v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

A Short Summary of Jason's Stanley's Book on Propaganda

 

From the blog Reason and Meaning:

Propaganda in the derogatory sense refers to information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, that is used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. In today’s America for example, the propagandists tell people that voter fraud is a serious problem, or that Mexican immigrants are rapists, or that more guns will solve the gun-violence problem. The purpose of all this? To suppress voting, get re-elected, or sell guns. (Consider how immigration reform received bi-partisan support in the US Senate in 2014 and was about to be approved the US House of Representatives. But when Eric Cantor lost his primary to a fervent anti-immigrationist the reform was immediately killed. Some congressmen obviously feared they wouldn’t get re-elected in their reactionary and racist districts. For the details see the PBS documentary “Immigration Battle.”)

But Stanley wonders why some falsehoods work and others don’t? And why are these lies so impervious to contrary evidence even when believing and acting upon the truth would be in people’s self-interest? Why, for example, will people reject the scientific consensus on climate change or the overwhelming evidence that more guns equals more gun violence?

According to Stanley propaganda is the “manipulation of the rational will to close off debate” through the use of deception, emotion, misdirection, intimidation, and stereotype. How does this work in supposedly liberal democracies? The key to understanding this is that Americans now live in echo chambers that reinforce their prejudices and presuppositions. This makes them especially prone to propaganda.

Stanley differentiates between propaganda that supports something—let’s go to war because our enemies are evil—and undermining propaganda, which appeals to values in order to undermine those very values. An example of the latter is the false belief that America has a voter-fraud problem which is used to suppress voting in the name of election integrity. Or the false belief that Christians are discriminated against in America justifies denying marriage licenses to gay couples. So values like equality and integrity are used to undermine equality and integrity. (I would add a third category—confusing propaganda. Just say enough contradictory things that people won’t know what to believe and will then give up the search for truth altogether.)

Stanley also invokes the idea of a flawed ideology which generates false beliefs that are impervious to evidence. Once the flawed ideology has been implanted, then you don’t need propaganda anymore, you just reactivate the false belief. For example. if you convince people that President Obama is a Muslim, then you just use his middle name to bring that belief to the surface. Or if you convince them against all evidence that he wasn’t born in America, you just have to keep talking about how foreign he seems.

Where do these false ideologies come from? Stanley argues that they derive from self-interest, especially the belief that we are good, and from our social identity. For example, the lifestyle of American slaveholders in the pre-Civil War south was dependent upon believing blacks were inferior. And it would be hard to reject such beliefs if your social identity depended on those beliefs. Religious beliefs function similarly. Other believers are members of your clan, and it takes courage to admit that you clan has false beliefs, commits atrocities, etc.

In sum, we develop a social identity with people who share our interests, and we naturally avoid contrary ideas. This leads to flawed ideologies based on emotion, stereotype, and prejudice rather than reason and evidence. These false beliefs are reinforced by propaganda that tells us that freedom or equality demand that we diminish the freedom or equality of others. Such beliefs are almost impossible to refute because different ideas threaten the believer’s ego and social relationships.

Reflection – But who or what determines what ideas are true and what ones are false? Can’t we just say that everyone just believes on the basis of self-interest and social relationships? We could say that, but it isn’t true. Why? Because some things are really true and some things are really false independent of our prejudices. Climate change really is happening, vaccines are really good for preventing disease, voter fraud isn’t really happening, and there are no significant biological distinctions between races. (For more see “Race is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue.” In fact, the idea of race is not a biological notion.) There really is a truth about these matters which is determined not by what you want to be true, but by what really is true. And the truth is discovered in the world by the careful application of the scientific method.

 

Tonglen

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- A recent concert by Tonglen-Derrick Michaels, Sarah Hughes, Zack Branch, Derek Wiegmann at An Die Musik Live

Lira's Great Bossa Nova Testament

 

A telling story of Bossa Novaist Carlos Lira, a great Brazilian composer of that style:

In the early 1960s a rift was opening in the bossa nova movement as some – mostly younger – singers developed a taste for including political messages in their songs.  This approach often also involved a rejection of foreign influences in Brazilian music and a return to samba’s roots.   Carlos Lira (often spelled Lyra), born in Rio de Janeiro on May 11, 1936*, was perhaps the greatest leader of the bossa novistas “engajados” — Portuguese for politically and socially “engaged,” whose ranks included  renowned musicians like Edu Lobo and Nara Leão by the mid 1960s. The other side — “purists” who thought bossa nova should remain faithful to the contemplative serenity of songs like “O Barquinho” — included Lira’s former partner (and Nara Leão’s ex-boyfriend) Ronaldo Bôscoli, and the brothers Marcos Valle and Paulo Sérgio Valle. The Valle brothers composed the song “A Resposta” (“The Answer“) to criticize socially “engaged” bossa nova – and Nara Leão in particular.

