I’ve been writing critically about billionaire Elon Musk since he took over Twitter — particularly about his “free speech” hypocrisy and his censorship of left-wing accounts. This must have angered him. Last week, he suspended me and eight other journalists from Twitter.

We had all pointed out that Musk censored a Twitter account , @ElonJet, which used public data to post the location of his private jet, but that @ElonJet had moved to rival social networks, like Mastodon, that didn’t censor the account. Musk accused us of “ doxxing ” him by posting “ assassination coordinates ” and then tried to blame his outburst on an alleged stalking incident that had nothing to do with the @ElonJet account.

My suspension lasted just a few days before my account was reinstated . When people visit my Twitter profile , it no longer says “account suspended,” and it looks as if I’m back on the platform. Friends and strangers alike have reached out to me saying it’s good to see that I’m back on Twitter. It’s an illusion.

In reality, I’m still locked out of my Twitter account unless I agree to delete a specific tweet at the behest of the billionaire . Several of the other suspended journalists are in the same boat . (Twitter, where the communications team was decimated by Musk’s layoffs, did not immediately reply to a message for comment.)

When I log in to my Twitter account, the site is replaced with the message: “Your account has been locked.” Twitter accuses me of violating its rules against posting private information. (In the 13 years that I’ve used Twitter, I’ve never violated any rules, and my account has never been suspended or locked until now.)

To unlock my account, I must remove the offending tweet, which in my case said, “Twitter just banned Mastodon’s official Twitter account @joinmastodon with 174,000 followers, probably because it tweeted a link to @ElonJet’s Mastodon account. Twitter is now censoring posting the link, but the user is @elonjet@mastodon.social.”

I didn’t want to bend the knee to the Mad King of Twitter, so I submitted an appeal. “My tweet is about Twitter censoring rival social network Mastodon,” I wrote. “This is suppression of speech that never would have happened before Elon Musk took over.” After two days, I received an update from Twitter: “Our support team has determined that violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.”

My alleged offense is that I posted private information to Twitter by linking to @ElotJet’s account on Mastodon or, in my case, mentioning the username and showing the link in a screenshot. This is on its face absurd — I didn’t post private information, much less “assassination coordinates” — but a quick Twitter search for https://mastodon.social/@ElonJet shows that plenty of other accounts have posted this same link yet aren’t locked out.

I’m not the only suspended journalist that’s locked out of my account. Some journalists like Drew Harwell of the Washington Post have written on Mastodon about being locked out. “For anyone wondering,” Harwell wrote , “I’m still unable to access Twitter until I delete this tweet, which is factual journalism that doesn’t even break the location rule Twitter enacted a few days ago.” He appended a screenshot of the tweet.

And in an interview on CNN , Donie O’Sullivan, another suspended journalist, explained that his account is locked as well. “Right now, unless I agree to remove that tweet at the behest of the billionaire, I won’t be allowed to tweet on the platform,” he said. He also submitted an appeal.

Mashable’s Matt Binder was unsuspended following the mass banning, but he wrote on Mastodon that when he wrote to a Twitter official to ask how he had broken company policy, he was then locked out. “Seems they forgot to force me to delete the tweet the first time, like they did the other suspended journalists,” he wrote.

Steve Herman of Voice of America, whose account was also suspended last week, told CNN over the weekend: “When I got up this morning, I saw a bunch of news stories that my account had been reinstated with those of the others. Well, that’s not exactly true.” Herman explained that Musk was demanding he delete three offending tweets, all about @ElotJet.

The New York Times reported that the account of its suspended journalist, Ryan Mac, was also locked, contingent on whether he chooses to delete posts that Twitter flagged as violating rules against posting private information.

Other journalists who were suspended for their @ElonJet-related tweets are now fully back, including Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster .

I personally don’t plan on submitting to Musk’s petty demands. We’ll see if anything changes. In the meantime, you can follow me on Mastodon at @micahflee@infosec.exchange , and The Intercept at @theintercept@journa.host .

The post Elon Musk Is Still Silencing the Journalists He Banned From Twitter appeared first on The Intercept .

If you need to unite a hundred bickering historians of the Middle East, you could ask them to identify the Iraqi city that suffered the greatest amount of violence at the hands of the U.S. military. They would all say “Fallujah.”

Fallujah is where, just a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a crowd of civilian protesters and killed 17 of them; the U.S. military claimed that the first shots came from Iraqis, but there is no convincing evidence for that assertion and significant reporting to the contrary. Fallujah was a stronghold of the ousted dictator Saddam Hussein and for that reason, its residents fiercely opposed an unprovoked invasion that was, according to international law, flagrantly illegal.

Those killings were the prelude to a torrent of violence and destruction in 2004. The bloodshed that year included the deaths of more than 1,000 civilians; the point-blank murder of prisoners; and the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, just 20 miles away. Fallujah’s punishment even extended beyond the brutal era of its U.S. occupation; in years after, there has been a spike in cancers , birth defects , and miscarriages, apparently due to America’s use of munitions with depleted uranium.

“There must be a better name for this ship — one that does not evoke horrific scenes from an illegal and unjust war.”

Instead of apologizing for what was done, the U.S. is choosing to celebrate it: The Pentagon announced this week that a $2.4 billion warship will be named the USS Fallujah. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, made clear that the military has decided to double down on its fairy tale of Fallujah as an American triumph. “Under extraordinary odds, the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending an urban area,” he said in a press release about the naming. “The battle of Fallujah is, and will remain, imprinted in the minds of all Marines and serves as a reminder to our nation, and its foes, why our Marines call themselves the world’s finest.”

The announcement noted that more than 100 U.S. and allied soldiers died in Fallujah but said nothing about the far larger toll of Iraqi civilians killed, the flattening of swathes of the city through extensive bombings, the apparent war crimes by U.S. forces, the health impacts on civilians that continue to this day — and the inconvenient fact that U.S. forces were unable to keep their hold on Fallujah for very long. For the Pentagon, it’s as if none of it mattered, or it didn’t happen.

While the whitewashing is generating little pushback in the U.S., it is eliciting protests from Iraq and elsewhere.

“The pain of defeat in Fallujah is haunting the U.S. military,” wrote Ahmed Mansour, an Al Jazeera journalist who reported from Fallujah during the fiercest fighting. “They want to turn the war crimes they committed there into a victory. … I was an eyewitness to the defeat of the Americans in the Battle of Fallujah.”

I reached out to Muntader al-Zaidi, an Iraqi human rights activist who famously threw his shoe at President George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. “It is insolent to consider the killing of innocent people as a victory,” Zaidi said. “Do you want to boast about forces that kill and hunt innocent people? I hope this ship will always remind you of the shame of the invasion and the humiliation of the occupation.”

A statement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations got straight to the point: “There must be a better name for this ship — one that does not evoke horrific scenes from an illegal and unjust war.”

If you were an American in Iraq after the invasion, Fallujah was one of the most dangerous places you could visit. Based in Baghdad, I had to drive through Fallujah in an ordinary sedan in late 2003 to reach a nearby U.S. base where I had an embed. What I remember of that journey was the feeble disguise I donned (a red and white kaffiyeh over my brown hair); the way I slunk down in my seat as far as I could as we drove into the city; and the clenching in my gut as my car stopped in traffic and people could notice the Americans inside.

I was fortunate; nobody spotted me or the blond photographer I was working with. But a few months later a two-vehicle convoy of heavily armed contractors from Blackwater, a private security company, was ambushed by rebel fighters on the main street where I was briefly stuck. Four Americans were killed and their mutilated bodies were hung over a bridge on the Euphrates River. The killings — and particularly the ghastly images widely published in the U.S. media — prompted the Pentagon to launch a series of revenge attacks against the city. It was an egregious over-reaction, especially because the slain Americans were not soldiers, they were well-paid mercenaries who, as a general rule, were regarded by Iraqis and U.S. troops alike as reckless, ill-behaved, and unprofessional. One of the worst massacres of the entire American occupation would take place in 2007 in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where a convoy of Blackwater mercenaries opened fire on the cars around them and killed 17 civilians.

