In the present-day vernacular, people are most humbled by the things that make them look good. They are humbled by the sublimity of their own achievements. The “humblebrag” — a boast couched in a self-deprecating comment — has migrated from subtext to text, leaving self-awareness passed out in the bathroom behind the potted plant.

Diving at random into the internet and social media finds this new humility everywhere. A soap-opera actress on tour is humbled by the outpouring of love from fans. Comedians are humbled by big laughs, yoga practitioners are humbled by achieving difficult poses, athletes are humbled by good days on the field, Christmas volunteers are humbled by their own generosity and holiday spirit.

And yet none of these people sound very “humbled” at all. On the contrary: They all seem exceedingly proud of themselves, hashtagging their humility to advertise their own status, success, sprightliness, generosity, moral superiority and luck.

When did humility get so cocky and vainglorious? I remember the first time, around 15 years ago, that I heard someone describe herself as “blessed.” An old friend of my boyfriend’s came to visit and spent the evening regaling us with stories of her many blessings. She wasn’t especially religious, which somehow made her choice of words worse. Every good thing in her life — friends, job, apartment, decent parking space — was a blessing: i.e., something deliberate, something thoughtfully picked out for her by a higher power. It took a while to put a finger on why it got on my nerves. The problem was that she couldn’t just let herself be lucky, because luck was random, meaningless, undeserved. Luck was a roll of the dice. She had to be chosen.

At corporations and universities across the country, incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake. Or, in the simplest of terms, advancements in audio and video technology are becoming so sophisticated that they will be able to replicate real news—real TV broadcasts, for instance, or radio interviews—in unprecedented, and truly indecipherable, ways.

One research paper published last year by professors at Stanford University and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg demonstrated how technologists can record video of someone talking and then change their facial expressions in real time. The professors’ technology could take a news clip of, say, Vladimir Putin, and alter his facial expressions in real time in hard-to-detect ways. In fact, in this video demonstrating the technology, the researchers show how they did manipulate Putin’s facial expressions and responses, among those of other people, too.

This is eerie, to say the least. But it’s only one part of the future fake-news menace. Other similar technologies have been in the works in universities and research labs for years, but they have never really pulled off what computers can do today. Take for example “The Digital Emily Project,” a study in which researchers created digital actors that could be used in lieu of real people. For the past several years, the results have been crude and easily detectable as digital re-creations. But technologies that are now used by Hollywood and the video-game industry have largely rendered digital avatars almost indecipherable from real people. (Go and watch the latest Star Wars to see if you can tell which actors are real and which are computer-generated. I bet you can’t tell the difference.) You could imagine some political group utilizing that technology to create a fake hidden video clip of President Trump telling Rex Tillerson that he plans to drop a nuclear bomb on China. The velocity with which news clips spread across social media would also mean that the administration would have frightfully little time to respond before a fake-news story turned into an international crisis.

Audio advancements may be just as harrowing. At its annual developer’s conference, in November, Adobe showed off a new product that has been nicknamed “Photoshop for audio.” The product allows users to feed about ten to 20 minutes of someone’s voice into the application and then allows them to type words that are expressed in that exact voice. The resultant voice, which is comprised of the person’s phonemes, or the distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another in each language, doesn’t sound even remotely computer-generated or made up. It sounds real.

As the first full week of the Trump administration draws to a close, many anti-Trump Twitter users have been heartened by the rise of a group of more than 50 (according to CNN) “rogue” Twitter accounts supposedly affiliated with U.S. government employees. These employees, the story goes, have been disgruntled by moves the administration has made to tamp down on these agency’s abilities to spread their messages — particularly messages having to do with subjects like climate changes — and have taken to Twitter to resist Trump’s authoritarianism.

As a result, some of these accounts have quickly amassed huge followings — 1.25 million for the most famous one, @AltNatParkSer. But at the moment, according to multiple news stories about the accounts, no one really knows who is behind them, since it doesn’t appear anyone has verified the identities of the Tweeters. Therefore, Anti-Trumpers who spread them are engaging in the exact same sort of motivated, credulous sharing that fuels the dissemination of all sorts of crazy internet rumors, including those which targeted Hillary Clinton during the campaign.

bareshark1975 1 day ago
Well, if anyone is actually that damn scared about being played, here's an idea: go out and actually VERIFY the facts being spread with actual scientists on respectable websites. It's a good idea anyway and you might just learn some more than you would have. In the meantime, F*** humility.

Scientists to Trump: Torture doesn’t work http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/scientists-trump-torture-doesn-t-work … #resist https://twitter.com/altusda/status/825732483836760068

Small farmers win 8-year fight against National Chicken Council, then Trump takes over and blocks USDA rule change
https://twitter.com/altusda/status/825179157327966210

2016 was the hottest year on record, worldwide. Also, @realDonaldTrump is a man-baby.
https://twitter.com/AltBadlandsPark/status/824442496323321857

Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor, trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere and warm the planet. #climatefacts
https://twitter.com/AltBadlandsPark/status/824644231788658690

The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1] and the Trump Tirade[2]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it's unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop. The Gish Gallop is named after creationist Duane Gish, who often abused it.

