Tag Archives: humans

Donald Trump Is Very Easily Disgusted

by FletchePyh Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Consider the following five anecdotes about Donald Trump:

On Hillary Clinton’s late return from a debate break in December: “I know where she went — it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting.”
On Megyn Kelly’s tough questioning during a debate in August: “She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
On Elizabeth Beck’s request to take a breast pump break during a deposition in 2011: “He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there.”
On his well-known germaphobia: “Trump doesn’t even like to push a ground floor elevator button because it’s been tapped by so many people….Trump especially avoids shaking hands with teachers, since they are likely to be have been ‘in touch’ with too many germy kids. Trump has what he calls a borderline case of germaphobia — aka msyophobia — that the American Psychological Association defines as one of the more common forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
On his one-time friendship with notorious lawyer Roy Cohn: “By virtually all accounts, one of Trump’s closest friends early in his career was Roy Cohn….When Cohn was facing disbarment in the mid-’80s, Trump testified on his friend’s behalf as a character witness. For a while, according to Vanity Fair, the two men spoke ’15 or 20 times a day.’ Then Trump found out Cohn was HIV-positive. He moved swiftly to cut ties with his mentor, seeking out new attorneys and transferring his legal business to them. The sudden rejection stunned Cohn.”

This brings to mind Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral foundations, which suggests that although liberals and conservatives share a set of five innate moral roots, they prioritize them quite differently. Conservatives, for example, are especially sensitive to moral foundation #5:

Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination….It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants.

I wonder how strongly Donald Trump scores on this particular moral foundation? Pretty strongly, I’d guess. I wonder how much it explains his approach to politics? And I wonder how much it explains his popularity with a certain subset of conservatives?

It’s just a thought. But perhaps one of the things that unites so many of Trump’s longtime obsessions (immigrants, crime, kicking out protesters, anything to do with foreigners) is a fear of growing impurity in the body of the country. It might explain a lot.

UPDATE: I see that Alexander Hurst got here first. His take on Haidt’s moral foundations and Trump’s sensitivity to disgust is here.

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Donald Trump Is Very Easily Disgusted

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Weekly Flint Water Report: April 9-15

by VanColbygtoflcf Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 905 samples. The average for the past week was 10.63.

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Weekly Flint Water Report: April 9-15

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Will Twitter Soon Be Overrun With Silicon Trolls?

by Hildred15C Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hugh Hancock muses today about the remarkable effectiveness of efforts to turn Microsoft’s (now) infamous Tay chatbot into an asshole. It didn’t take much. Mostly the people who did it were just having a laugh, and Tay took it from there. It turns out that being an asshole is a pretty easy thing to emulate.

So what does this mean for the future? Not the far future, mind you, but next year. Hancock has an unnerving answer:

Everyone Can Have Their Own Twitter Mob

Right now, if you want to have someone attacked by a horde of angry strangers, you need to be a celebrity. That’s a real problem on Twitter and Facebook both, with a few users in particular becoming well-known for abusing their power to send their fans after people with whom they disagree.

But remember, the Internet’s about democratising power, and this is the latest frontier. With a trollbot and some planning, this power will soon be accessible to anyone.

There’s a further twist, too: the bots will get better. Attacking someone on the Internet is a task eminently suited to deep learning. Give the bots a large corpus of starter insults and a win condition, and let them do what trolls do — find the most effective, most unpleasant ways to attack someone online. No matter how impervious you think you are to abuse, a swarm of learning robots can probably find your weak spot.

There are some details to be worked out, of course, like setting up all the accounts your trollbot would need. Hancock addresses that. He figures the bots will be pretty good at this stuff too.

The unnerving part of this is that although Hancock is writing in a chatty tone, this is all very plausible. And for something like Twitter, where a bot doesn’t need much intelligence to fit right in, it’s a pretty serious near-term possibility.