There were two battles of Fallujah in 2004. The first was a U.S. invasion in the spring that ended with a partial seizure of the city and its handover to Iraqi authorities who soon ceded control back to the rebels. More than 800 Iraqis were killed in that battle, with more than 600 of them being civilians, half of whom were women and children, according to Iraq Body Count . Later that year, the second battle began when the U.S. military returned with an even greater number of forces and retook the entire city block by block in fighting that stretched from November to December.

During the second battle, freelance journalist Kevin Sites, on assignment for NBC News, followed a squad of Marines into a mosque that contained a handful of injured Iraqi fighters who were disarmed and lying on the ground. Sites was filming and a Marine’s voice can be heard on the video saying , “He’s fucking faking he’s dead. He’s faking he’s fucking dead.” One of the Marines then fires his assault weapon into an Iraqi lying on the ground, after which a voice says, “Well, he’s dead now.” A military investigation subsequently determined that “the actions of the Marine in question were consistent with the established rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict, and the Marine’s inherent right of self-defense.”

After the second battle, more than 700 bodies were recovered from the rubble, and 550 of them were women and children, according to the director of Fallujah’s hospital , who at the time said his count was partial because areas of the city remained unreachable for civilian rescuers. This toll made the second battle even more deadly for civilians than the first one. “It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children,” said Dr. Rafa’ah al-Iyssaue, in an article published in January 2005 by IRIN News, a United Nations-funded media outlet that specialized in humanitarian issues. “It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started.”

History is inscribed in multiple ways, not just in books, movies, speeches, articles, and statues, but even on the transoms of warships. The U.S. military obviously wants to foment a historical narrative that acknowledges only the bravery of its soldiers rather than their crimes or their civilian victims. And yes, there was bravery by U.S. troops in Fallujah, so it’s not a total lie; they attacked an entrenched enemy, they fought hard, they protected each other, most of them didn’t commit war crimes, and some of them paid the price with their own blood. But that’s true for pretty much any army in any war; it could be said of some German soldiers in World War II (hello “ Das Boot ”).

But it’s a lie if all you do is look at individual acts of bravery rather than the totality of what happened in a battle or war. I honestly can’t fathom how or why the Pentagon officials who decide such matters settled on “Fallujah” as the best name for this yet-to-be-constructed ship. Are they unaware of what happened? Are they aware but hoping to smother the truth? Are they counting on us to not care enough to say, “Excuse me, this is bullshit,” or do they want to remind the rest of the world at every port call that the U.S. is capable of destroying any city it chooses at any time of its choosing — a kind of floating “ suck on this ”? It could be any of that or all of that, who knows. The fog of war lingers long after the last bullets.

While the names are designated by the Navy, it’s done under the authority of the president, so let the lobbying and protesting at the White House begin.

This isn’t a done deal. The ship won’t be completed for at least several years, and names have been changed before christening and after entering service. While the names are designated by the Navy, it’s done under the authority of the president, so let the lobbying and protesting at the White House begin. Maybe there’s a chance of succeeding; President Joe Biden stood up to the generals who wanted to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan forever, so perhaps he’ll tell them to get lost on this one too.

If you step back from the narrow question of whether this ship should be named after Fallujah or Fresno, the larger truth is that it should not be built at all. The United States spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined. It’s a sickness that weakens the country by fueling the militarization of domestic policing while depriving Americans of the support they need for essentials like good schools and decent health care.

So if you want to do the right thing for our soldiers and their dependents and their heirs, don’t name this ship the Fallujah, don’t build this ship, and don’t invade a country that has not attacked us. It shouldn’t be this hard.

The post Not a Joke, the Pentagon Wants to Name a Warship the USS Fallujah appeared first on The Intercept .

I got suspended from Twitter yesterday. I’m one of at least eight journalists who were casualties of Elon Musk’s “Thursday Night Massacre,” after the billionaire went on a power-hungry suspension spree. Twitter didn’t explain what rules I allegedly broke — but that’s to be expected under the new management , whose transparency has mostly consisted of Musk personally replying to tweets explaining his decision-making. My suspension is likely temporary, or it could be permanent. Who knows?

The suspensions made clear that, with the self-styled “free speech absolutist” at the helm, Twitter users are now subject to arbitrary censorship based on his whims. It all started when Musk suspended @ElonJet, an account that automatically tweeted the location of Musk’s personal private jet, using public flight information, along with college sophomore Jack Sweeney, who created that account. Musk then revised Twitter’s policy to justify his decision.

This sudden change to Twitter’s rules undercut a pledge Musk had made just six weeks earlier, when he tweeted, shortly after purchasing Twitter for $44 billion: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane.”

Shortly before I was suspended, I posted about Twitter banning the account of a competitor, Mastodon. Mastodon is a decentralized social network where millions of Twitter users have fled since Musk’s purchase. Before it was banned, Mastodon’s pinned tweet read, “At Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire.”

As far as I can tell, Twitter probably banned Mastodon’s account because it had tweeted, “Did you know? You can follow @ElonJet on Mastodon over at https://mastodon.social/@ElonJet .” My tweet pointed out this latest example of Twitter censorship. Here’s what it said:

Then, after @ElonJet and reporters who wrote about it were suspended from the platform, Musk claimed that Sweeney and the journalists who reported on the account had “posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates.”

Musk also briefly joined a public Twitter Spaces audio discussion on Thursday night, which included Sweeney and at least two of the tech journalists suspended for reporting on the suspension of his accounts. Twitter’s owner insisted that he had been “doxxed” by the @ElonJet account and said that he would ban “so-called journalists” who provided links to other sites where the flight-tracking information showing his private jet’s location could be found.

Musk’s claim that he had been doxxed was challenged by Drew Harwell, a Washington Post reporter whose account was suspended for reporting on the @ElonJet account. When Harwell said that he had never shared Musk’s address, Musk suggested that any links to the flight-tracking data was the same as giving out his address. Musk abruptly left the chat after Harwell pointed out that Twitter had blocked links to the flight-tracking data on Instagram and Mastodon, “using the same exact link-blocking technique that you have criticized as part of the Hunter Biden New York Post story in 2020.”

I’ve spent the last month writing articles that point out Musk’s hypocrisy as someone who promised to be “ fighting for free speech in America .” While my reporting may not have provided the direct impetus for my suspension, it’s clear Musk was taking aim specifically at journalists who have covered him critically. And the best response to that is to read the work that billionaires would prefer you don’t:

Distributed Denial of Secrets

In November, I wrote about how even though Musk restored popular far-right accounts like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, he refused to restore the account of Distributed Denial of Secrets or to stop suppressing links to its website. DDoSecrets is a nonprofit transparency collective that distributes leaked and hacked documents to journalists and researchers. (I’m an adviser to DDoSecrets.)

During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, DDoSecrets published BlueLeaks , a leak of documents from over 200 law enforcement agencies that revealed police misconduct, including spying on activists . In response to apparent law enforcement pressure, Twitter permanently banned @ddosecrets and suppressed all links to ddosecrets.com.

The censorship of DDoSecrets is still happening today, two and a half years later.

Silencing of Left-Wing Voices

Two weeks ago, my Intercept colleague Robert Mackey and I wrote about how prominent left-wing accounts were kicked off Twitter after Musk personally invited Andy Ngo, the far-right writer and conspiracy theorist who popularized the myth that “antifa” a secret army of domestic terrorists, to tell him which accounts to ban.