In 1961, Lira — together with Oduvaldo Viana Filho, Ferreira Gullar, and others —  founded the Popular Culture Center (Centro Popular de Cultura) of the National Students’ Union, which aimed to support and disseminate “revolutionary art” among university students. By this point, according to Jairo Severiano and Zuza Homem de Mello, Lira was beginning to express frustrations with bossa nova, feeling it was “just a trite modern style, repeating the same romantic musings as always.” He began to compose more explicitly political and nationalistic songs, including “Mister Golden,” “Os Subdesenvolvidos” (“the Underdeveloped”), and “Influência do Jazz,” which laments the tainting of traditional samba with obvious foreign influences.

While the lyrics protest the influence of jazz, the samba is written in an Americanized, bossa nova style– using the pentatonic scale so pervasive in American jazz and blues compositions — with a melody that purposefully recalls American songs like “You Were Meant for Me,” from Singing in the Rain, and “Indian Love Call,” from Rose-Marie. 

“Influência do Jazz” was first released by the Tamba Trio on Zé Trinidade’s sunday program on TV Rio. It was an immediate hit, and was performed twice at the famous bossa nova show at Carnegie Hall — by Lira and the Oscar Castro Neves Quartet.

Lyrics translated to the classic song:

My poor samba
It started getting mixed up and modernized, and got lost
And the sway, where is it? It’s gone
Where’s that shimmy that stirs us up
Poor thing, my samba changed all of a sudden
Influence of jazz

It almost died
And ends up dying, is almost dying, it didn’t realize
That samba sways from side to side
Jazz is different, forward and back
And samba, half dead, got half warped
Influence of jazz

In the afro-cubano, it’s getting complicated
It’s going down the tubes, it’s going
It’s getting warped, going without rest
Going, leaving, falling off the scale

My poor samba
Go back there to the hillside and seek help where you were born
To not be a samba with too many notes
Not be a warped samba, forward and back
You’re going to have to stand on your own to be able to free yourself
From the influence of jazz

Worse than a Failure

From The New Yorker:

Of course, anybody who has followed Trump’s career already knew that much of what he said was erroneous and deceptive. He financed the parts of his business portfolio that he didn’t inherit from Fred by taking on huge loans. During the recession of the early nineteen-nineties, four of his highly indebted businesses declared bankruptcy—three casinos in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Other Trump businesses only survived because they were sold or his lenders decided they were worth more as going concerns and allowed him to write down some of his debts.

The Times reporters and other journalists have already covered some of this troubled history. In September, 2016, the Times received a copy of part of Trump’s 1995 tax return, which showed that he declared a massive tax loss, of nine hundred and sixteen million dollars. Under tax laws, business owners are allowed to carry losses into subsequent years and offset them against income. Trump’s loss was so huge in 1995, the Times noted, that it “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.” In response to that Times scoop, Trump’s campaign released a statement that didn’t challenge the nine-hundred-and-sixteen-million-dollar loss but claimed that he “has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”

By lumping all the different taxes together, this statement seemed to concede that Trump’s federal-tax payments after 1995 weren’t very large. The latest Times report confirms that Trump didn’t pay much tax in the decade before 1995, either. To wit: “Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years.” (The story also notes, “It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.”)

This revelation confirms another thing that many Trump skeptics have long suspected. The financial problems his businesses faced predated the bust of the early nineteen-nineties. “The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses—largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings,” the Times reported. “They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.” In 1987, Trump published a ghostwritten book—“Trump: The Art of the Deal”—that became a best-seller and cemented his status as a celebrity. By the time the book came out, the story notes, Trump “was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals.”

 

 

The Logic of Guilt

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Baltimore MD

The Logic of Guilt

It was true, but I would contest.

The blue car, the red lipstick, the receipt, all were false. Fake.

I was in Singapore. Not in NYC.

There were photographs to prove it. A hotel bill.

There were things that no one notices. The broken lock, her misguide eye, some dirty laundry.

The image was very blurry but I was not there.

I had witnesses, all with good recollections and solid reputations.

They provided their depositions. We had several translators.

They all knew what they thought and what they saw.

My lawyer advised me not to to talk.

It was a simple process.

The evening was getting late, the mountains spoke another language.

The prosecutor obtained some lies from others.

We had some shots of Bowmore No. 1 to celebrate.

But there was more, some stolen jewelry, the perfume spilled in the bathroom, and the missing painting.

The morning afterwards, a walk in the park and some sunlight.

End of story

 

From Data Collection to Behavior Prediction

 

From The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes:

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” joins a small library of books chronicling the ill effects of Internet economics and culture: Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget,” Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Astra Taylor’s “The People’s Platform,” Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together,” Evgeny Morozov’s “The Net Delusion,” and dozens of others. Zuboff’s work is likely to have a longer life than most, not only because she deploys an indispensable term—surveillance capitalism is defined as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales”—but because her arguments are backed by staggeringly thorough documentation. This is no thin polemical screed, although the tone is often impassioned. Weighing in at nearly seven hundred pages, the book is a step-by-step account of the building of the digital iron cage.

