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I once followed the work of a group of far-right teenagers who devoted much of their time to radicalising people. The strategy was simple. They’d set up meme pages that, on the surface, appeared to be run-of-the-mill, Republican Maga-type accounts. The bio might read: 📃Free Speech, 🔵 Debate Welcome, 🔴 Make America Great – by all outward appearances it would look like a regular conservative Instagram page. This account would repost high-performing content from big Republican pages (@DC_Draino, @the_typical_liberal, etc) and use the popularity of these images to accumulate a following of Fox, Breitbart and Turning Point USA-type viewers.

About once a week, the account would unexpectedly post extreme content. While regular posts would feature familiar conservative tropes like “having an iPhone means you can’t criticize capitalism” and “Venezuela proves that socialism doesn’t work”, extreme posts would contain racist caricatures and anti-capitalist messaging in favor of white identity.

https://archive.ph/88xqq

Truth seeker sounds breezy and appealing, especially when it’s used in place of other, more derisive terms that are often applied to the same behavior. Those terms are always changing, rotated out after they become too loaded. Even conspiracy theory was a neutral turn of phrase for many years—a piece of forensic jargon. It first gained prominence in the 19th century, following the 1881 shooting of President James Garfield, in the sense that the possibility of a conspiracy was just one theory an investigator might hold among many about the assassination. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, this was how the phrase was used, in courtrooms and the media.

Only after World War II did we gain a term for the feared and scorned creator of conspiracy theories, the conspiracy theorist—a person who pushes unfounded narratives of secret schemes and cover-ups, often to further her own aims. In the aftermath of Nazism and then McCarthyism, Americans grew worried about the harmful power of these theories, says Katharina Thalmann, an assistant American-studies professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the author of the 2019 book The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory Since the 1950s. Once academics and journalists—the philosopher Karl Popper and the historian Richard Hofstadter, most famously—started writing on the topic, conspiracy theory took on a very negative connotation, Thalmann told me. “That’s when people start[ed] to point fingers at conspiracy theorists.”

It would soon be common knowledge among Americans that conspiracy theorists are dangerous and must be kept out of mainstream discourse. (In their 1970 book, The Politics of Unreason, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Rabb noted, “The conspiracy theory fleshes out nativist bigotry; and nativist bigotry fleshes out the conspiracy theory.”) As the reputation of conspiracy theorists foundered, they responded by rebranding the nature of their work. Instead of writing about “conspiracies,” per se, they deployed more open-ended phrases about how they were “just asking questions,” or examining “discrepancies” in a given narrative.

https://archive.ph/uy4o6#selection-421.1-421.28

“In the last six months, 39 electricity pylons that bring imported power into Afghanistan have been damaged,” Sangar Niazi, the spokesman of Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), the country’s national power supplier, told Al Jazeera.

Afghanistan imports nearly 70 percent of the 1,600 megawatts of its electricity needs from neighbouring countries through these pylons.

“Some were completely destroyed while others were partially damaged, affecting power supply to Kunduz, Baghlan, Kabul, Nangarhar and Parwan provinces,” Niazi said.

While Niazi did not share who the attackers were, the Afghan government has frequently blamed the Taliban for the infrastructural destruction.
Millions of Afghans have become intimately familiar with regular power cuts and being forced to navigate daily tasks and chores with just a few hours of electricity supply.

However, the lack of electricity has badly hit the country’s small IT sector, particularly for young professionals like Atayee.

“People in Kabul get only a few hours of electricity per day, some not even an hour, which is only enough to charge your devices and it gets cut again,” he said to highlight the challenges of delivering work amid the power and internet cuts.

As a freelance web developer, Atayee has struggled to meet deadlines on his ongoing project.

“I have barely been able to get any work done lately, and all my tasks are piling up. The other day, my laptop charger got fired due to the unstable electric currents. It not only slows down my work, but also creates a problem for the clients who are trying to launch a website for their new business,” he told Al Jazeera.

“If I don’t deliver on time, I lose clients.”

https://archive.ph/2irVk

A FOURTH man... is accused of an offence contrary to the Sexual Offences Act for public masturbation at Marks & Spencer on Mary Street on June 16 last.

Last week, three other men appeared at the same court accused of lewd behaviour in the same Marks & Spencer store.

He was caught red-handed during an undercover garda surveillance operation on June 16 last. The court heard he grabbed an undercover garda’s backside while exposing himself.

The defence said something came over him after he “read the signals wrong”.

Two other men, including a married father of three, were granted bail to appear in September to enter pleas. They are accused of masturbating in the same toilet in the presence of undercover gardaí on dates in June.

https://archive.ph/vXPCx

“There has been a lot of talk online that accuses me of moving to dismiss Mr. Hawn because he taught anti-racism lessons. Let me be perfectly clear. Sullivan County Schools, and I in no way condone racism of any county. We have encouraged all of our teachers, including Mr. Hawn, to promote an environment welcoming to all students of all races of all backgrounds,” Cox said.

He added that he has been told that white privilege was the reason for his dismissal charges against Hawn.

“This is also simply not true. In the charges I just read aloud in fact, I read that appropriate discussions around concepts like white privilege remain perfectly appropriate for a high school class, like contemporary issues. These charges of dismissal about Mr. Hawn refusing to provide his students with access to varying points of view, which is required under Tennessee law. And these charges are about Mr. Hawn, again, assigning inappropriate materials to his students,” he said.