Daily Archives: July 21, 2021

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon weighed in on the "misinformation" war and how his satirical news site has been able to thrive amid a constant onslaught from the left.

Appearing at Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit in Tampa, Dillon knocked the Biden administration's efforts to combat so-called coronavirus "misinformation" on social media, which he said suggests that Big Tech is "acting like an arm of the government" and that such companies have become "state actors."

"It's really troubling to see them going in that direction and speaking about it so openly, like they're not even trying to hide that that's how they're working together with Facebook," Dillon said during an interview with Fox News on Monday. "I really think they're giving a handout to anybody who's seeking to fight in court to argue that Facebook is acting on behalf of the government and, you know, requires some kind of regulation for that reason. So, it's really interesting to see what's going on there but I think it's also, you know, pretty disturbing."

BABYLON BEE CEO ON NYT RETRACTING CLAIM SATIRE SITE PEDDLES FAKE NEWS: IT'S MALICIOUS BECAUSE THEY KNOW BETTER

When asked if he was concerned that the White House would eventually take aim on the Babylon Bee over "misinformation," Dillon acknowledged that "the left has made us a target," pointing to the coverage the satirical site received from The New York Times, which resulted in a retraction.

"I don't expect it to come from the White House for them to get involved with us, but I think honestly- look, this is a way of gauging success in my mind," Dillon told Fox News. "If they were to attack us that way. I mean, that means we're doing something right."

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said his satirical news site is "punching back" amid censorship attempts from the left.

Dillon spoke at length about how the Bee has become a frequent target of liberals, calling it "intimidating" but also "encouraging" at the same time.

"On one level, it is a little bit scary to have like people in positions of power like that saying those kinds of things because- I mean, these are things that threaten the business," Dillon said. "I don't think a lot of people understand that the focus has been so much on getting misinformation off of these platforms. And if you get lumped in with the end of that bucket, and you're considered misinformation, you're not going to have a home on YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of them. You're going to be off of all of them. So our business is driven by traffic and shares and engagement on those platforms, so it's really important for us to maintain that and to see attacks coming from that place, it's like, you know, this is the business is in jeopardy. So on the one hand, you know, it's very intimidating."

NEW YORK TIMES ADMITS BABYLON BEE IS SATIRE, NOT MISINFORMATION, IN CORRECTION

"On the other hand I think it's encouraging. It's a combination of intimidation and encouragement at the same time because it's like we are, we are in a battle right now, we're often accused of punching down the likes to be punched down, I can't make jokes about women because they're beneath me. I guess that'd be punching down we're really punching back," Dillon continued. "You know, the culture war- we've been on the ropes and for a long time. I think we're defending ourselves against attacks, they're coming from the top down, they're coming from politicians, celebrities, corporations, the biggest of all of them. So we're really, honestly, conservatives doing comedy are really kind of like in the fetal position curled up on the floor trying to just stay alive and fight back, they're not really punching down on anyone. So I do think it's encouraging to some extent too."

Dillon reflected on the Babylon Bee's successes, which began at the tail end of the Obama administration in 2016, exploded during the Trump era and continued under Biden.

"When conservatives are winning, they're under a lot of attack and there's a lot to fight back against, And when conservatives are losing, there's a lot at stake and there's a lot of, you know, targets you want to go after to be proactive in that fight," Dillon explained. "So I think, really, it doesn't really matter to us from a business perspective and for, like, popularity and how we grow, it doesn't really matter who's in power. Obviously, we have our own preferences for what we would like to see. But as far as how that plays out, it works either way."

The Babylon Bee CEO did acknowledge how both President Biden and former President Trump are "difficult to satirize" since they are "like parodies of themselves."

"Trump is like this larger-than-life character, he says ridiculous things you'd never expect anybody to say, he's not politically correct. Biden, you can quote him verbatim and it seems like satire," Dillon elaborated. "So, both of them present their own challenges. I don't think it really makes much of a difference to us whether or not one or the other is in power."

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Dillon also spoke about how the left has tried to "strangle comedy" with various "rules" to prevent people from being offended, boasting how the Bee makes jokes "you're not allowed to make."

