Saturday, 17 May 2025

How Does Copaganda Work and Why Is It Harmful?

 “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” -  ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 

A demonstrater raises her hands in front of a line of police.

Copaganda contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.

Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. I use the term “punishment bureaucracy” instead of “criminal justice system” in this book because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law. The government determines what things are considered a “crime” subject to punishment versus what things are permitted or tolerated even if they hurt people. Then, the government determines what kinds of punishments are appropriate for the conduct it prohibits. Across history and different societies, the definition of crime and how it should be punished has varied depending on who has power and what serves their interests, not an objective evaluation of what causes harm.

The powerful define crime to suit their interests, making some things legal and others punishable. They also decide how what is criminalized gets punished. Should the government execute or cage or whip people who break a law? Should the government mandate a public apology, permit survivors to initiate restorative processes, seize assets, require volunteer work, revoke a business or driver’s license, confine someone to their home, banish them? Should society show them love and give them help? Should society instead invest more in preventing certain harms from happening in the first place?

Having defined crime and punishment, the government also determines which crimes to enforce against which people. “Law enforcement” rarely responds to most violations of the law. It only enforces some criminal laws against some people some of the time.

The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities.

These decisions, too, follow patterns of power, not safety. That is why U.S. police chose for many years to arrest more people for marijuana possession than for all “violent crime” combined. That is why police prioritize budgets for SWAT teams to search for drugs in poor communities over testing rape kits. That is why the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office responded to proposed county budget cuts by threatening to cut the divisions that handle white-collar crimes and sexual abuse. That is why about 90 percent of people prosecuted for crimes are very poor. That is why no senior figures were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crisis or the U.S. torture program after 9/11. That is why police tolerate widespread drug use in dorms at Ivy League universities. That is why most of the undercover police operations in hundreds of U.S. cities target disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant people instead of other police officers, prosecutors, real estate developers, fraternities with histories of drug distribution and rape, or corporate board rooms with histories of tax evasion, fraud, and insider trading. That is why a playground fight at a low-income school results in a child being taken away from their parents and jailed with a criminal record, while the same fight at a prep school may result in a call to parents for an early pickup that afternoon.

In an unequal society where a few have more money and power than the many, the punishment bureaucracy is a tool for preserving inequalities. It maintains the social order by using government violence to manage the unrest that comes from unfairness, desperation, and alienation, and it crushes organized opposition against the political system. These functions explain why the punishment bureaucracy expands during times of growing inequality and social agitation. Throughout history, those who are comfortable with how society looks tend to preserve and expand the punishment bureaucracy, even though—and largely because—it operates as an anti-democratic force. Those who have wanted to change certain aspects of our society—such as movements for workers, racial justice, women’s suffrage, economic equality, peace, ecological sustainability, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on—have tended throughout history to combat the size, power, and discretion of the punishment bureaucracy. Why? Because it is almost always wielded against them.

So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles.

Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat

The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined—such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies—costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time, most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure “safety” as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or robbery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclu- sively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money.

Job #2: Manufacturing Fear

The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of “crime waves” concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near-historic fifty-year lows the entire time. As a result of continual news-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling.

Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.) This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear.

Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution

The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people’s lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as “disorder” solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option.

If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, as I discuss later, greater investment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police-recorded crime. Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as “crime.”

The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.

As you read the examples collected in this book with the above three themes in mind, ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years, and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance.

Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission and please note that it is not available for re-posting elsewhere.

 

Friday, 9 May 2025

“Freedom is never willingly given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

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 The asylum seekers at the Argentine embassy in Caracas negotiated their exit.

 Tiempo Argentino: They were not extracted or escaped, as the US attempted to claim and the media repeated, but rather made a pact with the Maduro government. 

Asilados embajada de Argentina en Caracas

 The five members of the far-right group Vente Venezuela were not extracted or escaped in a James Bond-style operation, but rather negotiated their departure from the Argentine embassy residence in Caracas, where they remained for more than a year. 

 They are Claudia Macero, Pedro Urruchurtu, Magallí Meda, Humberto Villalobos, and Omar González. The five entered the embassy during Holy Week 2024 to evade an investigation by the Venezuelan prosecutor's office into a violent destabilization plan prior to last July's presidential elections. 

After those elections, Nicolás Maduro severed diplomatic relations with the government of Javier Milei, and the embassy and the asylum seekers were placed under Brazilian supervision. Since then, media outlets close to the extremist María Corina Machado and the asylum seekers themselves have routinely reported, without evidence, a siege on the residence, which the Venezuelan government has always denied. 

 For weeks, there has been talk in Caracas that the asylum seekers were seeking direct dialogue with the Minister of the Interior and second-in-command of Chavismo, Diosdado Cabello. Cabello himself hinted at this in January of this year on his weekly television program "Con el Mazo Dando." 

A source with knowledge of the case confirmed that they had all been negotiating their departure from the embassy for several months. Meanwhile, Brazilian diplomats also confirmed that negotiations had taken place, in which Itamaraty was not directly involved. 

