The Ugly Truth

Every time we have a real shot at making changes that will benefit very large portions of the American public, some jag-off Democrat pops up and appoints himself kingpin - the guardian of the exchequer - the one true voice of reason - a hostage-taking son of a bitch.

Every.

Fucking.

Time.

Ten years ago, when ObamaCare was moving through the process, it was Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, and while there was some pretty strong push back, I don't remember anything like this:

Of course, we didn't have the kind of total immersion and over-saturation of social media that we have now.

Democracy is fighting for its life, slugging it out with full-blown Plutocracy, and the winner will likely be decided by people who live and die on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tik Tok, and YouTube.

That seems like it's nine kinds of fucked up, but that's what we've got, kids. We have to figure out how to make the best of it.

On Facebook

When we get busy blaming "the media", let's be clear - and inclusive: Who all we talkin' 'bout here?

My Facebook feed has changed dramatically just over the last year or so. That could be at least partly due to people dropping out of the thing because it's turned into such a fuckin' cess pit, but I think it has plenty to do with the massive increase in the volume of targeted advertising, and the even more annoying attempts to push me into adding friends - people I don't know from Adam's off ox.

Anyway, somebody threw a study into it, and gee, what a whole big buncha surprises they came up with.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election, study says

Right-leaning pages also produce more misinformation, the forthcoming study found.

A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources.

The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources, such as CNN or the World Health Organization.

Ever since “fake news” on Facebook became a public concern following the 2016 presidential election, publishers who traffic in misinformation have been repeatedly shown to be able to gain major audiences on the platform. But the NYU study is one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure and isolate the misinformation effect across a wide group of publishers on Facebook, experts said, and its conclusions support the criticism that Facebook’s platform rewards publishers that put out misleading accounts.

The study “helps add to the growing body of evidence that, despite a variety of mitigation efforts, misinformation has found a comfortable home — and an engaged audience — on Facebook,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who reviewed the study’s findings.

In response, Facebook said that the report measured the number of people who engage with content, but that is not a measure of the number of people that actually view it (Facebook does not make the latter number, called impressions, publicly available to researchers).

“This report looks mostly at how people engage with content, which should not be confused with how many people actually see it on Facebook,” said Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne. "When you look at the content that gets the most reach across Facebook, it is not at all like what this study suggests.”

He added that the company has 80 fact checking partners covering over 60 languages that work to label and reduce the distribution of false information.

The study’s authors relied on categorizations from two nonprofit organizations that study misinformation, NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check. Both groups have categorized thousands of Facebook publishers by their political leanings, ranging from far left to far right, and by their propensity to share trustworthy or untrustworthy news. The team then took 2,551 of these pages and compared the interactions on posts on pages by publishers known for misinformation, such as the left-leaning Occupy Democrats and the right-leaning Dan Bongino and Breitbart, to interactions on posts from factual publishers.

The researchers also found that the statistically significant misinformation boost is politically neutral — misinformation-trafficking pages on both the far left and the far right generated much more engagement from Facebook users than factual pages of any political slant. But publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories, the study found. The latter finding echoes the conclusions of other researchers, as well as Facebook’s own internal findings ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, according to Washington Post reporting.

Only Facebook knows the extent of its misinformation problem. And it’s not sharing, even with the White House.

Occupy Democrats, Bongino and Breitbart did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Facebook’s critics have long charged that misleading, inflammatory content that often reinforces the viewpoints of its viewers generates significantly more attention and clicks than mainstream news.

That claim — which has been reiterated by members of Congress as well as by Silicon Valley engineers in films such as “The Social Dilemma” — had gained significant traction during the pandemic. Conspiracy theories about covid-19 and vaccines, along with misleading information about treatments and cures, have gone viral, and may have influenced the views of large numbers of Americans. A recent survey by the COVID States Project found that U.S. Facebook users were less likely to be vaccinated any other type of news consumer, even consumers of right-leaning Fox News.

President Biden upped the ante in July when he said covid-related misinformation on platforms such as Facebook was “killing people,” a comment he later walked back.

But there has been little hard data to back up the assertions about the harm caused by Facebook’s algorithms, in part because Facebook has limited the data that researchers can access, Tromble said.

