My husband made a good point yesterday, that an historian a hundred years from now could reasonably argue that Trump was never truly president because he was never allowed by the rest of the system to assume full power. For these four years America has been essentially sans-president.
The system has chosen Biden; never mind whether it reflects the will of the voters–if we cared about true democracy, we wouldn’t have an electoral college, either. The rule isn’t “no cheating,” the rule is “only do as much cheating as you can get away with.”
Of course it is better if the cheating is done behind closed doors, so it doesn’t undermine the legitimacy of the system, but the system was already having serious legitimacy issues due to the rest of the government having a serious allergic reaction to Trump.
There is nothing exceptional about the slowed-down Nancy Pelosi video, and nothing terribly exceptional in reporters saying uninformed things about subjects they aren’t well versed in.
Wow, that is awfully coincidental that Facebook just happened to be thinking about changing these policies anyway right before a doctored video just happened to make it onto the news, prompting millions of people to pressure Facebook into doing exactly what Facebook already wanted to do.
Don’t be fooled: this isn’t spontaneous. Oh, sure, many of the people at the low end, like reporters, are just doing their job of reading the news they have been given into the camera, but there is plenty of active coordination going on behind the scenes by organizations like Facebook and the Democratic Party.
The Democrats realized sometime around 2016 that they have a meme problem. People on the internet thought Trump was funny and Democrats were boring sticks in the mud. People on the internet made videos about Hillary Clinton’s health, the European migration crisis, and other subjects the Dems didn’t approve of.
They don’t want this happening again.
So they are laying the groundwork now to re-write the policies and algorithms to strategically remove problematic conservative voices from the fray. Alex Jones has already been kicked off Youtube, Facebook, PayPal, etc. FB has taken a particularly hard line, threatening not just to delete Jones’s videos, but any account that posts them (excepting those that post them in order to criticize them).
Even Visa and Mastercard are getting in on the act, cutting off banking services to organizations whose political views they don’t like.
The ostensible reason for Alex Jones’s deplatforming is his supposed spread of conspiracy theories post-Sandy Hook (I say “supposedly” because I have not seen the clips in question,) but it is obvious that 1. these concerns surfaced years after Sandy Hook and 2. no one has deplatformed media outlets that pushed the “Iraq has WMDs” conspiracy theory that cost the US trillions of dollars and lead to the deaths of thousands (millions?) of people.
This has all been accompanied by a basic shift in how media platforms and infrastructure are viewed.
The traditional conception is that these are platforms, not publishers, and thus they merely provide something akin to infrastructure without much say over how you, the user, put it to use. For example, the electric company provides electricity to anyone who pays for it, and even if you use your electricity to warm the cages of your illegally gotten, exotic, endangered reptile collection, the electric company will generally keep providing you with electricity. The electric company does not have to approve of what you do with the electricity you buy, and if you break the law with their electricity, they see it as the state’s job to stop you.
A publisher and a platform, like Facebook, traditionally enjoyed different legal rights and safeguards. A publisher checks and decides to publish every single item they put out, and so is held to be responsible for anything they print. A platform merely provides a space where other people can publish their own works, without supervision. Platforms do not check posts before they go up, (as a practical matter, they can’t,) and thus are generally only held legally responsible for taking down material on their site if someone has notified them that it is in violation of some law.
EG, suppose someone posts something really illegal, child porn, on Facebook. If Facebook is a “publisher,” it is now publishing child porn and is in big legal trouble. But since Facebook is just a platform, it deletes the videos and is legally in the clear. (The poster may still go to prison, of course.)
The conceptual shift in recent years has been to portray platforms as “allowing” people to come in and use their platforms, and then ask why they are allowing such shitty people to use their platform. No one asks why the electric company allows you to use their electricity to raise your army of bio mutant squids, but they do ask why Facebook allows right-wingers to be on the platform at all.
This is treating platforms like publishers, and they are absolutely jumping into it with both feet.
Let’s skip forward a bit in the video to the lady in white to see this in action:
It’s been viewed millions of times on the internet, but it’s not real… This is really scary, and not going away, and I’m fearful this is going to be all over the 2020 election.
You know, that’s how I felt when libs kept bringing up Harry Potter in the context of the last election, but for some reason taking a children’s fantasy story about wizards is acceptable in political discourse but slowed-down videos aren’t.
And who is responsible for monitoring this stuff, taking it down? Facebook, Youtube took it down, but after how long?
Other commentator… At Facebook it’s still up because Facebook allows you to do a mock video…
The correct answer is that no one is responsible for monitoring all of Facebook and Youtube’s content, because that’s impossible to do and because Facebook isn’t your mommy. If you want Facebook to be your mom and monitor everything you consume, just stop talking and leave the adults alone.