"A comedian's job is to flout those rules and to make fun of whoever the idiot was who presented them to you," Dillon explained. "Comedians who, like, self-censor and response to that power move of trying to like get satirists and comedians in line, they are themselves a joke So I think what we do differently is we simply make the jokes that you're not supposed to make. We're very politically incorrect, we're attacking the sacred cows of the powers that mean."

He added, "It's my hope that we encourage more people to do it because there need to be more people who are making those kinds of jokes. I think comedians need a backbone and the comedians that take advantage of that situation, this fertile environment where leftists have choked themselves and they're silencing themselves, there's a huge opportunity for comedians to like rise up and fill that gap."

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Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon on 'misinformation' wars, how satire site continues to thrive in Biden era - Fox News

Dealing with disability and figuring out how to best manage it played a big part in my time at Stanford, said Roy Perkins, Earth systems BS 20, who wears prosthetics on both legs. I am very independent, and I knew going to college is a big transition for everybody, so I didnt really connect the dots between the extra time and energy I spent on certain things like showering with the struggle of being a student and full-time athlete. I gradually made more accommodation requests to the Office of Accessible Education which eliminated a lot of my mobility issues and helped me to become a better student as well.

What is disability?

More than 26% of adults in the United States, or 61 million people, have some kind of documented disability. In the world, its estimated that one-fifth of the global population, or between 110 million and 190 million people, experience significant disabilities.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which passed in July 1990, defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. While the ADA does not specifically name all of the conditions that are covered, many covered disabilities can affect a persons vision, movement, bodily function, thinking, remembering, learning, communicating, hearing, and/or mental health. Some of these conditions may be more visible, while others may be less apparent.

People can experience disability in many ways they may show neurodivergent traits like autism or ADHD; use an assistive device like a wheelchair, cane, or a hearing aid; have experienced an injury; have a chronic illness or condition; or have a mental health condition. Disability may grow progressively worse, remain static, or affect an individual intermittently throughout their life. As a result, people with disabilities have widely varied experiences and potential needs for accommodation.

Disability in academia

Compared to the 26% of the U.S. adult population with a disability, only 11% of undergraduate and 7% of graduate students with a documented disability are pursuing STEM majors in the U.S. This may mean that students with disabilities are less likely to enroll in STEM fields or are underreporting their disabilities to avoid stigmatization.

When going into the workforce, only 4.8% of graduating students entering STEM careers self-disclose their disabilities. Concerns about stigma extend to the professoriate as well. Some U.S. faculty members say stigma prevents them from being open about their conditions, and that the pathway to academia may not encourage retention for those with disabilities.

For students who exhibit neurodiversity, including traits like ADHD, autism, or dyslexia, having customized learning opportunities in the classroom can be critical to a successful educational experience. For example, approximately 25% of college students who receive disabilities services are diagnosed with ADHD, making that the most common type of disability supported by college disability offices. In this 2021 study, researchers found that college students with ADHD frequently received grades half a grade below their peers across all four years, and that college students with ADHD were significantly less likely to stay enrolled across semesters. Among the top indicators that might predict academic success for students with ADHD was having received academic support and accommodations throughout high school and college.

Disability in the field

Physical barriers to geoscience learning can exist in the field from remote field excursions with uneven terrain, unusually long or strenuous travel expectations, inflexible transport options, lack of restrooms, or lack of accessible learning tools or connectivity. These roadblocks are also found on campuses through inaccessible labs, hidden ramps, broken elevators, poorly designed displays, or weak color contrast.

However, many of the barriers in place are a result of the perceptions that some geoscientists have about disability. Commonly held stereotypes about who a geoscientist is, as well as biases about what those with disabilities can or cannot do, give the impression that certain physical abilities are a prerequisite to being a geoscientist. Biased employers or advisors may opt not to select persons with a disability for roles or invite them to field excursions because of perceived barriers.

Other barriers to inclusive fieldwork may be institutional. Inflexible policies on transportation or accommodations, lack of funding for learning tools like interpreters, failure to provide medical professionals, reluctance to complete additional paperwork, or lab restrictions related to disability are all examples of institutional obstacles and discrimination that may be in place.

As fieldwork is considered integral to a geoscience education, disability rights advocates have long pushed for improved accommodations in field and other physical learning opportunities. In 2020, the global pandemic highlighted the issue of field accessibility, driving a shift toward virtual field learning and extended use of visualization tools like Google Earth, remote sensing resources, drone imagery, and ultrahigh-resolution photography. At Stanford Earth, faculty and staff have developed a collection of Stanford Earth Virtual Field Trips that will serve as a tool to make some field learning more accessible to all students.

