Mediaboss Marketing

As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.

Yet, given the divisions among us, deeper and wider than ever, it is an open question as to how, and how long, we will endure as one people.

After World War II, our judicial dictatorship began a purge of public manifestations of the "Christian nation" that Harry Truman said we were.

In 2009, Barack Obama retorted, "We do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation." Secularism had been enthroned as our established religion, with only the most feeble of protests.

One can only imagine how Iranians or Afghans would deal with unelected judges moving to de-Islamicize their nations. Heads would roll, literally.

Which bring us to the first culture war skirmish of the Trump era.

Taking sides with Attorney General Jeff Sessions against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the president rescinded the Obama directive that gave transgender students the right to use the bathroom of their choice in public schools. President Donald Trump sent the issue back to the states and locales to decide.

While treated by the media and left as the civil rights cause of our era, the "bathroom debate" calls to mind Marx's observation, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

Can anyone seriously contend that whether a 14-year-old boy, who thinks he is a girl, gets to use the girls' bathroom is a civil rights issue comparable to whether African-Americans get the right to vote?

Remarkably, there was vigorous dissent, from DeVos, to returning this issue to where it belongs, with state and local officials.

After yielding on the bathroom question, she put out a statement declaring that every school in America has a "moral obligation" to protect children from bullying, and directed her Office of Civil Rights to investigate all claims of bullying or harassment "against those who are most vulnerable in our schools."

Now, bullying is bad behavior, and it may be horrible behavior.

But when did a Republican Party that believes in states rights decide this was a responsibility of a bureaucracy Ronald Reagan promised but failed to shut down? When did the GOP become nanny-staters?

Bullying is something every kid in public, parochial or private school has witnessed by graduation. While unfortunate, it is part of growing up.

But what kind of society, what kind of people have we become when we start to rely on federal bureaucrats to stop big kids from harassing and beating up smaller or weaker kids?

While the bathroom debate is a skirmish in the culture war, Trump's solution -- send the issue back to the states and the people there to work it out -- may point the way to a truce -- assuming Americans still want a truce.

For Trump's solution is rooted in the principle of subsidiarity, first advanced in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII -- that social problems are best resolved by the smallest unit of society with the ability to resolve them.

In brief, bullying is a problem for parents, teachers, principals to deal with, and local cops and the school district if it becomes widespread.

This idea is consistent with the Republican idea of federalism -- that the national government should undertake those duties -- securing the borders, fighting the nation's wars, creating a continental road and rail system -- that states alone cannot do.

Indeed, the nationalization of decision-making, the imposition of one-size-fits-all solutions to social problems, the court orders emanating from the ideology of judges -- to which there is no appeal -- that is behind the culture wars that may yet bring an end to this experiment in democratic rule.

Those factors are also among the primary causes of the fever of secessionism that is spreading all across Europe, and is now visible here.

Consider California. Democrats hold every state office, both Senate seats, two-thirds of both houses of the state legislature, 3 in 4 of the congressional seats. Hillary Clinton beat Trump 2-to-1 in California, with her margin in excess of 4 million votes.

Suddenly, California knows exactly how Marine Le Pen feels.

And as she wants to "Let France Be France," and leave the EU, as Brits did with Brexit, a movement is afoot in California to secede from the United States and form a separate nation.

California seceding sounds like a cause that could bring San Francisco Democrats into a grand alliance with Breitbart.

A new federalism -- a devolution of power and resources away from Washington and back to states, cities, towns and citizens, to let them resolve their problems their own way and according to their own principles -- may be the price of retention of the American Union.

Let California be California; let red state America be red state America.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority."

Read more:
What is the solution to the culture war? - Daily Corinthian (subscription)

Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website on the internet according to Wikipedia has amassed an amazing 40 million entries since its launch in 2001, but underneath all that free information, a cold cyber war has been waging.

