Today, Facebook officials announced that they would continue former president Trump’s suspension for at least two years from his February 7 suspension, when he continued to praise the mob in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. After two years, the company will reassess his ban, deciding “whether the risk to public safety has receded.” Facebook promised that it would begin holding political figures to common standards for hate speech, rather than giving them a pass on the grounds their actions are noteworthy. If, in their opinion, noteworthiness requires an exception, they will explain why.
The former president, we are told, still has millions of avid, rabid, supporters. Republicans are publicly anyway, denying the reality of the last election trying to court these supporters believing, rightfully, their support is fundamental to the Republicans' political survival.
And the former president's blog, or whatever it was, folds up for lack of interest. What happened to those tens of millions of followers who lived for their Dear Leader's daily, hourly, verbal defications on Facebook and Twitter? Do they even exist?
Above it all, I am most heartened by the news that Cyrus Vance is hauling Trump people in to talk to the grand jury. Sing, sing, sing!
This is being made out to be such a big deal. But when I was growing up, newspapers chose which "Letters to the Editor" they would publish, and would sometimes even edit them for clarity. There were the "seven words you can't say on television," and my mother would have given me no end of grief for the mouth I have on me now. It seems perfectly obvious that these social media platforms are "broadcast advertising" sites -- that's how they make their money, and is the ONLY reason politicians use them -- and should be subject to at least the same truth-in-advertising and decency standards as any other medium.
I'm relieved that 45 won't have direct access to either Twitter or Facebook for the next few years, but those agitating on his behalf will still be able to organize and continue to spread misinformation. 45 will always "be a risk to public safety." Considering Flynn's remark that what happened in Myanmar should also happen here, I wonder how many more feel the same way and are just waiting for 45 to "strike the match" to set them off again, on a more local scale... and then there's the millions more who believe the Big Lie to be true. Some of those include distant relatives as well as current patients in my office, so it's been an interesting time since 2016, walking the fine line of diplomacy, and I chuckle thinking about the definition of diplomacy (paraphrased): "Telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they actually look forward to the trip."
Hopefully, Rick Wilson will be proven completely right about "Everything Trump touches, dies." Most particularly the Trump Party. Let the doddering old duffer go rant and rave to the morons. With any luck he'll have his massive fatal myocardial infarction in front of them mid-rant. That would be perfect!
As regards Facebook, I see no reason why they can't be held to the same responsibility standards required of your local neighborhood bar. FB's business model is to keep serving the ranting drunk at the end of the bar doubles of whatever they're drinking, and to disclaim all responsibility after the drunk staggers out to the parking lot, manages to open the car door and stick the key in the ignition.
File under: How Scummy are the Scumballs? Richard Barnett is selling copies of the photo of him with his feet up on Pelosi's desk on 1/6. And he's making a killing.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned a thick document I was given in the early '80's about the plan of the republicans, masked under the "religious right," to infiltrate our systems in America in order to hold total power in all areas of our lives. And I feel that is what we have been witnessing for decades. No one from my life back then seems to remember this document. ?? So I did some research and found a paper from NOVA (Nova Southeastern University, FL) via their Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations. "The Rise of American Extremism: An Exploratory Analysis of American Religious and Political Extremism from Presidents Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama: 1977-2016" by Alwyn J. Melton (Doctorate of Philosophy) 2018.
This is the closest document I could find that relates what I have been concerned about for decades (since Reagan) as the rise of anti-American and anti-Democracy persons on our own shores reveal themselves. It is of course very long, but has a table of contents so you can pick and choose if you do not have time to read the entire dissertation. Eventually, I plan to read the entire document, but I am stumbling through Caste (with kleenex) right now. Small doses at a time. Same way I view films on the Holocaust. Never forget man's inhumanity against man.
Yay for FB and I hope they extend the ban for life.
But this sentence really struck me: “ Republican officials are begging him to talk about policy and the 2022 election, but he appears to be focused on his conviction that he won in 2020, ...”
These republican officials are as delusional as iDJT if they think he will talk policy instead of replaying that scratchy old record of his perceived grievances. Have they learned nothing from past performances? They’re a bunch of Charlie Browns giving Lucy the football one more time and hoping she’ll change her ways for the sanctity of the game.
Heather: Great 060421 newsletter! If you, or any of your very skillful critical analytical readers have the time to do so, I highly recommend exploring a brief book that I have been working my way through today. The authors are Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The title is HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE. The publication date was 2019. Levitsky and Ziblatt are both professors at Harvard University. I find the brief book very helpful because it strives to analyze not only the long history of authoritarianism, and anti-authoritarianism, in the U.S. but also tracks anti-fascist campaigns (some quite successful) over the past one hundred years. It is an invaluable analysis!