Shifting the narrative

The stereotype of the able-bodied geoscientist works to exclude students with visible disabilities, and it may also show students with less noticeable disabilities that they arent welcome either.

Nearly one in five Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year, and some of these individuals may classify as disabled. Adults with disabilities report mental health distress nearly five times more often than non-disabled people do. In 2018, an estimated 17.4 million adults with disabilities experienced frequent mental distress associated with limitations in daily life, increased use of health services, poor health behaviors, and chronic illness.

Individuals with less visible disabilities may experience increased fatigue and pain that impacts their performance and that causes them to feel the pressure to prove the validity of their disability to their supervisors and colleagues who dont recognize their disability. Conversely, individuals with less visible disabilities may also choose not to disclose their conditions because of the stigma associated with disability that can be detrimental to their careers.

Looking beyond what is legally required by the ADA, institutions can use the Universal Design for Learning guidelines to optimize teaching and learning based on scientific insights into how people learn, whether they have more or or less obviousdisabilities.

For Stanford community members hoping to learn more, good places to begin are the Stanford Office of Accessible Education, the Stanford Office of Digital Accessibility, the Stanford Disability Initiative, andStanford Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS).

Stanford Earth transitioned the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) into its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative in 2020. As part of an effort to celebrate and discuss identity, four Stanford Earth community members talk about how disability, neurodivergence, and chronic illness have informed and impacted their careers.Stanford Earths Assistant Director of DEI Isabel Carrera Zamanillo; MS student Sabrina Tecklenburg; and alumni Roy Perkins, BS 20, and Bliss Temple, BA 04, BS 04, discuss their hopes for the future of diversity and inclusion in the geosciences.

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Q&A: Why discuss disability in the geosciences? - Stanford University News - Stanford University News

By Jennifer Agiesta, CNN Polling Director

(CNN) -- Polls in the final weeks of the 2020 election campaign were farther off the mark from the election results on average than polls in any election in decades, according to a new task force report released Monday. The analysis, from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, suggests partisan differences in who chooses to take polls -- portending challenges for pollsters trying to avoid similar problems in the future.

While nearly all polls in the two weeks leading up to Election Day correctly pegged Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential race nationwide, polling performance was more mixed across states, and the average size of the miss on the margin in the presidential race and other contests was larger than in other recent years. The errors tended to be larger in more Republican parts of the country, and overall, consistently underestimated the support for Republican candidates, a trend observed in several recent federal elections.

The average 2020 errors were high regardless of how a poll's interviews were conducted or how it selected people to interview. There were errors across contests as well -- it wasn't just the presidential polls that missed, but the down-ballot ones, too. The errors were also fairly consistent over time, meaning polls conducted just before the election, when more voters would have made up their minds, were no better than those a week or even months earlier.

The report suggests that the widespread miss across polls was not due to a repeat of the errors that sent 2016 state polling astray -- including late shifts in voter preferences and not ensuring that polls included the correct share of people without college degrees -- but rather that new sources of error had emerged, with the evidence largely pointing toward differences in political views between those who responded to polls and those who did not.

But in analyzing the data collected through those pre-election surveys, the task force did not have enough information to say with certainty what caused those errors or whether they were limited only to election estimates. Being more precise would require in-depth study of those who chose not to participate in polls, a task pollsters are just beginning to undertake.

"Following up with the people who we tried to contact but who aren't taking our polls is really important for getting an understanding about, is there something systematically different about them? Why are they not participating and what reasons do they give? How much of this is unique to the particular moment versus something that's a more structural or enduring issue that polling's going to confront going forward?" said Joshua D. Clinton, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University who chaired the task force.

In one effort to pinpoint the source of the error, the task force adjusted the results of several pre-election surveys so that poll takers presidential preferences matched the outcome of the election to see what else might change. That meant, for example, taking a national survey where Biden had 52% support and Donald Trump had 42% and weighting it so that Biden supporters made up 51% of the total and Trump supporters represented 47%.

