Thursday* Roundup: 11-29-24

Some of the most insightful information Public Enlightenment saw this week.

*Yesterday was Thanksgiving, so, ya know, I was eating and drinking all day. Friday is the new Thursday Roundup…for one week only.

The Guardian’s Editorial Board wrote about the stunning, unexpected victory of previously fringe, far-right candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, in the first round of Romania’s presidential election.

His rise, fueled by viral TikTok videos and podcast appearances, echoes in some ways the tactics successfully deployed by Mr Trump in the US presidential election. Across democracies there appears to be a growing synergy between the populist far right and new social media, which is helping to normalise its extremist positions.

Like Trump, Georgescu spouts pro-Putin talking points. Coincidence? No. We all need to get hip to the reality that Putin is conducting a global information war and he is winning. In America his efforts are aided by the information war RW billionaires have been conducting ever since they created the Heritage Foundation in the 1970s. READ IT HERE.

Stephania Taladrid wrote about “The Texas OB-GYN Exodus” for the New Yorker.

In the coming months a new reality set in for ob-gyns in Texas. As Ogburn told his colleagues, “The standard of care can now be construed as a felony.” Many of the doctors had moved cross-country to join him at the university, but now the law complicated their work. “I see horrible things go wrong all the time in people’s pregnancies, and the law has made it so that there’s no guarantee that the right thing can be done,” Serapio told me. Even after getting all the mandatory clearances from lawyers and administrators, she added, “you still don’t know if you’re going to have an anesthesiologist who will agree to do it. By that time, the person has bled out and could die.”

The U.S. already has the highest maternal mortality and infant mortality rates of any wealthy nation. It looks like this situation will only worsen and many more Americans will die needlessly in Texas. READ IT HERE.

A Science research article affirms what we know about how disinformation spreads online, while adding a sad new wrinkle. We may be aware we are spreading false information and do it anyway to communicate our moral outlook or to signal loyalty to our tribe.

“Users may share outrageous, inaccurate content to signal their moral positions or loyalty to political groups…users are more willing to share outrage-evoking misinformation without reading it first. Consequently, outrage-evoking misinformation may be difficult to mitigate with interventions that assume users want to share accurate information.

Scary to think we’re knowingly making our information ecosystem more toxic, basically just to fit in. Not sure why the authors refer to purposeful sharing of false information—disinformation—as misinformation, which is mistakenly sharing false information but, I could only read the abstract. READ THE ABSTRACT HERE.

Mark Jacob held it down for hard working federal employees while lamenting press normalization of Trump’s strategic attacks on the “Deep State” in a piece entitled “It’s not the ‘deep state’ - it’s the deep dedication of public servants.”

A key part of the fascist attack on democracy is manufacturing dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, that fits in well with the outlook of some journalists that good news is no news. Why else do we hear so little about the amazing fact that there hasn’t been a fatal commercial airline crash in the U.S. since 2009? That’s thanks in large part to efficient government actions by dedicated public employees.

READ IT HERE.

Speaking of normalization, Joe Patrice eviscerated NPR’s softball interview of Leonard Leo this week. Leo—more or less responsible for the total corruption of our Supreme Court—was given free reign to push all his talking points with zero pushback from the NPR team.

Chaos is a ladder in the game of thrones and objective journalism is a ladder in a democracy. You can’t cover guys like Leo—or Trump or Judge Jones—with all the niceties of “objective” journalism. They depend on the journalistic impulse to stay “balanced” to paper over their outrageousness. Trust that they know that they’re winning this exchange in the mainstream media. And it’s going to get a lot worse and the media just isn’t ready.

The corruption will come thick and fast next year and early signs are that it will be totally glossed over by an obedient mainstream press. READ IT HERE.

Let’s fight. Call your senators right now and tell them to pass the PRESS Act.

Here’s to healthier information!