Nice that FB is “holding political figures” to a much higher standard than they had before but I still feel banning Fake45 for only up to two years isn’t enough. Maybe they are thinking either he won't be alive then or he will be in prison. I like either of those odds, quite frankly. Is that cruel of me?
The Big Lie that the former guy and his minions continue to tout could just as well be called the Big Scam. DJT, as well as Republican officials and future candidates, are amplifying the lies and illusions about the election as a fundraising tool. Millions of Trumplicans continue to open their wallets, buying into the Big Scam. Additionally, state Republican parties and legislatures are intentionally pushing the Big Scam, using it as an excuse for passing voting restrictions. Perhaps the former guy isn’t as addle-brained and delusional as many of us have believed. He and his Republican cohorts are raking in donations, dragging out the Big Scam with a clear end in mind: They want to line their own pockets and grab power to run the country into the ground. They will steal anything and everything to obtain that money and power. Taking away DJT’s social media megaphones is a win, albeit a small one, for the future of our democracy.
The most appropriate comment to the continued ban seems to me to be Nelson from the Simpsons crooning “ha-ha.” Bullies understand bullyese best. But all the comments in this section deploring Facebook’s power confuse me. What Zuckerberg created was a version of the Roman Forum, brilliant in its accessibility and generalized democratic possibilities. Any schmoe (who has access to a device and electricity and an internet connection, so it is not purely democratic, but public libraries in the US help narrow the gap domestically and libraries/mutual aid internationally) who wants to can open an account and broadcast a barbaric yawp -no editing like newspaper LTE, no tightly restricted access like radio/TV. That a grifting buffoon like Trump was able to amass numbers of followers (analogous to elites in the Forum gaining followings by dispensing largesse and making promises in exchange for bodies in support of them) by calling out “elites” in media who controlled narratives spoke to a visceral truth those economically left behind latched on to with fervor. Zuckerberg and co created a platform for such truths to be articulated and one hopes their attempts to appease government regulators holds off a state takeover of the platforms.
FB has banned the former president from its site for 2 years. Now, if only the major TV networks, and journalists would follow suit it would be great. Every mention of the former guy in the news gives him life. Shut down the life supports and may be he'll die. It's time....
George Orwell, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Two who I find myself reading these days are Orwell and Thomas Payne; both so painfully relevant to our dangerous division today. The Communists ironically enabled the win of Franco in the civil war in Spain. The Russians are playing a major role in the success of the so called "Republicans" now. The DJT fellow-travelers in the name of patriotism may very well find themselves aligned with our most aggressive, long term enemy, facing the slow realization that it was they who were "hoaxed'.
Thank you for keeping us updated. It does indeed seem significant (and 100 years from now relevant) that a social media giant, which has so much influence over the world that it literally affects the wellbeing of entire countries, has chosen to hold political figures to same standards as average users.
I’m glad of their decision, but feel worried about their continued power over our lives. It used to be our biggest worry was who rich people and corporations were funding politically, but social media has become a wild card in that arena. Common people can affect change, but bad actors using disinformation tactics can steer the direction.
Being smart doesn’t make anyone immune to the pitfalls of humanity.
In the now famous words of Alan Greenspan, “I didn’t anticipate the market’s inability to regulate itself.”
When people start saying things like “I can police myself” or that they’re “the chosen one”, alarm bells should go off, everywhere. When it comes to exercising power, within a Democracy, there must be “checks and balances”. When there are no “checks” on power, history has repeatedly proven it won’t work. I wouldn’t trust Mark Zuckerberg, anymore than I would mother Teresa or Donald Trump.
I am happy the social media bans are still in place,. Now if they don't hype his rallies and the legal system starts bringing cases to court I hope his followers will lose interest.
On this almost white-bright and very warm Saturday morning, Heather brought Donald J. Trump to my computer screen. She couldn't help herself. HE'S BACK. That's North Carolina, where he will address the Republican Party, tomorrow' Sunday night. It is a precursor to the rallies Trump plans to hold in Ohio, Alabama, and Florida next month. Soon after reading the Letter, I had to go elsewhere for relief.
'On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg finally dropped the hammer and declared that the former president would be barred from Facebook for at least two years — a lesser sentence than that handed down by Twitter, which has ejected him permanently. Facebook did, however, say that it would let Mr. Trump return only “if the risk to public safety has receded.”'