The exercise did not significantly move the numbers for demographics like age, race, education or gender -- traits which researchers often use to correct for survey non-response. But it did move the numbers for partisanship and for self-reported 2016 vote. That suggests two possibilities: Either the makeup of partisans reached by the poll was incorrect, or that the types of people reached within some subsets were not representative.

As many states have finalized voter records with updated information on who voted in 2020 and how they cast their ballots, more pollsters and voter list vendors have started to release their own analyses of what happened in polling and in the election. Several of those have pointed toward conclusions similar to those suggested by the AAPOR Task Force Report, and a consensus appears to be building around four possible ways that the polls missed.

First, the polls may have underrepresented the share of Republicans in the electorate. Perhaps Republicans were dissuaded from taking polls by the frequent criticism leveled against them by Trump, or because of lower levels of trust in frequent sponsors of polls such as media organizations and academic institutions. Or, with the politicization of the pandemic and Republican leaders railing against pandemic-related restrictions, it's possible Republicans were just harder to reach because they were less likely than Democrats to stay home as a precautionary measure against Covid-19

Second, the group of people interviewed in polls and identified as likely voters may have included too many Democrats. The theory holds that Democrats were unusually enthusiastic about the election and were also more apt to stay home because of the politicization of responses to the coronavirus pandemic, and therefore, may have been easier to reach and more apt to take a survey once they were contacted.

Third, the polls could have had the right overall share of Democrats and Republicans but got the wrong types of people within those subsets or among independents. Maybe they interviewed too many Republicans who had turned away from Trump and not enough of his core supporters, for example.

And fourth, polling may have erred in its estimates of how infrequent voters would behave, either in how many new voters would turn out or their candidate preferences. Turnout in 2020 was so high that at minimum, about 1 in 7 voters were people who did not cast ballots in 2016, nearly three times higher than the equivalent figure between 2012 and 2016. And since poll respondents do tend to be more politically engaged than those who opt out of polls, it's especially difficult to tell whether the poll respondents in this more disengaged subset of the electorate were representative of the broader group of new voters.

But moving from possible explanations to clear answers is a challenge, and pollsters don't yet have the data they need to draw firm conclusions. There are few agreed-upon sources of truth for the election polling metrics that matter the most, such as partisanship, which makes it challenging to effectively diagnose what went wrong when polls miss.

There are voter lists which show who voted in 2020, but information on the demographic characteristics and political leanings of voters comes from statistical modeling and varies depending on who is doing the modeling. Exit polls, which traditionally interviewed voters as they left their polling places and therefore avoided the peril inherent in identifying likely voters, are now more reliant on pre-election surveys to capture the sizable pool of absentee and early voters, and so are subject to some of the same concerns as other pre-election polls.

And even the Census Bureau's estimates of the voting population from its post-election Current Population Survey have some error built in due to reliance on self-reported voting behavior, which is often overstated, and those figures don't include any information about vote choice.

None of these sources can definitively show what the difference is between the voters who took polls in 2020 and those who did not. Without more concrete information about who the people are who did not take polls in 2020 and why they opted not to, finding solutions could be a challenge.

A consortium of Democratic campaign pollsters released a post-election assessment in April which suggested that getting the wrong people within their subset of Trump supporters was a bigger problem than wrongly estimating the size of any particular group.

"What we have settled on is the idea there is something systematically different about the people we reached, and the people we did not," the report states, going on to note that initial analysis points to an underrepresentation of people who saw Trump as presidential and an overrepresentation of those who favored government action.

Similarly, an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation on polling conducted with the Cook Political Report also points to political differences between those taking polls and those who did not: "What is clear in our analysis and others' is that polls are missing a certain segment of voters who disproportionately supported President Trump."

Surveys conducted using online panels, where the same people are interviewed at fairly regular intervals, have some ability to track voter preferences over time using data collected as past elections happened rather than being dependent on a poll taker's ability to accurately report what they did four years ago.

Doug Rivers, a Stanford University political science professor and chief scientist for YouGov, drew on YouGov's data to provide evidence suggesting a difference among Republicans at a Roper Center event in January. Looking at YouGov's panelists, Rivers said, "the 2016 Trump voters who still approved of Trump in December of 2019 had declining participation rates over 2020, and 2016 Trump voters who ... disapproved of him at the end of 2019 actually had increasing participation rates, the only group that actually went up in its participation rate over time. So our weighting on 2016 Trump vote unfortunately had the effect that we had too many 2016 Trump voters who were not enthusiastic about him and too few who were enthusiastic about him."

