Using web browsing data and survey responses, and comparing actual fake news stories that circulated to “placebo” stories they invented that never circulated, the researchers estimated that the average American actually remembers less than one—0.92—fake news stories favoring Trump, and 0.23 favoring Clinton.
Source: A new study kills the notion that fake news swung the US election to Trump — Quartz
Saying “we mustn’t normalize this behavior” rather than “we need to stop this behavior” is really a way of saying that you don’t want to engage in politics, but would rather just signal to those who already agree with us just how appalled we are.
Perhaps the increasingly popular premise, that to air a belief is to normalize it, renders a society least able to contest wrongheaded ideas precisely when it is most vital.
Source: Forget What Is Normal, Champion What Is Just – The Atlantic
NPR has confirmed that intelligence officials say it’s now “quite clear” Russian hackers worked to tip the presidency in Donald Trump’s favor. Trump’s transition team has dismissed the assessment.
“What worries me is the extent to which this is an ongoing pattern — which, by the way, is the Russians’ pattern in other parts of the world.
And is that going to be the case in our elections? Four years from now, are we going to have the Democrats, the Republicans, the independents and the Russians? I mean, this is very serious stuff.”
— Senator Angus King, an independent senator from Maine
Deep down in its article, the Post notes — rather critically — that “there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” Most importantly, the Post adds that “intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.”
Most important of all, the more serious the claim is — and accusing a nuclear-armed power of directly and deliberately interfering in the U.S. election in order to help the winning candidate is about as serious as a claim can get — the more important it is to demand evidence before believing it. Wars have started over far less serious claims than this one.
Source: Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence — The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald
The U.S. voters who rejected decades of bipartisan foreign-policy consensus might be on to something.
So far this century, America has failed to achieve most of the key national-security objectives it has set for itself. … We’d better ask why.
The alternative to dealing with other major powers as equals is to confront them as rivals.
Source: What’s So Great About American World Leadership? – The Atlantic
Source: You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex, by Scott Alexander
there are not enough organized white supremacists to make up “a lot” of anyone’s support
Let me say this for the millionth time. I’m not saying Trump doesn’t have some racist attitudes and policies. I am saying that talk of “entire campaign built around white supremacy” and “the white power candidate” is deliberate and dangerous exaggeration.
I don’t think people appreciate how weird this guy is. His weird way of speaking. His catchphrases like “haters and losers!” or “Sad!”. His tendency to avoid perfectly reasonable questions in favor of meandering tangents about Mar-a-Lago. The ability to bait him into saying basically anything just by telling him people who don’t like him think he shouldn’t.
If you insist that Trump would have to be racist to say or do whatever awful thing he just said or did, you are giving him too much credit. Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible. Sometimes his random and bizarre terribleness is about white people, and then we laugh it off. Sometimes it’s about minorities, and then we interpret it as racism.
Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?
Stop turning everything into identity politics.
Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later”, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.