Although it takes a trivial amount of effort on the Galloper's part to make each individual point before skipping on to the next (especially if they cite from a pre-concocted list of Gallop arguments), a refutation of the same Gallop may likely take much longer and require significantly more effort (per the basic principle that it's always easier to make a mess than to clean it back up again).

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
—programmer Alberto Brandolini[9]

Refuting a Gish Gallop is hard. Not because it's a well-formed argument that forces you to reconsider your worldview in a new light, a process taking critical thought over a long span of time. Not at all. It's hard because there's so fucking much to refute.

Her visibility has made her both prized and disdained by the media, whose attention she so visibly courts, which has cast her as everyone from a latter-day Joan of Arc to a "Tabloid Feminist." When I asked Allred what she makes of the media's derision, she was dismissive: "I don't really care how I'm perceived. Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn. I just want justice for women. I have to be a strong advocate, and all I care about is winning for my clients."

"My view is that women are hurt more than men," she said. "That men, because they have more access to power and wealth, are more likely to use it to hurt women." Both might lie to each other, but "I think it's definitely more devastating to women, emotionally and financially. Women are socialized from birth to believe in men, to believe men will protect them." If she saw any dissonance between the deprivation that had motivated the suffragettes and the situation that faced Blitsch and Ryncarz, Allred wasn't showing it. "I'm never satisfied with the status and condition of women. Why would I be?"

If today it sometimes seems as though Ms. Allred is living in the nascent feminism of the 1970s, so, in a way, are many of her firm’s less visible clients: women (and men) who have been sexually harassed or fondled at work, girls who’ve been molested, or female prison inmates forced to wear handcuffs while delivering their babies. Those who support Ms. Allred argue that cases like those of Ms. Lorenzana and Citibank fit into this galaxy — but with tabloid glare, notoriety and guaranteed publicity thrown into the mix.

Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist and law professor at Fordham University, sees Ms. Allred as what he calls “a moral attorney,” which he defines as someone who takes on a case without any thought for her own reputation or even whether she’s going to win or lose in the courtroom.

“She represents people who we might not want to go to lunch with,” Mr. Rosenbaum said, “and she ruffles the feathers of people who think lawyers should confine themselves to the courtroom. She takes on issues that are too messy for the courtroom. Some people think it’s salacious, what she’s bringing into the public square. She’s in effect saying: ‘I move the ball out of this arena and take it into this arena. Being a quiet, demure woman will get this case nowhere.’ ”

“These women have no money, no power. There are very serious consequences when women are not empowered. Humiliation, depression, poverty.”

She put on her do-not-mess-with-me face. “It is very frightening to feel alone when you are standing against a rich and powerful person and all his attendant helpers,” she said. “It’s dangerous out there.” It’s the Wild West. People come to me to tell them how to manage the maelstrom. And the defense” — here she allows herself a little smile — “the defense just hopes the woman doesn’t hire Gloria Allred.”

“The concept of fairness is always culturally defined,” she said. “Even here, where we think we are such an advanced nation, people advise women to grin and bear harassment in the workplace. I say, ‘Do complain.’ It’s only going to get worse. We have rights so that we don’t have to go like beggars with cups in our hands asking for mercy. We have to be heard in the court of public opinion as well as in the actual courts. Silence is the enemy.”

Like it or not, Donald Trump's face is here to stay. From being named Time magazine's person of the year, to daily coverage of his transitional plans, you can't glance at a news source—let alone social media—without seeing Trump's face several times over.

Or can you?

With the help of a Google Chrome extension called "Make America Kittens Again" you can find sweet relief, in the form of kittens.

The extension finds headlines with Trump's name in them and replaces the associated images with pictures of adorable little furballs snuggling, playing, and being generally kittenish.

You have many choices when it comes to customizing your your experience of reading news about Donald Trump. Simple, free Chrome extensions let you replace every mention of the Republican primary frontrunner with something stranger, funnier, or otherwise more palatable.

Here are some of the best options.

1) Make America's Hands Tiny Again
Replaces “Donald Trump” with “Someone With Tiny Hands” because Trump is apparently incredibly sensitive about his tiny fingers.

2) Trump Filter
As the extension's description says, “This Chrome extension will identify parts of a web page likely to contain Donald Trump and erase them from the Internet.”

3) Remove Donald Trump from Facebook
This one works like the Trump Filter extension listed above but is designed specifically for Facebook.

Q: I’m not a woman, am I invited?
A: Yes, the Women’s March on Washington (WMW) is for any person, regardless of gender or gender identity, who believes women’s rights are human rights.

The Women’s March on Washington is a grassroots effort comprised of dozens of independent coordinators at the state level. The effort is helmed by four national co-chairs and a national coordinating committee who are working around the clock to pull it all together.

Date and Time: Saturday, January 21, 2017. Rally begins at 10:00am and ends at 1:15pm

Location: The starting point and rally will be the intersection of Independence Avenue and Third Street, Washington DC, near the U.S. Capitol (see map below).

The Rally: A program featuring nationally recognized advocates, artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and others will be announced in the coming days.

Tickets: The Women's March is NOT a ticketed event, no ticket is required.