The necessity of “thinking differently”.

Here are a couple of new articles from the Opinion page of today’s New York Times that are worth our serious consideration. As I’ve mentioned before, if you want to get a good sense for how the Times‘ readership feels about an article, go to their comments section and click on Reader’s Picks. You might be surprised.

Time to Break the Silence on Palestine, Michelle Alexander, which explores an old controversy that doesn’t seem to budge from it’s firmly implanted beginnings. Or does it? The reader’s comments seem to signal a changing perspective on some fronts.

If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?, Tom Wheeler. We’re at another “new beginning” with the Internet, and as Wheeler points out, we’re about to make the same old mistakes with a great new opportunity.

Here’s to a new year, and all of its grand possibilities.

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.”

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910, W.W. Norton & Company

The Sadness in Human Nature

As I watch Donald Trump sow confusion and chaos in a nation that heretofore has been known to the world as a standard in all that is good in human nature, and as I watch his own political party stand aside in silence in the face of his selfish and destructive behavior, I am reminded of two quotations that say a lot about Trump’s enablers.

“. . . in obedience to figures they see as ‘authoritative,’ people will do to ‘others’ what they would otherwise do to nobody.”

Seven Theories of Human Nature, p.140, Leslie Stevenson

And this quotation I’ve already used recently, but in this instance is worth repeating.

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

Albert Einstein

A Moral Disaster

An hour after putting up my previous post, this story was published by the Associated Press: The Trump Administration is Holding Thousands of Migrant Kids in Mass Shelters. This is a prime example of what I was talking about. 

Dr. Jack Shonkoff, who, heads Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child said of the 14,000 migrant children separated from their parents and held in detention centers: “This is not a perplexing scientific puzzle. This is a moral disaster.”

Why aren’t more members of Congress decrying this “policy”? What happened to the “compassionate conservative?” Certainly, our two Texas Senators as well as our representatives in Congress ought to be publicly vocal against what is happening in the Texas institutions holding these adolescents. And they should be actively pursuing a more compassionate solution to this heartless problem that their President has created. There’s no way they can avoid being responsible for what is happening to these children in their state.

Their Silence is Their Consent

While reading of our current American Chaos in the morning’s paper (yes, actual newsprint), I was reminded of a phrase and a quotation that seem apt considerations for our national dilemma.

The first is the Latin phrase “cui bono”, which means “to whose profit?” or “to whose benefit?” It is most often used today as a forensic question in law enforcement or legal circumstances in which the object is to find out who has the motive for a particular crime or misdeed to have been done. Often, too, it is applied to a situation where there is a hidden motive or where the party responsible for it happening is hidden or not apparent.

So when I think of Donald Trump’s presidency, with all of it’s moral darkness and it’s venal corruption, I wonder, how can this be allowed to happen? I look to his party. Don’t they benefit from being “in power” because he is in power? A few of them do speak up, but often they are headed out of office, and have nothing to loose. But for those who hold positions of influence in the party of the President, we hear mostly silence. Even though they may also find his Presidency abhorrent, they don’t want him removed from office lest it threaten their own power and the profit that comes with it.

And then I came across this quotation by Albert Einstein:

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

 There’s no escaping the fact that those of the President’s own party who remain silent, and hide behind that silence while the President sows chaos and harm across the globe in the name of this nation, are as deserving of our disdain as Donald Trump himself. Their silence is their consent.

The Chiaroscuro of Life

Carl Jung

“Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil, and no evil that cannot produce good.”

Collected Works, Vol. 12, p.31, paragraph 36

The Facebook Dilemma

The following is from an NPR Frontline notice I received as a subscriber. I know I’ve got a lot of posts recently hammering Facebook, but it seems that finally a lot of people are waking up to the platform’s dangers. There are good things about FB, undeniably. But nothing is ALL good. Facebook’s dark side has been at work far too long without any questioning from anyone. Now the time for asking questions has come. And it’s long overdue. 

The promise of Facebook was to create a more open and connected world. But from the company’s failure to protect millions of users’ data, to the proliferation of so-called “fake news” and disinformation in the U.S.and across the world, mounting crises have raised the question: How has Facebook’s historic success as a social network brought about real-world harm?

