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Im Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, aina? So listen, here we are past the middle of May already and Im too depressed to whip out an essay for yous this week. Im ready for fall. What with the high heat and stupidity hovering just past the springtime horizon, its all I can do to get up over by the Uptowner tavern/charm school, where I can take a good gander at my options and enjoy a nice cocktail. Come along if youd like, but you buy the first round.

Julius: I heard that the crowd outside the Fiserv Forum last Friday had a higher shooting percentage than the Bucks had inside the forum.

Little Jimmy Iodine: Really? Cripes, thats no way to win a championship.

Emil: Any of yous guys hear about Eddie Brzylicki? Age 68. Natural causes. Died. In his sleep.

Ray: Hey, put me down for one of those, what the fock.

Herbie: Yes sir, natural is the way to go in each and every way, I hear. Jeez louise, every other goddamn TV ad begs you to buy this or that cause its natural; so this or that has just got to be gosh darn good for you cause its natural, you bet. No artificial substitute, please, like cancer, hit by a bus, gunshot. Got to be natural.

Ernie: And I figure that dying in or during your sleep, of natural causes, is also a financially sound way to bid adieuto say aloha, all before a boatload of MRIs, PET scans, CAT scans, X-rays, chemotherapy, lying in a ho$pital bed puking sick for weeks, sends you to bankruptcy and the poor house from the bills from the crappy or nonexistent health insurance bullshit. Yeah, Ill take the focking natural croak in my sleepcuts costs, I figure. Ha! Take that, you focking HMOs.

Stay on top of the news of the daySubscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.

Little Jimmy Iodine: I wonder if the public will learn anything from some kind of government House Intelligence subcommittee hearings on UFOs that they got going now for the first time in 50 years.

Emil: You betcha. For starters, Id like to know if they had torture on the Star Trek Enterprise that we never learned about.

Ernie: You talk like a sausage, Emil. Of course they wouldve had to what-you-call torture at some point. Listen, youre on a five-year mission for the United Federation of Planets to explore strange, new worlds and every time you turn around, all youre getting is some-kind-of shit from space aliens whose only purpose in the universe is to fock you up; and not in a good way.

Julius: Sounds logical. I can imagine that while the Captain Quirk and that pointy-eared Nimrod whats-his-name are shoveling their dime-store philosophy in front of the cameras up on the bridge of the ship, deep in the bowels are a couple-three beefy redshirt uncredited crew members kicking the ever-loving crap out of some three-eyed squishy-headed piece-of-work from the planet Upyerz II, cause theyre trying to get this pus-bag to fess up to messing with one of those bullshit crystals focking Scotty was always whining about, aina?

Little Jimmy Iodine: Hey, Artie! Over here. Put a load on your keister.

Art: Hey gents. What do you hear, what do you know.

Emil: I hear there was torture on the Star Trek Enterprise.

Art: If the Geneva Convention covered acting, I suppose a William Shatner line-reading could be construed as ag- ainst the rule s.

Little Jimmy: He always did seem a little wooden, aina?

Ray: He was the only actor on that show who didnt go to make-up before a scene. They used varnish instead.

Ernie: I watched some old Star Trek movies last weekend cause its been a while, so what the fock. Remember Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan?

Herbie: Fockin-A. Thats the one where Ricardo Montalban with long hair looks like that Marjorie Taylor Greene with big knockers, aina?

Julius: No. I thought he looked more like the other Republican bitch-harpy, Ann Coulter, but with bigger knockers.

Ray: De ship! De ship! Yeah, TVs Mr. Roarke with the hair and a set of jugs, por favor, not my kind of fantasy. But Ill tell yous, if Trumpel-thinskin decides not to run for president and chief grifter again, maybe he can get cast as the bad guy in a Star Trek movie called The Wrath of Con.

Art: I never saw that Khan movie cause its like Groucho said, he never went to a picture where the leading mans tits were bigger than the leading ladys.

Ernie: Doesnt it always seem like the futures here before you know it and when it shows up, its like big focking deal?

Julius: You got a point, Ernie. There was that movie, 2001: Space something-or-another that was actually made in 1968. So what the fock, its 2022 now and we still havent stepped on another planet?

Emil: Youre full of a crap. I seem to recall that as a species weve been to the moon, have we not, Mr. Einstein?

LEARN MORE

Ernie: Fock the moon. All those millions and millions of dollars spent so a couple, three flyboys could knock a golf ball around a place that looks just like the middle of Nevada but without all the gambling and legalized prostitution. Like I said: Big focking deal.