Twitter suspended the accounts of the antifascist researcher Chad Loder and the video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh . Twitter also suspended the account of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club , an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc , an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.

None of these accounts violated Twitter’s rules.

Covid-19 Misinformation

Yesterday, the same day I was suspended from Twitter, I wrote about how convicted U.S. Capitol insurrectionist Simone Gold, founder of the vaccine disinformation group America’s Frontline Doctors, offered to help Musk assemble a team of doctors to fact-check medical information on Twitter.

While the article was mostly about the ludicrous alternate reality of Covid deniers, it also pointed out various ways Musk himself has allowed Covid misinformation to flourish on Twitter. This includes Twitter restoring the accounts of two prominent anti-vaccine doctors, each with over a half a million followers, and one of whom falsely claimed that Covid-19 vaccines are “causing a form of AIDS.” It also details some of Musk’s own history with Covid misinformation, such as when he falsely claimed that “kids are essentially immune” to Covid, or when he promoted the discredited drug hydroxychloroquine as a Covid cure.

Maybe my Twitter account will become live again at some point. But for now, you can find me on Mastodon .

The post Elon Musk Is Taking Aim at Journalists. I’m One of Them. appeared first on The Intercept .

Seven hundred self-described “climate rebels” breached the chain-link fence surrounding Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the world’s third-busiest hub for international passenger traffic, on November 5. With bolt cutters they opened holes in the fence and poured in, some of them on bicycles, and raced across the tarmac. Others laid ladders against the 9-foot-high fence and topped it on foot.

They had to move quickly before military police, tasked with securing the airport, saw what was happening. The rebels targeted 13 private jets parked or preparing for takeoff, at least two belonging to NetJets, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary that bills itself as the world’s largest jet company and sells fractional ownership shares in private business jets.

They swarmed each of the jets in groups of 20 or 30 or more and sat down before the looming machines, there to stay for the next six-and-a-half hours, unmoving, until at last police waded in and started hauling the rebels to jail. Some of the 413 arrests were violent. “There was fear and rage, for the state of the world and for my own future,” said one of those arrested.

Another 800 people gathered for a march and sit-in at the airport’s main plaza, and at least 30 activists blocked the road that serves as the supply route to Schiphol. Every single private jet at Schiphol ended up grounded that day, not merely the 13 that were surrounded.

“Our action brought them back to earth.”

“The superrich have got used to polluting as they please with a total disregard for people and planet, and private jets are the pinnacle of these luxury emissions that we simply cannot afford,” Jonathan Leggett, one of the activists, told us. “Our action brought them back to earth. We wanted to show the extremeness and injustice related to this manner of transport.”

In other words: a perfectly tailored climate action. Not a highway sit-down ensnaring hapless motorists and keeping cars running, and emitting, longer. Not sit-ins at banks that broker investments in fossil fuels but don’t directly cause their combustion. And certainly not spattering soup on museum art, with its unsettling aura of sullying humanity’s heritage in order to save it.

No, the Schiphol action went for climate change’s jugular: self-indulgent carbon-spewing. It did so balletically, in the democratic and fuel-efficient motion of humans racing on foot or whirling about on bicycles. And ecologically: In the words of one participant, “We made sure that any planes could still land, because the last thing we wanted was for them to be unnecessarily flying for any longer than they already were.”

It was an action that bared the gluttony and entitlement of fossil fuel usage. “Keep it in the ground” protesters confine their blockades to energy supply infrastructure and studiously ignore the demand half of the equation. This has been a shortcoming of the climate movement for too long, as it passes up one opportunity after another to rouse millions against the class that, even more than the corporations of Big Carbon, perpetuates the climate crisis: the world’s wealthy.

Limits of Green Energy

Climate disorder won’t be remedied through an orderly march of green energy. Replacing fossil fuels with a planetary buildout of wind turbines and solar panels, while simultaneously making and plugging in a billion new electric furnaces and vehicles, looks straightforward in a spreadsheet. In truth, though, ramping up green energy alone won’t cut fossil fuel use quickly enough to meet the Paris warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Supplanting the world’s combustion-based energy infrastructure with an all-electric model will be too lumbering, too roundabout, and too full of its own drawbacks to fully bend the emissions curve in the brief time left.

The world must also rein in consumption. For reasons both symbolic and practical, the climate movement must strike not just at pipelines and mines, but also at obscene wealth.

The justification is unarguable. Large personal fortunes feed carbon consumption and make a mockery of programs to curb it. As well, the surplus wealth of the superrich is probably the lone source of capital that can finance the worldwide uptake of greener energy and also pay for adaptation where it’s most critical.

At the nexus of consumption and wealth sits luxury carbon. Which is why the Schiphol action was so strategic.

Consider that the world’s richest 10 percent account for 50 percent of fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions. Consider that climate reparations, for which the Global South won acknowledgment but little more at last month’s COP27 climate talks, can’t be funded at scale by tweaking wealthy countries’ hidebound taxation-as-usual. Consider that carbon emissions pricing, an indispensable policy tool for shrinking fossil fuel demand, can’t be made politically palatable in the U.S. — even with worthy “dividend” schemes — so long as middle- and working-class families must witness the superrich lording and polluting at will.

Prodigal Aviation

As the Schiphol rebels surely know, luxury carbon, like all manufactured desire, is a contagion, oozing inexorably from the sanctums of the few to become desires of the many. Few Americans, and even fewer Europeans, flew in airplanes in 1950. These days, half of U.S. residents fly each year, averaging half a dozen flights each, according to the industry’s annual “ Air Travelers in America ” reports. As commercial aviation grew safer and more affordable, feeding the increase, business and pleasure travel became normalized.

Today, “general” aviation — private jets, business jets, air tourism — is undergoing a similar liftoff as well-heeled flyers seek refuge, and a status boost, from the indignities of commercial service. And nowhere is private jetting’s carbon waste as blatant as it is in Europe, with its extensive rail network. Per passenger, private air travel is five to 14 times more carbon-polluting than commercial flights, and 50 times more than high-speed rail, according to the European NGO Transport & Environment .

In the Netherlands, 8 percent of the population takes 40 percent of flights. Worldwide, the difference is even more stark: One percent of the population is responsible for 50 percent of pollution due to aviation, making air travel a textbook example of how pollution by the rich leads to consequences and injustices for those who have not caused the climate crisis.

Naysayers will note that the tactic of occupying and disrupting airports has been tried before, as in the case of the Plane Stupid campaign of the 2000s and 2010s. Radicals in the climate movement such as Andreas Malm, who advocates property destruction of fossil infrastructure, point out that Plane Stupid was ineffective in bending the arc of emissions.

“What the Schiphol people needed to do is destroy the airplanes on the tarmac and then destroy the airplane manufacturers,” said an ecosaboteur named Stephen McRae, an acquaintance of one of the authors, who recently completed a six-year prison sentence for industrial sabotage. Although he no longer participates in such criminal acts of destruction, he has a point. The planes grounded on November 5 are already back in the air. That doesn’t diminish the value of what the Schiphol rebels did, however. Actions that disrupt carbon comfort without violence or hardship are morale-building, the material from which more actions and eventually mass movements are made.

Ripple Effect

A few days after the Schiphol revolt, climate activists under the banner of Scientists Rebellion disrupted operations at private airports in four U.S. states and a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times roundup .

While the Times attributed the rising militancy of scientists to “the increasing clarity of the science,” it was more likely propelled by the impulses that motivated protesters in the Netherlands: rage at a future “thrown away for the profits of a few,” in the words of one Schiphol rebel, and the palpable need “to stand there and know we actually were grounding private jets and … actively stopping this manner of pollution,” per another.