So what happens? Behind Door 1, Twitter becomes an abattoir of filth and verbal war. Only the bravest dare enter. Behind Door 2, Twitter mobs become so frequent that no one cares about them anymore. Even the most sensitive among us just shrug them off. Behind Door 3, it all becomes a tedious war between semi-intelligent trollbots and semi-intelligent trollbot filters. It’s just Act II of the online production that began with email spam.

On the bright side, this might put actual trolls out of commission. How can they compete? And what will they do with all their newfound free time?

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Will Twitter Soon Be Overrun With Silicon Trolls?

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What’s the Deal With Oldsters and Hillary, Anyway?

by EfrainGilley Posted on April 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s Sunday, and that’s time for some idle musing. Today’s idle musing is this: why is it that us oldsters tend to favor Hillary over Bernie? Obviously we have some substantive reasons, just as Bernie supporters have theirs. But it’s a funny thing. I pretty much agree with Bernie’s take on money in politics. I like his attitude toward Wall Street. I have reservations about his foreign policy, but I still suspect that he’d be less interventionist and more to my liking. And yet, I still lean toward Hillary. Partly this is also substantive—she’s better briefed, her proposals are more realistic, and I think she could get more done—but there’s no denying that a lot of it is mood affiliation.

For some reason this got me thinking about fight scenes in movies. Bear with me here. If you watch a movie from 50 years ago, the fight scenes will mostly strike you as ridiculous. The staging is weak, the sound effects are amateurish, and the choreography is slapdash. Things improved over the next couple of decades, but then they went overboard. Fight scenes began to devour blockbuster movies, with directors all trying to one up each other. But really, a fight is a fight. After a while, there’s little new you can do, and all the CGI in the world can’t hide that. Anyone who saw the most recent Star Trek movie knows what I’m talking about. The final fight scene was absurd, tedious, and completely unnecessary. But JJ Abrams put it in because he figured his audience demanded it. And I suppose they did. But those of us who have been watching movies since the 60s or 70s found it boring and predictable.

Now on to politics. To me, Bernie is like one of those fight scenes: I’ve seen it all before. On the Democratic side, primaries have specialized in having at least one bold truthteller like Bernie in every cycle since the 1960s. Sometimes they’re lefty truthtellers, sometimes they’re “hard truths” truthtellers, and sometimes they’re a bit of a mishmash. But the one thing they have in common is that they can afford to tell the truth—in the beginning, at least—because they’re mostly running as rebels who don’t really expect to win. And if you’re not seriously trying to win, there’s no downside to being entirely candid. Who cares if you’re going to lose a few important demographics in the process?

Since 1968, we’ve seen at least one of these in every contested Democratic primary. Off the top of my head, the list includes Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Mo Udall, Gary Hart, Paul Simon, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich. They all attracted a crowd of fans, some more than others, and generally speaking they were lionized by the press. None of them won except for McGovern, who went down to an epic defeat in the general election. (Probably any Democrat would have lost that year, but McGovern lost in a landslide.)

So this year I look at Bernie, and I see the same old thing: a bold truthteller who could afford not to play conventional politics because he was never really planning to win. He just wanted to get his issues on the table. The fact that he’s running so close is probably as much of a surprise to him as it is to everyone else.

But this is obviously something that’s far more salient to older voters than to younger ones. Bernie doesn’t seem fresh and courageous to us. He seems like the same guy we’ve seen every four years. They all have one or two issues they care about. They want those issues on the table, and running for president is a good way to do it. They usually drop out by spring. And generally speaking, most of them probably didn’t have the temperament to make good presidents.

Obviously your mileage might vary. Maybe Bernie is finally the one to do it, and I’m just too old and jaded to see it. Maybe his temperament is different, and he’d surprise us all by being a pretty good president. Maybe he’d get serious about rallying his troops to care about downballot elections, and win control of Congress. Maybe he’d really get a lot of the stuff done that he’s been talking about.

I doubt it. But then again, none of the previous truthtellers has ever made it to the White House, so who knows? Maybe eight years from now we’ll all be feeling the Bern.

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What’s the Deal With Oldsters and Hillary, Anyway?

