La Parade du grotesque

Tony Macron ou Emmanuel Montana ?

Dernier post sur Tumblr (même si les photos de fesses, c’est pas mon truc, je ne supporte pas la censure).

Suivez moi sur Mastodon: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@ParadeGrotesque

Et peut-être un jour sur mon propre blog. Ou pas.

L’Internet c’est bien. Mais à condition d’en sortir.

Vous reprendrez bien un petit coup de Trump ?

Oh, and United States, please impeach that Orange Monkey already -- it’s getting embarassing.

This is so frightening:

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

Nationwide, the researchers estimated in an interview, this effect drove one-tenth of all anti-refugee violence.

The uptick in violence did not correlate with general web use or other related factors; this was not about the internet as an open platform for mobilization or communication. It was particular to Facebook.

Other experts, asked to review the findings, called them credible, rigorous — and disturbing. [...]

Such links would be indirect, researchers say, but begin with the algorithm that determines each user’s newsfeed.

That algorithm is built around a core mission: promote content that will maximize user engagement. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, perform best and so proliferate.

That is how anti-refugee sentiment — which combines fear of social change with us-versus-them rallying cries, two powerful forces on the algorithm — can seem unusually common on Facebook, even in a pro-refugee town like Altena.

Ban Facebook. Now. Delete your account, leave this toxic company behind.

At the very least, make it accountable for all the hate speech and racist nonsense that it shelters to get more eyeballs and offer advertisers more compliant consumers.

Cet article ne surprendra personne, mais il contient des choses qui méritent d'être répétée :

En Suède, Roland Paulsen a quantifié l’inutilité quotidienne du travail. Dans son ouvrage intitulé Empty Labor (« travail vide »), le sociologue à l’Université de Lund estime que nous passons au minimum deux heures de notre journée de travail à ne rien faire ou pour des activités extraprofessionnelles : coups de fil, courriels personnels, achats sur internet, consultation des réseaux sociaux… Dans certains secteurs comme le marketing ou la banque, le pourcentage d’inactivité avoisine la moitié du temps de travail, voire davantage (lire encadré). Selon le chercheur, cette inactivité est dans la plupart des cas liée au manque de sens ou à une frustration à l’égard de l’entreprise ou d’un manager. [...]

« N’oublions pas que le contrat de travail reste un cadre de subordination. L’entreprise achète une force de travail. La tendance du management participatif ne change pas ce cadre. Cela reste de la subordination. L’entreprise demande à l’employé d’être autonome dans le cadre qu’elle a préalablement défini. Sa créativité doit se mettre au service des objectifs de l’employeur. »

Subordination. "Travail vide". Tout est dit.

Now, this is a prescient article. I would not be surprised if, 20 years from now, people look at this and said: "Yes, we were warned".

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

If it's a surprise to you, you haven't been paying attention.

In Italy the moment came on Aug. 16, 1924.

For more than two months, one of Benito Mussolini’s most formidable opponents, Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist member of the Italian parliament, had been missing.

Mussolini had been prime minister for 20 months. In April 1924, his power was consolidated by a landslide victory, the fascists winning more than 65 percent of the vote. Given this mandate in a democratically run national election, Mussolini hesitated to take the next step that his followers wanted and expected—to seize absolute, autocratic power.

Then, on that August day, during road works in a Roman suburb, Matteotti’s body, eviscerated by multiple stab wounds, was unearthed in a ditch.

Matteotti wasn’t a leftist rabble-rouser. He was wealthy patrician landowner with progressive views. He saw through the falsity of Mussolini’s pose as a man of the people. Mussolini, he warned, would ride to dictatorship on the backs of the masses who were being conditioned by propaganda to believe their interests were his.

Go ahead and read the entire article. The USA are in a very very bad spot right now.

The author may be a bit hyperbolic:

American collapse is more like a megacollapse. A supercollapse. A hypercollapse. It combines elements of all the previous collapses which we know about in modern history — and then some of its own, too — and melds, combines, and blends them together into something like a a titanic, earth-shattering, historic, once in a millennium implosion. Think of it as a supervolcano that’s capable of taking down a whole continent, changing the world’s climate, tilting the globe off its axis, and darkening the sun itself for an age, erupting.

But it's hard to disagree with the following:

And then American collapse adds its own new elements. It uses the “innovations” American society has pioneered, and turns them against democracy. Social media is used to spread propaganda at light-speed. Databases and surveillance are used to track people. The internet is a place for every manner of regressive force to stage attacks on civil society. Young men are radicalized in the open by extremist street preachers like the famous academic who tells them women are a cancer, a stain, and an infection. Predatory capitalism is used to create the very despair that fuels the annihilation anxieties which turn people to authoritarians. In that sense, American collapse is “hypercollapse”, made of bots and “fake news” and hacked elections, not just demagogues and speeches, which are radicalizing people already left ignorant by failing education institutions and civic norms, at maximum velocity, preventing them from believing in constitutional democracy, an open society, and the basic civilizing values of freedom, truth, justice, and equality.

Important insight (and that's just the first lines of the article):

Humans are hackable. Ask any conman. Our desire to think we have control over our lives often hides this from ourselves, but most of us are highly suggestible and hypnotizable. If you think you’re not, you’re in more danger of being hacked than someone who has humbled themselves enough to see how this works in them.

I cannot summarize this. Go read it, it should be your required reading for this week.

C'est assez limpide :

Six mois, cela commence à donner une bonne vision de ce que sera l’ensemble de l’année : l’Etat a déjà reçu en particulier plus de la moitié des recettes fiscales qu’il a prévu d’engranger sur 2018. Or ce bilan fait apparaître une situation inquiétante. [...]

Mais le plus inquiétant c’est la façon dont le gouvernement a engendré ce trou dans les rentrées fiscales. Les recettes des taxes qui pèsent sur les gens ordinaires - la taxe intérieure sur la consommation de produits énergétiques (TICPE), la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée (TVA) ou encore l’impôt sur le revenu - augmentent en volume en 2018 par rapport à la même période de 2017.

Les recettes fiscales qui font chuter l’ensemble ne sont concentrées que sur l’impôt sur les sociétés d’une part, et les autres impôts d’autre part. [...]

Autrement dit, bien que les gens ordinaires continuent à acquitter de plus en plus d’impôts, l’Etat va être obligé de réduire significativement les services qu’il leur rend à cause de l’ampleur considérable des cadeaux fiscaux consentis aux entreprises et aux très riches… 

There you go, from D. Rushkoff:

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

And:

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

What a bright future, indeed.

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

C’est quoi ce bin’s dans le résumé ?