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The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.
How credible is any of this?
My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.
I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.
What do you make of it?
As Alejandro Mayorkas warns that FEMA doesn't have enough funds to last through Hurricane season, a reminder that the Jewish Lobby's campaign to secure over $300 million for federal handouts to Jewish synagogues and NGOs comes from the FEMA budget.
Well thanks for the reminder, pointed as it ever is lol.
Yeah the Jewish lobby is super powerful. Not surprised, seems like most well funded and well connected lobbying groups are able to just raid the budget indiscriminately at this point.
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I haven't followed the FEMA stuff, but there has been a libertarian claim "the purpose of police is to prevent private citizens from enforcing the law." For a long time I scoffed at it, but I've slowly come around. When I watched the BLM protests there were a lot of police out on the street, but a lot of people were engaging in looting, disorderly conduct, street blocking, etc, with total impunity. But of course, if a group of concerned citizens had come out with clubs to beat up the vandals and looters, the police would have come down hard on them. In some cases there are videos of police arresting citizens who are trying to pull protestors away from blocking the street.
What it comes down to is that it is simply easier for the police to arrest Joe taxpayer-with-something-to-lose for vigilantism, than it is to stop a mob of BLM protestors. Furthermore, it may be more of an embarrassment, a challenge to their manhood, if a private citizen is enforcing the law. The elite don't like the private citizen enforcing the law either, a BLM protest they can contain, private citizens enforcing the law would be far more unpredictable. This model also predicts why despite blatant disorderly crime being so common and unpunished, and gangland violence being common, actual murdering of white children is very rare in a city. The police do take this seriously, because they know threat of arrest won't be enough to stop parents from engaging in vigilantism. So the police still have to do enough actual law enforcement to keep crime to a barely tolerable level.
There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.
Getting back to FEMA, I don't think this is a case of FEMA consciously having orders to punish rural Trump voters. But, as a bureaucracy, they probably have some mandate that says, "our job is to establish chain of command and authority over the disaster area, so we don't have chaos and anarchy, and decision making comes through us." Sounds sensible to people in Washington sitting in the office coming up with the plans. But on the ground, in the middle of the disaster, it turns out it is far easier to stop people from helping, to stop people from flying helicopters in, than it is for FEMA itself to actually analyze and approve all incoming resources, or for FEMA itself to do the providing of resources. So the plan initially is:
But then in the fog of war it becomes:
So the actual result of the organization is that it is an anti-disaster relief bureaucracy. Conquest's third law strikes again.
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At this point, with lawfare, several unclear assassination attempts, it's IMO pretty credible FEMA would deliberately be a bit slow. Politico thinks Helene could affect elections in the states hit.
Politico has an article.
...
"Every little tweak matters" - there you have it.
Perfect motivation for strong partisans to be inefficient with recovery so that voting is depressed in leaning red counties.
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This is just how it works now. Semi-functional establishment institutions have squandered most of the bipartisan trust and goodwill they once enjoyed. When they screw up, often through a mix of mostly incompetence and some malice/political maneuvering, this is first ignored by a wholly partisan mainstream media and then picked up by a right-wing information ecosystem whose sole epistemological lodestar seems to be "does it make progressives look maximally bad?". This leads to the most unhinged takes bubbling up to the surface which allows the technically-not-lying-but-who-are-we-kidding mainstream media to enact their "right-wing conspiracy theorists pounce"-shtick. Which then leads to pundits on the dissident right to scramble for something, anything, that makes their inanity seem "directionally correct".
It's all so tiresome.
But lots of these takes are not unhinged.
FEMA distributes relief to migrants and illegals. That's not a conspiracy or furtive rumor. That's a basic function it performs with budget allocations and press releases and grants. Noticing that FEMA is now claiming to be out of money is not some weird partisan non-sequitur. It's a basic observation of cause-and-effect: they spent money on illegals and now are out of money for Americans.
Likewise, rumors about FEMA getting in the way. This is rumoring of the worst sort, but it's also correct to talk about it. You have first-hand accounts of people claiming that FEMA officers are confiscating relief and getting in the way. Imagine that that happened to you -- well, some guy on twitter concluded that this is just all part of a broken media incentive infrastructure, so it doesn't matter if it's true or false. Comforting!
Sure. And a functioning media ecosystem would be able to discuss these cases without partisan mud-slinging.
And I don't doubt that there are cases of FEMA dysfunction. But that's not under dispute here. The more interesting claims are that FEMA is deliberately, systemically, and strategically witholding help from those in need to help Harris win the election.
Meditating on the potential emotional state of a potential truth-teller not being believed does not really tell us much about whether the person making such claims is actually telling the truth. Facts over feelings cuts both ways.
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I find it equally tiresome, but I think anyone who's ever labored under the assumption that politics or say the media was ever at bottom about anything more than competing moral tribes with different visions of society's future, is deluding themselves.
For example, just the other day I was watching Piers Morgan's regretful debate with Mehdi Hassan over Israel/Palestine. Mehdi being a big player in the same space Piers is, clearly knows how the game is played, and spanked Piers pretty hard on his own show. It makes for great soundbites and entertainment, but is no way to conduct an honest debate.
Maybe I have just grown much more cynical over the years, but I remember that the propaganda of, say, 20 years ago, was much more refined. Now it is just insultingly stupid, in a taunting "we know that you know we know you know we are lying, what are you going to do about it?" kind of way.
20 years ago the American media hadn't had it's back broken by social media and journalism was a profession rather than an advocacy platform.