In 2018, an MIT study of misleading stories on Twitter — a platform whose content, unlike Facebook’s, is largely public — found that they performed better among Twitter users than factual stories. Other studies have found that engagement with misinformation is not as widespread as people might think, and that the people who consume and spread misinformation tend to be small numbers of highly motivated partisans.

Facebook shared new data about what’s popular on its platform. The answers are deeply weird.

Facebook is also increasingly restricting access to outside groups that make attempts to mine the company’s data. In the past several months, the White House has repeatedly asked Facebook for information about the extent of covid misinformation on the platform, but the company did not provide it.

One of the researchers Facebook has clamped down on was the NYU researcher, Laura Edelson, who conducted the study. The company cut off Edelson and her colleagues’ accounts last month, arguing that her data collection — which relied on users voluntarily downloading a software widget that allows researchers to track the ads that they see — put Facebook potentially in violation of a 2019 U.S. Federal Trade Commission privacy settlement.

The commission, in a rare rebuttal, shot back that the settlement makes exceptions for researchers and that Facebook should not use it as an excuse to deny the public the ability to understand people’s behavior on social networks.

Edelson noted that because Facebook stopped her project, called the NYU Ad Observatory, last month, she would not be able to continue to study the reach and impact of misinformation on the platform.

In response to criticism that it is becoming less transparent, Facebook recently published a new transparency report that shows the most popular content on the platform every quarter. But the report is highly curated, and Facebook censored an earlier version of the report out of concerns that it would generate bad press, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. That led critics to argue that the company was not being transparent.

One of the reasons it is hard to tell how much exposure people have to misinformation on Facebook in particular is because so much content is shared in private groups, Tromble said.

Analysis: People are more anti-vaccine if they get their covid news from Facebook than from Fox News, data shows

To conduct the study, Edelson’s team used a Facebook-owned business analytics tool called CrowdTangle to conduct the analysis. The tool is often used by journalists and researchers to track the popularity of posts. But CrowdTangle has limitations as well: The tool shares how many likes and shares a particular post received, but does not disclose what are known as impressions, or how many people saw the post.

Edelson said the study showed that Facebook algorithms were not rewarding partisanship or bias, or favoring sites on one side of the political spectrum, as some critics have claimed. She said that Facebook amplifies misinformation because it does well with users, and the sites that happen to have more misinformation are on the right. Among publishers categorized as on the far right, those that share misinformation get a majority — or 68 percent — of all engagement from users.

Today's Dumbassery

It just doesn't make any sense to me that people would go so far out of their way to find shit that could easily bring them harm, and shame their families.

No mention in the Times of the penalties people can face for this kinda shit.

See The Conversation for more on that:

NYT: (pay wall)

Instagram User @AntiVaxMomma Charged With Selling Fake Vaccine Cards

The charges highlight how a black market for counterfeit Covid-19 vaccine cards has grown as the Delta variant fuels the latest wave of the coronavirus.

A New Jersey woman who used the Instagram handle @AntiVaxMomma was charged in a conspiracy to sell hundreds of fake coronavirus vaccination cards over the social media platform, Manhattan prosecutors said on Tuesday.

The allegations against the woman, Jasmine Clifford, 31, were unveiled in Manhattan criminal court. Prosecutors said that Ms. Clifford sold about 250 forged cards over Instagram.

She also worked with another woman, Nadayza Barkley, 27, who is employed at a medical clinic in Patchogue, N.Y., to fraudulently enter at least 10 people into New York’s immunization database, prosecutors said.

There was a warrant out for Ms. Clifford’s arrest, but she did not appear in the courtroom on Tuesday. She is expected to be charged with two felonies related to the scheme, in addition to the conspiracy charge, which is a misdemeanor.

Ms. Barkley, who did appear in court, was charged with a felony, as were 13 people who purchased the cards, some of whom worked in hospitals and nursing homes. A lawyer for Ms. Clifford could not immediately be reached for comment. Theodore Goldbergh, a lawyer who represented Ms. Barkley at the appearance, said that she had been released on her own recognizance but declined to comment further.

