av Mikael Winterkvist | feb 13, 2021 | Lästips
The New Yorker har intervjuat en av de mer framträdande personerna under attacken mot Kapitolium – en kvinna i rosa mössa. Hon visar sig vara en fyrabarnsmor från Pennsylvania som använde Facebook för att diskutera yoga, hälsa och andra relaterade ämnen fram till för ett år sedan då¨hennes inlägg fylldes med vilda konspirationsteorier.
The New Yorkes intervju visar hur en rätt vanlig mamma radikaliseras och hur det görs via Facebook.
A Pennsylvania Mother’s Path to Insurrection
Before the pandemic, Rachel Powell, a forty-year-old mother of eight from western Pennsylvania, sold cheese and yogurt at local farmers’ markets and used Facebook mostly to discuss yoga, organic food, and her children’s baseball games. But, last year, Powell began to post more frequently, embracing more extreme political views. Her interests grew to include conspiracy theories about covid-19 and the results of the Presidential election, filtered through such figures as Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the Infowars founder Alex Jones.
On May 3, 2020, Powell wrote on Facebook, “One good thing about this whole CV crisis is that I suddenly feel very patriotic.” Expressing outrage at the restrictions that accompanied the pandemic, she wrote, “It isn’t to late to wake up, say no, and restore freedoms.” Several days later, she posted a distraught seven-minute video, shot outside a local gym that had been closed. “Police need to see there’s people that are citizens that are not afraid of you guys showing up in your masks. We’re going to be here banded together, and we’re not afraid of you,” she said. “Maybe they should be a little bit afraid.”
Källa: A Pennsylvania Mother’s Path to Insurrection
av Mikael Winterkvist | feb 1, 2021 | Lästips
Donald Trump ansågs vara en tillgång av den ryska underrättelsetjänsten i över 40 år och ryssarna sig noga till att kartlägga Trumps svagheter.
I ett längre reportage berättar brittiska The Guardian om ryssarnas intresse för Donald Trump och de har öven intervjuat en före detta KGB-agent.
Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 24, 2021 | Lästips
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram och Twitch har stängt ut Donald Trump vilket betyder att just nu så har vi ett nät utan Trump.
HOW HUMANS CONNECT is determined by the prevailing mediums of their era. In the political sphere, beginning in the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt leveraged public radio for his “fireside chats.” Later, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama drew on the visual charm of TV, where they excelled as gifted orators. Not all presidents are as adept at using the tools afforded to them, but there are certain political figures who understand the rhythms of the time they inhabit better than others.
That includes Donald Trump. He was made from TV and thus the ideal avatar for an internet populace that feeds on the unpredictable theatrics of its public figures. With the guile of an arrogant con man, he played to an increasingly fractured nation using social media. Trump took a distinct liking to Twitter, where he adopted the rhetorical flair of a WWE brawler. He wasn’t just the reality-TV president; it was that he lived somewhere beyond actual reality. Online, he was seemingly omnipresent: in meme form and GIFs, hectoring in soundbites, mocked on Saturday Night Live. In time, it began to feel like Trump was the only fixed point around which all of us orbited, even as many tried to avoid his dangerous pull.
Amerikanska Wired har tagit sig en titt på nätet utan ett av dessa värsta troll på senare år – Donald Trump.
Wired
av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 10, 2021 | Lästips
Jan. 6, 2021, was always on the country’s radar.
Two runoff elections that would determine control of the Senate still had not been decided as Tuesday became Wednesday. A joint session of Congress convened to certify Joe Biden’s electoral-vote win while thousands gathered on the Mall in support of President Trump, who continued to falsely claim that the election was stolen from him.
As the scene in D.C. continued to darken, smaller demonstrations across the nation also flared, forcing officials in several statehouses to evacuate.
This is how the day unfolded.
Washington Post
av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 5, 2021 | Lästips
Det är ingen smickrande lista – Wireds The Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2020. Det är säkert inte smickrande heller, för de som är med på listan att vara med en lista med de som är med på listan, sällskapet.
FOR MANY OF us, 2020 has been a very dangerous year. Alongside the usual headline grabbers like wars, violent crime, and terrorism, we also faced more insidious, creeping threats: a pandemic that has claimed more than 300,000 American lives, and the lives of 1.5 million people worldwide, thanks in part to waves of viral lies dismissing Covid-19’s deathly serious effects. Hackers who have spied on, attacked, and extorted countless companies and government institutions—including even hospitals—during a global health crisis. And a US president who has sought to fundamentally undermine both the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and democracy itself with nakedly self-serving, corrosive misinformation.
Wired
av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 1, 2021 | Lästips
I augusti 2014 kom chockbeskedet – det komiska geniet Robin Williams, 63, var död. Han hade tagit sitt eget liv i den egna bostaden i Marin County i Kalifornien.
Kort efter beskedet startade spekulationer om att Williams återfallit i drogmissbruk men det skulle visa sig att komikern led av Lewy body dementia (LBD). En sjukdom kan drabbas av minnesförluster, sömnlöshet, hallucinationer, oro och ångest.
Susan Schneider Williams watched her husband suffer with undiagnosed Lewy body dementia before he killed himself in 2014. Her new film tries to educate others about the condition – and put to rest assumptions about his death.
After Robin Williams died in August 2014, aged 63, a lot of people had a lot of things to say about him. There was the predictable speculation about why a hugely beloved and seemingly healthy Hollywood star would end his own life, with some confidently stating that he was depressed or had succumbed to old addictions.
Others talked, with more evidence, about Williams as a comic genius (Mork & Mindy, Mrs Doubtfire, The Birdcage, Aladdin); a brilliant dramatic actor (Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, One Hour Photo); and both (Good Morning, Vietnam; The Fisher King). One thing everyone agreed on was that he had an extraordinary mind. Comedians spoke about how no one thought faster on stage than Williams; those who made movies with him said he never did the same take twice, always ad-libbing and getting funnier each time.
Källa: Robin Williams’s widow: ’There were so many misunderstandings about what had happened to him’
