A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I'm feeling rattled by Facebook, no longer sure if there's any point in sharing serious things there. It was the Trump election that did me in - things just got too weird. But then I see a story like this and I want to share it with people, because it's so damn interesting, so what can I do? When I want to be able to find something that I think is important enough that I'll probably want to track it down later when it's all coming true, I post it here. The March 2016 piece in Vox  posits the theory that the U.S. is experiencing a rise in authoritarianism among its citizens, and that a guy like Donald Trump was pretty much the dream candidate for a period in time when this authoritarian tendency happens to be in full bloom. "Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force,"...

    This feels like an important piece. It's a New York Times commentary from Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science who writes for the Times on occasion.     Her point is that massive information dumps like the ones WikiLeaks is known for, one of which is currently making life miserable for U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, only look like strikes for freedom. In fact, they are tools for smothering dissent, says Tufekci.      "This method is so common in Russia and the former Soviet states that it has a name: kompromat, releasing compromising material against political opponents," she writes.     "Emails of dissidents are hacked, their houses bugged, the activities in their bedrooms videotaped, and the material made public to embarrass and intimidate people whose politics displeases the powerful. Kompromat does not have to go after every single di...