Differential non-response -- the technical term for this type of issue -- hadn't been much of a problem for surveys until now. The share of people contacted to participate in polls who choose to take part -- the response rate -- has declined sharply in the last two decades, but research assessing the validity of low-response rate polls generally found that they were still gathering a representative sample of Americans.

Analysis from the Pew Research Center as recently as 2016 found that low-response-rate telephone polls produced estimates on many demographic and political measures that were similar to high-response-rate polls. For many surveys, adjusting a handful of demographic results to match the population totals in a process called weighting -- typically for age, race and ethnicity, gender, and educational attainment -- was enough to ensure that poll results would represent the views of the full adult population.

But the new report suggests such straightforward adjustments may no longer do the trick for polls seeking to measure election preferences, and the finding could have implications for the interpretation of data on other political and issue topics.

If the main source of error turns out not to be the relative size of the groups of partisans who were interviewed, but a difference within a group of partisans between those who respond to polls and those who do not, it would be hard to find evidence of that error outside of a comparison to election results. A poll could look completely reasonable in its partisan composition and still be off the mark if it isn't taking the right steps to account for differences within partisan groups. That would mean a poll's ability to get the right result could become more reliant on statistical modeling.

"The polling results are increasingly dependent upon the statistical adjustments that are being done," said Clinton in presenting the preliminary results of the report to AAPOR's conference attendees in May. "That makes it very hard as a consumer to evaluate what's going on because you don't know how much of what's going on is due to the data that's being collected vs. the assumptions that are being made to adjust those results."

Until there is a clear consensus on which of the most likely possible causes of the 2020 errors contributed the most, pollsters may have a difficult time choosing which adjustments to make and proving that their polls are really representative. Some have begun applying new weights to their surveys to adjust for partisan composition or self-reported 2020 vote preferences, but there isn't much evidence to suggest that those adjustments do enough to make up for what happened in 2020.

The answer likely lies in knowing more about who took the poll and who opted out.

"There are different clues that you get depending on the methods that you use," Clinton said in an interview. "If you're doing a registration-based sample, then I think you can get clues, because you know, or you think you know, what the demographics and the partisanship are of the people who aren't responding to your survey...Or if you are doing an online survey from an existing panel that has taken other surveys in the past, that may give you clues by saying are there characteristics of people who are choosing to take the survey or not."

The pollsters who can successfully interpret those clues will be able to paint a more accurate picture of public opinion in America today.

Disclaimer: The author is a member of the AAPOR task force involved in preparing this research.

The-CNN-Wire & 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

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How pollsters are trying to fix election polls after 2020 - WDJT

Over the last weekend, a few hours ahead of the Copa finals between Argentina and Brazil, a diehard Argentinian fan forwarded me a link to a report on how, in a town in Bangladesh, theres been a ban on public television display of the match. The ban has been imposed so that warring factions dont get violent: there had already been cases of fights between camps the Argentinians and the Brazilians through the tournament, and some people sustained injuries. All this was taking place far, far away from the scene of the actual football action, but I was intrigued how an event totally dissociated from geography was stoking such intense emotional fervour and leading to physical brawls.

I remembered instantly how in my hometown, Kolkata, not too far from where all this (the Bangladesh ban) happened, the joke is that if India plays Brazil in the city, the latter would feel more at home. Most Bengalis are Brazilians when it comes to football.

Growing up, in my neck of the woods, Bengal, football, much more than cricket, had an entire population in thraldom. A Keralite friend pointed out it used to be the same in her state, but I dont have first-hand data.

These days, my team is England, fuelled by my deep love for Gary Lineker and David Beckham. Since Beckham played for Manchester United, there was a time, in the late 90s and the turn of the millennium, when I followed the English Premier League with rapt attention. But even before that, in the early 80s, I had become a football fanatic. At that time, it was a trend. If you lived in Kolkata, you had to be either a Mohun Bagan supporter or an East Bengal one. Both were club sides, and the rivalry (initially) started out as a regional divide. Mohun Bagan embodied the colours of those who were originally from the western province of Bengal; East Bengal (as is evident from the name) of those from the side where the sun rose. But along the way, those boundaries got blurred, and it became a matter of an undefinable allegiance.