CNN asks:
So Monika, in the wake of the 2016 election obviously Facebook has repeatedly told Congress and the American people that yo’re serious about fighting disinformation, fake news, and yet this doctored video which I think even your own fact checkers acknowledge is doctored of speaker Pelosi remains on your platform. Why?
Like the previous guy already said, because it’s not against Facebook’s TOS. Of course Anderson Cooper already knows this. He doesn’t need to get an actual Facebook representative on his show to find out that “funny reaction videos are allowed on Facebook.” And if Facebook were serious about maintaining its neutrality as a platform, not a publisher, it would not have bothered to send anyone to CNN–it would have just left matters at a blanket statement that the video does not violate the TOS.
The Facebook Lady (Monika,) then explains how Facebook uses its algorithms to demote and demonitize content the “experts” claim is false. They’re proud of this and want you to know about it.
So misinformation that doesn’t promote violence, but misinformation that portrays the third most powerful politician in the country as a drunk or as somehow impaired, that’s fine?
Oh no, quick, someone save the third most powerful person in the country from people saying mean things about her on the internet! We can’t have those disgusting peasants being rude to their betters!
Anderson Cooper is infuriatingly moronic; does not “logically understand” why Facebook leaves up videos that don’t violate the TOS but suggests that Facebook should “get out of the news business” if it can’t do it well.
Facebook isn’t in the “news business” you moron, because Facebook is a platform, not a publisher. You’re in the news business, so you really ought to know the difference.
If you don’ know the difference between Facebook and a news organization, maybe you shouldn’t be in the news business.
That said, of course Anderson Cooper actually understands how Facebook works. This whole thing is a charade to give Facebook cover for changing its policies under the excuse of “there was public outrage, so we had to.” It’s an old scam.
One final note: even though I think there is coordinated activity at the top/behind the scenes at tech companies and the like, I don’t think the average talking head you see on TV is in on it. Conspiracies like that are too hard to pull off; rather, humans naturally cooperate and coordinate their behavior because they want to work together, signal high social status, keep their jobs, etc.
My first reaction to this video was to yell Head Like a Hole at the screen.
… Head like a hole.
Black as your soul.
I’d rather die than give you control.
Head like a hole.
Black as your soul.
I’d rather die than give you control.
Bow down before the one you serve.
You’re going to get what you deserve.
Bow down before the one you serve.
You’re going to get what you deserve. …
With that bit of catharsis, let’s take a deeper look at the first video.
A doctored video of Pelosi that surfaced this week has been viewed millions of times and some social media giants are refusing to take it down.
By the way, the “doctoring” in this video was just slowing it down, not some scary-sounding “deep fake” like the scene where Forrest Gump met JFK. (Good luck distinguishing between “slowed down” and your average humorous “reaction” video.)
Social media sites like Youtube and Facebook have traditionally taken the view that they basically let people post whatever they want, without supervision, and then take it down if 1. they receive a complaint and 2. it is illegal or otherwise violates their terms of service. Aside from a Youtube algorithm that catches pirated music, these sites rely on users’ reports because they have no way to scan and check the contents of 100% of posts.
So before a company takes down a video, you have make a credible argument to them that the video is in some way illegal or violating their TOS. If the copyright holder claimed violation, the video would probably be instantly gone, because social media sites are legally required to take down copyright violations.
But merely remixing someone else’s video, maybe adding some music or a laugh track or a bit of your own commentary, happens all the time and is usually allowed–sans a copyright claim, “this video has been edited” does not violate Youtube or Facebook’s terms of service.
So one sentence in, and already this reporter is showing a fundamental misunderstanding of how social media companies handle content complaints. They are not “refusing to take it down;” they are “not taking it down because they have not decided that it violates one of their policies.”
… I think what’s different now is the way that this kind of content can be weaponized. …
Sure, the Malleus Maleficarum, 1487, might have contributed to thousands of innocent people being tortured and burned to death during the European witch trials; Nazi propaganda might have contributed to the Holocaust; communist propaganda might have contributed to mass famines, Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, etc., but now this kind of content can be weaponized!
… There are now websites out there where you can ask people for ten, twenty bucks to make deep fakes for you…
Deepfakes are legitimately interesting in their own right and we do need to have a real, sit-down think about the possibility of all video and photographs becoming unreliable, but this isn’t a deepfake. This is a video slowed down with ordinary video editing software like the one I use to make videos of the kids for grandma.
They’re trying to scare you with the ominous sounding “deepfake” because “slowed down a bit” doesn’t sound like nearly so big a threat to civilization.
Facebook’s actions drew strong criticism from media watchers, … so, what should viewers expect from Facebook and other social media sites when it comes to authenticating media on their platform?
Nothing. They should expect nothing because Facebook does not “authenticate” things on its platform, nor does it have the ability to.