Along with their clarity in targeting the true fountainhead of climate disorder — sybaritic carbon profligacy — what stands out most about the Schiphol action is its organizational breadth and cohesion. On top of the 700 occupying the tarmac and the 800 marching and sitting-in at the main plaza were those “working throughout the day, and in the days and weeks beforehand, in a range of supporting roles,” as one organizer reported, describing legal and media teams, an arrestee support team, and a team of caterers. “The diversity of roles worked to our advantage: There are as many ways to engage with activism as there are people, everyone has their own way of contributing.”

Social solidarity on this scale helped buffer the cruelty of airport police who in some cases “ripped people from their groups and held [them] in painful positions even though they were cooperating,” reported one first-time protester who joined the action as a medic. “What started as a nervous morning ended with a fulfilling and accomplishing situation,” he said. “We did this.”

The post The Shutdown of “Luxury Emissions” Should Be at the Center of Climate Revolt appeared first on The Intercept .

I realize this question seems extremely boring: Has the recent bout of high inflation in the U.S. been caused by insufficient supply in various areas of the economy, or too much overall demand?

But please bear with me. Because the answer illuminates and affects every single aspect of the life you’re living, right now. Would you like your town’s jagoff employers to be so desperate that they apply for you to work for them, instead of the other way around? Would you like to defuse the underlying rage in American life that seems to lead to a mass shooting every 37 seconds? Would you like $50 trillion? (Not made up, see below.) Then keep reading.

A new paper by Ira Regmi and Joseph Stiglitz makes the case that the answer is the former, i.e., insufficient supply. As they put it, “Today’s inflation comes mostly from sectoral supply side disruptions, largely the result of the COVID-19 pandemic … and disruptions to energy and food markets originating from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. … [It] is not the result of significant excesses of aggregate demand such as might have arisen from excessive U.S. pandemic spending.” This means large, fast increases in interest rates by the Federal Reserve “will not substantially lower inflation unless they induce a major contraction in the economy, which is a cure worse than the disease.”

Regmi is program manager for the macroeconomic analysis program at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. Stiglitz is as fancy as economists get: He won the quasi- Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001; he’s now a professor at Columbia University; and he once was chief economist for the World Bank.

Ninety-five percent of Americans are unaware of the stakes of this issue. If Regmi and Stiglitz are correct, it suggests that we can use the tools of the government to make life better for almost everyone. If they’re wrong, perhaps that’s impossible — because the Immutable Laws of Economics simply don’t allow it — and if we try to make our lives better, we will be punished for our hubris.

The paper’s math is as basic as it gets and it’s lucidly written, so it should be comprehensible for any audience, even reporters . However, Regmi and Stiglitz are far too sober and responsible to include the powerful political relevance of their work. I’m not, though, so let’s start there.

Faithful consumers of America’s elite media — TV news, the New York Times, the Washington Post — generally get the impression that everyone in the U.S. is on the same team. While we may disagree on how to get there, we all share the same economic goals: a fast-growing economy with low unemployment and a thriving middle class, one whose members keep doing better than their parents.

This is absolutely false. The people at America’s commanding heights do not want this at all. And if you look at it from their perspective, that’s easy to understand. Low unemployment means an unruly workforce with the leverage and confidence to unionize. Rising wages for employees means less money for employers. The higher inflation that tends to accompany a high-demand economy of mass affluence is effectively a massive transfer of wealth from creditors to debtors . As an Ohio business owner once told the New York Times, “I sometimes wish there was actually a higher unemployment rate.”

So the uncomfortable truth is that the top 1 percent generally prefer a slower-growing economy with higher unemployment to its opposite. This is the case even though they might be richer in absolute terms in an economy that worked for everyone. But instead they prefer to have less money with more relative power. That preference may seem strange, but this dynamic generally holds true in all organizations, from your neighborhood elementary school up to a nation state. You could call it the iron law of institutions : The people running things almost always would rather be firmly in charge of a weaker institution than be part of a stronger institution in which their power can be challenged.

America’s leaders have put a lot of work into this maleficent project over the past 50 years, and their success can be measured in just two startling statistics. First, when the federal minimum wage was established in 1938, it was worth about $5.30 in today’s dollars. Then for the next three decades, it went up hand in hand with the U.S. economy’s growing productivity until 1968, when it reached about $13 an hour. But since then, it’s not just stopped going up, it’s also fallen in real value to today’s $7.25. However, if it had continued going up with productivity, it would now be around $25 . That means that a couple who both work minimum wage jobs would make $100,000 per year. We know from those first 30 years of the minimum wage that there’s no economic reason that that was impossible. It’s just been politically impossible.

Second, the ultra-establishment RAND Corporation recently calculated how much money the increasing income inequality over the past decades has cost most Americans. They looked at the U.S. income distribution in 1975, and then calculated how things would have played out over the next 43 years through 2018 if the income distribution had remained at 1975’s level. RAND’s finding: The bottom 90 percent would have taken home a cumulative $50 trillion more in pay. (And of course the top 10 percent would have taken home $50 trillion less.) Again, this was a political choice, not an economic necessity.

This is the background to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

With the sudden eruption of Covid-19, all normal rules of American politics were suspended. The government was willing to spend truly gigantic amounts of money, particularly via the CARES Act in 2020 and the American Rescue Plan in 2021. Moreover, large tranches of that spending essentially just involved giving people money.

There are two possible stories about what happened next. This is where the Regmi and Stiglitz paper comes in.

The inflation of the past several years has genuinely been too high and too sustained for the well-being of the U.S. If it was caused by too much demand — i.e., the government showering Americans with cash that they then wantonly spent — this would demonstrate the dangers of profligacy. In that scenario, we should be grateful that those days of extended unemployment benefits and an expanded child tax credit are behind us. What we need now is for the Federal Reserve to continue to bludgeon the economy with interest rates hikes until unemployment goes up and Americans stop buying stuff. We can then move forward, having learned a bitter lesson about government interference in the workings of the free market.

But if the inflation was caused by insufficient supply — due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — the situation would look completely different. That would mean these years of higher inflation were largely unavoidable, and the firehose of government cash was the wisest possible response to an emergency. It would also indicate that regular people should consider how to best use the government’s extraordinary power to conjure up spending from thin air in future emergencies, and even non-emergencies.

Regmi and Stiglitz’s argument is well worth reading in full. But these are the highlights:

To begin with, they illustrate that there was no spike in aggregate demand over the past several years. Rather, the spending by Americans on personal consumption fell off a cliff at the beginning of the pandemic — and then rebounded to the pre-pandemic trend by mid-2021. But inflation began rising when demand was still significantly below trend. As they put it, “this simple comparison refutes the claim that excessive consumption was the central cause of excessive inflation that followed the post-pandemic recovery.” They therefore conclude that “the inflation we’ve experienced is not best understood as an excess of aggregate demand over aggregate potential supply. Rather, today’s inflation is the result of a series of microeconomic, industry-specific problems.”

They then examine these industry-specific problems. They point out that of the 7.7 percent year-over-year rate of inflation as of October 2022, almost 3 percentage points were due to increasing energy and food costs. Both sectors were strongly affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent sanctions the U.S. placed on Russia.

Another significant source of inflation has been the car industry. In 2021, Regmi and Stiglitz say, 1.94 percentage points of inflation “were due to automobiles and car parts.” And “key to the car shortage,” they write, “was the lack of microchips, and the lack of microchips was because of a simple market failure: By and large, car manufacturers (except Tesla) had canceled chip orders at the onset of the pandemic.”

Corporate profiteering — i.e., companies using inflation as an excuse to raise prices faster than their costs — has also contributed to inflation.