Little Jimmy: The future has always been hard to figure for mankind. Again, like Groucho said: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Herbie: And dont forget, about mans yearning for knowledge of his place in the universe, Groucho said: Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, its too dark to read.

(Hey, its getting late and I know you got to go, but thanks for letting us bend your ear, cause Im Art Kumbalek and I told you so.)

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What the Spock? - Shepherd Express

from the don't-feed-the-trolls dept

Weve noted for a while that Trumps alternative social media platform, Truth Social, isnt doing particularly well. Being a Trump product, the platform (surprise!) began with a lot of money slushing around that wasnt spent in any coherent way. Its also just generally glitchy and terrible. And its not helped much by the fact that after all of his whining about social media censorship (read: minimal accountability for saying stupid and sometimes dangerous things), Trump doesnt even use the product.

Then theres been the slow realization by the company that it still has to deal with the headaches of reality and content moderation at scale, which weve also noted isnt going particularly well. If you want a platform that isnt just a pit of bile and illegal content, you have to have moderation standards, which is why Parler, Gab, and now Truth Social (which muzzled some racist drivel by right wing dirty ops shitlord Roger Stone last week) have barred obnoxious people from doing dumb and sometimes illegal things.

Truth failed to gain traction even with the National Republican Senatorial Committee spamming its support for the platform like a feverish street corner huckster:

Putting the corruption, grift, and technical incompetence aside (and theres a lot to put aside), when the political mainstream press discusses the struggles of Social and other GOP social media platforms, one of the top arguments explaining why they fail is because echo chambers are just no fun:

I think the challenge that a lot of these newer ones have is to not be an echo chamber for people who hold similar beliefs, said Alex Weber, a content creator who was embraced by conservatives online after posting videos criticizing mask mandates, vaccine mandates and the mainstream media. I think why Instagram and Facebook and all these are so impactful is because youve got all different types of people.

While thats true to a point, it misses a key part of the failure. The problem isnt just that such groups corral like-minded people into groups made specifically for them. Hell, huddling with like-minded people is 80 percent of the reason Reddit was created and a major reason for its success.

No, one of the major reasons such projects fail is because they break the GOPs troll and inadvertent amplification cycle. How many times does a right wing personality say something grotesque, racist, or otherwise terrible on Twitter only to have it hate retweeted countless times by numerous people, usually partisan opposites, who think theyre dunking on, correcting, or punishing the content?

The entire success of modern GOP discourse is based on trolling. On any given day on Twitter and Facebook, theres a ceaseless array of left wing and centrist accounts hate retweeting every idiotic and racist thing Fox personality Tucker Carlson says, expanding distribution of his viewpoints exponentially.

Right wing celebrities like Ann Coulter have paid their mortgage for 30 years by intentionally saying stupid and controversial things, then soaking up free advertising as the outraged amplify said stupid and controversial thing to a significantly larger audience that might have never seen it otherwise.

Twitter dunks work to amplify dodgy and shitty trolls in much the same way. Theres just a countless array of folks who think theyre helping by dunking on terrible takes, when theyre only really amplifying those terrible takes to a much broader audience. Its utterly counterintuitive, and in some cases punished by engagement and ad engines (across both online and traditional cable media), to do anything else. Controversy sells. Nuance does not.

So while platforms like Truth Social are stumbling because theyre badly made by incompetent people who arent magically immune from the challenges of content moderation, theyre also stumbling because they break a cornerstone of online right wing discourse: trolling to amplify propaganda. A room full of terrible trolling propagandists has nobody to troll but themselves. And what fun is that?

Most of the Section 230 and conservatives are being silenced discourse is falsely framed as a conversation about free speech in punditry and the press. In reality, what the modern Trump GOP wants is the mandated carriage of propaganda. The dominant U.S. press simply cant help but frame Trump GOP concerns of censorship as legitimate, which speaks to the propagandas effectiveness.

Its why the GOP freaked out when DirecTV made the ordinary business decision to kick the conspiracy and fantasy channel off of its lineup. Its why the GOP despises big techs belated and often sloppy attempt to clean up race-baiting GOP propaganda on their platforms. Its why the party adores media consolidation at the hands of Sinclair, and the steady destruction of genuine local news reporting.

The modern Trump GOP cant just come out and admit their goal is mandated carriage of bigoted propaganda designed to rile up low-information Americans, so they have to dress it all up as something grander, including the Trump GOPs performative support of antitrust reform (read: an attempt to gain leverage over tech giants to mandate the carriage of, you guessed it, propaganda).