A new analysis of the first 10 years of Wikipedia has found that huge numbers of automated software 'bots' editing algorithms powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are embroiled in epic, ongoing disputes over articles, continually reverting each others' edits in a desperate bid to have the last word.

"The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people," researcher Taha Yasseri from the University of Oxford in the UK told The Guardian.

"Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years."

In their study, Yasseri and fellow researchers tracked edits on Wikipedia in between 2001 and 2010.

While the amount of bot activity in the website's early years was low, it skyrocketed as the platform and bot technology matured, with bots responsible for about 15 percent of all edits across all language editions of the encyclopaedia in 2014 even though these algorithms only make up about 0.1 percent of Wikipedia editors.

Editing bots perform a number of roles on the site to do with modifying Wikipedia content, including undoing vandalism, enforcing bans, checking spelling, creating links, and importing new content automatically.

These bots are designed to be benevolent, supporting human Wikipedia users and cooperating with them but that benevolence doesn't always respond to their own kind.

Two bots in particular, Xqbot and Darknessbot, clashed on over 3,600 articles on a range of topics, from Alexander of Greece to Aston Villa football club.

Between 2009 and 2010, Xqbot reverted more than 2,000 of Darknessbot's edits with Darknessbot returning the favour with some 1,700 of its own changes to Xqbot's edits.

Another epic clash, between bots called Tachikoma and Russbot, saw each undo more than 1,000 edits made by the other.

These kind of stoushes came as a shock to the researchers, given the bots aren't intended to conflict with one another but were accidentally caught in loops where their programming made editorial combat inevitable.

"We had very low expectations to see anything interesting. When you think about them they are very boring," Yasseri told Ian Sample at The Guardian.

"The very fact that we saw a lot of conflict among bots was a big surprise to us. They are good bots, they are based on good intentions, and they are based on same open source technology."

Another surprise for the researchers was how bot conflict played out differently over the range of foreign language versions of the site.

The German edition of Wikipedia had the fewest bot conflicts with 24 reversions per bot on average over the 10-year study period. The Portuguese Wikipedia had the most clashes an average of 185 reversions per bot while the English language page fell in the middle, with bots altering each other's edits 105 times on average in 10 years.

"We find that bots behave differently in different cultural environments and their conflicts are also very different to the ones between human editors," explains one of the team, Milena Tsvetkova, in a press release.

"This has implications not only for how we design artificial agents but also for how we study them. We need more research into the sociology of bots."

As automated AI becomes increasingly prevalent and more powerful, considering the cultural (and potentially combative) dispositions of their programming is something we'll have to pay a lot more attention too.

Otherwise, the future is going to end up looking way too much like this:

The findings are reported in PLOS ONE.

Go here to read the rest:
Investigation Reveals That Wikipedia's Bots Are in a Silent, Never-Ending War With Each Other - ScienceAlert

posted at 8:01 am on February 27, 2017 by Jazz Shaw

This is a story which would never take place in the United States, at least not yet and not with the official permission of the government. The European Union has obviously become increasingly alarmed over trends in popular sentiment rippling through their member countries. This started with Brexit, but has more recently cropped up with the candidacies of Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Clearly such rabble rousing is not to be tolerated in the largely socialist paradise so something had to be done. The solution? The EU has passed new rules which will allow them to cut the broadcast of any hate speech or offensive material and then purge such speech from the official record. (Associated Press)

With the specter of populism looming over a critical election year in Europe, the European Parliament has taken an unusual step to crack down on racism and hate speech in its own house.

In an unprecedented move, lawmakers have granted special powers to the president to pull the plug on live broadcasts of parliamentary debate in cases of racist speech or acts and the ability to purge any offending video or audio material from the system.

Trouble is, the rules on what is considered offensive are none too clear. Some are concerned about manipulation. Others are crying censorship.