With Facebook under continued scrutiny, we’re releasing the newest installment of The FRONTLINE Transparency Project: An interactive version of our acclaimed, two-hour investigation, The Facebook Dilemma, that allows you to experience the film in a different way and explore extended, in-depth, on-the-record interviews with nearly 30 sources from the making of the documentary.

Those sources include 13 current or former Facebook employees — all speaking on the record. Among them are: 

What they and the other Facebook insiders we interviewed have to say constitutes one of the most in-depth collections to date of what it’s like inside Facebook. And, our interactive enables you to click, see, save, and share scores of key quotes from sources like these in their original context – and to share direct links to any quote within an extended interview by highlighting the text.

In addition to Facebook insiders, this new installment of The FRONTLINE Transparency Project includes extended interviews with other key figures, including: President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, who says, “I mean, it’s kind of like a gift” of recent changes to Facebook’s political advertising policies; and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who tells us, “I think there does need to besome oversight of what’s out there on social media.”

This project is the latest example of FRONTLINE’s ongoing commitment to journalistic transparency, and is an interactive window into how the company has handled challenges over the years — as well as into how our documentary itself took shape. We’re opening up our reporting, and making the source material that goes into building our journalism not just available, but easily navigable and sharable.

We hope you’ll check out the interactive version of The FacebookDilemma today — and tell us what you think. Send a note to frontline@pbs.org to share your feedback.

Thank you for exploring our journalism .

It’s the End of News as We Know it (and Facebook is Feeling Fine)

This article in Mother Jones is an important summary of recent issues confronting Facebook, and how they’ve manipulated their response to the public and their users. I first saw this mentioned in a tweet by James Fallows. It’ll set your hair on fire. We can thank the British Guardian and the New York Times, for bringing this story to the public’s attention. Mark Zuckerberg tried to cover it up.

A Common Sense Website and Movement

I recently came across this website (Freedom From Facebook) and looked into its mission and organizers. I think it’s a worthy organization to pay attention to if you’re concerned at all about your data on the Internet. Don’t take your privacy for granted. It’s YOUR data Facebook is monetizing, and we need to be informed about what they’re harvesting, and how they’re using it. How else can we judge if the trade-off is worth it?

Also, you should go to this page on the website for a step-by-step guide for getting the maximum privacy from your Facebook use. You don’t have to give them everything!

By the way, the New York Times has been doing an admirable job of exposing the egregious misuse of power by Facebook.

Jump back Jack!! Times Are Changin’ in Texas!!

 

Here are some excerpts from a November 9 article in the New York Times about the mid-term election turnout. Texas is on the move.

“By percent of people eligible to vote, it was the highest turnout of any midterm election [nationally] since at least 1970 and the first time midterm turnout topped 100 million. . .”

“In some counties, something almost unheard-of happened: More people voted in the midterms than in the last presidential election. One example is fast-growing Travis County, Tex., which contains the left-leaning city of Austin. Preliminary numbers show that 775,950 people voted there on Tuesday, compared with 725,035 in 2016.”

“Texas, which had the nation’s lowest percentage turnout in 2014, saw the biggest increase this year: 63 percent more people voted than in the last midterm elections.”

“For one thing, there were exciting and competitive races in some states that rarely have them. In Texas, which had the biggest turnout increase in the country, Beto O’Rourke launched a headline-grabbing challenge to Senator Ted Cruz and lost by less than three percentage points. (For comparison, Mr. Cruz was elected by 16 percentage points in 2012.)”

AND HERE’S MORE PROOF TEXAS IS CHANGING:

In Harris County . . .

Seventeen lawyers, all Black women, won their races for judgeships “by double-digits in Harris County, Tex., the nation’s third largest county, which includes Houston. Each of the lawyers, all Democrats ranging in age from 31 to early 60s, will join the bench in January for four-year terms in the civil, criminal, family and probate courts.”

Houston is also the nation’s most racially diverse city.

Real America Versus Senate America

This article by Paul Krugman highlights once again, the disparity in voting weight between rural and urban Americans in an age when most of the population is rapidly shifting to urban settings. There have been countless articles about this, but this one provokes a great deal of insightful comments.

I often find the comments section of many news platforms that use them as instructive as the articles themselves. They show you how “most people” stand on the views of the columnist. It’s an excellent learning tool for me.

Read this article and then check out the comments. Good stuff.

