Nov 17, 2016
Rhinoceritis
Via my Facebook pal Bill D:
NYT:
NYT:
It is an epidemic of “rhinoceritis.” Almost everyone succumbs: those who admire the brute force of the rhinos, those who didn’t believe the sightings to begin with, those who initially found them alarming. One character, Dudard, declares, “If you’re going to criticize, it’s better to do so from the inside.” And so he willingly undergoes the metamorphosis, and there’s no way back for him. The final holdouts from this mass capitulation are Berenger and Daisy, his co-worker.
Eugène Ionesco was French-Romanian. He wrote “Rhinoceros” in 1958 as a response to totalitarian movements in Europe, but he was influenced specifically by his experience of fascism in Romania in the 1930s. Ionesco wanted to know why so many people give in to these poisonous ideologies. How could so many get it so wrong? The play, an absurd farce, was one way he grappled with this problem.This shit is not normal. Fight back.
Grab Your Wallet
Paraphrasing Harry Truman:
"Anybody who leaves office with more money than he started with is a crook."
The boycott thing is on.
Make a call
Send an email
Get this thing goin'
"Anybody who leaves office with more money than he started with is a crook."
The boycott thing is on.
Make a call
Send an email
Get this thing goin'
Nov 16, 2016
The Truth About Post-Truth
MTV Politics
FACEBOOK’S FAKE-NEWS PROBLEM AND THE RISE OF THE POSTMODERN RIGHT
Is anyone surprised that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't feel responsible? One of the luxuries of power in Silicon Valley is the luxury to deny that your power exists. It wasn't you, it was the algorithm. Facebook may have swallowed traditional media (on purpose), massively destabilized journalism (by accident), and facilitated the spread of misinformation on a colossal scale in the run-up to an election that was won by Donald Trump (ha! whoops). But that wasn't Facebook's fault! It was the user base, or else it was the platform, or else it was the nature of sharing in our increasingly connected world. It was whatever impersonal phrase will absolve Zuckerberg's bland, drowsy appetite from blame for unsettling the things it consumes. In this way, the god-emperors of our smartphones form an instructive contrast with our president-elect: They are anti-charismatic. Unlike Trump, the agents of disruption would rather not be seen as disruptors. In the sharing economy, nothing gets distributed like guilt.
The argument that Facebook has no editorial responsibility for the content it shows its users is fatuous, because it rests on a definition of "editorial" that confuses an intention with a behavior. Editing isn't a motive. It is something you do, not something you mean. If I publish a list of five articles, the order in which I arrange them is an editorial choice, whether I think of it that way or not. Facebook's algorithm, which promotes some links over others and controls which links appear to which users, likewise reflects a series of editorial choices, and it is itself a bad choice, because it turns over the architecture of American information to a system that is infinitely scammable. I have my own issues with the New York Times, but when your all-powerful social network accidentally replaces newspapers with a cartel of Macedonian teens generating fake pro-Trump stories for money, then friend, you have made a mistake. It is time to consider pivoting toward a new vertical in the contrition space.
Knife Fight
I don't much like the way Rachel tells her stories, but dang, this one's pretty worth it.
And if I may be indulged for a brief momentito - what was all that about draining the swamp? That Trump Bunch is a fucking swamp.
A New Era Dawns
BBC News
Remember all the stuff we learned in US History way back in high school? Stuff like Yellow Journalism?
Some of y'all are too young to have had that chance because we stopped teaching the good "liberal" stuff quite a while ago, and of course, some of us are too old, and I guess we forgot too much and now here we are again.
Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months.
It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.
Its selection follows June's Brexit vote and the US presidential election.
Oxford Dictionaries' Casper Grathwohl said post-truth could become "one of the defining words of our time".
Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right" from a shortlist selected to reflect the social, cultural, political, economic and technological trends and events of the year.Spotting the false thingie
Remember all the stuff we learned in US History way back in high school? Stuff like Yellow Journalism?
Some of y'all are too young to have had that chance because we stopped teaching the good "liberal" stuff quite a while ago, and of course, some of us are too old, and I guess we forgot too much and now here we are again.
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| Nov 1888 |
Today's Quote
"Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly, and focused on happier things than 'politics'. They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren't nice people? Resistors."
Stop Making It Normal
On the Know-Nothing language: "What's with this I've-Never-Met-The-Guy defense? I never met John Wilkes Booth, but I let his past work inform my opinion of him."
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