Anyone who thinks, “I saw it on Facebook, therefore it must be true,” should not be allowed out of the house without supervision (nor should they be allowed on Facebook).
So, the video reflects this problem that we’re going to increasingly face, which is that we can’t trust our own eyes so it’s not that easy for the average citizen to make sense of what’s true and what’s false, what gets circulated or goes viral on Facebook, so they need to defer to people with expert opinions…
I think that popping sound was me turning into a Marxist.
Seriously, though, deferring political decisions to “experts” just leads to people competing over what “experts” believe. We discussed this back in my review of Tom Nichols’s The Death of Expertise:
Nichols ends with a plea that voters respect experts (and that experts, in turn, be humble and polite to voters.) After all, modern society is too complicated for any of us to be experts on everything. If we don’t pay attention to expert advice, he warns, modern society is bound to end in ignorant goo.
The logical inconsistency is that Nichols believes in democracy at all–he thinks democracy can be saved if ignorant people vote within a range of options as defined by experts like himself, eg, “What vaccine options are best?” rather than “Should we have vaccines at all?”
The problem, then, is that whoever controls the experts (or controls which expert opinions people hear) controls the limits of policy debates. This leads to people arguing over experts, which leads right back where we are today. As long as there are politics, “expertise” will be politicized, eg:
“Experts quoted in the piece.”
And where do these experts come from? I study these things; am I an expert? Do I get to decide which Youtube videos are Fake News?
What, someone’s complaining that I demonetized all of their pro-antifa videos? Too bad. I’m the expert, now.
“Experts” have brought us many valuable things, like heart surgery and airplanes. They have also had many mistakes. They once swore that witches were a serious problem, that the Earth stood still at the center of the universe, and that chemicals in the water were causing the frogs to change sex. Wait, that last one is true. Experts once claimed that homosexuality was a mental illness; today they proclaim that transsexual children should go on hormone blockers. Experts claimed that satanic ritual abuse was definitely a real thing and that there was an international conspiracy of Satanic preschools, resulting in real people actually going to prison.
The potential for the rich, powerful, and well-connected to hire their own experts and fund studies that coincidentally show they deserve to keep making lots of money and aren’t doing anything that could harm your health or well being (like the time gas companies paid for studies claiming leaded gas was harmless, or tobacco companies paid experts to claim cigarettes didn’t cause cancer.)
This is why courts let both sides bring their own experts to a case–because there are always experts on both sides.
Back to the video:
I think the republic begins to suffer if people are getting extremely bad information and the authorities, the elites, the gatekeepers, are basically throwing up their hands and just saying, “not my problem.”
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. –Marx, The German Ideology
Back to the guy in the video:
In the last election, we saw how outside actors came in and tried to manipulate the American electorate, spreading misinformation and Facebook was their primary platform for spreading misinformation.
The guy who just said that the Republic begins to suffer if people are getting misinformation just spread misinformation about “outside interference” in the 2016 election, and he thinks there exists some sort of politically disinterested “experts” who can determine which videos are true or not?
So what happens when those actors, when the Russians, or some bad political actors here, try to use manipulated video that does’t just change a snippet in a clip, but invents things wholecloth?
Like the time the New York Times ran a story attacking a student from Covington highschool based on deceptively edited video footage?
Or is it okay when the New York Times, the paper of record whom millions of people trust for their news does it, but bad when Alex Jones, the guy who thinks chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay, does it?
I don’t see how, once that firehose [of fake videos] is unleashed, we have any choice but to have some authority step in and make those distinctions about what’s real and what’s not.
It’s amazing how quickly we went from “Hooray the internet is spreading the Arab Spring” to “Oh no the internet is threatening our hold on political power; shut it down!”
For the sake of both my need to sleep and everyone’s rage levels, let’s continue this in the next post.
So the New York Times (which I don’t read, but Steve does so in the end, I do,) ran an article today how Bernie Sanders is a bad guy for inadequately responding to one campaign staffer touching another campaign staffer’s hair back in 2016.
I’ve noticed that SJWs tend to attack low-status people, not high-status (Trump excepted.) For example, a Portland Taco Truck may get driven out of business for “culturally appropriating” Mexican food, but Taco Bell doesn’t. Mere mortals calling Mohammad a pedophile for marrying a 9 yr old might go to prison for insulting Islam, but China can round up millions of Muslims and put them in “re-education camps” and no one makes a peep.
So when SJWs attack someone, it’s safe to say that 1. Their real intent has nothing to do with their claimed intent, and 2. The target is either low-status, losing status, or about to lose status, ie, protection.
The Democratic establishment didn’t like Sanders running the first time and did what they could to prevent him from getting the nomination.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Democrats are gearing up for the next election–looking over their candidates and deciding whom to run–as this piece comes out. Looks like a smear job, a hit piece intended to crush the Bernie campaign before it starts.
