The Armalite and the Amazon box

The Armalite and the Amazon box͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ Read about the failures of post-war gender quotas. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing… ...read about what drives refugee policy. As recent asylum applicants in the US can attest, getting governments to accept you as a refugee can seem like a roll of the dice. In a new [article]( in the journal International Interactions, however, political scientist Lamis Abdelaaty finds a certain Machiavellian logic in which refugees countries choose to accept and which ones they send away. Using refugee data from around the world, Abdelaaty shows that states draw their refugee policies from their foreign policy and their ethnic politics. Countries are much more likely to welcome refugees with whom the government feels they have an ethnic tie. Perhaps less intuitively, countries are also more likely to accept refugees from adversary governments, in hopes of weakening their regimes, but are likely to turn away refugees from friendly governments, to avoid embarrassing allies. Incarceration and COVID-19 The mass negligent homicide that is the US approach to COVID-19 in the criminal justice system continues. A new [study]( from the University of Texas finds that the pandemic has killed 231 people in Texas prisons and jails. The Texas prison system alone has recorded 23,137 cases of COVID-19, the most of any prison system in the country, including the federal system. 6% of the entire inmate population at one prison died of COVID-19, which is to say, over five months, one out of every 18 people the state of Texas had in its care there was killed by a preventable disease. 80% of the people who died of the disease in Texas jails had not been convicted of any crime, and 58% of those who died in prison were eligible for parole. No one on the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, which oversees the system, has lost their job. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Turna-trout is fair play A long-running conflict in Nova Scotia between members of the Mi’kmaq First Nation and non-Indigenous fishermen took a delicious turn last week. Canadian law, following 19th century treaties between the Mi’kmaq and the Canadian government, guarantees Mi’kmaq fishermen rights to fish in their traditional territory. Non-Indigenous fishermen, bitter that those fishing rights might infringe on their catch, had taken to attacking Indigenous lobstermen in incidents the Canadian government [called]( “unacceptable” and “racist.” Last week, the Mi’kmaq First Nations Coalition [announced]( it was buying Clearwater Seafood, the largest fishing company in Canada and the holder of the fishing licenses under which some of the non-Indigenous attackers operate. The acquisition doesn’t end the dispute, which centers a different type of fishing rights than those under which Clearwater fishes. It does, however, give the Mi’kmaq the kind of leverage they lacked when this dispute last erupted into violence. In 1999, Canadian government ships rammed Mi’kmaq fishing boats as Indigenous fishermen attempted to exercise their fishing rights. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] DEEP DIVE Disinfo Wars: Part I It’s a real epistemological mess out there. The US president is tweeting wild lies about the election, and because Twitter refuses to ban him from the platform, it’s some poor employee’s job to write little [alerts]( under his tweets saying that his claims are “disputed,” as though the truth of the matter is somehow unknowable. There has been a pervading sense within political discourse for years that this kind of rejection of settled fact is bad, but remarkably little rigorous research into the ways or extent it might be harmful. On the next two editions of Deep Dive, we’ll look at some of the work that has been done on that subject, and try to better understand the dreaded “disinformation threat.” Though he might like for you to believe otherwise, Donald Trump did not invent lying. Nor, despite concerns about election disinformation originating in Russia, did Vladimir Putin. Disinformation has been a part of regular political communication for as long as there have been politics. With that in mind, one promising way to study modern disinformation is to treat it like other forms of speech by political leaders — rhetoric that may be taken more or less seriously by voters as the result of a number of factors. That’s the approach taken by political scientists Katherine Clayton, Nicholas Davis, Brendan Nyhan, Ethan Porter, Timothy Ryan, and Thomas Wood in their new [working paper](. Their work examines the effect of Trump’s tweets about the 2020 presidential election on the attitudes of a cross-section of American voters. Clayton et al. aren’t particularly interested in the veracity of the president’s tweets. Instead, they treat the tweets as speech that matters because Trump, in his capacity as president and leader of the Republican party, sent them in an attempt to influence the political process. Their study relies on a panel survey experiment, which ran for 17 days in October, just before the 2020 election. Participants were asked for their baseline demographic data, political leanings, and views on the legitimacy of the election, and then shown a series of the president’s