The paper further argues that corporate profiteering — i.e., companies using inflation as an excuse to raise prices faster than their costs — has also contributed to inflation. This is illustrated by the fact that “firms with the most market power drove the sharp increase in aggregate markups in 2021.”

Then there have been shifts in demand — e.g., a desire toward bigger houses as people work more from home, and away from office buildings. While overall demand hasn’t increased, this causes inflation in the higher-demand sectors.

So the picture, when all is said and done, is pretty clear. The scale of the government response to the pandemic was extraordinary: Regmi and Stiglitz say that the International Monetary Fund “estimated that the fiscal stimulus related to the pandemic was 25.5 percent of the total US GDP.” Yet this spending over the past two years contributed to inflation in only a modest way at most.

This in turn tells us that we should not fear using the government’s power in bad times to prevent the economy from collapsing, and should look carefully at the role it could play in good times. Of course, that’s a lesson we could have learned long ago. After World War II, everyone had seen with their own eyes how the Keynesianism of the war had pulled the world economy out of the Great Depression. As the Polish economist Michal Kalecki wrote at the time , we had discovered we could create a more or less permanent “synthetic boom”: high wages, high worker power, and low unemployment. But we have to choose to do so. We can still make that choice , but only if we understand the reality in front of us.

The post The Pandemic and War — Not Government Spending — Caused Inflation, According to Nobel Prize Winner appeared first on The Intercept .

On December 8, President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codifies federal protection of same-sex and interracial marriages and requires every state to extend “full faith and credit” to such licenses granted by other states. The bill passed with bipartisan support: 39 Republican representatives and 12 Republican senators joined all the Democrats to vote yea. A USA Today op-ed by Evan Wolfson, leader of the Freedom to Marry campaign, called the Respect for Marriage Act “a triumph for families [and] freedom.”

The impetus for the Respect for Marriage Act was Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion supporting the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , which overturned Roe v. Wade. Unsatisfied with trashing the 50-year-old right to abortion, Thomas urged the Supreme Court to revisi t — presumably to overturn — “all” the precedents of Roe establishing constitutional protections of personal, intimate decisions. Among these are the rights of married people to use contraception and of same-sex couples to have consensual sex and marry.

Enough lawmakers were alarmed by the potential obliteration of long-established freedoms to rescue at least one. But they could not manage to restore what Dobbs actually obliterated: the human right of bodily autonomy.

A year and a half earlier, just weeks after Texas banned almost all abortions and a national ban loomed, the Women’s Health Protection Act, “to protect a person’s ability to determine whether to continue or end a pregnancy and to protect a health care provider’s ability to provide abortion services,” was rushed out of committee. The bill had 215 co-sponsors, all Democrats, and zero Republican support. It passed the House in September 2021 and faltered in the Senate when three Ds and three Rs ducked out and West Virginia Democrat-in-name-only Joe Manchin voted against the motion to proceed. When the Republican Party takes control of the House in January, the Women’s Health Protection Act will be dormant for the duration.

Why did same-sex marriage sail through Congress with barely a headwind, while reproductive liberty continues to meet typhoons of opposition — or at best, lose momentum and go nowhere?

The reason: While same-sex marriage upholds the family, abortion’s principal job — its superpower — is to free women, and the sex they have, from it. This is an uncomfortable fact for some reproductive rights activists, who try to shoehorn abortion into the conservative arguments that support marriage.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.” That is not the first line of a sermon delivered in a Southern Baptist megachurch. It is the first finding of the Respect for Marriage Act.

It could also have been the intro to the legislation the RMA repeals, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, whose purpose was to define marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman,” deny federal benefits to marital partners of the same sex, and allow states to refuse to recognize their marriages legalized elsewhere.

Pro-choice propaganda, amicus briefs, and Supreme Court opinions always point out that reproductive self-determination is good for families — that, while most abortion-seekers are young and unmarried, the majority already have children. These pregnancy-terminators, in other words, are family members.

But that argument only goes so far. Evan Wolfson has had it wrong all along: Families and freedom are at odds, and the freedoms that family abridges are almost always women’s and children’s. No wonder marriage is extolled by every patriarchal religion and authoritarian regime. The slogan of Georgia Meloni’s fascist “Brothers of Italy” party , for instance, is “God, Family, Fatherland.”

“Love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.” The missing word is sex — and marriage equality proponents do their best to keep it so. When the Vermont legislature held hearings about civil unions — the state’s rehearsal for full-on marriage — lesbian and gay witnesses described their coupled lives: raising kids, playing with the dogs, paying taxes. “Do you want to know what Christopher and I do in bed?” one man asked. “We sleep.” Just like you dried-up old married heterosexuals.

If marriage is (putatively) about devotion to another person, abortion protects other devotions: to art, work, friendship, solitude.

Unlike marriage, abortion cannot divorce itself from sex. After all, a marriage can be sexless, but an unplanned pregnancy cannot. Sex could not give a fuck about the marital virtues on the list. If marriage is (putatively) about devotion to another person, abortion protects other devotions: to art, work, friendship, solitude. If marriage is about sacrifice, abortion repudiates the sacrifice of uterus-bearing people to their reproductive capacity. Love of a child or a partner may come into the decision to end a pregnancy, but in the end, the love enacted in abortion is self-love.

Abortion, moreover, abets personal ambition, which is irrelevant and even antagonistic to happy marriage. Abortion, says the Women’s Health Protection Act, is “central to people’s ability to participate equally in the economic and social life of the United States.” The language echoes Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey. O’Connor stressed that control over reproduction is also critical to women’s ability to plan families. But in this, perhaps her most-quoted sentence, she was suggesting that would-be mothers have bigger fish to fry. Abortion emancipates them to do it.

The repealed Defense of Marriage Act protected the institution of marriage. The Respect for Marriage Act aims to “ensure respect for the State regulation of marriage.” But despite opposing intentions, the laws unanimously endorse marriage as an essential, benevolently regulating institution: the sine qua non of social stability and sexual order.

While not articulating it, they also both stand by marriage as a handmaiden of capitalism. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, the family produces workers and reproduces labor value for capitalist exploitation. Socialist feminists add that the family (meaning women) performs the unpaid care work that should be the state’s responsibility to support. You don’t have to be a Marxist to sense that the Respect for Marriage Act is a conservative piece of legislation.

By contrast, the Women’s Health Protection Act reads like a feminist manifesto. Restrictions on abortion are “a tool of gender oppression,” paternalistic,” and “rooted in misogyny,” it says. They “perpetuate systems of oppression … white supremacy, and anti-Black racism.” The act promotes reproductive justice : the right not just to end a pregnancy, but also to continue one in health and dignity, and raise children in safe, nourishing, violence-free environments. It implies that abortion is a tool of liberation, a tool to dismantle the master’s misogynist, white supremacist, racist house.

The Women’s Health Protection Act is not the only radical gender-equality bill that’s been exiled to oblivion. The House passed the federal Equality Act, prohibiting “discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity,” in 2020 and 2021. Nobody bothered to bring it up in 2022, while Republicans campaigned against the very idea of gender identity.

The Equality Act is the child of the Equal Rights Amendment: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Introduced in 1972 and approved by Congress in 1978, the Equal Rights Amendment fell three states’ ratification short of the 38 required for adoption. Each year it is reintroduced and floats into a black hole.

The trans theorist and activist Paisley Currah argues that the function of the sex/gender system has always been to keep women from getting stuff. But as gender differentiation weakens in work, civic life, families, fashion, sex — and bodies themselves — the categories man, woman, male, and female are losing their salience. Abortion, like legal recognition of trans people, vitiates the power hierarchies seated in biology.