Whenever these two sides would play, each neighbourhood, at times buildings too, would flaunt club flags, and youd know immediately how the dice was loaded in a particular area. Post-victory, the winning side fans would take out processions, waving flags, beating drums, shouting slogans (the ones reserved for the losing side would now be considered pejoratives). Wed stand on terraces and balconies, and watch, like they were some Republic Day rallies.

My grandfather claimed his family was from the west, and he was withering of his (very politically-incorrect) opinion of those from the east, but I became an unfazed East Bengal fangirl after I watched a movie on television.

It was a movie called Mohunbaganer Meye (The Mohun Bagan Girl). Veteran actor Utpal Dutt played an inveterate Mohun Bagan fan. His son was an East Bengal supporter. Father and son had formed an uneasy truce at their polarised home, but the father was very clear that when sonny gets married, it would be subject to only one condition (in those days, it was apparently unthinkable for Bengali men to get hitched without parental approval): the woman who would become the daughter-in-law of the household should be a Mohun Bagan supporter. Period.

The problem was that the son already had a girlfriend, an East Bengal fan. So they embark on a plan: she would lie about her loyalties. They get married and, soon after, theres a Mohun Bagan-East Bengal match. East Bengal wins. Father is devastated. Son and daughter-in-law are over the moon, and are celebrating in the (what they assume) privacy of their bedroom, when father walks in and realises hes been played in more senses than one. The shock is too much for him to weather, so he has a heart attack or at least a panic attack I forget. Of course, alls well that ends well, so, if memory serves me right, they decide to bury the hatchet and live happily ever after.

I decided to be on the side of true love, so, overnight, I morphed into a fan.

I realised I wasnt the only one. In school, I started mingling with girls who were football fanatics too. And once, when there was a league final between the two sides, and one side won (I forget who), there was pandemonium in my classroom the next day. Violence erupted. There were girls beating each other up, pulling hair, abusing in girlie slang. The principal had to intervene, and teachers stepped in to physically segregate the two warring clans. But many of the girls ceased to be on talking terms with the others till the end of the term.

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com

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WKND Musings: How soccer violence continues to plague the world of sports - Khaleej Times

Residents hold a peaceful protest against looting and taxi violence on 19 July 2021 in Cape Town. (Photo: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach)

Dale T McKinley is a political activist, researcher-writer and lecturer who presently works at the International Labour, Research and Information Group.

At first, I hesitated to put fingers to keyboard on what transpired last week, given the large number of reports, analysis-opinion pieces, statements and general commentary that have populated the media and civil society terrains. Yet, as I read through many of them (and there are several exceptions), two crucial things became clear: the dominant causal narratives are overly simplistic and often unidimensional, and the dominant analytical tropes miss some basic facts.

The combined result is that the picture of what has happened is only partial, thus making a fuller understanding, representation and explanation more difficult. In this respect, and intentionally leaving aside the terrain of addressing what is to be done?, there are three foundational points that ground the events of the last week and two factual points that need to be made.

Foundational point number one

The historic (apartheid era) and more contemporary (post-apartheid) structural/systemic realities of South African capitalist society are foundational to any understanding and interpretation/analysis. These realities are multifaceted and encompass the following:

Foundational point number two

Expanding on the last reality as above, understanding and locating the character and role of the ANC which was the dominant former liberation movement and since 1994 has been the dominant and ruling political party in SAs representative democracy is absolutely central. The ANCs historic and ongoing macro-strategy of accession and accumulation, through the vehicle of the state at all levels, has incubated and spread a politics whose core and dual purpose is the retention of personal and organisational power as well as the advancement of individual and class material benefits.

Besides the more than predictable governance and policy choices that flow from these realities, the natural result has always been and remains the presence of different factions (inclusive of the two presently dominant ones revolving around President Cyril Ramaphosa and former president Jacob Zuma), vying from different angles and through different means, for the organisational and institutional drivers seats.

In all of this, the ANC (regardless of whatever faction has been dominant) approaches, engages and uses the people/the masses in whatever way best facilitates the overall strategy and the more specific practical pursuit of position and power. This is the case whether that pursuit takes place through the avenues of party politics, electoral politics and/or mass/civil society politics and struggle.

