tingilinde

dismantling democracy

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier on the current Republican effort to damage and possibly destroy democracy.

snip

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American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.

This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.

When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.

Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.

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predatory capitalism

Cory Doctorow with a tale from our golden age of predatory capitalism,

 

improving ventilation

This resource may be useful if you're trying to improve air changes in a room.  The readme has commentary and references.

Good ventilation is an important tool.

 

 

 

airbreak

Very cool - jailbreak CPAP machines to make them function as a ventilator.

a tip of the hat to Steve

 

 

homemade face masks

A note on some designs.  Probably the greatest benefit is preventing you from touching your face.

 

an example - it looks like there are hundreds of how-to videos

hotel hint

 

a tip of the hat to Bryan

 

bringing a rembrandt painting to life

About six years ago, but still run to re-run

 

more fancy shoe techniques

noted by Sukie.  

 

the labyrinth of toulouse

Absolutely remarkable 

 

pew on the latino vote

It's broken...  there are probably several things going on, but they could wield real power.