Beginning in May, prosecutors said, Ms. Clifford, who described herself online as an entrepreneur and the operator of multiple businesses, began advertising forged vaccination cards through her Instagram account.

She charged $200 for the falsified cards, prosecutors said. For $250 more, Ms. Barkley would enter a customer’s name into New York’s official immunization database, enabling him or her to obtain the state’s Excelsior Pass, a digital certificate of vaccination.

Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, released a statement that called on Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, to crack down on fraud.

“We will continue to safeguard public health in New York with proactive investigations like these, but the stakes are too high to tackle fake vaccination cards with whack-a-mole prosecutions,” Mr. Vance said. “Making, selling, and purchasing forged vaccination cards are serious crimes with serious public safety consequences.”

A spokesman for Facebook said the platform prohibited anyone from buying or selling vaccine cards, that it had removed Ms. Clifford’s account at the beginning of August, and that it would review any other accounts that might be doing the same thing, removing any it turned up.

A popular TikTok user, @Tizzyent, highlighted Ms. Clifford’s scheme in a viral video this month. A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that the video had not led to the charges against Ms. Clifford and the others, and court documents indicated that Ms. Clifford had been under investigation since June.

The charges against Ms. Clifford and her collaborators underscore a black-market industry for counterfeit vaccination cards that has come roaring into existence this year.

With only about 52 percent of the country fully vaccinated and a significant minority of Americans skeptical of the vaccines, forged cards are offered up on messaging services like Telegram and WhatsApp, as well as social media platforms like Instagram. Counterfeits have been spotted for sale on Amazon and Etsy.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said this month that its officers in Memphis had seized more than 3,000 forged cards in 2021 so far. Earlier this year, the National Association of Attorneys General sent a letter to the heads of Twitter, Shopify and eBay asking that they take immediate action to halt the sale of the fake cards on their websites.

Concerns about forged cards have risen as states, cities and corporations have shown more willingness to mandate vaccinations for certain activities and groups.

Earlier this month, New York City announced that it would begin to require that workers and customers at indoor restaurant dining rooms, gyms and performances have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine.

Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the city’s more than 300,000 employees would have to get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing, prompting some pushback from unions, which are now in negotiations with the mayor’s office over the details of implementation.

Law enforcement officials have done what they can to crack down on fraud. Earlier this month, a Chicago-based pharmacist was arrested by federal agents and charged with the sale of 125 vaccination cards to 11 different buyers on eBay. The previous month, a naturopathic doctor in California was charged with a scheme to falsely record her customers as having received the Moderna vaccine.

New York’s Legislature recently passed a bill that would make it a state crime to falsify vaccination records. In an interview, State Senator Todd Kaminsky, one of the bill’s sponsors, said that counterfeit vaccine cards represented a growing threat.

“It was good foresight on our part to recognize that there were going to be those who would forge vaccine cards and create a public health danger,” he said.

@Tizzyent, the TikTok user who made a video about Ms. Clifford’s scheme this month, is an independent filmmaker in Florida who asked that he only be identified by his first name, Michael, because he had received threats for his videos in the past. He said in an interview that he had been fighting misinformation on social platforms for more than a year.

“It’s something that’s just a pet peeve,” he said.

He said that he had been alerted to a number of people selling counterfeit vaccine cards on social media, but that the @AntiVaxMomma scheme, for which she appeared to be recruiting collaborators when he stumbled upon one of her posts, seemed particularly advanced.

“A couple of days ago, a good friend of mine passed away from Covid,” he said. “When I see someone offering a workaround like this that’s putting everyone at risk, it’s horrifying to me.”

On Our Differences

Just once, I'd like to see an article like,

"Extroverted? Here are some tips on how you can shut the fuck up and leave people alone."

hat tip = @tomandlorenzo

Overheard

@Ir8te33

I'll tell you a little secret. I don't care if there are undocumented immigrants in this country - it's a non-issue. The overwhelming majority of them are normal people trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. And without Social Security Numbers, they're not getting the welfare help people claim they're getting.

This whole Build-A-Wall-And-Deport-The-Illegals bullshit is just the One Percent convincing the working poor to blame a subset of the working poor for the fact that they're all poor (and getting poorer), instead of realizing they're poor due to a vast artificial gulf of Income Inequality, together with Resource Price Inflation and Wage Stagnation, and outright Benefit Theft.