Sources in Caracas assured Tiempo Argentino that the asylum seekers left the embassy at different times, and not as a group. They even indicated that Claudia Macero, formerly in charge of communications for María Corina Machado, had been in Buenos Aires for several weeks. 

 This contradicts the version of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who tweeted Tuesday night, just hours after a rumor circulated that the five were in the US, "following a precise operation," in military language.

  Along the same lines, the Milei government in Argentina went further and issued a statement in the same vein, welcoming the "operation that allowed the five Venezuelans who had taken refuge at the Argentine Embassy in Venezuela to be successfully extracted from Caracas and transferred to US soil." Another militarist.

 Meanwhile, the far-right leader and political leader of the asylum seekers, María Corina Machado, reposted Rubio. Four of the five "released" refugees did the same. Such caution was striking in Caracas. Hours tick by, and none of the five have made a statement or provided "proof of life" to reinforce the US official's version. It's not even known for sure where they are (we insist, several sources place at least Macero in Buenos Aires, not in the north).

 Another element that did not go unnoticed was that after Rubio's post on X, several journalists close to Machado changed their initial version and began referring to an "escape," when they had previously claimed it was a negotiation. The feverish rumors about "commando operations by foreign military personnel" to "extract" the asylum seekers also faded as the hours passed and there was no new information beyond the tweet. 

 On Wednesday morning in Caracas, several analysts asserted that Rubio's version sought to muddy the waters and distract from President Maduro's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. 

 tiempoar.com.ar ---

Tuesday, 6 May 2025

"The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man." – Thomas Jefferson

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Artificial Intelligence: Can Machines Think? 

 Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a boom, and writing about it is a particularly fraught subject. It involves systems that learn and achieve superlative levels without human intervention. In their book, *Artificial: The New Intelligence and the Contour of the Human* (2023), Argentines Mariano Sigman, a renowned neuroscientist, and Santiago Bilinkis, an economist, technologist, and science communicator, trace the origins and development of AI in great detail. According to the authors, the initiator of AI was mathematician Alan Turing, who in 1938 led a formidable team of 35 mathematicians and physicists in England to analyze the secret messages of Hitler's Nazism. After the war, Turing continued his research and, in 1948, designed the first algorithm for a machine to play chess: Turochamp. New gaming machines followed, including Go, which originated in China 2,500 years ago, for which the Deep Mind company invented the AlphaGo program (2015). This time, the machine faced Lee Se-dol, the Korean winner of eight world titles, in a match broadcast and watched by 200 million people. The machine defeated the human. In recent years, OpenAI, an organization of scientists, has emerged that has become a company dedicated to generating the most ambitious AI. To date, they have generated four versions of the so-called GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) chat. The first had 120 million parameters (2018), the second with 1.5 billion parameters from 8 million web pages (2019), the third 175 billion parameters (2021), and the fourth is estimated at 100 trillion parameters, one followed by 14 zeros (2023). In its most sophisticated versions, AI can instantly design a PowerPoint presentation simply by giving it a topic to illustrate, or create a video or an entire film. Although the Argentine authors strive to appear neutral in their book, they subtly defend AI through constant praise and accolades, which becomes explicit in a sentence on page 46 of their book: "Welcome, machines, to this privileged place that intelligence until now has only reserved for humans."

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  • "Without a free press, there can be no free society." – Benigno Aquino Jr.

This powerful AI capability has generated unimaginable problems, such as ambiguity regarding copyright. In a widely circulated manifesto on April 25, the Coalition for Legal Access to Culture accepts AI as a complementary tool, not a substitute for human creativity and human beings themselves. Now let's turn to the empirical evidence. When I asked about the world's leading political ecology authors, ChatGPT gave me seven names and Google 13. The same question, but specifically for Mexico: ChatGPT gave six names, four of which were incorrect, and Google gave five, all correct. For the field of agroecology worldwide and in Mexico, ChatGPT gave five authors, all correct, and for Mexico, six, but only two were correct, while Google gave six and five names, all correct. To test ChatGPT's reliability, I asked it to name Mexico's three leading ecologists, and it named a well-known colleague who specializes in corn, cited the name of someone unknown, and cited me, inventing a completely false profile. Furthermore, ChatGPT has learned to speak 30 different languages ​​and perform instant translations. However, while it can do this with an essay, it is difficult to do so with a novel, almost impossible with a short story, and impossible to translate a poem. A literary work conveys not only ideas, but also emotions, rhythm, cadence, musicality, and wordplay with a certain meaning. 

 I conclude by citing two opinions: that of Noam Chomsky and that of AI itself. The former states: "Unlike ChatGPT and its ilk, the human mind is not a cumbersome statistical pattern-matching machine, cramming hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely response in a conversation or the most likely answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that works with small amounts of information; it does not seek to infer crude correlations between data points, but to create explanations" (The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html).

 Are you a human? Chat GPT replied: “No, I am not a human. I am an artificial intelligence created to help you answer questions and have conversations, but I have no emotions, consciousness, or physical body. My role is to try to offer you useful and understandable answers based on the knowledge I was trained with… my goal is to make the conversation feel as natural and friendly as possible” (4/27/25, 10:40 PM).