To be clear here, they are obviously not talking about concerns over any of the members giving speeches endorsing slavery, a new Holocaust or racial purging. They are talking about so-called nationalist platforms supporting some of these upstart candidates who threaten the permanence of the European Union Parliament itself. With more exits being threatened in places like France, the Netherlands, Hungary and Poland, supporters of the EU clearly feel they are in danger.

Anyone who is acting surprised clearly hasnt been paying attention to the news. This is representative of most of Europe in a nutshell. Despite the fact that we tend to think of most of our allied nations on the continent as being westernized in nature, their citizens (and indeed their lawmakers as well) do not have the same freedoms in terms of speech, religion and other things which Americans take for granted. It is still standard practice in many European countries for laws to remain on the books which allow for the prosecution of people who are overheard saying unpopular things, even if that option is not frequently exercised. Lets not forget that Geert Wilders was recently convicted of a crime for chanting the word fewer at a political rally when asking how many Moroccan immigrants the crowd wanted to see.

This censorship at the European Union Parliament may be going even one step further. The Associated Press article brings up the fact that they are already looking at some sort of delay button for the live broadcast of parliamentary speeches. We have such things in the United States to prevent the seven dirty words from being heard on network programming (and yes, were looking at you, Joe Scarborough) but such a thing is not employed to prevent the airing of political diatribes, even when they include unpopular speech.

The only conclusion I can draw at the moment is that candidates like Le Pen and Wilders really have the wizened heads at the European Union in a panic. The lesson we can take from this is found in observing the response. Actual freedom requires a robust rebuttal and persuasive argument against real hate speech. But in the EU they can simply make your speech disappear, and the powers that be get to determine what qualifies as acceptable.

Link:
European Union Parliament moves to censor offensive speech - Hot Air

While the UK has reached agreements in principle with most members of the European Union already there are still several nations, including Germany, who have refused to discuss the issue until after Brexit is triggered.

Mrs May is also facing a rebellion in the House of Lords over the issue where Tory peers are prepared to back a campaign by Labour and the Liberal Democrats to guarantee the rights of EU nationals.

It came after reports that ministers are also discussing plans to give the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) an advisory role on how many visas should be issued to take the political sting out of the issue.

The committee would decide how many visas need to be issued for workers in key industries such as software engineering, health and social care, farming and hospitality, which are heavily reliant on immigrants.

The cut-off date for the 1.2million British nationals living in other EU countries will ultimately be decided by Brussels. The European Parliament's chief negotiator has suggested that the EU will offer British people to individually opt-in and remain European citizens.

Read the original post:
Theresa May poised to announce end of free movement for new EU migrants next month - Telegraph.co.uk

Brussels: The European Union (EU) on Monday imposed new sanctions on North Korea in line with the UN Security Council's resolution adopted after a ballistic missile launch.

Kim Jong Un. File Photo. AFP

According to the European Council (EC), the new sanctions include further restrictions on material transactions, new export and import bans and restrictions on North Korean diplomats' real estate and bank accounts in the EU, Efe news reported.

"Like existing sanctions, these restrictive measures are designed in such a way as to avoid adverse humanitarian consequences for the country's civilian population," said an EC statement.

It added that the sanctions "include exemptions for livelihood and humanitarian purposes, where appropriate".

Scientific and technological cooperation with teams that include North Koreans or are officially backed by the state are also to be suspended, except in medical exchanges.

The new measures will also give EU member states legal permission to prevent North Korean citizens from accessing training or education that could contribute to the country's nuclear and ballistic missiles programme.

"The existing measures implement all Security Council resolutions adopted in response to North Korea's nuclear tests and launches using ballistic missile technology and include additional EU autonomous measures," the EC said.

The Security Council's resolution was adopted on 30 November, 2016, after a successful nuclear test was announced by Pyongyang on 9 September.

On 12 February, North Korea launched a ballistic missile, violating that resolution and several others.

Original post:
European Union imposes new sanctions on North Korea over ballistic missile launch - Firstpost