DARVO is an acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse, Victim and Offender. It is a defense mechanism used by manipulators to evade accountability for the abuse they inflict on others. It is a blame-shifting tactic used for gaslighting in the context of emotional abuse. [snip]

The cognitive distortions created by DARVO cultivate an ecosystem of moral corruption. Members of the peer group are encouraged by the narcissist to engage in polarized or black and white thinking.

The group’s empathy for the narcissist is weaponized and used to encourage negative biases about the recipient of the abuse. Narcissists, psychopaths and other manipulators do this in order to ensure that members of the dominant clique become indifferent and callous about the betrayal of the survivor.

The desensitization of the group opens the door to the objectification of the targeted individual and once this is accomplished every kind of violence becomes acceptable.

Examples of this can be seen in manifestations of anti-semitism, racism, sexism and homophobia.

The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts.

One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act. While their action may have been statistically predictable (e.g. "given the provocation, someone will probably do such-and-such" ), the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."

The lone wolf who was the "missile" gets captured and sentenced to life in prison, while the stochastic terrorist keeps his prime time slot and goes on to incite more lone wolves.

I’ve reported on the WaPo story on the security review of the disk drive commonly referred to as the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” a bunch of times.

But in advance of ripping apart this James Comer fan-fiction about Hunter Biden and before the Twitter thread I did disappears into the Elmo dumpster fire, I wanted to repeat it here. The WaPo asked security experts Matt Green (who worked with his Johns Hopkins students) and Jake Williams to review the drive to see what they could authenticate.

They discovered that people had kept adding content to the “laptop,” making it impossible to say what was on the “laptop” when it was provided to the blind computer repairman. [snip]

Still more important: some of the forensic data that would be necessary to authenticate the drive itself had been deleted.

CONTENTS
How to join Mastodon
How to find and follow other users on Mastodon
How to find your Twitter contacts on Mastodon
How to use Debirdify to find Twitter users on Mastodon
How to import Twitter contacts to Mastodon

Tips and advice for getting started with Mastodon. Especially if you're used to Twitter.

This is for people who now have Mastodon accounts and have poked around a bit, but are still a bit confused about the whole experience.

NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks with Bloomberg Law's Madison Alder about a push by congressional Democrats to establish a formal code of ethics for the U.S. Supreme Court. [snip]

MCCAMMON: First, many of our listeners may be surprised to learn that the Supreme Court is not subject to a code of ethics. How does the court currently operate? Do justices have any official rules that they're accountable to?

ALDER: The justices aren't bound by the same code of conduct that lower court judges are bound by. But they aren't really allowed to act unethically. There is a statute that requires any justice or judge or magistrate to decline to hear cases where their impartiality might be questioned. But other than that, the justices don't have those same code of conduct rules that lower court judges have. The court does say that they reference those code of conduct rules, but they are not bound by them in the same manner. [more]

New AFJ report outlines the consequences of having no code of ethics that applies to the justices of the Supreme Court.

Five of the conservative justices have run afoul of the ethics code that applies to all lower court judges.

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 28, 2022 – Today Alliance for Justice announced the release of a new special report entitled Accountable To None: The Urgent Need for Supreme Court Ethics Reforms, an essential cataloguing of ethical violations by current Supreme Court justices. There can be no accountability for these violations, however, because the Code of Conduct for lower-court judges is considered mere “guidance” for the justices, who are not required to actually follow its Five Canons.

“Time and time again, we’ve seen the conservative justices skirt their ethical obligations in favor of their political biases,” said Rakim H.D. Brooks, president of Alliance for Justice. “With their credibility at an all-time low, these justices are further undermining their ability to serve as fair arbiters of the law.”

The Supreme Court, however, has so far refused to adopt an ethics code. The justices may consult the code in effect for all other federal judges, but they need not do so, and the choices they make are their own. What requirements they do apparently impose on their workforce, such as a duty of confidentiality, they do not make public. President Joe Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States noted in its final report that “most public and private entities have adopted Codes of Conduct for their organizations and employees,” and that “it is not obvious why the Court is best served by an exemption from what so many consider best practice.” (I was a co-chair of that commission, but the views here are mine alone.)