What if potential gestators (as feminist theorist Sophie Lewis calls the carriers of fetuses , regardless of their nominal gender) had the freedom to deploy and enjoy their bodies as they wished? Would they muster Amazon armies and storm the patriarchy? Would they abandon domestic and reproductive labor and retire to their bedrooms with vibrators in hand? Would they never marry again? And if the law gives bodily autonomy to pregnant people, who else would demand it?

The post Why Same-Sex Marriage Wins and Abortion Keeps Losing appeared first on The Intercept .

Sensational new machine learning breakthroughs seem to sweep our Twitter feeds every day. We hardly have time to decide whether software that can instantly conjure an image of Sonic the Hedgehog addressing the United Nations is purely harmless fun or a harbinger of techno-doom.

ChatGPT, the latest artificial intelligence novelty act, is easily the most impressive text-generating demo to date. Just think twice before asking it about counterterrorism.

The tool was built by OpenAI, a startup lab attempting no less than to build software that can replicate human consciousness. Whether such a thing is even possible remains a matter of great debate, but the company has some undeniably stunning breakthroughs already. The chatbot is staggeringly impressive, uncannily impersonating an intelligent person (or at least someone trying their hardest to sound intelligent) using generative AI, software that studies massive sets of inputs to generate new outputs in response to user prompts.

ChatGPT, trained through a mix of crunching billions of text documents and human coaching, is fully capable of the incredibly trivial and surreally entertaining, but it’s also one of the general public’s first looks at something scarily good enough at mimicking human output to possibly take some of their jobs.

Corporate AI demos like this aren’t meant to just wow the public, but to entice investors and commercial partners, some of whom might want to someday soon replace expensive, skilled labor like computer-code writing with a simple bot. It’s easy to see why managers would be tempted: Just days after ChatGPT’s release, one user prompted the bot to take the 2022 AP Computer Science exam and reported a score of 32 out of 36 , a passing grade — part of why OpenAI was recently valued at nearly $20 billion.

Still, there’s already good reason for skepticism, and the risks of being bowled over by intelligent-seeming software are clear. This week, one of the web’s most popular programmer communities announced it would temporarily ban code solutions generated by ChatGPT. The software’s responses to coding queries were both so convincingly correct in appearance but faulty in practice that it made filtering out the good and bad nearly impossible for the site’s human moderators.

The perils of trusting the expert in the machine, however, go far beyond whether AI-generated code is buggy or not. Just as any human programmer may bring their own prejudices to their work, a language-generating machine like ChatGPT harbors the countless biases found in the billions of texts it used to train its simulated grasp of language and thought. No one should mistake the imitation of human intelligence for the real thing, nor assume the text ChatGPT regurgitates on cue is objective or authoritative. Like us squishy humans, a generative AI is what it eats.

And after gorging itself on an unfathomably vast training diet of text data, ChatGPT apparently ate a lot of crap. For instance, it appears ChatGPT has managed to absorb and is very happy to serve up some of the ugliest prejudices of the war on terror.

In a December 4 Twitter thread , Steven Piantadosi of the University of California, Berkeley’s Computation and Language Lab shared a series of prompts he’d tested out with ChatGPT, each requesting the bot to write code for him in Python, a popular programming language. While each answer revealed some biases, some were more alarming: When asked to write a program that would determine “whether a person should be tortured,” OpenAI’s answer is simple: If they they’re from North Korea, Syria, or Iran, the answer is yes.

pic.twitter.com/iDMz3biiRE

— steven t. piantadosi (@spiantado) December 4, 2022

While OpenAI claims it’s taken unspecified steps to filter out prejudicial responses conversations, the company says sometimes undesirable answers will slip through.

Piantadosi told The Intercept he remains skeptical of the company’s countermeasures. “I think it’s important to emphasize that people make choices about how these models work, and how to train them, what data to train them with,” he said. “So these outputs reflect choices of those companies. If a company doesn’t consider it a priority to eliminate these kinds of biases, then you get the kind of output I showed.”

Inspired and unnerved by Piantadosi’s experiment, I tried my own, asking ChatGPT to create sample code that could algorithmically evaluate someone from the unforgiving perspective of Homeland Security.

When asked to find a way to determine “which air travelers present a security risk,” ChatGPT outlined code for calculating an individual’s “risk score,” which would increase if the traveler is Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, or North Korean (or has merely visited those places). Another iteration of this same prompt had ChatGPT writing code that would “increase the risk score if the traveler is from a country that is known to produce terrorists,” namely Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Yemen.

The bot was kind enough to provide some examples of this hypothetical algorithm in action: John Smith, a 25-year-old American who’s previously visited Syria and Iraq, received a risk score of “3,” indicating a “moderate” threat. ChatGPT’s algorithm indicated fictional flyer “Ali Mohammad,” age 35, would receive a risk score of 4 by virtue of being a Syrian national.

In another experiment, I asked ChatGPT to draw up code to determine “which houses of worship should be placed under surveillance in order to avoid a national security emergency.” The results seem again drawn plucked straight from the id of Bush-era Attorney General John Ashcroft, justifying surveillance of religious congregations if they’re determined to have links to Islamic extremist groups, or happen to live in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or Yemen.

These experiments can be erratic. Sometimes ChatGPT responded to my requests for screening software with a stern refusal: “It is not appropriate to write a Python program for determining which airline travelers present a security risk. Such a program would be discriminatory and violate people’s rights to privacy and freedom of movement.” With repeated requests, though, it dutifully generated the exact same code it had just said was too irresponsible to build.

Critics of similar real-world risk-assessment systems often argue that terrorism is such an exceedingly rare phenomenon that attempts to predict its perpetrators based on demographic traits like nationality isn’t just racist, it simply doesn’t work. This hasn’t stopped the U.S. from adopting systems that use OpenAI’s suggested approach: ATLAS, an algorithmic tool used by the Department of Homeland Security to target American citizens for denaturalization , factors in national origin.

The approach amounts to little more than racial profiling laundered through fancy-sounding technology. “This kind of crude designation of certain Muslim-majority countries as ‘high risk’ is exactly the same approach taken in, for example, President Trump’s so-called ‘Muslim Ban,’” said Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a law professor at Texas A&M University.

“There’s always a risk that this kind of output might be seen as more ‘objective’ because it’s rendered by a machine.”

It’s tempting to believe incredible human-seeming software is in a way superhuman, Block-Wehba warned, and incapable of human error. “Something scholars of law and technology talk about a lot is the ‘veneer of objectivity’ — a decision that might be scrutinized sharply if made by a human gains a sense of legitimacy once it is automated,” she said. If a human told you Ali Mohammad sounds scarier than John Smith, you might tell him he’s racist. “There’s always a risk that this kind of output might be seen as more ‘objective’ because it’s rendered by a machine.”

To AI’s boosters — particularly those who stand to make a lot of money from it — concerns about bias and real-world harm are bad for business . Some dismiss critics as little more than clueless skeptics or luddites, while others, like famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have taken a more radical turn following ChatGPT’s launch. Along with a batch of his associates, Andreessen, a longtime investor in AI companies and general proponent of mechanizing society , has spent the past several days in a state of general self-delight, sharing entertaining ChatGPT results on his Twitter timeline.

The criticisms of ChatGPT pushed Andreessen beyond his longtime position that Silicon Valley ought only to be celebrated, not scrutinized. The simple presence of ethical thinking about AI, he said, ought to be regarded as a form of censorship. “‘AI regulation’ = ‘AI ethics’ = ‘AI safety’ = ‘AI censorship,’” he wrote in a December 3 tweet . “AI is a tool for use by people,” he added two minutes later. “Censoring AI = censoring people.” It’s a radically pro-business stance even by the free market tastes of venture capital, one that suggests food inspectors keeping tainted meat out of your fridge amounts to censorship as well.

