” says Downey.

I have long maintained that ignorance and lack of education (and perhaps psychological problems) are prerequisites for adherence to fundamentalist religious belief.   Now, it seems that lack of access to uncensored information provided via the Internet is another prerequisite.  Knowledge and access to information are mutually exclusive with fundamentalist belief.  No wonder the "godly folk" hate the Internet and easy access to the truth.  Interestingly, the decline of religion mirrors what happened in the former Soviet Union: once information and other views became increasingly available, it became harder and harder to maintain the lie that communism was working.  So too with fundamentalist religion.

 

Will Washington Post Cut it Own Throat and Charge Internet Readers?

One of the phenomenons that has been interesting to watch is the reaction of old fashioned newspapers to the rise of the Internet and the exploding accessibility to news through alternate outlets.  Yes, most newspapers have a web version, but historically their main revenue has come from advertising sales in print editions.   Indeed, the two main local papers in Hampton Roads continue to operate their papers as a frame work for selling advertising and actual news content has become filler between the advertising pages.  Worse yet, as the ad revenues have dropped, writers and columnists have been eliminated and the quality of what news and opinion pieces continue to exist has plummeted thereby accelerating the death spiral.  Some newspapers have reacted by charging web readers - a move that I believe in the longer term will simply drive web readers away and ultimately lead to even fewer subscribers and readers.   

Two cases in point: the New York Times and the local Daily Press.  The latter requires that either one be a 7 day a week print edition subscriber or a paid online subscriber in order to access news articles online.  What's been my reaction?  I simply no longer even bother with the Daily Press and all links to that publication have disappeared from this blog.  That's right, they are 100% gone - as are blog readers who might have followed the link for the full article.  That translates to fewer over all visitors and fewer page view - which leads to advertisers being even less willing to purchase ad space in either version of the newspaper.  

The New York Times hasn't been quite as stupid as the folks at the Daily Press and one can still get 10 free articles per month (20 if one has two computers with different IPS addresses).  So what happens on this blog?  After the free articles for any given month have been used up, all links to New York Times stories disappear from this blog until the following month.  Meanwhile, there is reduce link trough traffic, fewer pages views, and advertisers are less willing to pay for advertising space.  As with the Daily Press, it is a case of being penny wise and pound foolish. 

Now the Washington Post seems poised to cut its own throat and implement some sort of pay for web access scheme.  My prediction?  People will not be willing to pay for it.  A piece on Andrew Sullivan's blog looks at the thoughts of other critics of what I suspect will be a failed strategy:

Rod Dreher, for one, isn't buying the WaPo's subscription strategy:

[I] visit its site multiple times per day, and often come away with articles to link to and comment on. Would I pay for it? No, I wouldn’t. If I lived in Washington, or wrote mostly about politics on this blog, I would. But I live in Louisiana, and besides, I already pay a lot of money to subscribe to a quality national newspaper, The New York Times. I keep going back and forth about whether to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal’s digital edition, because I love the Weekend Review section so much. The problem is that subscribing to the Times costs over $400 a year. Do I have an extra $300 lying around to subscribe to the Journal too? I do not. It has to be one or the other. I need to rethink which one it’s going to be. One reason I’ve stuck with the Times is that it’s much easier to use their links in this blog.

TNC, unlike Dreher,"read[s] the Post online enough to say that I would pay for this". But:

The problem with the Post is that the paper has been so decimated that you wonder whether they still have a product they can sell. I wonder if the Post basically got it backwards--they tried to save by cutting, but in cutting damaged the product (and the brand), and now the Post is trying to get people pay a much less substantial product. It seems it would have been smarter to charge when you had something you knew you could charge for.

In the case of the Daily Press, it truly is no longer worth paying for.  Indeed, the Press' headquarters building is now for sale  as a cost cutting measure.  Charging for online reading is only going to hasten the Press' death.  I hope the Post doesn't follow the Daily Press' model of slow suicide.

Going Dark on Jan 18 to Protest SOPA

As a blogger and frequent user of the Internet for both business and personal matters, I - like may, many others including Google, Wikipedia and countless others - I am very concerned about the censorship powers the U. S. House of Representative's proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and it's U. S. Senate equivalent, the PROTECT IP Act, would give the government. The strongest protection from a tyrannical government and abuse of the government's police powers is a free and unfettered press. Nowadays, that press includes the power of the blogosphere. One of the blogs participating in the Internet blackout tomorrow is the Bilerico Project for which I have been a contributor for almost 3 years. Frankly, this legislation is the first step towards government control of the Internet such as exists in China and other dictatorships. Here are highlights from Bil Browning's explanation of the importance of defeating these bills.

This legislation simply gives the government way too much power to censor America's internet and as a minority community that's something that should particularly concern us. While nothing in this suggests it would be used to target the LGBT community, the broad reach of the proposed laws could be used to censor any group worldwide.

This is not a decision I've made lightly. Quite frankly, my income is mostly based on our ad revenue and subtracting an entire day's impressions will take its toll - especially since our traffic has continued to climb.

SOPA, however, gives the government the ability to force search engines to hide bilerico.com, put me in jail, and take all of my ad revenue whenever they decide. This is a longterm decision - one day versus any potential day the government decides.

We will display a black page on every page tomorrow with a message about the importance of defending the freedom of the internet. We'll link readers to more information about SOPA and the protest by Bilerico Project and sites like Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook.

To learn more about this threat and to take action, go here. Be assured, I have already registered my opposition.

Blogger Issues - Posts to Resume Latter Today

I am not sure what the issue was, but this morning when I normally put up morning posts, Blogger - the platform I use for this blog - was apparently not working and I could not access the blog or other blogger platform blogs. The problem seems to be fixed and normal posting will resume latter today. For now, here's a Wednesday Male Beauty photo to hold folks over.