A Theory and a Story

Here’s an article by Michael Tomasky that makes an argument that I whole-heartedly embrace. It’s about how, of the two major American political parties, the Republicans’ messaging in the last 30 or 40 years has steam-rolled the Democrats, who seem to be utterly incapable of refuting it or offering something better.

The main reason the Republicans have been so successful: they have a theory and a story and they’re sticking to it. It’s supply-side economics: Cutting taxes, especially for the rich, and decreasing regulation, they say, will unleash so much innovation and economic activity that tax revenues will actually increase and the entire economy will benefit.

But now the Republicans have a problem with their theory and story: they haven’t worked. During the same 30 or 40 years they’ve been flogging that mantra, the middle class has all but disappeared, while the wealth of the upper 5% has exploded. Now, it seems, the people are finally catching on to the Republican shell game.

Tomasky’s argument is that the Democrats are long overdue for a theory and a story of their own, one that will clearly convey to the voters what they stand for, and how they want to respond to the Republican deception . And he has some answers to that. I urge you to read the article.

Democrats need to hear and heed Tomasky’s message. Then do it.

Side by side headlines, dramatically different stories.

I’m occasionally struck by the media’s juxtaposition of stories with startlingly different headlines. You wonder why editorial chose to put such jarring stories side by side. I came across this one last week: the cruelty of poverty and war . . . and the unabashed abundance of a wealthy nation.

The day before yesterday the New York times posted this image again . . . and said the little girl had died.

“I’m a Child of Immigrants. And I Have a Plan to Fix Immigration”

“Neither Democrats nor Republicans will like it. But it would be humane, it would adhere to the rule of law, and it would work.”

Sonia Nazario is the author of Enrique’s Journey, is a graduate of Williams College and holds a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She received an honorary doctorate in 2010 from Mount St. Mary’s College. She has twice made the same journey those in “the caravan” are making, traveling the length of Mexico with Central American migrants.

Ms. Nazario’s fix, as she outlines in her article (same title as this post) is, finally, an adult, compassionate, and common sensical approach to the “immigration problem” as we’ve come to call it. It’s a problem of our own making, and we will have to be the people who “fix” it. We need to listen to what she has to say.

Voter Suppression? It’s real. It works.

The issue of voter suppression has exploded during the past month or so because of some flagrant suppression efforts in Georgia where the Republican candidate Brian Kemp, now the Secretary of State, but running for higher office, has put more than 53,000 voter registration applications in limbo. As Ari Berman says in his article How Voter Suppression Could Swing the Midterms in Sunday’s New York Times (2018-10-27), a number of states are placing obstacles in the way of would-be voters at a time when many states are experiencing new voter registrations at an all-time high.

Here’s a discouraging quote for us living in Texas:

“Nowhere have hopes for high Democratic turnout collided with the reality of suppressive voting laws more than in Texas.”

And this:

“Texas has the most restrictive voter registration law in the country . . .”

Berman’s article, though fairly short, is full of insightful facts about how one “One man, one vote,” is far more an ideal we have to continue to fight for, than a reality we already possess.

“The greatest liar hath his believers . . .”

This morning’s New York Times editorial page carried this article by Jennifer Finney Boylan of Banard College, Colombia University in which she quotes Jonathan Swift (1667-1745):

“The greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.”

The article was about the destructive power of lies, and the shocking potential destruction that can be wrought by “deep fakes,” a unique production of our digital age. Deep fakes are lies that deceive the eye and ears via digital manipulation of photos, videos, and documents so that they appear to deliver a message other than what the original intended. Donald J. Trump and his minions are adept at this, and they are continually taking advanced courses from the true masters of deception and lies, the Russians.

All of this is to say, that today, more than ever (the lies of Swift’s era over 300 years ago took weeks to travel to their targeted ears and eyes) when a lie travels a global course in seconds, a believed lie can be acted upon to disastrous results, before truth can be ferreted out. To that point, here’s the rest of Swift’s quote, the sentence immediately following the one Boylan cited above:

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . . .”

More than ever, all of us today need always apply “critical thinking” to all we hear and see.  In a world where lies are so convincingly presented, citizens who cherish their democracy need to be educated, and involved, and vote. If we aren’t and don’t, there’s no certainty we’ll have our democracy long, and no reason to believe we deserve it.