Shared Article from Caracas Chronicles

Another Nationwide Blackout In Venezuela | Caracas Chronicles

Around 4:40 am on Friday, another national blackout hit Venezuela. Here's everything we know so far

Caracas Chronicles @ caracaschronicles.com

Around 4:40 am on Friday, a national power outage hit Venezuela. More than ten hours later, electricity is still out in most of the country. After a small surge, the average nationwide connectivity levels have fallen to 17.9% according to VE Sin Filtro, a digital rights watchdog of NGO Conexión Libre y Segura. The situation feels eerily similar to March 2019, when the country was plunged into darkness for a week amidst a political struggle for the presidency—traumatic days for many Venezuelans. While a short-timed outage had hit the country on Tuesday night, the reasons and geographic origin of this outage are not clear yet.

Yet, according to experts, it was a matter of time before another nationwide blackout in Venezuela following years of disrepair, lack of maintenance and investment that destroyed the power grid—alongside repressive management, terrible wages, and unsafe working conditions.

. . . Following a decade-and-a-half long Chavista tradition of blaming adversaries when facing power grid failures, Nicolás Maduro blamed the national power outage on a fascist attack. His Minister of Communications, Freddy Ñanez, had previously described it as an electric sabotage led by the opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González. Diosdado Cabello, who is debuting as Minister of the Interior, also said that the culprits will face justice. González had been summoned for today, a third time this week, by General Prosecutor Tarek W. Saab as part of the case against the opposition’s dispute of the results. The summons threatened González if he tried to “run away” or obstruct justice.

Amidst the outage, Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López says that the Armed Forces are being deployed along the entire border of the national territory and they are in perfect civic-military and police union. Padrino said military tactical and non-tactical vehicles are being deployed to transport and mobilize citizens as part of Plan Centella.

— Caracas Chronicles, Another Nationwide Blackout In Venezuela
August 30, 2024

Que se vayan todos.

See also:

• GT 2023-07-24: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): There Is Not Enough Functioning Equipment To Convert The Gas Into Fuel
• GT 2019-03-07: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): 900
• GT 2017-07-08: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): Pro-government militias wielding wooden sticks and metal bars stormed congress on Wednesday

Shared Article from slowboring.com

Elite misinformation is an underrated problem

Important institutions are too eager to mislead people

Matthew Yglesias @ slowboring.com

The whole notion of misinformation as conventionally construed has taken some blows lately, including scandals in the misinformation research field and, more importantly, some great work from Brendan Nyhan, Emily Thorson, and co-authors showing that in our review of behavioural science research on online misinformation, we document a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information.

From where I sit, that’s all to the good — I’ve been complaining for years about the problems with this framework as an explanation for political outcomes. It is true that there is fringe content circulating on the internet and also that some of your political enemies probably believe some of it, but there’s little reason to believe that such content exerts an important causal influence on American politics.

That said, one complaint I still have about the misinformation paradigm is that even in its debunking forms, it uses a generic term in a highly specific and somewhat peculiar way.

People have a lot of erroneous beliefs about the policy status quo in the United States, and that seems to matter. These beliefs are normally not formed via exposure to some kind of social media misinformation; they’re just about things that aren’t in the news very much and that people misunderstand. Which is to say that people having information that is not correct is absolutely a huge deal in politics… it’s just not necessarily misinformation in the sense that the misinformation police intend. In Dylan Matthews’ profile of the State Department’s small but very successful intelligence bureau, for example, one thing that comes through is that the bulk of American intelligence agencies genuinely believed that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program. This erroneous information had a huge impact on the media, on the mass public understanding of political debates 2002-2003, in decision-making in Washington, and on the broad trajectory of American politics.

And I think erroneous ideas that are perpetrated by mainstream institutions — what I’m going to call elite misinformation — are a really big deal in an underrated way. . . .

— Matt Yglesias, Elite misinformation is an underrated problem
Slow Boring, June 26, 2024

RIP Kinky Friedman (1944-2024).

Shared Article from Reason.com

How Kinky Friedman conquered Texas

Friday A/V Club: A caustic cowboy among the cosmic cowboys.

Jesse Walker @ reason.com

From Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (1970), in The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream:

The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream

. . . In current social science usage,^[1] the concept of survival technique has somehow become confused with technology and restricted to matters of food, clothing, and shelter. (Incidentally the most transparent fallacy of all white norm/black deviation folklore is its exaggeration of the cultural implications of the control by white people of the production and distribution of the creature comforts required for subsistence in the Temperate Zone.) Human survival, however, involves much more than biological prolongation. The human organism must be nourished and secured against destruction, to be sure, but what makes man^[2] human is style. Hence the crucial significance of art in the study of human behavior: All human effort beyond the lowest level of the struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style.

Certainly the struggle for political and social liberty is nothing if not a quest for freedom to choose one’s own way or style of life. Moreover, it should be equally as obvious that there can be no such thing as human dignity and nobility without a consummate, definite style, pattern, or archetypal image. Economic interpretations of history notwithstanding, what activates revolutions is not destitution (which is most often leads only to petty thievery and the like) but intolerable systems and methods–intolerable styles of life. . . .

. . . As an art form, the blues idiom by its very nature goes beyond the objective of making human existence bearable physically or psychologically. The most elementary and hence the least dispensable objective of all serious artistic expression, whether aboriginal or sophisticated, is to make human existence meaningful. Man’s^[3] primary concern with life is to make it as significant as possible, and the blues are part of this effort.

— Albert Murray, The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream
In The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (1970), pp. 54-55, 57.

1. ^[1][The opening section of the book is really fascinating. The argument in this section is also notable for its especially unrelenting hostility towards efforts (by social science technicians, etc.) to introduce quantitative social science findings into the public debate over social issues. There are some reasons why staking out this opposition was understandable, and productive, within the specific context of Murray’s argument and the rising strains of technocratic liberalism and neoconservatism within the public intellectualism in mid-late 1960s America. (You can see some similar strains of argument raising parallel concerns in something like young Noam Chomsky’s The Responsibility of Intellectuals, for example.) On the other hand, on the whole I think that nevertheless, on reflection, introducing quantitative social science findings into the public debate over social issues is often a pretty good idea, and the efforts to do this at the time deserved plenty of vigorous criticism but also a lot of attention and sympathy. —R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][Sic. —R.G.]↩
3. ^[3][Sic. —R.G.]↩