One of the interesting things that I noticed about the Edward Snowden case is how many so-called liberals and Democrats tried to portray him as a ‘bad leaker’ and distinguish him from Daniel Ellsberg as a ‘good leaker’, making the argument that Ellsberg had worked ‘within the system’, had first exhausted the ‘proper channels’, and stayed in the country to face the consequences, while Snowden had not only gone outside the system but even outside the country.
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Alfie Kohn’s description of Donald Trump as a narcissistic, boasting, lying, preening, swaggering, thin-skinned, petulant, desperately competitive, vindictive person with the “attention span of a toddler” who is lacking in “shame, humility, empathy, or capacity for reflection and self-scrutiny” and also “lacking not only in knowledge but in curiosity” was, I thought, a pretty succinct and accurate description.
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The president of Mexico has canceled a trip to the US next week to meet with Donald Trump after he said that Mexico was not going to pay for the wall, following which Trump said that there was no point him coming for the meeting if he was not going to pay. This cancellation was entirely predictable and the first sign that the US is going to be steadily alienating nations that were once its allies.
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Donald Trump has only the sketchiest relationship with truth. He lies repeatedly and brazenly and in the face of easily available and widely known counter-evidence. This habit was no doubt enhanced by a life in business where he was surrounded by sycophants. One question of academic interest is whether he knows he is lying when he lies or whether he lives in a world where fantasy and reality blend seamlessly. In this age where any crackpot point of view can be found on the internet, TV, and radio, anyone can say “I have heard …” or “I have seen …” or “People say …” in support of their views, confirmation bias can be immensely powerful in that even the slightest indication of support for his views, however unfounded, is seen by him as conclusive.
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There are some passing obscure references that I come across while surfing the web for news that I find curious but not intriguing enough to investigate until at some point the damn thing becomes so ubiquitous and annoying that I feel compelled to find out what the hell is going on. So it is with this ‘Pepe the Frog’ meme. It is a green frog that has started being associated with anti-Semitic and other racist tropes. This article describes how it became transformed from a benign, non-political, playful image to being associated with hateful message.
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A federal judge has ruled that the US government must release photographs of the abuse that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that the Bush and Obama administrations have fought vigorously to suppress. The ACLU has been seeking the release of the photos under FOIA since 2004. While some of the infamous photos had leaked earlier, there are an estimated 2,000 still being kept under wraps. The US government had argued that their release would endanger its troops but the judge ruled that with only about 5,000 US troops still in Iraq and serving as advisors rather than in active combat, that danger had not been proven by the outgoing defense secretary.
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