How Antonin Scalia's death (and life) exposed cracks in our so-called democratic system

This is a story I wrote for the Village Voice in March of 2016, when Donald Trump was still a running joke on late-night television and our so-called democratic system had yet to suffer the possibly fatal insult of Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented refusal to even hold a hearing for Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to replace Justice Scalia, who had died of a heart attack just two weeks before the piece was published. With the Supreme Court’s hearing of the affirmative action case yesterday, something for which I’m certain Scalia would have wished to be alive for — it is probable that Roberts would have chosen him to write the opinion sending his career-long bete noir to yet another precedent-ending grave — I thought the piece worth reprinting here. [snip]

Scalia’s benefactors were doubtlessly pleased by his career on the Court, but they sure as hell aren’t pleased with his unexpected passing. Justice All Expenses Paid heard Gabriel’s trumpet precisely one year too soon for their tastes. After all, the person tasked with appointing his successor is a black man the St. Hubertus types have no respect for and whom they do not trust; meanwhile, the person most likely to be the GOP’s nominee to replace him as president is a bloviating bivalve whom they trust and respect even less, if that’s possible.

In truth, however, they are impaled on the horns of a dilemma created nearly 250 years ago. Think about it. Practically our entire system is a series of gigantic rolls of the dice, depending on elections to fill the two main bodies through which we exercise self-governance and do stuff like nominate and confirm Supreme Court justices. And although there was a lot of high-minded speechifying and writing by the Founding Fathers about the necessity of a well-informed electorate, as we can see — daily — this concept has been completely jettisoned by at least one of our political parties. “I love the poorly educated!” burbled Trump last week. [snip]

The Republicans know there remains at least one place in our little-R republican system where scale-tipping is easy as pie. The firewall they have been working on building for about thirty years is around our third branch of government, the courts, and most importantly the Supreme Court. They have done this by appointing water carriers like Justice All Expenses Paid to do their bidding. This is why you saw the temper tantrum thrown less than an hour after Justice Scalia was pronounced dead. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s pledge that the upper chamber would not take up any nominee for the Court put forth by President Obama tells you everything you need to know about the way the Republican Party intends to deal with its inevitable demographic demise. They’re going to do what they do best: put in the fix.

Atticus West
@AtticusWest
[Headline Grades]
WaPo: A+
BuzzFeed: B
NYT: D-
CNN: F

[image text follows ]

WaPo: "Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he running again in 2024."

BuzzFeed News: "Trump says he's running for president again after lying about the 2020 election and trying to undermine democracy."

NYT: "Donald Trump announced a 2024 run for president, ignoring GOP warnings that his influence is harming the party."

CNN: "Donald Trump announces another run for the White House, aiming to become only the second president ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms."

9:34 PM · Nov 15, 2022

Some of the nation's largest retailers have been using soaring inflation rates as an excuse to raise prices and rake in billions of dollars in additional profit, a corporate watchdog group charged on Friday.

Companies such as CVS Health, Kroger and T.J. Maxx parent company TJX appear to have raised their prices unnecessarily in 2020 and 2021 at a time when Americans were dealing with the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, Accountable.US said in a new report. Instead of keeping prices stable for struggling families, corporations have overcharged Americans and prioritized profit, the group claims. [snip]

The new figures comes as companies enjoy their most profitable year since the 1950s. Pre-tax profits last year soared 25% from 2020, far outpacing the increase in consumer prices. The report highlights an ongoing debate about the causes of inflation, with some consumer advocates arguing that corporations are using inflation as a justification for passing on even higher price hikes to consumers.

Corporations and their industry groups spent big to defeat various bills to crack down on price gouging, according to a report from the Groundwork Collaborative and Public Citizen released Thursday.

Corporate interests deployed lobbyists to oppose bills taking aim at prescription drug costs, bank overdraft fees and sky-high gas prices more than 2,600 times since 2020, outnumbering the bills’ supporters 9-to-1, the progressive groups’ report found.

Opponents of those bills spent $751 million on lobbying over that period, compared to $82 million by supporters. [snip]

While economists initially rejected that idea, noting that prices are primarily driven by supply and demand, more economists are pointing to huge profits as a factor now that demand for products has slowed and supply chains have somewhat recovered in recent months.