Interpreting “schlonged”; calls for Clinton to stop “Hispandering”; and more.
I don’t think I’ve read a more cogent analysis of just what irks Donald Trump than this witty essay from Megan Carpentier in The Guardian, commenting on his recent declaration that Hillary Clinton had been “schlonged” in 2008 by Barack Obama: “…in 2015, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination has admitted that he’s grossed out by the thought of women urinating, he’s disgusted by breast-feeding, he thinks menstruation is a mind-altering phenomenon, and he thinks that the best rhetorical method for referring to a woman’s campaign loss is to evoke mental images of her getting bested by a penis. One would think that a man who likes to build skyline-altering, metal-and-glass phalluses and slap his name on them couldn’t pantomime his sexual insecurities any louder.”
Tech and the presidentials: Believe it or not, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree about the role of technology in fighting terrorism—and they’re equally wrong about it. That’s Brian Fung’s point in this smart piece for the Washington Post, where he argues that they each are advocating policies that display a common ignorance about how the Internet and online communications actually work and a naive faith in cyber geniuses. “I have a lot of confidence in our tech experts,” Clinton said at Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, regarding their ability to solve the encryption dilemma. “We should be using our brilliant people, our most brilliant minds, to figure out a way that ISIS cannot use the Internet,” Trump declared at this month’s GOP debate.
David Dayen argues for Salon that the real scandal in the Sanders-NGP-VAN-DNC data war is the party’s de facto creation of a monopoly on voter data services, a single-point of failure full of risk for its candidates.
And NationBuilder’s Will Conway piles on in Medium with a very similar argument.
Hillary Clinton’s latest online push for support from Hispanic voters, a social media campaign centered on “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela,” has generated an online backlash from voters who say that don’t want to be “Hispandered” to, Juana Summers reports for Mashable.
Using behavioral science, the Organizing Center’s Michael Moschella’s dissects the Clinton campaign’s latest fundraising email, which makes much of the likelihood that they may be outraged by Sanders this quarter.
Organizing news: Our Jessica McKenzie reports on two new online platforms that are helping American Muslims organize and crowdfund for good causes, MPower Change and LaunchGood.
Jodi Jacobson, the editor in chief of RH Reality Check, exposes more of the realities of workplace sexual harassment in progressive organizations, an issue that got blown open by last week’s abrupt closing of FitzGibbon Media, and reports that many of the employees of the now-defunct company are in dire straits. An Indiegogo page has been set up to help them out.
Money watch: David Callahan’s always essential Inside Philanthropy has just rolled out its annual list of Philanthropy Awards (or IPPYs), and there are some tough and astute picks in the list. This recent piece on the general lack of transparency in much philanthropic giving is pretty mind-boggling.
Whither the internet: Scott Malcomson, author of the new book Splinternet, explains how rising and divergent forces in the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union are all reaching “the same conclusion—that the map of the political world should become the map of cyberspace.”