The existence of another poor person is not why you're poor.

You're poor because the people who control everything refuse to treat you better.

Continuing The Fight (updated)

It should be hard to imagine a government led by people who think we have a right to Twitter but not healthcare.

It isn't hard to imagine that at all. Not here in USAmerica Inc.

Twitter shut down President Stoopid's account recently because of his insistence on using it to spread the "election fraud" bullshit, and now Amazon has stepped up by kicking Parler off their web services platform because:

And of course, the Q Cucks Clan have reacted with their usual cool and aplomb.

Buzzfeed:

Amazon's suspension of Parler's account means that unless it can find another host, once the ban takes effect on Sunday Parler will go offline.

Amazon notified Parler that it would be cutting off the social network favored by conservatives and extremists from its cloud hosting service Amazon Web Services, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. The suspension, which will go into effect on Sunday just before midnight, means that Parler will be unable to operate and will go offline unless it can find another hosting service.

People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC with weapons on January 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the suspension.

In a post on Saturday evening following publication of this story, Parler CEO John Matze, who did not return a request for comment from BuzzFeed News, said it is possible the social network will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch."

Update - as of this morning, Parler is homeless.

Radicalization is big business. This shit will always be with us because there's always a double digit percentage of wackos out there who need to live in their fantasies, and there will always be cynical manipulative assholes looking to monetize the crazy.

We can't set ourselves up to fail by insisting that any given way of thinking is illegal, so we have to make it plain that there's a big difference between thought and action. 

We also have to insist on understanding the 1st amendment.

We can only push the culture forward and let the loonies know their deliberate ignorance and  abhorrent behaviors won't be tolerated in a civil society.

They won't be employed. and they won't be invited to the neighbors' for dinner, and they won't be welcome at the tailgates until they learn how to mind their manners.

You Thought The Tea Party Was Bad?

Remember hearing the "theory" that the Romans crashed and burned because they all got brain damage from the lead that leached out of their plumbing into their drinking water?

Well, it turns out that didn't happen, but...wow, man - maybe it really did happen that way and somebody needs you to believe otherwise because yada yada yada.

So, what if civilizations naturally arrive at a point where the weirdness of their everyday politics gets so out of whack that people just start making shit up, and over time, it spins so terribly out of control that society takes on the kind of mania that inevitably leads to self-destruction on a massive society-wide basis?

Guess what.

NYT:

QAnon Was a Theory on a Message Board. Now It’s Headed to Congress.

A supporter of the dangerous conspiracy theory won a primary runoff on Tuesday. The social media platforms have some soul-searching to do.

For almost three years, I’ve wondered when the QAnon tipping point would arrive — the time when a critical mass of Americans would come to regard the sprawling pro-Trump conspiracy theory not merely as a sideshow, but as a legitimate threat to safety and even democracy.

There have been plenty of potential wake-up calls. Among them: a 2018 standoff at the Hoover Dam with a QAnon believer, the 2019 murder of a Gambino crime family boss by a QAnon supporter who believed the boss was part of a deep-state cabal, an August 2019 F.B.I. report that warned that QAnon could spur domestic terrorism, a West Point report calling the movement “a security threat in the making,” and the April arrest of a QAnon follower who was found with a dozen knives while driving to “take out” Joe Biden, the former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

But it seems the true tipping point came this week. First was the report from Ari Sen and Brandy Zadrozny at NBC News about an internal Facebook investigation that gives the first real glimpse into the size of QAnon’s online footprint. The investigation found millions of members across thousands of QAnon groups and pages.

This was followed by a Guardian investigation that found “more than 170 QAnon groups, pages and accounts across Facebook and Instagram with more than 4.5 million aggregate followers.”

Then, on Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who has been vocal in her support of QAnon, won a primary runoff. (In recently uncovered blog posts, Ms. Greene said that Hillary Clinton had a “kill list” of political enemies and questioned whether the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting was orchestrated in a bid to overturn the Second Amendment.) Given the deeply Republican makeup of Ms. Greene’s district, she is widely expected to be elected to Congress in November.