Part of what makes professions different from trades is their willingness to punish their own for violating standards. Flaws did and do exist, but the economic downturns meant that there was a gradual shift towards the survivors being people willing to work for less (because they were more willing to work for ideology), and these people in turn- many of them more junior entries who had less experience and thus lower paychecks in the first place- were more inclined to punish on the basis of ideological deviation than on lack of adherence to style.
That explains the ideological conformity and the zeal of the survivors. It does not explain the total lack of subtlety.
I... generally don't associate conformist zeal with subtlety in the same person?
To clarify- the more subtle people were the professionals. The professionals were not the survivors.
I mean, you can both be zealous and competent at what you do, no? And if what you do is propaganda production...
You're conflating (and changing) the standard of comparison. Competent is not synonymous with subtle, particularly in a context where survival (a screening factor for what is / is not competent) is characterized by exceptionally enthusiastic support for a cause.
Being unsubtle is not a lack of competence in and of itself. Competence is the characteristic of what it takes to succeed. The metric of success in the selection effect to be a modern journalist is surviving as a modern journalist, not being a subtle propagandist.
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Well one problem has been that technological developments and social trends have made it easier by lowering the costs for people with cheap contributions to have a voice. I was one of the few skeptical and somewhat cynical naysayers among those I knew who took the opposite position and usually went around championing things like the democratization of the media or X or Y, and allowing people to have a voice, saying its going to raise the aggregate level news quality among people's media diet. Instead you got the reverse, more along the lines I more or less thought it would, where the signal to noise ratio became so out of hand that the bad drives out the good, and mediocrity rules the waves from one end to the other.
None of these things ever get pitched on the harm they'll do to society when the first appear and gain traction, but instead it's all about the great and wonderful and productive things it'll enable us to do. But the noble and moral uses of these things only ever end up being a footnote and an afterthought to their real uses. Mindless consumerism. Intellectual laziness. Style over substance. I really don't understand how it seems like nobody ever saw this coming. I saw it coming from a mile away. But maybe I'm just that pessimistic.
Idiots on Twitter is one thing. Midwits on the payroll of the NYT is quite another.
I’m reminded of Gay — a NYT editor. I can’t remember if she tweeted that when Bloomberg spent 500m on his political he instead could’ve given the 327m Americans over a million dollars each or merely saw the tweet and ran with it as a story for Brian Williams.
In either case, she had more than enough time to think “that sounds crazy — is the math right.” And either she can’t do basic basic math or she doesn’t care.
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In all seriousness these days, it can be hard to tell the difference. Bari Weiss could've passed as someone they hired off Twitter.
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I saw someone post this leadership page on the fema website. Do these people look like the best our country has to offer? Just looking at these people I wouldn’t put it past them to be dragging their feet. I also wouldn’t be surprised if they’re incompetent. Either way, I don’t know how anyone can look at this and think the USA is anything other than an embarrassment.
https://www.fema.gov/about/organization/offices-leadership
They all seem pretty qualified. Just looking at the first one;
Seems like the exact experience you would expect for someone in such a role? She was also Commissioner of the NY Emergency Management Dept.
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How exactly are you judging them as "an embarrassment"? Those look like ordinary professional photos and they look Iike normal people. Without knowing anything else about them, should I assume it's just the fact that many of them are black and/or women that's causing the curled upper lip?
They look like bureaucrats. They look like people that have spent their entire professional lives pushing paper around and playing office politics. I can only imagine what skillset it takes to advance to leadership in the federal government, but it seems unlikely that they’ve been selected for competence at responding to emergency situations.
I think it’s worthwhile for people to look at that page and assess for themselves what type of person is responsible for the hurricane response.
People should ask themselves, does this group look like the type of people that would prioritize Ukraine, “migrants”, or rural Americans. There is a well known trope that coastal elites seem to hold rural people in contempt. I’m willing to make the leap that the people on that leadership page are part of that group.
They look like every person I see with a professional headshot on LinkedIn, from sales managers to software engineers.
Actually, being an adept bureaucrat is very important for people in charge of managing and funding a disaster response. These are not the people who will actually be wading through floodwaters to bring emergency supplies, which is of course an entirely different skillset.
I would ask myself that about the politicians who determine policy, not try to divine someone's innermost loyalties based on a picture that reveals only sex and race.
"Well known trope" = "Thing that lots of people are happy to believe because it fits their culture war priors." In fact most civil servants (and these people, while fairly high up in FEMA, are pretty low on the fed food chain) are no more or less diligent about their duties and responsibilities than the average corp wageslave, and I would argue generally moreso. You don't join FEMA because you have a seething hatred of "rural people" and think this is your best avenue to hurt them.
Again, I am asking why you think you can be so confident about this based solely on their photographs? If you just assume that anyone in a government agency leadership position is a "coastal elite" who holds rural people in contempt, then it wouldn't really matter what they look like. You could have just said "I'll bet FEMA hates rural people." I think you have a very unsophisticated inductive reasoning chain.
Tomayto, tomahto. It's not a pure demographics thing: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/prima-facie-leadership
I'm autistic enough to dislike this observation and to not be particularly acute at picking it up myself, but not autistic enough to pretend it isn't real.
I am very skeptical of this kind of phenotyping, which is often little better than phrenology. "You can just tell by looking at the strong-jawed white chad that he's a superior
New Soviet Manalpha male." A lot of people claim they can detect "soy face" when it's just a guy making a goofy expression. Really, do you think you could pick Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower out of that West Point photo without being told who they are?In this instance, it seems pretty clear to me that the judgment is purely based on the fact that the OP saw a lot of women and blacks.