Gay Marriage & Marijuana - Why You Can't Stop Either One

In a column in Newsweek that no doubt is provocative to those on the far right, Jacob Weisberg looks at the inevitability of nationally recognized same sex marriage and changes in the nation's marijuana laws. He posits that society is changing and that this change dooms the efforts of conservatives in the long run to keep same sex couples as legal inferiors and to continue to criminalize the use/possession of small amounts of marijuana use for personal use. In the case of the latter issue, I for one have never believed that marijuana use necessarily leads to other drug use. Individuals with addictive personalities/genes will become addicted if not on marijuana, then on alcohol or other legal drugs. I don't mean to sound unsympathetic towards such individuals, but the fact that some will abuse marijuana and/or become psychologically addicted should not mean that we put laws on the books that needlessly condemn many to criminal records for mere recreational use of marijuana. The situation is truly no different than with alcohol and we all know what a failure Prohibition turned out to be - except for the bootleggers who made fortunes. Likewise, the younger generation increasingly recognizes that the validating same sex relationships in no wise threatens heterosexual marriage. Indeed, it might avoid all of the divorces that arise from gays marrying straights in an effort to conform only to have it all fall apart over time. Here are some highlights:

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Prohibition now is different from Prohibition then. When the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920, it was a radical social experiment challenging a custom as old as civilization. A predictable failure—the insult to individual rights, the impossibility of enforcement, the spawning of organized crime—it came to an end in 1933. Today it is a byword for futile attempts to legislate morality and remake human nature.
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Our forms of prohibition are more sins of omission than commission. Rather than trying to take away longstanding rights, they're instances of conservative laws failing to keep pace with a liberalizing society. But like Prohibition in the '20s, these restrictions have become indefensible as well as impractical, and as a result are fading fast. Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. These reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed, but because society has.
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The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness. What's driving the legalization of gay marriage is not so much the moral argument, but the pressures from couples who want to sanctify their relationships, obtain legal benefits, and raise children in a stable environment. What's advancing the decriminalization of marijuana is not just the demand for pot as medicine but the number of adults—more than 23 million in the past year, according to the most recent government survey—who use it and don't believe they should face legal jeopardy.
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The Internet has been a crucial amplifier of all such claims. With pornography and gambling, the Web itself became an irrepressible distribution tool. When it comes to gay marriage, it has accelerated the recognition of a new civil right by serving as an organizing tool and information clearinghouse. More broadly, the freest communications medium the world has ever known has raised expectations of personal liberty.
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Politicians will continue to lag, rather than lead, these changes. Republicans face a risk in resisting the new realities. If the GOP remains the party of prohibition, it will increasingly alienate libertarian leaners and the young. Democrats face a different danger in embracing cultural transformations too eagerly.
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I believe that Weisberg is correct in his analysis. The question, therefore, then becomes one of when will the forces of reaction and old ways of thinking will be overcome or die out?

Join the Impact - Nationwide Protests Today

The "Join the Impact" movement has taken off like a California wild fire and today hundreds of protests are taking place all across the USA. Hopefully, many usually complacent members of the LGBT community will come out and stand with others who want to show that we gays are everywhere and that we do not all look like outlandish images in gay pride parades that our enemies love to disseminate. Information on the effort and an event in your area can be found at the Join the Impact website here. In the Norfolk area, the protest will be at 1:30 PM at Norfolk City Hall, 810 Union Street, Norfolk, Virgina. Events are taking place at six (6) other cities, including Richmond, Charlottesville and Williamsburg. If your schedule permits and an event is nearby, PLEASE consider attending. If we do not fight for our rights, do not expect others to do the right thing and just hand them to us.

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And believe me, the media is picking up on the movement. Here are highlights from the New York Times:

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The Internet played an unprecedented role in rallying voters during this year’s election. In the aftermath of the election, Web 2.0 tools are continuing to play a role in other causes, astonishing long-time activists with the power and speed with which it gets their message out.

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The latest example is a series of international protests scheduled for Saturday in opposition to California’s Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban that passed on Nov. 4. Join the Impact, a Web site built the morning of Friday, Nov. 7, has rallied hundreds of thousands of people who are gathering this weekend in eight countries, 50 states and 300 cities.

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This is the pinnacle of giving people a voice online. And people are taking that voice and making it meaningful with a megaphone.” Amy Balliett, one of the two original organizers of the movement, has organized local demonstrations and fundraisers in the past the old-fashioned way, with fliers around town and word of mouth. She said she is astonished at the momentum and speed that Join the Impact has picked up from the Web.

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Join the Impact is also on Twitter and Facebook, which are also helping to “drive the masses,” Ms. Balliett said. After the Saturday protests, the week-old organization will keep harnessing the power of the Web to fight for equality, she said. Next up: they are planning a “day without gays,” when they will encourage gay people to stay home and not contribute to the economy.

New York Times to end paid Internet service

I am glad that the New York Times has finally come to its senses (http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSWEN101120070918?feedType=RSS&feedName=internetNews&rpc=22&sp=true). While I enjoy many of the Times columnists, I refused to pay for opinions when I could get so many other views for free (and often get the Times columns a few days later in other publications. The blogosphere is changing how people get both the news and commentary. Here's some of the Reuters story:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue. TimesSelect will shut down on Wednesday, two years after the Times launched it, which charges subscribers $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year to read articles by columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman.

The trademark orange "T's" marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night, said the Web site's Vice President and General Manager Vivian Schiller. The move is an acknowledgment by The Times that making Web site visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising.

Figuring out how to increase online revenue is crucial to the Times and other U.S. newspaper publishers, which are struggling with a drop in advertising sales and paying subscribers as more readers move online. "Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur.
"The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."