This week’s news is a sign of QAnon’s increasing influence in American cultural and political life. What started as a niche web of disproved predictions by an anonymous individual has metastasized into a movement that is now too big to be ignored.

The recent news also feels like a clear example of the real-world consequences of our broken information ecosystem. QAnon’s rise is the direct result of a world in which media and politics are distorted by the dizzying scale of social networks, by their lack of adequate content moderation, and by the gaming of algorithms and hashtags. While the social media platforms didn’t create QAnon, they created the conditions for it to thrive. One can draw a straight line from these companies’ decisions — or, more accurately, their inaction — to where we are today.

Take the sheer size and scope of Facebook’s QAnon networks as revealed by NBC and The Guardian. Those reports note that Facebook groups and pages — many of which are private and therefore harder to moderate — drive QAnon’s growth on the platform by providing community to the movement’s followers. That growth is a feature, not a bug — one that Facebook began to prioritize in the summer of 2017, just four months before the first post from “Q” appeared on the message board 4chan.

That summer, onstage at a Facebook summit, the company’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, announced that Facebook would shift its focus toward building “meaningful communities” to “bring the world closer together.” Mr. Zuckerberg also announced that the company would use an artificial intelligence system to recommend such communities to users.

Facebook’s recommendations systems, designed to prioritize the growth of groups, most likely supercharged the QAnon community — exposing scores of people to the conspiracy theory and then forging bonds among like-minded believers who could communicate, organize and spread their message further. As NBC News’s Ben Collins notes, this spread has intensified during the coronavirus pandemic as QAnon has become a hub for public health misinformation on Facebook. According to The Wall Street Journal, “the average membership in 10 large public QAnon Facebook groups swelled by nearly 600 percent from March through July, to about 40,000 from about 6,000.”

QAnon followed a similar growth strategy on platforms like YouTube, building channels around influencers savvy enough to game the platform’s recommendation algorithms. On Twitter, the communities formed around the successful manipulation of hashtags, efforts amplified by the Trump campaign and the president’s Twitter feed. (On Friday Mr. Trump refused to answer whether he supported QAnon.)

This online ecosystem has been attractive to some political candidates. “Politicians see the infrastructure QAnon has built on these platforms. They recognize it as increasing in power and see it as having a political benefit,” said Alex Kaplan, a researcher for the media watchdog group Media Matters for America who has been tracking the increase in QAnon supporters running for Congress. “There are true believers, yes, but many also see pandering to QAnon as a way to cultivate political support. They say, ‘why not use this infrastructure to get some benefit?’ — be it followers or money or votes.” Mr. Kaplan has reported that there are at least 20 candidates on the ballot in November who support or have spoken favorably of QAnon.

The overtures of campaigns like Ms. Greene’s — and President Trump’s — are only likely to become more overt as QAnon moves further into the mainstream. Journalists like Mr. Kaplan are concerned that more media coverage will lead to the conspiracy theory being normalized. “People should be worried. They should not get used to this,” he told me. “It’s crucial to remember this all started as a theory on a message board linked to white nationalists and trolls that President Trump was involved in a secret plot to take down the deep state and pedophiles. That’s what all of this is.”

For those who’ve been following and reporting on QAnon since its earliest days, this week has been disorienting and disheartening. “It’s a horrifying, humbling and depressing feeling to have seen something like this back when it was just a few forum posts, warn of its potential to infect the nation and end up right,” Paris Martineau, a technology reporter who wrote the first explainer on QAnon for a national news outlet in 2017, told me. “I feel like, over the past three years, there have been so many moments where I thought it had reached its zenith, but it was really only just getting started.”

It’s no coincidence that a technology reporter was one of the first to identify this phenomenon — indeed, much of the best coverage of the movement has come from those steeped in understanding of social networks. QAnon is a product of the modern algorithmically powered internet (a fact that reporters flocking to cover the movement need to be mindful of).

The stewards of the Big Tech platforms surely didn’t envision QAnon when they sought to connect the world. But they should have. Because the movement leveraged all the platforms’ tools exactly as they were intended to be used.

“When you bring people together, you never know where it will lead,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the end of his speech in 2017.

He was right.

Dopamine Addiction

A new one for me: Charlie & Ben podcast.