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The steelman is that institutional DIE focus causes both uselessness and detectable changes in racial/sex ratios, which creates a correlation between those ratios and uselessness - valid Bayesian evidence - even in the absence of significant causation.
Except you can click on all these people and see that they are all amply qualified and experienced.
People can be socially promoted through their entire education process and career now despite incompetency. Private companies are more likely to terminate these people. Therefore they are more likely to end up working for the government. Without a process to cull the useless, useless people will accumulate within an organization.
Recently, a woman sued Hartford Public Schools because she is unable to read or write. She was an honor roll student at the high school and currently is a part time student at University of Connecticut-Hartford.
https://readlion.com/a-connecticut-college-student-cant-read-or-write-she-blames-her-public-school/
Of course none of this is evidence that these FEMA people are necessarily incompetent. But believing that "qualifications = competency" is mere credentialism.
I think it's clear that this disaster has been mismanaged by FEMA. That, more than college degrees, is strong evidence of competency or lack thereof.
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Is it representative of the population? Possibly. Is it representative of their workforce? Possibly. It's hard to tell
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What really pisses me off is that the head of the DoT Pete Buttigieg is calling Elon Musk a conspiracy nut for claiming this, and dozens of other articles are calling it misinformation and 'blatant lies.'
And yet if you go to the Asheville regional website it literally says that no flights may land without prior permission.
I know at this point I shouldn't be shocked anymore by the blatant lies of the media, but it continues to baffle me how blatant and idiotic they are about it.
Asheville Regional's PPA is for the airport, I think Musk is more complaining about some NOTAM, which is far bigger a deal and covers a lot bigger area. There's nothing listed as a TFR right now, but there was this weirdness until earlier today. It's not marked as a TFR -- they start with some variant of no pilot may operate (unless), cfe this VIP one from Biden flying through a couple days ago -- but it requires everyone to communicate to and obey a specific emergency center channel that could tell people to fuck off or just be overwhelmed.
EDIT: I'll add that it's possible there was no management-level decisions for Buttigieg to be aware of, for the specific problems Musk was highlighting; radio calls and management are rough in the best of circumstances, and no one in this field is gonna be NY TRACON-tier.
... and that this is in many ways a much worse thing. Public officials dealing with an emergency can't treat complaints like they're political conspiracy theories, not because such foul play is unimaginable -- I can give examples! -- but because the alternative is imaginable. Disasters are by definition the breakdown of normal systems, with lives on the line dependent on our ability to respond to those gaps.
Yeah I think this is my main issue. When the default response becomes "the other side is trying to smear us with insane conspiracies" then the government becomes basically immune to any criticism.
Extremely worrying development.
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What is more annoying is that the media will say “government official debunks Musk’s wild claim.”
The evidence they will point to is the government official. The same government official Musk is criticizing.
It would be like if our judicial system asked the defendant “did you do it” and if they said “no” accepted their word as final. Just crazy.
I know!! Exactly it's just... comically thin.
But then again political and news discourse has been degrading at a dramatic rate.
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My guess is that fema is fucking up because it literally does not occur to them that requiring permits slows things down.
Look, I’m not a fan of the federal government or the cathedral. But they don’t actually hate us and want us dead. They’re shitty and incompetent and don’t share values, but they’re not cartoon villains. I think this is typical federal bureaucracy which doesn’t stop to think that checking every can of donated food for botulism before letting it through will stop aid from reaching the people who need it, causing more harm than the botulism would.
Why are you so sure?
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So you suggest we invoke Hanlon's Razor?
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I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.
Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.
At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.
Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.
This is underselling the culpability of the democratic city and state leadership. There wasn't merely a 'not taking the imminent storm threat seriously', but actively delaying and hindering federal support responses including by not actually asking for various types of assistance from the federal and other states until days later, instigating a posse comitatus policy freeze disrupting federal military assistance, and of course the police not merely abandoning duty roles but partaking in the looting.
When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.
The steelman is that airspace is dangerous if uncontrolled, and so in a disaster a government doesn't want to be competing with airspace. This is especially true when rescue agencies would be further diverted if they had to rerout resources to help someone who got themselves into a mess- like, say, by crashing aircraft into a town.
On the other hand, this administration is the heir to the one that repeatedly targeted religious medical charities if they didn't support abortion-enabling policies. There is an established vein of 'our way or not at all' in some parts of the US government.
I have no insight into this specific circumstance, but 'stop getting in our way as you try to help' is a real, and sometimes even valid, thing.
Wait do you have examples or sources of this? Would be crazy if it turned out to be true.
“Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A five-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched. Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson's initial request.”
“Four New Orleans police officers have been cleared of allegations that they looted a Wal-Mart store after Hurricane Katrina, but each was suspended 10 days for not stopping civilians from ransacking the store, the Police Department said. The probe stemmed from an MSNBC report that showed the officers filling a shopping cart with shoes, clothes and other items. When a reporter asked the officers what they were doing, one responded, “Looking for looters” and turned her back. Assistant Police Chief Marlon Defillo, commander of the Public Integrity Bureau, said the officers seen on the video were recently cleared of looting because they had received permission from superiors to take necessities for themselves and other officers. The Police Department later informed Wal-Mart management, after the store had been secured, that its officers had taken some needed items, he said.”
I’m going to classify both of these stories as “technically true”.
The best kind of true, truly.
There is/was more- one of the reasons that Bush invoked the insurrection act in Katrina was because the Governor was refusing to invite federal troops in unless she could get control of them, there was significant desertion of police at the time (in some cases actual people just not coming in, but allegations I can no longer find reports of that various police numbers were never-show corruption), and even reports that reached NPR of shootings of unarmed civilians- but the general point is that the foundations were generally cracked, and that FEMA as an empowering rather than an overriding agency is always going to do worse the worse the local leadership is..