Shifting demographics and a fading (and dying) electoral base arent great news for the modern GOP, which increasingly alienates a big chunk of independent voters with unhinged behavior and positions. As a result, like many global authoritarian movements, theyve been forced to embrace online propaganda, fabricated culture war, and victimization porn to agitate and befuddle the public.

The idea that doing absolutely anything to rein in race-baiting propaganda in online or traditional media is censorship or the silencing of conservatives is itself propaganda, and it would be lovely if the broader discourse and press would wake up to this fact before were all drowning in many of the even uglier aspects of rank authoritarianism.

Filed Under: big tech, big tech censorship, censorship, conservative censorship, propaganda, section 230, silenced conservatives, social media, trolling, trollsCompanies: truth social

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GOP Social Media Experiments Fail (In Part) Because They Break The Troll/Amplification Cycle - Techdirt

This kind of foolishness, which arrived on April Fools Day no less, deserves nothing more than an eye roll and a trip to the recycling bin. But the invocation of QAnon makes this something beyond another sketchy promotion. The senders address is given as a post office box in Portsmouth, N.H., but no one seems to know whos behind this mailing, whos footing whats probably a sizable tab, or the motive behind it.

Get Weekend Reads from IdeasA weekly newsletter from the Boston Globe Ideas section, forged at the intersection of 'what if' and 'why not.'

Perhaps Id find clues if I scanned the cards QR codes or visited its email address, but my mother cured me of that sort of thing. Years ago, an envelope arrived from what appeared to be the Unification Church, led for decades by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who conducted mass weddings for church-arranged marriages, claimed he was the messiah, and bought full-page newspaper ads defending Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

That letter disturbed my mother so much, she made me throw it away but not in the house. I tore it up, balled up the remains, and tossed it in a public trash container a few blocks away.

Without question, Moon was a cult leader. But unlike QAnon followers, Moons devotees never participated in a deadly insurrection to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Unlike other cults, QAnon has no designated leader. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, the Q name is the umbrella term for a sprawling spider web of right-wing Internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements that falsely claim the world is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles who worship Satan and are plotting against former president Donald Trump.

Somehow theyve overlooked the fact that Trump was a longtime friend of convicted sex offender and accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump isnt mentioned in the postcards text, but his photo is featured alongside those of Big Tech megalomaniacs (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk); politicians (former president Barack Obama, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo); performers (Mel Gibson, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift); and far-right provocateurs (Alex Jones, Ann Coulter); among others.

While the postcard is certainly controversial, Steve Doherty, a United States Postal Service spokesman, told NBC 10 Bostons Alison King, there doesnt appear to be anything in the mailing that would make it illegal to send through the mail.

If these postcards violate no law, this could mean we should expect more of this propaganda from an unhinged lot the FBI labeled a domestic terrorism threat and that was before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Prominent among the throngs with Trump banners and Confederate flags were people wearing QAnon garb and holding up handmade Q signs. Some of them breached the US Capitol, pummeled police officers, and went hunting for lawmakers barricaded in their offices.

Instead of shunning QAnon, Republican lawmakers adopted its mendacious talking points on nonexistent voter fraud, the efficacy of COVID protocols, and purported pedophilia rings among Democrats. This was glaringly obvious in some GOP senators disgraceful performances during last months Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson. Unable to attack Jacksons qualifications, they drilled down on a manufactured theme that she gave lenient sentences to those convicted of possessing child pornography. That it was untrue didnt matter; Republicans followed through on a scurrilous lie Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeted before the hearings.

It was perhaps the most significant Republican nod yet to the QAnon faithful, a boost to normalizing the conspiratorial claptrap doused in hate, racism, and attempts to shred democracy. About 16 percent of Americans now say they adhere to QAnon theories that government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles, an even larger percentage than when Trump was president.

Under normal circumstances, one could laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. But this perilous moment is anything but normal. With little daylight between many Republicans and QAnon, American right-wing politics is mainlining extremism. Now after spilling from the bowels of the Internet to the halls of Congress, these dangerous beliefs are literally landing on our doorsteps.

Rene Graham can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.

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What is QAnon doing in my mailbox? - The Boston Globe

Millions flee Ukraine.

Where will they go?

Some want to come to America. But doing that legally is hard. A complex system is supposed to determine which people deserve to get in line to get in.

"The line is broken," explained Reason Magazine editor at large Matt Welch in my new video.

For example, America has a nursing shortage, but immigration authorities turn away foreign nurses. A Mexican teenager who wants to help build houses might be admitted, but he'd have to wait 100 years. No wonder people sneak across the border.

This month, President Joe Biden announced the United States would take in 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.