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Everyone Knows Why Hillary Clinton Won’t Release Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

by SPHLoretta Posted on April 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Judis says he’s worried about Hillary Clinton again:

I don’t understand why she can’t put the Goldman, Sachs question behind her. I initially assumed that she either didn’t have transcripts or that what she said was the usual milquetoast stuff politicians offer up. But her continued refusal to provide transcripts (which I now assume must exist) suggests that there must be something damning in them.

If she gets the nomination, she’ll face these questions again in the fall, and if Trump or Cruz is her opponent, these questions will detract from the attention that their past utterances about Mexican rapists or masturbation or whathaveyou.

For what it’s worth, I think we all know what’s in those transcripts: a bit of routine praise for the yeoman work that investment bankers do to keep the gears of the economy well oiled. Maybe something like this:

These are tough times for investment bankers. I think Goldman Sachs is the only organization with a lower approval rating than Congress audience laughs politely between bites of prime rib. But seriously, folks, Main Street and Wall Street need each other. Bankers aren’t villains. I support higher leverage requirements and regulation of derivatives audience stares moodily at their forks, but I’ve always said that we need to do it in a practical way. Some of the financial engineering that’s come under such attack from the Bernie Sanders of the world audience brightens is just what our country needs. It helps states build roads and cities build schools. You’re the villains when things go bad—and maybe sometimes you deserve to be. But other times you’re the heroes America can’t do without.

This is the kind of thing that people say when they give a speech. But in the hands of a political opponent, it will come out like this:

Bankers aren’t villains….The financial engineering that’s come under such attack from the Bernie Sanders of the world is just what our country needs. It helps states build roads and cities build schools….You’re the heroes America can’t do without.

Something like that, anyway. My own guess is that it’s vanishingly unlikely Hillary said anything in these speeches that’s truly a bombshell. Her entire life suggests the kind of caution and experience with leaks that almost certainly made these speeches dull and predictable. But the Goldman folks knew all that up front. They just wanted the cachet of having a Clinton address their dinner.

Still, when you give speeches to any industry group, you offer up some praise for the vital work they do. It’s just part of the spiel. And Hillary knows perfectly well without even looking that some of that stuff is in these speeches—and it can be taken out of context and made into yet another endless and idiotic Republican meme. Remember “You didn’t build that”? Sure you do.

On another note, if Hillary does release the transcripts, she’s sure not going to do it now. She’ll wait until she has the nomination wrapped up and then release them during the dog days of May or June. If possible, she’ll do it the same day Donald Trump blows up the news cycle again. By that time, Democrats will all be circling the wagons to defend her and the entire foofarah will be dead by the time the real campaign starts in September.

As for the odds of a genuine bombshell, I’d put it at about 1 percent. I guess you never know about these things, but literally everything in Hillary’s 40-year political career suggests a woman who simply doesn’t traffic in bombshells. It’s not in her personality, and in any case, long experience has taught her better. It’s only barely conceivable that something genuinely damning is anywhere in any of those speeches.

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Everyone Knows Why Hillary Clinton Won’t Release Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

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Bernie Sanders earned $205,000 in 2014

by DomingoTorreggi Posted on April 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I noted that someone who earns $200,000 pays an average federal income tax rate of 15 percent. Well, it turns out that Bernie Sanders is really, really average. He released his 2014 tax return tonight, and it reports that he had an adjusted gross income of $205,617 and total taxes due of $27,653. That’s 13 percent of his income.

Oddly, his return shows total wages of $156,441, even though US senators earn a minimum of $174,000. I’m not sure what the explanation for this is. He also shows charitable contributions of $8,350, which is 4 percent of his income. He’ll get some flak for that, I suppose, but I find all the showiness of politicians about their charitable donations to be tiresome. Whatever it is, it’s fine.

I just want to know why his reported wages were less than his official salary. Does the Senate pay less if you collect Social Security benefits?