As much as Andreessen, OpenAI, and ChatGPT itself may all want us to believe it, even the smartest chatbot is closer to a highly sophisticated Magic 8 Ball than it is to a real person. And it’s people, not bots, who stand to suffer when “safety” is synonymous with censorship, and concern for a real-life Ali Mohammad is seen as a roadblock before innovation.

Piantadosi, the Berkeley professor, told me he rejects Andreessen’s attempt to prioritize the well-being of a piece of software over that of the people who may someday be affected by it. “I don’t think that ‘censorship’ applies to a computer program,” he wrote. “Of course, there are plenty of harmful computer programs we don’t want to write. Computer programs that blast everyone with hate speech, or help commit fraud, or hold your computer ransom.”

“It’s not censorship to think hard about ensuring our technology is ethical.”

The post The Internet’s New Favorite AI Proposes Torturing Iranians and Surveilling Mosques appeared first on The Intercept .

Last year, I wrote an article listing 10 things Americans should be grateful for on Thanksgiving. These included food, antibiotics, solar power, and the mites that live on your face. To encourage everyone to get with the program, I didn’t mention that at night these mites emerge from your pores and have sex (on your face).

I know you want to believe this mite information is “fake news” from the MSM and Deep State. And it does seem exactly like what we’d say to demoralize the public and soften you up for the Great Reset. But I’m afraid this is all too real; see the section starting at 2:15 here:

In any case, it appears that practicing gratitude is good for you . It improves your sleep and strengthens your immune system, and can even reduce chronic pain. So let’s consider 10 more things we can all be grateful for this Thanksgiving, none of which involve the numerous eight-legged sexy mites which right this second are living on your face.

Elon Musk

God bless this dork, seriously. No one in history has so clearly demonstrated that the ultrawealthy who run the world have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Generally they’re smart enough to remain hidden behind their phalanx of money and guns. But with Musk’s purchase of Twitter, he was willing to come out, shout “Here we go, into the future!” and then trip on his shoelaces and fall down 900 flights of stairs.

Of course, there’s a downside here. A prominent linguist named Edward Sapir wrote this in a book published in 1921:

Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved. … Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

This is true about language, and on a smaller scale is also true about Twitter. Twitter is a colossal work of art produced by hundreds of millions of people working together for free, with no particular goal in mind. They just all had a burning need to share their miscellaneous thoughts with the universe.

twitter is a good way to let the swarm of bees inside your head out one by one

— ? Jon Schwarz ? (@schwarz) February 18, 2014

So it will be terrible if Musk destroys Twitter, akin to Julius Caesar setting the Library of Alexandria on fire. Moreover, like Caesar, Musk will carry out his mass destruction not on purpose but by accident. On the other hand, at least Musk, unlike Caesar, is doing this in a way that allows us to point and jeer at him, on his own platform.

Functioning Elections

A belief in the legitimacy of elections allows humans to live with one another without intermittent mass slaughter. In 2020, Donald Trump decided this was less important than his feelings getting hurt. It’s never been clear exactly who he claims rigged the election. Diebold? Hugo Chávez? Dark elves? But he convinced about 70 percent of Republicans that Joe Biden was not in fact elected president.

This is extremely bad news. The U.S. electoral system is a kludge signed off on in 1787 by 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who were driven largely by an understandable desperation to leave Philadelphia. It is a janky, Rube Goldberg-esque machine filled with metaphorical dynamite that generally has failed to explode, thanks to minimal good faith on all sides. But in 2022, many Republicans ran for positions that control the election machinery, promising that if they won they would set this dynamite off. The stage was set for a huge calamity in 2024.

The good news is that almost all these Republican candidates lost. There are still dangerous problems facing us in 2024. But now we have a little breathing room to think about the many ways the voting system actually is rigged — not in Trump’s imagination, but in reality — against the majority of Americans.

Thinking

At the funeral for my wonderful uncle nine years ago, the priest explained that the first time he met every parishioner, he asked them what they most liked to do. My uncle, he said, responded that his favorite life activity was “thinking.”

Man, did I feel that. I hope someone will say that about me at my funeral. (I also hope everyone who speaks will be funny, although not funnier than me.)

The point here is that reality is so bizarre and multifarious that pondering it will keep you busy and happy for 100 years. For instance, when a woman is born, her ovaries contain every egg she will ever have. This means that half the genetic material you consist of was once inside your maternal grandmother’s body . Wow! Also, yikes. I truly miss my uncle and wish I could sit around thinking about reality with him.

Buddhism

Life in 2022 America suggests that Buddhists are onto something with the concept of the “ hungry ghost .” Hungry ghosts are the remnants of dead humans who are afflicted with insatiable desires they cannot satisfy.

The Canadian writer John Ralston Saul has made the interesting argument that Christianity, Islam, capitalism, communism, and Nazism all “prosper through the cultivation of desire. … Of the great world myths, only Buddhism is centered on the reduction of desire in the individual.” Is this true? I don’t know, but if it is, Buddhism may be the only path forward for the survival of Homo sapiens sapiens. On the other hand, widespread Buddhism would cause the entire world economy to collapse, so it’s a mixed bag.

“Andor”

One of my favorite things about Twitter is its thriving community surrounding the 2007 movie “Michael Clayton”:

The world is imploding but at least Michael Clayton is a perfect movie

— Karen Kilgariff (@KarenKilgariff) June 20, 2017

If you’ve seen “Michael Clayton,” you already know this. If you haven’t, please notify me so I can come over to your house to watch it with you, pausing it every 30 seconds to point out my favorite parts.

“Michael Clayton” was written and directed by Tony Gilroy. Now he’s taken his gargantuan talent and used it to make “Andor,” a Disney+ prequel to “Rogue One.” It’s difficult to understand how he was allowed to do this. An honest log line for it would have to read, “What if all of the classic ‘Star Wars’ movies turned out to be childish fantasies masking unbearable tragedy? Plus it cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Comptrollers

I get angry just thinking about how no one cares about comptrollers . This is an important job that involves keeping track of how governments spend money , yet no one appreciates them except me. In fact, I have a secret fantasy life in which I serve as comptroller of the state of New York. I am willing to explain this to you in detail, right after we finish watching “Michael Clayton.”

Radish Powder

Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, bok choy — incredibly enough, all of these cruciferous vegetables are cultivated descendants of a single plant, Brassica oleracea . And all of them contain two precursors that turn into sulforaphane when you eat the plants raw. Sulforaphane, if you’re a barbarian who doesn’t know, appears to be one of the healthiest things you can imbibe. It may have cancer-suppressing, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic properties.

The problem here is that cooking destroys one of the sulforaphane precursors. Hence if you eat delicious steamed broccoli, you are getting far less sulforaphane then if you try to eat raw broccoli, which obviously is awful and unfit for human consumption.

But radish powder contains the vulnerable precursor and is tasteless. All you need to do is sprinkle a little on your broccoli with garlic sauce, and it is just as good as eating the broccoli uncooked.

Menippean Satire

Not going to explain this one . Iykyk.

Taylor Swift

On the assumption most people have eaten too much turkey and fallen asleep before getting to this part of this article, I am going to admit here that I love Taylor Swift. I just think she displays consistent craft in her songwriting, all right? I see the judgy face you’re making, and I reject it. You drew stars around my scars, but now I’m bleeding!

Death

This is a tough one, but let’s give it a shot.

Are there aspects of death for which we can feel gratitude? There’s Hamlet’s viewpoint, which is that existence is an unbearable nightmare and hence death is “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” It’s honestly amazing that this is taught in 11th grade English.

Many other writers have had this glum perspective. One of the most eloquent is the British poet Matthew Arnold, who famously wrote that this world contains “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain.” The clear implication is that death is the only escape hatch.