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Ahh I thought you were talking about Helene, not Katrina.
Still though, what a mess. Every time I think I can't hate the government more...
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On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis. In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.
I’m mostly with the steelman here. People who don’t know what they’re doing wandering about a disaster area are more likely to create situations where they need rescue than to do substantial good — unless they have enough knowledge to know what they’re doing. A bunch of rednecks coming in and sawing through things or chopping down trees or whatever might well injure people or need rescue themselves. Disaster areas tend to be dangerous and the dangers aren’t always obvious. Taking your John boat over downed power lines is pretty dangerous. So the government probably is turning people away because they don’t want to rescue the redneck brigades who have no experience rescuing people.
It's always extremely easy to be intellectually lazy and unconsciously fall victim to propaganda. Britain and the US invented the modern public relations and propaganda industry and have been very successful at convincing the average person who had never even heard of places like Donetsk and Luhansk up until a few years ago, that they're on the right side of an issue they know nothing about.
I remember awhile ago getting into a debate with someone in the /r/geopolitics subreddit, who literally said to me that if Russia only spent more money on it's domestic social programs to take care of its people, NATO wouldn't expand into Ukraine. And that is not hyperbole. This is the quality and caliber of the average person who takes great pride in having very strong opinions about something they know absolutely nothing about. Americans in general are not very good when it comes to putting themselves in the shoes of other people, and when you combine that with someone who mistakes the philosophy subreddit for the geopolitics one when it comes to understanding international affairs, riding a bike on the highway isn't your only problem when you're also going the wrong direction.
If you don't understand what's really going on, then you can't even represent the other accurately enough to have a sensible disagreement with it.
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Are you even dismissing the right hypothesis?
No, seriously. I think you mis-read what was claimed, and projected previous / other experiences onto it. The hypothesis is not that 'the coverage is the result of Russian trolls.' The hypothesis is 'no matter what happens, there will be Russian trolls trying to make it worse.' Whether the Russian trolls succeed in significantly shaping the conversation, or originated the talking points, or are fallaciously conflated with legitimate grievance is irrelevant to a characterization of their (a) existence and (b) attempts.
If you want to dismiss that, sure, but you haven't actually provided a grounds of disputing either supporting point. Which do you find non-sensible- that Russian troll farms like the Internet Research Agency exist?
Very directly- what do you think the Russians use the Internet Research Agency for? Not how influential it is, not whether it's fair to tar Americans with guilt by association. What do you think the Russian IRA does, and why?
What does 'traced back' even mean in this context? If you mean 'originated with,' one of the more famous was the Colombian Chemicals Plant Hoax in 2014, and more recently the 2021 the pre-Ukraine War propaganda justification/narrative blitz, which included claims of genocide of Russian-speakers to justify Russian intervention.
But if 'traced back' means 'shaped / signal boosted,' which is the claimed level involvement here, then by definition any Russian social media coverage of any topic counts, especially since you said 'for the government or not.' Unless you intend to argue that the Russians don't use social media...?
I personally find the "Russian trolls" narratives to be really frustrating because, whether or not the subject actually originated, or even was just amplified by them, the discussion tends to devolve into Westerners (Americans) accusing each other of being Russian trolls. Which is itself a loss in social trust "making it worse" in ways far beyond what the Russians would have been able to do themselves. Bickering about Russian trolls is, in itself, a victory for those trolls! The long-running inquisition into the Russian activities in the 2016 election seems to me to have been far more damaging to American institutions than anything the Russians themselves directly did.
Which isn't to say that they don't exist -- they do -- but most coverage I see of the issue seems, at best, counterproductive.
I'd fully agree on grounds of counter-productive and social trust loss, and I've had similar thoughts for some time. Even here, the point of the original raising of it was an example of an actor that would be present rather than a claim that the actor was responsible, but not being clear enough about that clearly triggered the (justified!) argument-immune system response for some.
Which I think has been more than interesting enough to leave the original lack of clarity in, but I truly do sympathize for those who thought I was implying something I didn't intend to.
In the spirit of an apology- and to maybe remind myself to write on effort post on it later- here's a pretty interesting article from Foreign Affairs last week on how Russian influencer-networks like the Social Design Agency are inflating their roles.
This has some interesting (and effort-post worthy) implications for what it means for western discourse on Russian troll farms, as it can mean that Western leaders are truthfully conveying key points from actual intelligence reporting that accurately characterizes the intent of legitimate Russian influence efforts. It is both a potential example of the limits of deductive reasoning (where all premise must be true, but here the chain of links can be compromised by self-aggrandization), but also in characterizing the head-space of leaders who see these reports of 'we're going to mess with the Americans with lies', try to tell the public of these things, and are... discounted and dismissed by people who then also repeat themese these actors say they're going to boost.
There's more steps than that- the conflation of false and true signal boosting, the role of lack of social credibility, the motivated reasoning to believe the negative effects are the result of a malefactor taking credit for achieving them- but just as intellectual empathy requires understanding why some people can doubt elites for reasonable reasons, the same standard can understand that elites can have their own reasonable reasons to believe things others may dismiss as mere partisan motivation.
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Just for your understanding, this is exactly the danger of the Russian style of disinformation. It is decentralized and not tied to any particular narrative or to truth in general. The agents will amplify both true and false stories with impunity. This is because the stated goal of the Russian propaganda machine in the West is not, for example, 'make Russia look good' or 'show hypocrisy in Western countries'. The essential goal is to create division in Western societies over the long term by degrading trust in institutions, information sources, and each other.