'Fat chance of that if you’ve seen how insistently and persistently Mr. Trump has continued to huff and puff on his sousaphone of lies. This has been his modus operandi since the minute he applied his thumbs to a mobile phone keyboard way back when — behavior that has gotten only scarier and more dangerous over time. That’s why it has not been easy to imagine that an often canny, prescient entrepreneur like Mr. Zuckerberg has been played for a chump by Mr. Trump.'
If you haven't met Kara Swisher (quoted above) on her podcast Sway, in her Opinions in The New York Times, in her books and podcast, Pivot, I have brought her here for levity, smarts and kicks in the asses of Kuckerberg and Trump. Swisher is the super powerful tech journalist and a contributing editor at New York Magazine.
'In my innumerable conversations with him over many years — often late at night over a phone, giving them the feel of a college-dorm jaw session — he maintained that he trusted Facebook’s larger community to clean out the vile, often-toxic dreck that flowed over his ever-larger platform.'
'Mr. Zuckerberg believes in the perfectibility of man. I have studied the use of propaganda in Nazi Germany and during China’s Cultural Revolution. I told him that there is no low that some people will not sink to if it is in their interests to do so'
This will not be the last word from Swisher as there is a link later on to her Opinion, 'The Terrible Cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s Naïveté'. For now: '... no one can turn the clock back on what Mr. Zuckerberg has wrought by indulging Mr. Trump, who never met a Facebook regulation he did not desecrate. The attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 should have been no surprise to anyone who was connecting the dots, which Mr. Zuckerberg stubbornly declined to do until now.'
In case you are not aware at this moment, the Trump/Fox News and the Republican Party's next scapegoat, is Anthony Fauci/Covid-19/China/The Democratic Party Syndrome or what's known in Canada's horse racing as a 'superfecta'. Their campaign has already begun on Fox News and probably elsewhere in the the far-right's media world. Trump's negligence, lies and responsibility for the avoidable deaths of many infected with Covid will be assumed by this 'superfecta'. I saw Mike Pompano making the case on Fox yesterday. The image of this very large man with little slits for eyes and a mouth is a picture that most of us wish to avoid. His mien is menacing, a thick wall of calumny. Oh, his lying eyes and mouth.
The true pain of this is 'superfecta' is the detritus they are throwing at Anthony Fauci.
We are in for ugliness on a grand scale, bigger and worse that we can remember.. Our goal is to keep our eye on Democracy. Whatever has come Fauci's way, he keeps his eye on science, the job at hand and our welfare. We have great models to follow.
I'm experiencing a cognitive dissonance.
The former president, we are told, still has millions of avid, rabid, supporters. Republicans are publicly anyway, denying the reality of the last election trying to court these supporters believing, rightfully, their support is fundamental to the Republicans' political survival.
And the former president's blog, or whatever it was, folds up for lack of interest. What happened to those tens of millions of followers who lived for their Dear Leader's daily, hourly, verbal defications on Facebook and Twitter? Do they even exist?
Above it all, I am most heartened by the news that Cyrus Vance is hauling Trump people in to talk to the grand jury. Sing, sing, sing!
This is being made out to be such a big deal. But when I was growing up, newspapers chose which "Letters to the Editor" they would publish, and would sometimes even edit them for clarity. There were the "seven words you can't say on television," and my mother would have given me no end of grief for the mouth I have on me now. It seems perfectly obvious that these social media platforms are "broadcast advertising" sites -- that's how they make their money, and is the ONLY reason politicians use them -- and should be subject to at least the same truth-in-advertising and decency standards as any other medium.
I'm relieved that 45 won't have direct access to either Twitter or Facebook for the next few years, but those agitating on his behalf will still be able to organize and continue to spread misinformation. 45 will always "be a risk to public safety." Considering Flynn's remark that what happened in Myanmar should also happen here, I wonder how many more feel the same way and are just waiting for 45 to "strike the match" to set them off again, on a more local scale... and then there's the millions more who believe the Big Lie to be true. Some of those include distant relatives as well as current patients in my office, so it's been an interesting time since 2016, walking the fine line of diplomacy, and I chuckle thinking about the definition of diplomacy (paraphrased): "Telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they actually look forward to the trip."
Hopefully, Rick Wilson will be proven completely right about "Everything Trump touches, dies." Most particularly the Trump Party. Let the doddering old duffer go rant and rave to the morons. With any luck he'll have his massive fatal myocardial infarction in front of them mid-rant. That would be perfect!
As regards Facebook, I see no reason why they can't be held to the same responsibility standards required of your local neighborhood bar. FB's business model is to keep serving the ranting drunk at the end of the bar doubles of whatever they're drinking, and to disclaim all responsibility after the drunk staggers out to the parking lot, manages to open the car door and stick the key in the ignition.