tweets. Some of the tweets were fairly anodyne — recognizing National Doctors Day, for example — while others were, to use a word favored by many a mealy-mouthed newspaper editor, charged. Of the more aggressive tweets, which the researchers categorized as “norm violations,” there were two types: general norm violations (“THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”) and election norm violations (“Rigged Election, and EVERYONE knows it!”). Some participants were shown just the boring tweets, while others were shown a mixture of boring and norm-violating tweets. After having seen the tweets, the respondents were again asked their views about the legitimacy of the election. Perhaps unsurprisingly, seeing the tweets had no measurable effect on population-wide attitudes about the election. Trust in the election, willingness to accept the election results, support for political violence, support for democracy — all those measures stayed put, on average, no matter what kinds of tweets people were shown. Once Clayton et al. started subdividing the data, though, things got interesting. When respondents were grouped by their approval of the job Trump has done as president, measurable effects started to appear. When people who opposed Trump saw his tweets saying that the election was fraudulent, their trust in the legitimacy of the election actually went up. When people who supported Trump saw Trump’s norm-violating tweets — either about the election or just about Adam Schiff being corrupt and “probably sick” — their trust in the election went down. The election tweets caused Trump supporters not just to doubt the legitimacy of the election, but to believe the substance of Trump’s accusations. Nearly across the board, Trump supporters who saw his election tweets were more likely to say that the election was rigged in favor of his opponents. The increased suspicion among Trump supporters did not lead to an increased taste for electoral violence. Indeed, the researchers were careful to note “we find that no evidence that support for political violence or belief in democracy changes after repeated exposure to” Trump’s id. Nevertheless, the divergent effects of the tweets suggest that elite rhetoric is capable of causing significant reductions in confidence in American democratic institutions. The researchers offered no speculation on whether Twitter’s little blue [alerts]( under Trump’s tweets served to restore that confidence. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Bianca Hillier [explored]( the possibility that countries might boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing to protest China’s repression of Uighurs and other human rights abuses. Politicians from the US, UK and Australia have expressed support for a possible boycott, but human rights organizations and athletes are still largely on the fence. It is not clear how much of a political effect a boycott would have — historically, Olympic boycotts have been useful in drawing attention to certain issues, but less effective in directly driving policy changes. Nick Turse [discussed]( the displacement crisis that will be brought on by climate change. In the last 10 years, violent conflict has forced over 100 million people to leave their homes. That number already dwarfs the 60 million who were displaced by World War II, but it will pale in comparison to the projected 900 million who will be forced to move due to climate change by 2050. Worse, climate change will compound existing displacement crises by making more land unavailable for displaced people to return to. In places like Burkina Faso, where conflict and climate change are dual stresses on civilians, the prospects that displaced people will ever be able to come home are dim indeed. Rebecca Kanthor [reported]( on the National Basketball Association’s attempts to rebuild its relationships in China a year after then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey caused a breakdown by tweeting his support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. The NBA made a special effort to reach out to and support Chinese fans during the COVID-19 outbreak there, and those efforts seem to have paid off. Chinese national TV had stopped showing NBA games, but it broadcast the last two games of the league finals. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED Ireland’s plan to become a European tech hub is really starting to pay off. A Northern Irish Amazon customer took to Twitter to ask why they couldn’t watch a rugby tournament being broadcast in the UK on their Prime account, only to be told by Amazon’s customer service — based, presumably, in Dublin — that Northern Ireland isn’t in the UK. Irish Twitter, which is undefeated, had a [field day](. For a G-rated “autogolpe” joke, click [here](. For a Critical State After Dark “autogolpe” joke, click [here](. Veteran’s Day was last week, and former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell celebrated by [shouting out]( the US military’s most infamous [war criminal](. [This]( would be sadder if he was known as Charles the literally anything else. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media. The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and GBH. With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.” Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](