The sex talk is of particular interest to me (of course), but the segment following that - all about social media and the little jolts of happiness we feel when we get the thumbs up or the little red heart or whatever.

It gets a little iffy when they dive into YouTube and media control, but mostly it's really good.

Fascinating.

How Great I Art

Woohoo

Divide And Conquer

Turns out the Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie Social Media wasn't the plucky entrepreneurial good guy supernerd after all.

I think maybe the writers and producers had that suspicion all along.

WaPo, Yaël Eisenstat:

I joined Facebook in June 2018 as “head of Global Elections Integrity Ops” in the company’s business integrity organization, focused specifically on political advertising. I had spent much of my career working to strengthen and defend democracy — including freedom of speech — as an intelligence officer, diplomat and White House adviser. Now I had the opportunity to help correct the course of a company that I viewed as playing a major role in one of the biggest threats to our democracy.

In the year leading up to our 2016 election, I began to see the polarization and breakdown of civil discourse, exacerbated by social media, as our biggest national security threat; I had written about that before Facebook called. I didn’t think I was going to change the company by myself. But I wanted to help Facebook think through the role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.

A year and a half later, as the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers aim at us, showing each of us a different version of the truth and manipulating us with hyper-customized ads — ads that as of this fall can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, it can’t avoid damaging democracy.

I'm good with the argument that we don't want a private sector entity deciding questions of free speech - that's not really what we're talking about - but I get the argument.

Coupla things:

• It's everybody's job - everybody's right, and everybody's obligation - to hold as many people as possible to account for telling the truth.
• There's a near-absolute expectation that advertisers don't get to put out false or misleading claims about their own products, or the products of their competitors.

Caveat Emptor applies, but only to a certain extent. So if (eg) your dealership has a car for sale that you advertise as a peach, when it's a lemon - you can expect a visit from the fraud unit.

You can be fined.

You can go to jail.

You can be barred from that industry.

Thing 3: No rights are absolute or unlimited. Speech is not just an expression of ideas - it's also an action. If your actions present a clear and present danger to others - as individuals or as a community - you can be (and should be) smacked down.

We've got to have a taste of a Teddy Roosevelt-style Trust Buster in the White House. Some of these companies have grown too big and too powerful.

It's not like we've never been here before

How Great I Art

Today's Tweet

Gee - what might be going on that could make her think this shit's OK?
It is a wonderment.

Wow... I'm honestly just speechless on this video..

I'll never understand this level of hate.

Twitter, do your thing on making this go viral and ousting this horrible creature.

pic.twitter.com/cm4kUVKvqr

— Molly (@MollyRach33) September 26, 2019

Today's Homework

Our assignment for today is to plant the seeds in our brains that help us discern some of the truth about Manufactured Consent and the bullshit of what passes for Popular Opinion, General Consensus, etc.

Fun fact - as many as 60% of all Twitter accounts are phony.

UnHackTheVote:

Show 'em some love

Today I FlipFlop A Bit

This is the kinda shit that pops up on any given social media feed a hundred times on any given day.

First, I have no problem respecting and showing a little appreciation for the cops or the librarians or the moms or the service members or the guy behind the counter at 7-11 - although I have indeed gotten more than a little peeved at how much whining goes on about all of it.

But I think maybe I should be trying to see past the complaints, and look at the reasons for those complaints.

Maybe what we need to do is address the fucked up system that gives people good reason to believe there's no respect for them, and leads them to where they have to stand up and holler.

Which happens to be also the place where they're more easily manipulated into thinking a bottom-feeding slug like Donald Trump is their ticket to a more perfect union.

We have to start talking about honor again.

If we put some sense of honor (and honorability) back into the way we conduct ourselves - and the way we demand our government conducts itself - then there's less likelihood that anyone becomes so disillusioned that they end up feeling they have no alternative to throwing rocks and punches and bombs.

And like the man said - when we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make bloody rebellion inevitable.

This Is The World Now

Well now, it doesn't sound like it was a particularly good day for him either.

I'm pretty sure she doesn't mean to minimize the fact that the guy prob'ly died in something very much like panic and terror - clutching his chest in painful convulsions.