UPDATE: In comments, machev suggests that Bernie contributes $17,500 to the federal equivalent of a 401(k). So his reportable income is $174K – $17.5K = $156.5K

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Bernie Sanders earned $205,000 in 2014

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Donald Trump Continues to Know Nothing About the Bible

by LasonyaMesa Posted on April 15, 2016

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Oh look. Donald Trump has a new favorite Bible verse:

WHAM 1180 AM radio host Bob Lonsberry asked the Republican front-runner if he had a favorite verse or story from the Bible that’s impacted his thinking or character.

“Well, I think many. I mean, you know, when we get into the Bible, I think many. So many,” he responded. “And some people—look, an eye for an eye, you can almost say that. That’s not a particularly nice thing. But you know, if you look at what’s happening to our country, I mean, when you see what’s going on with our country, how people are taking advantage of us, and how they scoff at us and laugh at us.”

“And they laugh at our face, and they’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our money, they’re taking the health of our country,” he continued. “And we have to be firm and have to be very strong. And we can learn a lot from the Bible, that I can tell you.”

I’ll say one thing for this: I actually believe it. It’s entirely plausible that this really is the biggest lesson that Donald Trump has taken from the Bible. I even predicted it six months ago.1

Sadly, Trump misinterprets this admonition the same way most people do. It was meant to stop endless feuds among his people. If you lose an eye, Yahweh limits you to gouging out the other guy’s eye in retribution. You can’t just go ahead and massacre his entire family.

Still, this should go over OK. As near as I can tell, an awful lot of supposedly devout Christians really do think this is the main lesson of the Bible, right along with getting rich, keeping out immigrants, and fighting welfare programs for the poor. It was a nice, safe choice.

1Sort of.

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Donald Trump Continues to Know Nothing About the Bible

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UC Davis’s Effort to Scrub Its Pepper-Spraying Incident From the Internet Worked Pretty Well—Until Reporters Found Out About It

by LouShumack Posted on April 15, 2016

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In an embarrassing revelation, the Sacramento Bee reports that UC Davis has spent $175,000 trying to scrub the internet of references to its infamous 2011 pepper spraying incident. So how did that go? Aja Romano says not so well—and there’s a lesson to be learned from this:

As Gawker has been quick to point out, the efforts of both consulting firms failed miserably. As of this morning, “pepper spray” was the second autofill search result I received when I typed “UC Davis” into Google.

In all fairness, while it may suck for UC Davis to be perpetually judged for the actions of one man at an event that took place five years ago, the failure of its efforts to eradicate an unflattering reputation from the web perfectly encapsulates a crucial point about the nature of the internet. More specifically, it speaks to the internet’s ability to dismantle privilege and serve as an essentially egalitarian space where having power doesn’t necessarily mean you can drown out the voices of the many.

….This is a real and significant question, particularly for victims of revenge porn — people who’ve had images of themselves distributed online without their consent….Notably, many of the methods that UC Davis’s consultants used to try to bury the university’s pepper spray incident are the same methods that women are told to use when they’re fighting back against revenge porn: creating positive content, “Google-bombing” positive search results, and strengthening one’s online “brand” are all go-to strategies for cleaning up a negative internet past.

There’s a problem here: “As of this morning,” the reason that pepper spraying showed up so widely was because of reports that UC Davis tried to scrub the internet of references to pepper spraying. That put it back in the news. But how about before the SacBee report? I did a Google search that excluded stories about the $175,000 scrubbing effort in an effort to recreate UC Davis’s internet presence as of a few days ago. Here it is:

Unless I missed something, the top 50 hits didn’t include a single reference to pepper spraying. Every reference you see in a normal search is there solely because of the SacBee report.

Now, there’s no telling how much of UCD’s success was due to the scrubbing effort, and how much was due to the simple passage of five years. Still, it’s likely that the scrubbing was responsible for at least some of it, and that’s good news for revenge porn victims: the advice they’ve been given really does seem to work. Granted, it’s probably less effective if you don’t have $175,000 to spend on it, so Romano’s point about money having power on the internet is still valid. Nonetheless, it’s still the right basic approach. After all, it sure seems to have worked for UC Davis.