File under: How Scummy are the Scumballs? Richard Barnett is selling copies of the photo of him with his feet up on Pelosi's desk on 1/6. And he's making a killing.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned a thick document I was given in the early '80's about the plan of the republicans, masked under the "religious right," to infiltrate our systems in America in order to hold total power in all areas of our lives. And I feel that is what we have been witnessing for decades. No one from my life back then seems to remember this document. ?? So I did some research and found a paper from NOVA (Nova Southeastern University, FL) via their Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations. "The Rise of American Extremism: An Exploratory Analysis of American Religious and Political Extremism from Presidents Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama: 1977-2016" by Alwyn J. Melton (Doctorate of Philosophy) 2018.
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=shss_dcar_etd
This is the closest document I could find that relates what I have been concerned about for decades (since Reagan) as the rise of anti-American and anti-Democracy persons on our own shores reveal themselves. It is of course very long, but has a table of contents so you can pick and choose if you do not have time to read the entire dissertation. Eventually, I plan to read the entire document, but I am stumbling through Caste (with kleenex) right now. Small doses at a time. Same way I view films on the Holocaust. Never forget man's inhumanity against man.
Yay for FB and I hope they extend the ban for life.
But this sentence really struck me: “ Republican officials are begging him to talk about policy and the 2022 election, but he appears to be focused on his conviction that he won in 2020, ...”
These republican officials are as delusional as iDJT if they think he will talk policy instead of replaying that scratchy old record of his perceived grievances. Have they learned nothing from past performances? They’re a bunch of Charlie Browns giving Lucy the football one more time and hoping she’ll change her ways for the sanctity of the game.
Heather: Great 060421 newsletter! If you, or any of your very skillful critical analytical readers have the time to do so, I highly recommend exploring a brief book that I have been working my way through today. The authors are Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The title is HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE. The publication date was 2019. Levitsky and Ziblatt are both professors at Harvard University. I find the brief book very helpful because it strives to analyze not only the long history of authoritarianism, and anti-authoritarianism, in the U.S. but also tracks anti-fascist campaigns (some quite successful) over the past one hundred years. It is an invaluable analysis!
Nice that FB is “holding political figures” to a much higher standard than they had before but I still feel banning Fake45 for only up to two years isn’t enough. Maybe they are thinking either he won't be alive then or he will be in prison. I like either of those odds, quite frankly. Is that cruel of me?
The Big Lie that the former guy and his minions continue to tout could just as well be called the Big Scam. DJT, as well as Republican officials and future candidates, are amplifying the lies and illusions about the election as a fundraising tool. Millions of Trumplicans continue to open their wallets, buying into the Big Scam. Additionally, state Republican parties and legislatures are intentionally pushing the Big Scam, using it as an excuse for passing voting restrictions. Perhaps the former guy isn’t as addle-brained and delusional as many of us have believed. He and his Republican cohorts are raking in donations, dragging out the Big Scam with a clear end in mind: They want to line their own pockets and grab power to run the country into the ground. They will steal anything and everything to obtain that money and power. Taking away DJT’s social media megaphones is a win, albeit a small one, for the future of our democracy.
The most appropriate comment to the continued ban seems to me to be Nelson from the Simpsons crooning “ha-ha.” Bullies understand bullyese best. But all the comments in this section deploring Facebook’s power confuse me. What Zuckerberg created was a version of the Roman Forum, brilliant in its accessibility and generalized democratic possibilities. Any schmoe (who has access to a device and electricity and an internet connection, so it is not purely democratic, but public libraries in the US help narrow the gap domestically and libraries/mutual aid internationally) who wants to can open an account and broadcast a barbaric yawp -no editing like newspaper LTE, no tightly restricted access like radio/TV. That a grifting buffoon like Trump was able to amass numbers of followers (analogous to elites in the Forum gaining followings by dispensing largesse and making promises in exchange for bodies in support of them) by calling out “elites” in media who controlled narratives spoke to a visceral truth those economically left behind latched on to with fervor. Zuckerberg and co created a platform for such truths to be articulated and one hopes their attempts to appease government regulators holds off a state takeover of the platforms.
FB has banned the former president from its site for 2 years. Now, if only the major TV networks, and journalists would follow suit it would be great. Every mention of the former guy in the news gives him life. Shut down the life supports and may be he'll die. It's time....