So yes, in this case Russian disinformation may be amplifying actual government failures. In other cases it may be making things up wholesale. The point is to be aware that there are malign agents (and not just Russians) whose purpose is to turn this into a political or cultural battle rather than giving a clear picture of reality, and then factor that in to our assessment of the situation.
This is an unfalsifiable theory. If there is Russian interference, hey, wow, I was right. If there's not, well, whatever, I was just being careful, and it's always good to be careful.
Russian social media campaigns being in any way influential is extremely implausible. Whatever they might be spending would be a drop in the bucket relative to what Americans spend on social media all the time. That has been the case every time a number is attached to whatever Russia is supposedly spending.
Did he claim they were influential, or was he claiming a style?
If he's claiming a style, then that would actually be falsifiable, by establishing a different style is what is actually pursued.
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How are you defining "disinformation" in this context? That Russia has a project to subvert the liberal international order that the US has ran since the post-war period? They openly admit that all the time and have made formal declarations admitting as much. So presumably anybody who advances a different narrative through their own perception of events isn't pushing disinformation, unless you're setting the bar extremely low.
If Russia is this nebulous disinformation fountainhead that some people seem think it is, then their actions prove that they're incredibly bad at it. What Russia 'has' been successful in doing is a form of national rebranding and international marketing to try and attract disaffected people in their own nations to join them. And why would such a measure be aimed at such an end? Because most of the fractious disunity in western nations has come by their own hand. The progressive left in this country has done more harm and inflicted more damage upon itself than Vladimir Putin or Osama bin Laden ever have.
Why shouldn't the bar be that low for the way flailingace is using it?
Even selectively signal-boosting true-but-non-representative things can have an effect of misleading an audience. This very thread is based on someone taking something that has happened (an accusation of pushback against people wanting to help) in a way that generates outrage (FEMA is deliberately witholding help, partisan motivation?) that plausibly wouldn't exist with other potentially relevant context (the government has an interest in managing airspace, which appears to be the form of pushback being alluded to).
Nothing in it is false, but it's not information structured for building objective understanding either. It is an oppositional / antagonist information presentation, and one that- if done deliberately- can be information to promote discord rather than discourse.
flailingace's position, as I understand it, isn't that it's disinformation on the basis of truth / not truth, or 'their own' narrative, but the intended result of why the information is being presented.
Okay, I don't even disagree with you, but how does this relate to flailaingace's position?
This is a counter-argument of relative effectiveness, of relative harm done, but flailingace wasn't making an argument of relative harm / culpability / etc. Flailingace is making a point that russia will attempt to promote discord, to a person who has dismissed russian trolls as a reasonable hypothesis, to another post that also does not rest on relative effectiveness.
Remember that this branch of the conversation itself started over someone saying they felt there was a bit of an effort to manufacture an issue. Not that the issue was entirely manufactured, or that the dominant cause or concerns were manufactured.
You can personally set the bar wherever you want. But in that case, I'm struggling to understand why people say this like it's some kind of surprise. What am I supposed to be made to think or feel upon hearing that?
Well put it this way then. Anyone who would want to hold Russia or anyone else for that matter guilty of disinformation and not the media complex in the west which IMO is far worse by comparison, has a very hard sell to convince me of some kind of moral indictment, because anyone who wouldn't also hang the whole of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and everyone else from lampposts outside their headquarters for also being guilty of disinformation, is just being a partisan hack.
And RussiaToday can also make similar claims in some of their reports as well as far as exposing disinformation. So what? Are people calling for them to be restored to YouTube now on grounds of their occasional fairness?
Meaning what? If they're doing it for a good cause or something they agree with then its okay then?
That yourself and others should think on what you are feeling, and why, before you act upon what you are feeling, in case someone is trying to deceptively manipulate your feelings to cause you to act in their interests rather than yours.
That the lesson may be unnecessary to you personally does not mean the lesson is not needed for other people. Some people may not recognize that they are being targetted for manipulation. Others may dismiss the existence of relevant actors to focus on other grievances.
Noted, but where do you get the belief that flailingace or myself wouldn't agree that those aren't also disinformation actors?
Granted, I don't believe in hanging disinformation actors in general, so I suppose I fail that purity test if that's the standard you want to make.
So you should consider what, how, and why RT chooses to cover what it covering in the way it does before taking what it says as substantially true, the same as you should have bounded skepticism of any source...
...but also that you should recognize that RT, and countless actors like it, will continue to try and execute their motives in any given case, regardless of how much traction they have in general...
...so that if you start getting a suspicion that your intake of social media on something feels like it's being manipulated to try and encourage an impression, you're not being crazy, you are having a reasonable grounds of wanting to think more critically before you decide how to feel.
And, by extension, so are other people.
Yes, and why would you think there aren't any? The topic has died away from public awareness with time and distance, but there were and still are people who would agree that banning RT from youtube was bad on various grounds.
One of the general reasons for maximal free speech stances is that even malefactors can bring up good points and challenge/compel better actors to clean themselves up in ways they wouldn't if the 'better' people could exclude them from the public stage, and that it's easier to hone the counter-arguments / strengthen your own when you can openly engage them.
Even completely unfair media actors have their defenders on why they should be allowed to have a public position. For example, North Korea is one of the extreme examples of 'bad media actor,' but it's youtube presence was (and, to a lesser degree, still is) a resource for researchers trying to understand.