"He could snap his fingers and make it 250,000 if he chose," said Welch, and he should, because "we're a refugee country, and the people who come here tend to be the best."

"But they could be the worst," I point out.

Even the supposed "worst of the worst," Welch replied, made America better.

That's a reference to 1980, when Fidel Castro let 100,000 people out of jail and encouraged them to go to America. Some were his political opponents, but most were, as a Miami TV anchor put it, "bums off the streets of Havana -- murderers, thieves, perverts, prostitutes."

Castro assumed they'd cause problems in America.

But "that was wrong," Welch said. Despite their past problems, "they enriched Miami. They added to the economy and didn't detract from the people who lived there."

A study showed the Cuban exodus raised wages of low-skilled Miamians.

Immigrants improved America even when we took in people who'd tried to kill us, and who we had tried to kill. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter eagerly took in refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. Reagan, campaigning for the presidency, said immigrants make us better.

"They share the same values, the same dream," he said.

"He was bragging on this as a conservative and American value," Welch said. "It is no longer a conservative value."

Today, conservatives are more likely to argue against letting in refugees, saying, as Ann Coulter put it, "Things can turn overnight when you're bringing in these masses of people from very, very different cultures." Then she joked, "And make it a hate crime to ask them to assimilate."

It wasn't entirely a joke. Some leftists call asking Latinos to assimilate "racist repression."

More reasonably, many Americans fear that crime will rise if we let in more immigrants. But that's unlikely.

"They commit far less crime than native-born Americans," Welch points out.

He's right. Native-born Americans were 11.6 times more likely to be jailed than Afghan immigrants.

"It's hard for us to process that fact," Welch said. "It feels like it should be wrong, but it isn't. People who go to the lengths to get to this country tend to be less criminal than the native-born population."

"What if they just feed off welfare?" I asked.

"Then they would be the exception," he responded.

Immigrants, overall, collect less welfare than native-born Americans.

Still, people feel threatened when large numbers of foreigners arrive. Polish people protested when Syrian refugees came to Poland.

But now Poles welcome Ukrainians.

Some call that racism.

"Maybe it is racism," Welch responded. "But maybe when someone you speak a common language with, and have a common history with ... lives right next door, it's just a different story. ... Can we spare a moment and say, they've just assimilated an astonishing number of refugees. And they're not in tents in camps, shivering. They're staying with people in their apartments!"

That sure seems like a good thing.

Soon more refugees will come to America. Welch argued we should let more in.

"America is an assimilation machine," he said. "It's something that we should do more of because we're really good at it!"

I agree.

As long as people are peaceful, let them come.

John Stossel is creator of Stossel TV and author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media."

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Let them in - Jefferson City News Tribune

When Donald Trumps handpicked White House photographer Shea Craighead asked him to write the foreword to her book of Trump-era White House photos, he had one thought: How can I make money off this?

Trump's first idea, according to a New York Times story, was to take a cut from Craigheads royalties. In the end, the former president decided to simply beat her to market by publishing his own book of photos and pocketing millions in royalties himself.

Craighead put her book on ice when she learned she would be competing with Trump.

The reaction today, to the Times piece and other stories about this incident, is that Trump ripped her off. Some of the people who feel Trump mistreated Craighead are former Trump employees:

Sheas a very talented photographer and this was really all of her hard work, Stephanie Grisham, Trumps former press secretary, told the Times. I just keep thinking: What a shame that he is actually now profiting off of it. But then again, this is the guy who is hawking caps and all kinds of stuff right now to raise money for himself.

Other critics are former Trump supporters:

Ann Coulter is right. Donald Trump never looks out for the little guy, the working man, or even his own supporters. He occasionally acts as if he does but really only to benefit himself. Politicians being greedy and turning their power into personal wealth is nothing new, but Trump is more blatant and more greedy than his predecessors on this score.

His campaign spent millions at his own hotels, thus funneling donor money into his own pockets. As president, he made it clear that anyone seeking his favor would stay at his properties again, converting his position of public trust into his own private profit. And after he lost the election, he has continued his charade partly in the service of filling his own bank accounts. He gets supporters to donate to what they think is a cause, but is really just him. As Grisham points out, selling Trump merchandise seems to regular supporters like a way to support a political cause, but Trump uses it simply to further enrich himself.

Nobody should be surprised. Donald Trump is a conman and always has been a conman. Since 2015, hes just added tens of millions of new marks. And now his former photographer, Shea Craighead, is just the latest in a long line of people, including his wives, who have learned that if you get in business with Trump, you end up losing.

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Trump ripped off his White House photographer because he rips off everyone who gets close to him - Washington Examiner