George Orwell, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Two who I find myself reading these days are Orwell and Thomas Payne; both so painfully relevant to our dangerous division today. The Communists ironically enabled the win of Franco in the civil war in Spain. The Russians are playing a major role in the success of the so called "Republicans" now. The DJT fellow-travelers in the name of patriotism may very well find themselves aligned with our most aggressive, long term enemy, facing the slow realization that it was they who were "hoaxed'.
Dear Heather,
Thank you for keeping us updated. It does indeed seem significant (and 100 years from now relevant) that a social media giant, which has so much influence over the world that it literally affects the wellbeing of entire countries, has chosen to hold political figures to same standards as average users.
I’m glad of their decision, but feel worried about their continued power over our lives. It used to be our biggest worry was who rich people and corporations were funding politically, but social media has become a wild card in that arena. Common people can affect change, but bad actors using disinformation tactics can steer the direction.
Being smart doesn’t make anyone immune to the pitfalls of humanity.
In the now famous words of Alan Greenspan, “I didn’t anticipate the market’s inability to regulate itself.”
When people start saying things like “I can police myself” or that they’re “the chosen one”, alarm bells should go off, everywhere. When it comes to exercising power, within a Democracy, there must be “checks and balances”. When there are no “checks” on power, history has repeatedly proven it won’t work. I wouldn’t trust Mark Zuckerberg, anymore than I would mother Teresa or Donald Trump.
I am happy the social media bans are still in place,. Now if they don't hype his rallies and the legal system starts bringing cases to court I hope his followers will lose interest.
On this almost white-bright and very warm Saturday morning, Heather brought Donald J. Trump to my computer screen. She couldn't help herself. HE'S BACK. That's North Carolina, where he will address the Republican Party, tomorrow' Sunday night. It is a precursor to the rallies Trump plans to hold in Ohio, Alabama, and Florida next month. Soon after reading the Letter, I had to go elsewhere for relief.
'On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg finally dropped the hammer and declared that the former president would be barred from Facebook for at least two years — a lesser sentence than that handed down by Twitter, which has ejected him permanently. Facebook did, however, say that it would let Mr. Trump return only “if the risk to public safety has receded.”'
'Fat chance of that if you’ve seen how insistently and persistently Mr. Trump has continued to huff and puff on his sousaphone of lies. This has been his modus operandi since the minute he applied his thumbs to a mobile phone keyboard way back when — behavior that has gotten only scarier and more dangerous over time. That’s why it has not been easy to imagine that an often canny, prescient entrepreneur like Mr. Zuckerberg has been played for a chump by Mr. Trump.'
If you haven't met Kara Swisher (quoted above) on her podcast Sway, in her Opinions in The New York Times, in her books and podcast, Pivot, I have brought her here for levity, smarts and kicks in the asses of Kuckerberg and Trump. Swisher is the super powerful tech journalist and a contributing editor at New York Magazine.
'In my innumerable conversations with him over many years — often late at night over a phone, giving them the feel of a college-dorm jaw session — he maintained that he trusted Facebook’s larger community to clean out the vile, often-toxic dreck that flowed over his ever-larger platform.'
'Mr. Zuckerberg believes in the perfectibility of man. I have studied the use of propaganda in Nazi Germany and during China’s Cultural Revolution. I told him that there is no low that some people will not sink to if it is in their interests to do so'
This will not be the last word from Swisher as there is a link later on to her Opinion, 'The Terrible Cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s Naïveté'. For now: '... no one can turn the clock back on what Mr. Zuckerberg has wrought by indulging Mr. Trump, who never met a Facebook regulation he did not desecrate. The attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 should have been no surprise to anyone who was connecting the dots, which Mr. Zuckerberg stubbornly declined to do until now.'
In case you are not aware at this moment, the Trump/Fox News and the Republican Party's next scapegoat, is Anthony Fauci/Covid-19/China/The Democratic Party Syndrome or what's known in Canada's horse racing as a 'superfecta'. Their campaign has already begun on Fox News and probably elsewhere in the the far-right's media world. Trump's negligence, lies and responsibility for the avoidable deaths of many infected with Covid will be assumed by this 'superfecta'. I saw Mike Pompano making the case on Fox yesterday. The image of this very large man with little slits for eyes and a mouth is a picture that most of us wish to avoid. His mien is menacing, a thick wall of calumny. Oh, his lying eyes and mouth.
The true pain of this is 'superfecta' is the detritus they are throwing at Anthony Fauci.
We are in for ugliness on a grand scale, bigger and worse that we can remember.. Our goal is to keep our eye on Democracy. Whatever has come Fauci's way, he keeps his eye on science, the job at hand and our welfare. We have great models to follow.
Link to Swisher's Opinion:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/opinion/zuckerberg-trump-facebook-jan-6.html