And this doesn't even touch on grounds of national interest, ideology, or various forms of strategy. Russia took a decent black eye in the early Ukraine War when several hosts who had previously been taking the party line that the warnings of invasion were an American russophobic hoax publicly quit / were fired in objection. It was a self-harm / 'even their own propagandists couldn't support it' that could not have discredited the pro-Russian factions in various western governments had RT been restricted from that sort of public awareness earlier.
Less 'okay' and more of 'categorical difference in actor intent.'
Let's stick to 'just' true things, as in someone who never tells a direct falsehood.
If someone says true things because they value truth as an abstract concept in and of itself, we call them a truth-seeker and can recognize their errors may be out of ignorance but not deliberate distortion of context.
If someone says true things because they dislike deception even when it would benefit them, we call them honest, and can take them at their word. Their word may be limited, and unllike the truth seeker they may not be interested in actively establishing context and understanding, but they can be trusted within the bounds of that.
If someone would say true things but only selectively and with the intent to ruin others relationships, we would call them a manipulator, and recognize that they deserve extra scrutiny. Because their intent is what determines what they say and why, it behooves an audience to consider if there is additional context, missing information, or other truths that simply aren't being provided before believing what the manipulator tries to lead us to feel.
And this is before outright lies and other forms of dishonesty are included. A truth-seeker may have a motivated interest in what they focus on and find, an honest person may selectively try to avoid being questioned in certain ways to let a misunderstanding continue, but a manipulator who doesn't limit themselves to just truths can do even more to meet their interest.
Intent matters, and as such recognizing who's intent for what is a relevant piece of meta-context. 'Disinformation' may be an abused term, but 'Russian disinformation' is as good enough term as any other for characterizing a system intent by a coherent actor for information that is ambivalent about truth/accuracy but which is systemically proferred to try and shape public discourse in ways hoped to be systemically detrimental to the national target. This is a categorically different intent of, say, 'Partisan disinformation'- which wants what is bad for the opposition but good for the party- or 'ideological disinformation'- which wants what is good for cause and willing to tear down the obstacles.
You may feel the impact is grossly overestimated- and not only would I agree, but there was a very recent article last week pointing out a Russian incentive to overestimate their own impact which has interesting implications for if western leaders are accurately reflecting western intelligence accurately reporting on Russian self-assessments that are themselves incorrect for reasons of self-interested motivated reasoning- but again, what you are responding to isn't about 'relative' impact.
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Show me a person of influence who made this case when the George Floyd video dropped.
I do not believe anything the Russians could ever say or do could hold even a flickering candle to the gigaton flare generated by the actual words and deeds of genuine Americans.
I think I may have encountered a Russian troll. Specifically, this guy. He went into a bunch of WP articles about US surveillance, ruining them, and when I noticed the pattern and alerted WP he made a few ominous-but-vague threats and then vanished.
At the time I thought he was simply an NSA/CIA agent, but in retrospect I think that's unlikely. He was very sloppy, copypasting entire sections of NSA propaganda into Wikipedia without even changing the "we"s to "they"s, and my read on the Five Eyes is that they're usually slicker than that; a real NSA/CIA agent would also have no motivation to make vague public threats and then disappear, rather than simply ghosting straight away or picking up the phone to threaten someone for real. And if he wasn't a Five Eyes spook, he was somebody pretending to be one, presumably someone intending to get caught in order to frame them for vandalising Wikipedia. Could be a random lunatic, I suppose, but the people with a logical motive to do that are strategic adversaries of the USA, and my read based on PRC external propaganda and the Sam Dastyari fiasco is that 4D-chess shenanigans like this aren't their style. I suppose I'll never know, particularly since I've left Wikipedia.
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Sure, I think this is a healthy perspective. But Russia, and China, trying to sow discord is an argument some make:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/01/russia-and-china-target-us-protests-on-social-media-294315
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19401612221082052
Computer, enhance:
Wow, foreign infiltrators tweeted a thousand times! That's a lot of tweets.
Come on, there is no evidence that these campaigns are barely statistically significant. I know guys who put out that many tweets in a week.
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The government or at least substantial parts of it wanted the BLM protests. They aren’t going to call it trolling.
But again, very little of the stuff named Russian Trolls can actually be traced to Russia in any way whatsoever. They can’t find Russians behind the Laptop, election fraud, UAPs, or Q. They can’t because it’s not Russia.
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The person you responded to is filtered.
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I don't see any particular reason both can't be true.
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The problem with FEMA stopping other people from helping is that FEMA cannot help everyone. They are only able to help those reachable by road. FEMA sets up in major hubs in areas their trucks can reach and expects people to reach them. https://x.com/glennbeck/status/1842293685834416174
National guard can do search and rescue, but they don't have many helicopters. Civilian helicopters outnumber them by an order of magnitude and are flying a lot of the aid. https://instagram.com/reel/DArJyuevDTK/
https://www.facebook.com/p/Hurricane-Helene-Airlift-Relief-61566554308647/?wtsid=rdr_0LYxi1KBGzv4lEjYR
The federal government might be employing a strategy that saves the most lives in a major costal city. It might not do so well here.
If they are confiscating resources from private charities that are air dropping resources to those who need them, this is a death sentence for those who cannot be reached by road for weeks.
Airborne corps of the US army is based just a few hundred km away, at Ft.Bragg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVIII_Airborne_Corps#Structure
Might be something of a paper formation but they should still have a serious amount of helicopters and trained people.
You're probably thinking of the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB), which has one battalion of Blackhawks (1-rotor lift) and one aviation battalion of Chinooks (2-rotor).
(Disclaimer: This is not a counter-argument, but raising some factors you or others may not be aware of.)