Nowhere has this been more evident in recent times than in respect of the effective abandonment of the majority poor and workers to deal with the devastating socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic.

Foundational point number three

There is a small group of well-financed, equipped and dedicated opportunistic and reactionary political operators, thieves and saboteurs most of whom are either present or ex-members of the ANC in one form or another who operate simultaneously in the public sphere and the dark shadows of anonymity.

This group is varyingly gathered and organised around the persona and political-economic patronage circle of Zuma, the so-called Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction in the ANC and includes ex (and possibly serving) government officials (at different levels), intelligence operatives, police personnel and a motley crew of plain criminal elements.

Their main propaganda weapons include: pseudo-radical rhetoric around RET; opportunistically attacking the political and institutional legitimacy of the Constitution and the judiciary while making full use of both when it suits them; engaging in fake, racialised posturing as allies and defenders of the workers and poor; hypocritically claiming to confront White Monopoly Capital; and, more recently, using the cover of victimhood and grievance centred on Zumas legal cases and incarceration.

Practically, the core aims for some time now have been to germinate and execute a plan to: engage in an already successful campaign of turbo-charging the looting of public resources and state capacity; create parallel and wholly unaccountable structures/entities to fight internal state and ANC factional battles; construct the pretence of an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics while simultaneously forging an alternative regime of accumulation with both friendly and gangster capitalists as well as with more localised business mafias; and spread disinformation (mostly through social media), that seeks to foment racial (and to a lesser extent ethnic) division as well as incite violence and fear-mongering.

Factual point number one

Almost everything that took place as part of the unrest happened in certain parts of the two provinces of KZN and Gauteng and even then, especially in Gauteng, only in some areas/townships and not in many others. This was for very specific reasons, related mostly to: the key targets of those that initially engaged in acts of sabotage, incited violence and who threw the first matches; the social, economic and political differentiations within and between various poor/working-class communities; and, the somewhat special character of the two provinces spatial, residential and consumer geographies.

The forms of unrest that then came to dominate in KZN and Gauteng did not spread in any meaningful or sustained way to the other seven provinces in which the majority of South Africas population resides (55% by the latest count) and where most all of the same economic, political and social cleavages beset that majority. This does not mean that further unrest, inclusive of some of the same forms that occurred last week, is not eminently possible on a more nationwide scale whether in the more immediate or medium term.

Regardless, the dominant narrative and claiming/framing is that what happened last week was at a national, societal (qua, South Africa) level.

Whether intentional or not, this logically leads to an interpretive conclusion (especially in an age of social media-framed dumbing down and sound bites) that the various actors in the unrest are representative of all of the country, the society and its peoples.

As above, while the systemic and ANC realities are most definitely national and certainly South African in the sense of all who live in the country, the specific events that animated this unrest were definitely not. Saying and arguing otherwise is not only factually incorrect but borders on being patronising of the actual majority.

Factual point number two

There was a small minority of people inclusive of those who live in poor/marginalised communities who actually participated in the various forms of unrest and more particularly the targeting of shops and businesses (both corporate and small-scale) in the two provinces that do not sell/trade food items. Yes, there were thousands who did, but there were many more millions who did not and whose actions could/can never be captured on video/camera and broadcast to the nation and the world.

While an argument can be made that attributes a mass character to the taking of food in certain areas, a dominant narrative that ascribes the unrest to the masses might be representatively and politically satisfying but again, it is not factually correct.

Further, such a narrative indirectly makes a highly contestable assumption, namely that the majority of the masses are/would be, in silent acquiescence to what transpired. Likewise, it surfaces an almost pre-constructed, instrumentalist understanding of and approach to the agency of ordinary people.

This does not mean that the vast majority are not suffering, that there is not a real food crisis, a real jobs crisis, a real climate crisis, a real health crisis, a real social crisis or any of the other crises that do exist; nor, does it mean that those masses do not have fundamentally immediate needs or that they do not want meaningful socioeconomic redistribution and systemic change. It just means that even despite the structural/systemic realities that frame our society and peoples individual and collective lives, at a very fundamental level different people make different choices, not only about how they want to live, but about how they go about confronting those realities and trying to change their lives. DM

Original post:
Unrest: Of understanding, representation and explanation - Daily Maverick