Politico: How Trump Changed After Charlottesville

Nobody understands the attention economy better than President Donald Trump. Whenever he slips from his coveted position as Topic A in the news, or whenever the news angle of the latest reports displeases him, you can count on Trump to bludgeon his way back to control the media agenda. This time it was with a series of tweets hammering four congresswomen of color as un-American, and telling them to go back where they came from. [...]

At a Monday Cabinet meeting, Trump parried the question of whether his tweets being called racist bother him. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he said. During the week, he escalated his attacks on the Squad. And at a Wednesday evening campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., Trump tore into Rep. Omar for seven minutes, inspiring the crowd to chant, “Send her back! Send her back!” [...]

Why has Trump suddenly come to terms with his racism? It’s always a mistake to ascribe everything Trump does to forethought and calculation. He’s too impulsive for that. But we know from his Wednesday comments (made before the rally) to the Daily Mail that he’s pleased about the noise generated by his attacks. That goes a long way toward explaining why he pressed the racism button all week, and it’s a strong clue that he will put his thumb on it during the campaign. “The only thing they have, that they can do is, now, play the race card,” Trump said, turning the race onus back on the Squad. “Which they’ve always done.” Omar probably delighted Trump on Thursday when she told Washington reporters that he was a “fascist.” Set your watch for his return fire.

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The Guardian: Is FaceApp an evil plot by 'the Russians' to steal your data? Not quite

Concern escalated further when people started to point out that FaceApp is Russian. “The app that you’re willingly giving all your facial data to says the company’s location is in Saint-Petersburg, Russia,” tweeted the New York Times’s Charlie Warzel. And we all know what those Russians are like, don’t we? They want to harvest your data for nefarious purposes. Unlike American techies, of course. Who are always deeply respectful when it comes to personal data, and only use your private information to make the world a better, more connected, place.

By Wednesday things had calmed down a little bit. A French security researcher who uses the pseudonym Elliot Alderson ran a check on the app and found it was not actually uploading your entire camera roll – just the photo you were modifying. Which is what you’d expect from an app like that. Speaking to me over the phone, Alderson said he also couldn’t find any evidence it was stealing all your data; it was just getting your device ID and your device model. Which, again, is pretty much to be expected. The reason the app was causing such a fuss, Alderson hypothesized, was because of fears about Russia. [...]

In May Google researchers also disclosed that they had used 2,000 YouTube videos of people doing the mannequin challenge (the viral challenge where you stay still) to help train an AI model on predicting the depth of a moving object in a video. The researchers also released their data set for future research, meaning there’s no saying how that data will be used in the future. That video you made as a joke might be helping to train anything from a self-driving car to a killer drone.

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The Guardian: The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires

Barely has the fire been put out before some of the richest people in France rush to help rebuild it. From François-Henri Pinault, the ultimate owner of Gucci, comes €100m (£90m). Not to be outdone, the Arnault family at Louis Vuitton put up €200m. More of the wealthy join the bidding, as if a Damien Hirst is going under the hammer. Within just three days, France’s billionaire class has coughed up nearly €600m. Or so their press releases state.

A few folk question this very public display of plutocratic piety, but we are of course professional malcontents. Some of Paris’s 3,600 rough sleepers protest at how so many euros can be found for a new cathedral roof yet not a cent to put a roof over their heads – still, what do the poor know of the sublime? From all other seats, the applause is deafening. “Billionaires can sometimes come in really handy,” remarks the editor of Moneyweek. “Everybody is at our bedside,” says French TV celeb Stéphane Bern. Flush with cash, French president Emmanuel Macron vows the gothic masterpiece will be rebuilt within five years. Front pages scored, studio hours filled, the world moves on. You almost certainly haven’t heard the rest of the story – yet you should, because it comes with one hell of a twist. [...]