There's some policy issues at hand. 18th Airborne Corps is Federal Army, not National Guard. Part of the implications there is not only different authorities to provide support (the US Federal Army has significant limitations on domestic activities following Cold War issues / concerns). This isn't insurmountable, but other policies that matter include aircraft protection. The same storm to cause damage would also have justified flying aircraft out of the storm's path, and thus creating a return-delay, a sufficiently bad storm may have compromised local airfields (such as by flooding fuel reserves), the best airfields and the place where the best supplies may be significantly distant), etc. Even if you were to use those aircraft, that'd probably also contribute to the 'no one else fly where we are' issue that could contribute to a blockage, since military aviators are far more concerned about airspace deconfliction in general (since a lack of it is how friendly anti-air starts shooting down more aircraft than enemy).
A separate issue would be if they were uncommitted and thus available for use in the first place.
82nd CAB is supporting the 82nd Airborne Corps, which is less of a paper formation and one of the Americans' global first-responder units. For example, the 82nd was the American unit sent to secure the inside of Kabul Airport during the final month in Kabul. This doesn't include the regular deployment cycles. Where the forces go or are staged to go, the helicopters are meant to follow.
The so-what there is that since the 82nd's job is to basically be on a plane anywhere to the world on a phone call, if you take the ready forces away from that for natural disaster relief you're taking away a national response force for a period of days to weeks (because after doing the operations the aircraft will need to be returned, inspected/maintained after unusual utilization in more limited contexts, etc.). And given the real-world crisis hotspots like what's going on in the middle east, even if helicopters are around the area it may take an exceptionally important phone call to permit their use.
None of that says that they shouldn't be used, or couldn't be used, but there may be far fewer of them both literally and practically available than you'd think.
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I should restate, National Guard isn't sending lots of helicopters. Outside states are sending 1-3, North Carolina has 7 deployed: https://abc11.com/post/national-guard-appreciative-helene-recovery-help-fort-liberty/15390130/. Is it enough?
So 26 helicopters, compared to the hundreds being provided by charities like Operation Air Drop, Aerial Recovery, and other private citizens.
Meanwhile, rescues performed by individuals acting on their own are being attributed to the National Guard. https://instagram.com/reel/DAl8mr-PPsH/
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Totally incredible? Like, what is the actual evidence people are giving? Here's an article quoting multiple NC state, FEMA, and federal government officials about the effort. Here is a post by an actual Asheville resident describing the scale of the federal response. The contrast is with, what, anonymous sources "on the ground"?
I find it interesting, reading the first article, that it decries "right-wing influencers" saying that FEMA is denying other rescue teams access, but the article does not actually say that this isn't true.
I got an email from my (not at all right wing) employer noting that when some employees in the area needed rescue, we had to hire a FEMA-certified contractor to get them out. I think not only is FEMA (with local officials doing the actual enforcement, usually) denying other rescue teams access, but this is their standard operating procedure. They're the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Federal Emergency Relief Agency.
And as @Goodguy and @MaiqTheTrue noted, there are understandable and possibly-valid reasons for that.
But I felt that @Gillitrut might have needed the pointer on the "is this actually happening Y/N" question.
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It would be very Seeing Like a State for government agencies to dump a shitload of assets and supplies in the major regional cities with no real plan to get aid to the isolated residents in the mountains whose roads have been washed out.
FEMA in Asheville doesn't nessesarily mean FEMA in wherever the hell this is.
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I expect that Ashville, which has a working road into it, would see the most support from FEMA and will be the happiest with how aid goes. This does not mean that everyone who lives in a town with less than 10,000 people is receiving adequate aid.
The people who would have the most to complain about are the ones without power, gas, internet, water, or a road to anywhere.
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What’s annoying is the concept that FEMA saying “we are doing great” is also taken is settling the matter. They are a motivated party. Similarly you wouldn’t expect state officials to criticize the people whose help they need.
What we really need is an honest independent media but we don’t have that.
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Yes, the normal stupidity of bureaucracy.
But Secretary Buttigieg reacted to Elon Musk!
https://x.com/SecretaryPete/status/1842271678274928964
Musk reacted first aggressively, but after the call conciliatory:
Maybe he overreacted? Let’s see what he posts tomorrow.
But I think “legitimate” could be a key word here. It is an emergency, business as usual shouldn’t apply, and they shouldn’t restrict the airspace in any way. It is not like aircraft/helicopters pilots are blind, they are not crashing into each other easily.
Edit:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1842352252922843403
I think we need subject-mater expertise here. How is airspace usually regulated? What would happen if all restrictions were lifted? How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?
I'm sure FEMA considers Starlink to be low-priority compared to food, water, gas, etc. It's plausible that SpaceX flying wildcat deliveries of Starlink is net-negative to the relief efforts, but I would like to know why specifically they think that.
EDIT: Per CNN's Pete Muntean, "an unprecedented number of airplanes, helicopters, and drones swooping in to help with Hurricane Helene recovery efforts are now posing a safety hazard. There were 30 near-mid-air collisions last Saturday, a federal source tells me." I guess that's the official line. No idea if it's accurate or not.
I am not a pilot, but a rough overview...
Normal operations fall under various types of airspace classifications: Class A (18000-60000 foot above sea level), Class B - D (funnels of airspace near various sizes of towered airports), Class E (between 1200 foot above ground level and 18000 foot above sea level, with some exceptions not relevant here, and above 60,000 foot above sea level), and Class G or unclassed airspace (generally under 1200 foot above ground level, with some exceptions).