But such is Social Media - without some indication that you're not trying to make it all about you, it's going to come off like you're trying to make it all about you.

Kinda like keeping a blog.

How Great I Art

Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball is a good place to get a look at what's going on - and coming up - in electoral politics.

Larry Joseph Sabato is an American political scientist and political analyst. He is the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he is also the founder and director of the Center for Politics, which works to promote civic engagement and participation. The Center for Politics is also responsible for the publication of Sabato's Crystal Ball, an online newsletter and website that provides free political analysis and electoral projections.

We Will Get Fooled Again

It's already happening again. And the not-so-weird thing is that some of the worst trolling behavior is now part of how we "communicate" online - sometimes with people we actually know.

We Live For Recognition

The reason we're addicted to social media is that we're addicted to every little squirt of dopamine our brains give us when we get even the tiniest bit of approval - every Like or Retweet or Share or whatever.

Even when it's a negative reaction - we gotta have that daily fix. 

What makes it one of the greatest ironies ever is that the web has given us a feeling of power because of its promise of anonymity, but that same anonymity - the fear of being ignored and forgotten and discarded - that's what drives us to call attention to ourselves.

"...where your glory and your doom are bound up together..."

Plus - if you think nobody knows who you are, or where you are, or what you're doing, then you're completely daft, and you're the perfect pigeon when the cynical manipulators need to move political opinion in one direction or another.

For a good look at a fairly representative part of the problem, and how the rat-fuckers exploit these vulnerabilities, find "Brexit: The Uncivil War" (BBC and HBO).

And oh yeah - our "president" is "president" because in a bizarre and perverse way, he is, in fact "one of us".

Today's Tweet

From an interview in 1999.

David, this internet thing will never catch on... 🤦‍♀️ #davidbowie @timberners_lee pic.twitter.com/XKoSBVqZGU

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) January 13, 2019

Today's Traitorousness

Overheard on the intertoobz:

It's like Beelzebub ate Stalin and Hitler and George Wallace; drank a coupla gallons of orange food coloring, then took a giant shit, and boom - Donald Trump.

Not unrelated, Aaron Blake, WaPo:

The theory that President Trump is or has been a Russian asset is a popular one among his detractors. But for the first time, we’re learning that it’s something the FBI suspected strongly enough to dig into.

The Washington Post has confirmed that the FBI launched a counterintelligence inquiry into whether Trump was working for Russia shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017. The news was first reported by the New York Times.

Practically speaking, this may not mean a whole lot. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed mere days later, meaning any evidence the FBI collected was likely limited. It was Mueller’s decision to continue the line of inquiry, and we don’t know whether he has. But practical concerns aside, it’s a shocking story: The nation’s leading law enforcement agency was looking into whether a sitting U.S. president was working for a hostile foreign nation. The decision was something the FBI reportedly struggled with for months, and it still has its detractors.

But what might have led to such an extraordinary step by the FBI? And what’s the state of the evidence?

Comey’s firing was obviously the tipping point. Investigators reportedly shed their previous reservations about the inquiry after Trump’s televised admission to NBC News’s Lester Holt that the Russia investigation was on his mind when he did it. Another red flag was Trump’s attempts to include a reference to the Russia investigation in Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s letter justifying the firing.

We already know that these few days contained a central event in Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, but the idea that it also warranted a counterintelligence inquiry is notable. It’s one thing to deliberately hamper the investigation; it’s another to suspect Trump might have done so on behalf of Russia. Were this to ever lead to any concrete conclusions, that Holt interview will apparently have been an extraordinary misstep by Trump, who has often seemed to blurt out unhelpful statements about his true motivations.

I need to push back on that last point - the one about the "extraordinary misstep". It's not a misstep when it's intended - when it's part of the plan to do all this shit more or less out in the open. I think they do that because we're more likely to think they wouldn't do it out in the open if it's not OK.

Our conditioning is that the bad guys do their bad things under cover - that they wouldn't do those bad things in full view if those bad things were really bad.

If they just keep at it, and keep doing things little-by-little, then little-by-little, they can do whatever they want, and because we've never really objected all that much, we have everything we need to resolve our cognitive dissonance. We shrug it off - accepting their rationalizations as our own.