1For the record, my search term was: “uc davis” -scrub -175 -175K -175,000 -google -image -consultant -online

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UC Davis’s Effort to Scrub Its Pepper-Spraying Incident From the Internet Worked Pretty Well—Until Reporters Found Out About It

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Hillary Clinton Wants to Eliminate Lead Within Five Years

by WVTJoannevapufa Posted on April 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a speech on environmental justice today, Hillary Clinton made a bold proposal:

Be still my heart! Hillary’s plan has eight parts, and the first one is all about lead poisoning:

Eliminate lead as a major public health threat within five years.…For every dollar invested in preventing childhood exposure to lead, between $17 and $200 is saved in reduced educational, health, and criminal justice expenses and improved health and economic outcomes—but the few federal programs that exist are inadequate to address the scope of the problem and have seen significant budget cuts and volatility in recent years.

….Eliminating lead as a major public health threat to our children is a goal we can and must meet as a nation. Clinton will establish a Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure and charge it with writing a national plan to eliminate the risk of lead exposure from paint, pipes, and soil within five years; align state, local and philanthropic resources with federal initiatives; implement best prevention practices based on current science; and leverage new financial resources such as lead safe tax credits. Clinton will direct every federal agency to adopt the Commission’s recommendations, make sure our public water systems are following appropriate lead safety guidelines, and leverage federal, state, local, and philanthropic resources, including up to $5 billion in federal dollars, to replace lead paint, windows, and doors in homes, schools, and child care centers and remediate lead-contaminated soil.

I don’t think five years is anywhere near feasible—it’s more like a 10-20 year project—but that’s a nit. I’m especially happy to see Hillary acknowledge the importance of remediating lead in soil, which usually doesn’t get much attention. But that’s where all the lead from automobile emissions settled, and it’s worst in low-income urban neighborhoods that are dense with traffic.

Unfortunately, it’s also the most difficult to address. Replacing lead water pipes is expensive, but we know how to do it. Getting rid of lead paint in old houses is a little less expensive, especially if we concentrate on doors and window sills, but we know how to do that too. That leaves lead in soil, which is tough because there’s so damn much of it. The first step is to map the highest concentrations of lead in soil around the country, and we haven’t even done that yet. Next we have to figure out the best way to get rid of it. There are lots of different methods, and they differ a lot in cost. You can, for example, simply haul away the top few inches of soil. That’s expensive. Alternatively, there’s a lot of buzz around the idea of seeding contaminated soil with phosphates, which combine with lead to produce harmless pyromorphite. This can be done using fish bones, which contain calcium phosphates. And fish bones are cheap.

But does this really work? It looks like a promising approach, but it still needs more research. Either way, though, it’s nice to see a presidential candidate take lead seriously. We’ve been making progress on lead contamination for decades, but we’ve never truly made it a consistent priority. It’s time to do that.

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Hillary Clinton Wants to Eliminate Lead Within Five Years

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Paul Ryan Does Not Want to Be Your Next President

by SarahBaskervill Posted on April 12, 2016

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Paul Ryan will apparently be making a Shermanesque statement about an hour from now:

Ryan…has arranged a hastily called 3:15 p.m. press conference inside the Republican National Committee. Advisers say he will insist — in his clearest terms yet — to the GOP’s big donor and lobbyist class that he will not attempt to claim the nomination at the July convention in Cleveland.

“He’s going to rule himself out and put this to rest once and for all,” a Ryan aide said, requesting anonymity to discuss the planned speech.

Stay tuned. Presumably this is good news for Ted Cruz.

UPDATE: And the press conference is now over:

“Let me be clear,” Mr. Ryan said. “I do not want nor will I accept the nomination of our party.” He added that he had a message for convention delegates: “If no candidate has the majority on the first ballot, I believe you should only turn to a person who has participated in the primary. Count me out.”

That seems suitably blunt.

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Paul Ryan Does Not Want to Be Your Next President

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