Two major questions loom over the story that Zuboff unfolds. The first—How did Big Tech pull it off?—is answered in excruciating and infuriating detail. She traces a relentless progression from data collection to behavior prediction and finally to behavior control. The second—Why did we let them do it?—is more elusive, although Zuboff ventures some good guesses. She quotes Hannah Arendt and George Orwell; she talks about the instinct to bow before power, particularly before a supremely confident power. The seductive ease of life under surveillance capitalism has so far stilled the countervailing instinct to defy the bully, to protect the sliver of the self.

Neoliberal economics enabled the rise of the tech giants, as Zuboff makes clear at the outset. From the late nineteen-seventies onward, regulators were crippled and the corporate sector emboldened. No strong system of oversight was in place as Big Tech began its invasion of privacy. Google is the focus of the early part of the narrative. The company had devised a superior search engine but lacked a stable business model. After the tech crash of 2000, Google, under pressure from investors, looked for ways to increase revenue. Almost by accident, it discovered the benefits of “behavioral surplus”—the detritus of data that users leave behind when they visit the site. User profiles allowed Google’s clients to target their ads precisely. This was the origin of the intelligence-gathering capability that has made the Internet such a pervasively spooky place—its way of knowing whether your query about “Giants tickets” means baseball in San Francisco or football in New York.

Close scrutiny of a patent that Google filed at the end of 2003—“Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising”—allows Zuboff to establish that user profiles were “deduced” or “extracted” from personal data that users may have wished to keep hidden. Deduction is itself a euphemism. Google wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, inferring people’s professions from indentations on their hands; it simply vacuumed up information, overriding an ethic of privacy that had become enshrined in American law and culture. That mentality is all but universal in the world of Big Tech. Zuboff calls it the principle of “radical indifference,” according to which the masters of the digital universe act without regard for the social consequences of their actions. Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google, announced in his book “New Digital Age,” co-written with Jared Cohen, that “the online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws.”

The success of Google’s surveillance regime depended on the sheer numbers of people using it. Machine intelligence, Zuboff explains, “reaches its full potential for quality only as it approximates totality.” For this reason, the tendency toward all-devouring monopolies in the tech world is the inevitable outcome of the underlying algorithmic logic. Tech companies can really succeed only when they establish a monopoly over whatever zone of the economy they occupy: books, media, music streaming, movie streaming. One of the saddest aspects of life under Big Tech is our habit of equating entire sectors of human activity with particular corporations. Shopping becomes Amazon. Movies become Netflix. Music becomes Spotify. Friendship becomes Facebook. That urge to brand the basic functions of daily existence justifies the book’s citations of Arendt and the Frankfurt School on the psychology of totalitarianism.

At the Mitrione's

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Botafogo

You find the most peculiar dreams under the elevator. Once underneath their frame there were very little people living a perplexing debacle. But, of course, you can also go up and down to the big breakfast spread and long blue pool to forget it all. Trapped in a kind of deja vu we called it that summer. But in Botafogo these were considered new and inspiring machines with windows to observe the elaborate gardens once inflated and then disappeared.  Then there was a painting of the Virgin Mary that ran up and down the descent giving the private box a culture all its own experience. After those delirious rides to the rooftop we could begin to observe those little people below. Now they were at the beach or then suddenly starting a fire in the underpass. We eventually turned our attention to the cameras and the interviewer who was learning the mysteries of electricity on the local souls as he described the unique scene brought to us from the North.

In Unison With Yourself

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Monasterio de Santa Catalina Arequipa, Peru

The crux was Aretha repeating her legendary scream over and over. Everyone was prancing by in different directions like in a sophisticated but misdirected musical. You realized then that the future was now in short supply as the native slaves came to serve you local delicacies. You emote a last desperate smile. And then when the sun descends and the parade begins. . .the film we all agree was bad. Realism is not what it used to be. Unfortunately, she said, these reality shows is what TV is all about. They permeate the horizon and your history will be to seduce those watching the puppet show how convincing you can dance and boogaloo (a modern dance to rock-and-roll music performed with swiveling and shuffling movements of the body, originally popular in the 1960s).

Rennovations

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Singapore Botanic Garden

When you crossed the international date line over the Pacific and became a prior self again a sparkle happened. Like the little turtle that you took to the dense green pond in the park and deposited gently among the fat orange fish to start again. Years later we found him bigger and confident running a Chinese restaurant. You always said it was possible if this broken venture fails to set your alarm and hear that mechanical voice reminding you to rise in the dark again and begin to win again.

 

The New Violence

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Chorrillos

The new violence has yet to be identified. Obvious but deception is its ruse. Like the pretty woman coming down the street it invades your mind hours after. Smoke or a smell that permeates the room. I saw it once on television singing happy songs. But it comes at odd hours also. I lost my finger in front of the cashier. Also when we brought out that fish from the sea that was full of sores. The experts and graduate students knew they had finally located its lungs but during the long surgical procedure it infected them. The philosopher in the lobby said its best to understand the map of the city. Coming back to the lost country we need to unwrap that package now.