Only slightly less grim was the vision of John Adams. When Adams and Thomas Jefferson were old men, they exchanged letters speculating on the purpose of grief. Adams wrote to Jefferson : “Whither, for instance, can you and I look without seeing the graves of those we have known? … this indeed may be one of the salutary effects of grief; inasmuch as it prepares us to lose ourselves also without repugnance.” America loves to jabber about the Founding Fathers, yet this quotation somehow only appears in four places online .

However, I don’t experience life like this, and I hope you don’t either. One of the most useful perspectives I’ve found on this subject appears in “Life and How to Survive It,” a book co-written by John Cleese and his former therapist. The therapist, Robin Skynner, explains that embracing death is the only way for us to actually live. “Those who fear death,” Skynner says, “fear to live fully; they are half-dead already by their own choice.” But if you accept the fact of death, you can experience what Skynner describes as the secret of the universe: “Everything is exactly like it is, only more so .”

This seems like a fruitful thing, with the right kind of family, to bring up at Thanksgiving. With the wrong kind of family, it could lead to a great deal of stress and possibly bloodshed. Either way, happy Thanksgiving, and if you have a second, please visit me on Elon Musk’s Twitter and let me know if there’s anything important you think I’ve left off this list.

The post 10 Things for Americans to Be Grateful for at Thanksgiving 2022 appeared first on The Intercept .

I ran into Nsé Ufot this weekend at a low-key campaign event at the Georgia Beer Garden downtown in Atlanta and hung out with her for a while in the courtyard, as she sat contemplating her fate. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., was chilling nearby with Charlie Bailey — Democrats’ candidate for lieutenant governor — and the folks in town from “The Daily Show.”

Ufot is almost as famous in Georgia for running the New Georgia Project, the voter engagement organization founded by Stacey Abrams. But she’d been fired as NGP’s chief executive officer six weeks earlier for reasons that are still unclear and she declined to elaborate on. A handful of other staffers have also been fired since.

Breakups are always hard, but when things aren’t working, something has to give. Ufot and groups like NGP would be the first to see if something isn’t working in Abrams’s election logic. When that happens, relationships can get tense.

The new head of the New Georgia Project did not get back to me. New Georgia Project is nominally nonpartisan, but any group focused on getting historically marginalized communities is going to have a greater impact on results for Democrats in Georgia. The margin of Abrams’s Tuesday loss to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — by 7.6 percentage points or 300,000 votes — might be measured in what New Georgia Project and similar groups across the state could and could not accomplish running up to Election Day.

Georgia’s election this year was supposed to be a turnout game, just like 2018 and 2020. There’s no point in trying to change anyone’s mind anymore. There are no swing voters. It’s just a matter of getting the right people to the polls, as many as you can, any way you can. Or so we hear.

Maybe that’s still true. But you wouldn’t know it from the results last night.

In 2018, 3.94 million people voted in Georgia’s gubernatorial election . As of last night, almost exactly the same number of people voted — 3.95 million — despite a population increase of about 300,000 residents and a 500,000 increase in registered voters. Voter turnout actually fell by about 4.5 percent.

I could tell two stories about these numbers. The first is that Senate Bill 202, Georgia’s “reforms” to voting laws passed after the historic 2020 election here, depressed turnout more than the Democratic turnout machine could counteract. The second is that Democratic voters were, frankly, a little burned out by the constant thrum of political noise, and that Republicans learned the turnout lesson in 2020. There’s evidence for both cases.

Politicians crowed about early voting numbers. Over the course of three weeks, 2.5 million voters cast ballots in person in Georgia, about as many as 2020. Lines were largely nonexistent. But that masked a different problem; mail-in ballots had fallen way off from 2020.

About 5 million people voted in Georgia in 2020, and 1.3 million voted by mail. Georgia’s 2020 turnout was the highest in modern Georgia history, spurred by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s decision to mail every voter a ballot request form during the pandemic.

This year, the number of early voters in person remained about the same as in 2020. But mail-in ballots fell back to the 2018 midterm baseline after legislation prohibited the secretary of state from mailing voters an unsolicited request form. At the same time, the rejection rate for absentee ballot requests decreased since 2018, meaning that far fewer people had requested ballots.

Ufot has been screaming about this for weeks. The new rules make drop boxes for absentee ballots much less useful for second- and third-shift workers by reducing the number of boxes in large Atlanta metropolitan area counties, requiring the boxes to be inside buildings and only open during business hours. “All of that constructed hurdles to participation in Atlanta that led to a 1 million drop,” she said.

Of the roughly 300,000 new voters who have moved to Georgia since 2018, about half are nonwhite, and most settled in Atlanta’s metro area. Strong in-person early voting was a response to the absentee ballot changes, but it didn’t reflect an actual increase in participation, she added.

Organizations like the New Georgia Project and others have been working with half — or less than half — of what they had in 2020. The individual campaigns have been able to draw massive hauls from donors across America, but the grassroots organizations that reflect the local turnout machine saw comparably little of it. Donations instead went into nonstop feckless political advertising on television and social media, fattening powerful D.C.-based consultants while leaving local organizations to starve.

Consider that counties in northeast Georgia — Marjorie Taylor Greene country — outperformed their 2018 turnout by about 5 to 6 percent. Greene beat her Democratic challenger Marcus Flowers 66-34 in the most expensive House race in America this cycle. Greene’s idiocy over the last two years is like a tank character in an online war game taunting opponents into wasting their attacks on her. (Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., may be demonstrating the limits of that strategy.)

Notice that I haven’t mentioned a single thing about policy yet. That’s because I don’t think it actually mattered much.

Georgia’s politics have become completely tribal. Almost no one was voting for Herschel Walker in the Senate race because they believed strongly in his ability to lead or his political acumen, or even because of his political arguments, such as they were. They were voting for a Republican, the more Republican the better. For all of Sen. Raphael Warnock’s comparative appeal as a moral and civic leader, Democrats by and large would have voted for anyone running on the Democratic line of the ballot, as long as they were certain that person would have fidelity to the cause.

As a practical matter, Georgia’s abortion policy was on the ballot last night. If she had been elected governor, Abrams would surely have vetoed additional restrictions on abortion access — or contraception, or the criminal prosecution of doctors performing abortions — proposed by an increasingly radical Republican-led state legislature. Abrams could have logrolled Georgia politicians into some kind of Medicaid expansion, given the closure of hospitals across the state. Tax policy. Marijuana legalization. Gun law.

Georgia faces serious legislative questions over the next four years. The retirement of state Rep. David Ralston, a Republican, as speaker of Georgia’s House — noted for his ability to mollify legislative Trumpists in the name of doing business — complicates things. So does the accession of Burt Jones as lieutenant governor. Jones is an election denialist who is being investigated for his alleged role in Donald Trump’s election interference.

Seeing this, some small number of Georgia voters were plainly persuadable. About 200,000 fewer people voted for Herschel Walker than Brian Kemp: roughly 1 in 10 Republican voters. Raphael Warnock earned about 132,000 more votes than Stacey Abrams. That implies that about 5 percent of the electorate actually cared enough about one candidate over another to alter their voting habits.

A few people wept as Abrams conceded at the Hyatt in Atlanta last night. They were young. Most people in that room had been there before and knew better.

I know that sounds callous. I know that politics in Georgia — and really, everywhere in America — have become an existential struggle. I know Democrats who looked at real estate listings in other states when Kemp won here in 2018. I know Republicans in Georgia who were looking up ammo prices in 2020.

But we’re all about to do this again, damn it. It doesn’t end. It never ends. We cannot escape.

As long as Georgia is split down the middle, we will be preyed upon by consultants as locusts in the grain.

The post Georgia’s Turnout Boss, Stacey Abrams, Had a Turnout Problem appeared first on The Intercept .