Class A-D, you are under the direct control of a towered airport or other air traffic controller, rarely more than one. Class E means you can be under air traffic control for instrument flight rules, or you can operate in visual flight rules and you're allowed to fly whatever without radio traffic (though insurance companies will frown on this). Class E airspace over 10000 foot above sea level requires ADS-B out, and in practice it's pretty hard to operate without it, but people do still run below without ADS-B out.
Rules for drones are complicated, and a lot of the whole mess about Class G is the FAA trying to control where they can go and when.
Then you have various special airspaces, geographically (and sometimes temporally) specific stuff, with various constraints on entry. Restricted areas (and warning areas) have dangerous exercises going on at some times: you're pretty much never allowed in them when active unless you're working with the US military, and going in can get you in trouble with the feds in a way that results in pulling your pilot's license. Prohibited areas are like that, but they're always active, and you'll probably go to jail if you break one. MOAs are in the same realm, but it's not technically illegal to enter while flying visual flight rules, just a really bad idea.
Then you have Special Air Traffic Rules and Special Flight Rules Areas. These are all unique one-offs with their own special constraints, which can be as minor as having to call someone ahead of time before flying certain altitudes or locations, or as serious as needing a police officer with a loaded gun pointed at your pilot while you fly (the DC SFRA is a mess). Busting these can and does result in a military response: I know a pilot who's gotten the nickname 'takedown' because the SATR contact actually lost his tail number, and he ended up pulled over by a Blackhack and sprawled onto the tarmac.
Lastly, you have Temporary Flight Restrictions. These are issued rules for temporary limits in an area. They're fairly common and can happen for ground events (every Presidential visit, and even major sports games will have its own NOTAM), or they can happen because of high disaster response. Some TFRs are blanket prohibitions (you are not flying at low altitude near the President), but others will simply require calling ahead, and others still will restrict flights to certain groups.
In this case, there are very clearly TFRs specific to several disaster areas,
All restrictions being lifted wouldn't happen. The FAA would spontaneously explode if you even considered touching most MOAs, Class A-C airspace is genuinely like that for a reason, and the SATRs are statutory. But most air space in the mountains are Class E and Class G. They're not outside of FAA control, but you can normally wildcat all you want in them.
There might be a slightly increased risk of midair collision, and those do happen, both drone-aircraft and aircraft-aircraft. Crowded areas with unprofessional pilots are especially dangerous, and there was a recent Oshkosh incident that's made it more prevalent in a lot of minds. On the gripping hand, a lot of the FAA's concern on drones, the FAA vastly overstates a lot of the risk for unintentional incidents. You just shouldn't be that low in a fixed-wing aircraft unless you're about to land, and helicopters aren't doing the sort of movement that makes a drone-on-fixed-wing aircraft collision so dangerous.
((And also shouldn't be flying that low, although many helicopter pilots are daredevils.))
Fixed-wing on fixed-wing, near misses are more common than I'd like. ADS-B gives more warning if it's equipped, but especially near busy airports you also get a ton of false positives (from aircraft on ground), and outside of ADS-B you're dependent on the human eyeball to spot a thirty-foot object that might be closing distance at >200 knots combined speed, while you're in a vehicle with giant blind spots (like 'everything above you' or 'everything below you', cfe Aeromexico 498). The claimed thirty near misses isn't as serious as it sounds -- Oshkosh doesn't even count them at this point -- but a mid-sized flight school would be very upset to see that many in a month and not happy to see that many in six months, and not ever near-miss is gonna be reported.
Fixed wing, pretty rough. The Appalachias aren't that high, so you don't have the oxygen problems that the west coast mountains do, but they're messy areas to fly in from an updraft and thermal perspective, and there's a lot of space where you don't really have any way to handle an in-flight emergency. That's not helped by the lack of serious airports around and the roughness of terrain -- if you're not at 10k ASL, for a lot of western North Carolina your emergency response is gonna be to kiss your ass goodbye.
Helicopters have it a little better, but they tradeoff easier landing against much lower sustain.
Thank you for taking the time to describe all that!
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There was probably some thing that happened that one time and there was an accident and then a rule for made.
Mid-air collisions happen more often than you might expect given the size of, well, the atmosphere even in spots that aren't busy disaster zones. There was one just a few weeks ago in Nevada in clear weather, and there have been several over the years in tourist flight hotspots like Alaska. The automated systems (TCAS) are getting better, but still aren't going to prevent everything.
Although in this case, I think we should, as a society, consider that reducing safety standards (in a limited capacity) is an acceptable risk in response to the much more imminent risk to life and limb. I'm not sure exactly what my judgement would be in this case.
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Dead Republicans don't vote... at best. Most of the counties effected went 60% for Trump. In North Carolina, about 1 million voters out of the 6 million in the state have been impacted.
All the same, what we are seeing here is just the same passive aggressive indifference to the lives of people who vote wrong that the secret service showed towards Trump in Butler PA. It's the same attitude you Longshorman's Union Head mentioned if they force the Longshoremen to work. "We were moving 60 an hour, now we're moving 8." You can't force these organizations to save people they hate and want dead.
I don't think the numbers work out. One dead republican is very unlikely to move the result of a state election, you would probably require a few thousands at least.
However, having a few thousand citizens die due to your negligence will have political ramifications (unless you are the FDA and its red tape) orders of magnitude more significant than the missing votes of the dead people.
The US is politically divided, but neither the median Trump nor Harris voter would say that it would be a good thing if all the voters for the other party dropped dead. There are plenty of centrist Americans who would not think "they let all the rednecks starve to secure the election, that is clever" but "they let uncle Billy die, how could they!"
Big disasters are great opportunities for state capability to be seen as an unambiguous force of good. People normally don't like their governments much, but a competent disaster response can turn this around for a while.
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