Advertisement Whether in France or Britain or the US, the rich give money to the grand institutions at the heart of our cultures to secure their social status in plaques and photo opportunities. In much the same way, they fund our political parties, then enjoy the kickbacks when they form a government. As Julia Cagé, an economist at Paris’s SciencesPo, points out, some of the same people pledging donations to Notre Dame were also among those who funded Macron’s rise to the presidency. In her recent award-winning book, to be published in English next year as The Price of Democracy, Cagé calculates that 600 wealthy people in France gave between €3m and €4.5m to Macron’s election campaign. In other words, 2% of all donors made up between 40 % and 60% of all En Marche funding. Within a few months, the new president cut taxes on the wealthy, giving his richest donors “a return of nearly 60,000% on their investment”. Just as with Notre Dame – a tiny deposit, a lot of influence and one hell of a payout.

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Politico: Trump’s better deal with Iran looks a lot like Obama’s

At times, analysts and former officials say, it sounds like Trump wants to strike a deal that essentially mirrors the agreement that his White House predecessor inked — even if he’d never be willing to admit it. Iranian officials seem willing to egg him on, saying they’ll talk so long as Trump lifts the sanctions he’s imposed on them and returns to the 2015 Iran deal. And as European ministers warn that the existing deal is nearly extinct, Trump may feel like he is backed into a corner and running out of options. [...]

He’s said he’s “not looking for war,” wants to talk to Iran without preconditions and isn’t interested in regime change. He called off a military strike on Iran over its downing of an unmanned U.S. drone, overriding the advice of several top aides. His main public demand is that Iran not build nuclear weapons. In return, Trump has offered to help revive Iran’s sanctions-battered economy. [...]

Several European officials express astonishment at the audacity of the Trump administration demanding that Iran adhere to the deal when the U.S. the one who breached the agreement in the first place. Some said they were not surprised that Iran may have taken actions in the Persian Gulf as payback for the U.S. abandonment of the deal. 

Europeans “know that the original sin causing the current escalation in the Gulf is the U.S. violation of the Iran nuclear deal,” said Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. “At the same time, they are terribly concerned about the escalation and the threat it poses to the Middle East and to Europe itself.” [...]

Perhaps sensing this, Trump on Tuesday went out of his way to note that he didn’t want to oust the government in Tehran. “We're not looking, by the way, for regime change because some people say [we are] looking for regime change,” he said. “We're not looking for regime change.”

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UnHerd: Who’s afraid of the feminists?

The actual polling is not online, for some reason, but it’s been covered in the press and the charity sent me their report. It finds that significant percentages of every age group, including 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds, agrees that feminism makes some men feel marginalised. More men (42%) than women agreed, but a quarter of women did too. The charity themselves described it as “staggering”, and linked it to far-right YouTubers.

You might find it surprising, given that – on gender equality, as with almost all measures of social attitudes – Britain has, for decades, been getting more liberal. The 2018 British Social Attitudes survey shows that, in 1984, 43% agreed and just 37% disagreed with the statement “a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”. By 2017, those numbers had changed to 8% and 72% respectively. Shifts towards more liberal, feminist attitudes are seen in all groups – older, younger, male, female. Sometimes men have more “feminist” attitudes than women: for instance, men are more likely than women to say that it is “always” or “usually” wrong for men to comment on women’s appearance in the street. [...]

So how does that fit with the idea that a third of the population thinks that feminism is making men feel demonised? Well: easily, I’d say. That Survation/Fawcett Society poll – which, remember, found that 83% of people support “equality of opportunity for women”, surely the key goal of feminism – found that just 7% of people “describe themselves” as feminist. The 2015 YouGov poll found a higher number, 31%, who would “consider” themselves a feminist, but it’s still a definite minority. Another YouGov one in 2018 found 26%. [...]

My own suspicion, for what it’s worth, is that while “gender equality” is an ideal that is easy to get behind, “feminism” is a label that is attached to specific, identifiable people. And, because any large group of people contains at least some who are stupid and/or unpleasant, some prominent people to whom the label “feminist” is regularly attached will be stupid and/or unpleasant. One hates to call out individuals in this situation, although I will link to this with no further comment.

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