And Harvard’s commencement speech was delivered by Mark Zuckerberg, who discussed his presidential bid:
You’re graduating at a time when this is especially important. When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void.
As I’ve traveled around, I’ve sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after school program or somewhere to go.
Just a second. Do you know what I did after school to keep myself busy and out of juvie?
Homework.
Today I want to talk about three ways to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world.
First, let’s take on big meaningful projects.
Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together.
Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon – including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of more people built the Hoover dam and other great projects.
These projects didn’t just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things. …
So what are we waiting for? It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases and asking volunteers to track their health data and share their genomes? Today we spend 50x more treating people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place. That makes no sense. We can fix this. How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online, and personalizing education so everyone can learn?
Oh, Zuck. You poor, naive man.
I’m not going to run through the pros and cons of solar panels because I don’t know the subject well enough. Maybe that’s a good idea.
I’d love to cure all diseases. Sure, nature would invent new ones, but it’d still be great. But what’s actually driving medical costs? Diseases we have no cures for, like ALS, Alzheimer’s, or the common cold? Or preventable things like overeating=>obesity=>heart disease? Or is it just a nasty mishmash of regulation, insurance, and greedy pharmaceutical companies?
According to What is Driving US Healthcare Costs:
Half of all adults in the U.S. have at least one chronic disease, such as heart disease, cancer, and [type 2] diabetes. Twenty-five percent of adults in the U.S. have two or more chronic diseases. An aging population, lifestyle choices (like exercise and nutrition), and genetics contribute to the growing prevalence of chronic illnesses.
Chronic diseases contribute to rising healthcare costs because they are expensive to treat. Eighty-six percent of all healthcare spending is for patients with a chronic disease. Patients with three or more chronic diseases are likely to fall into the most expensive one percent of patients, accounting for 20 percent of healthcare expenditures. Many of these patients require high spending in every cost category – physician visits, hospital stays, prescription drugs, medical equipment use, and health insurance.
These are the diseases of Western Civilization, and they’re caused by sitting on your butt eating blog posts and eating Doritos all day instead of chasing down your dinner and killing it with your bare hands like a mighty caveman. Rar.
Luckily for us, unlike ALS, we know what causes them and how to prevent them. Unluckily for us, Doritos are really tasty.
But this also means that until we find some way to outlaw Doritos (or society collapses,) we’re going to keep spending more money treating Type-2 Diabetes and heart disease than on “curing” them.
I don’t see how “modernizing democracy” is going to put millions of people whose jobs have been automated back to work, though it might employ a few people to make websites.
As for education, you’d think Zuckerberg would have learned after throwing 100 MILLION DOLLARS at the Newark public schools and getting ZILCH–ZERO–NADA student improvement in return, but I guess not.
There’s this myth that students have “individual learning styles” and that if you could just figure out each student’s own special style and tailor the curriculum directly to them, they’d suddenly start learning.
In reality, this notion is idiotic. Learning is fundamental to our species; our brains do it automatically, all the time. Imagine a caveman who could only learn the location of a dangerous lion via pictograms sketched by other cavemen, rather than from someone shouting “Lion! Run!” Our brains are flexible and in the vast majority of cases will take in new information by whatever means they can.
But getting back to Zuck:
These achievements are within our reach. Let’s do them all in a way that gives everyone in our society a role. Let’s do big things, not only to create progress, but to create purpose.
So taking on big meaningful projects is the first thing we can do to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.
Overall, I think Zuckerberg has identified an important problem: the robot economy is replacing human workers, leaving people without a sense of purpose in their lives (or jobs.) Some of his proposed solutions, like “employ people in solar panel industry,” might work, but others, like “vote online,” miss the mark completely.
Unfortunately, this is a really hard problem to solve. (Potential solutions: Universal Basic Income so we don’t all starve to death when the robots automate everything, or just let 90% of the population starve to death because they’ve become economically irrelevant. Chose your future wisely.)
Back to Zuck:
The second is redefining equality to give everyone the freedom they need to pursue purpose.
Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers. Now we’re all entrepreneurial, whether we’re starting projects or finding or role. And that’s great. Our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress.
Now, an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. Facebook wasn’t the first thing I built. I also built games, chat systems, study tools and music players. I’m not alone. JK Rowling got rejected 12 times before publishing Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo. The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.
12? Is that it? I’ve got about a hundred rejections.
Actually, those 12 were from publishers after J.K. Rowling landed an agent, so that doesn’t tell you the full number of rejections she received trying to get that agent. 12 rejections from publishers sounds pretty par for the course–if not better than average. Publishing is an incredibly difficult world for new authors to break into.
But today, we have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone. When you don’t have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise, we all lose. Right now our society is way over-indexed on rewarding success and we don’t do nearly enough to make it easy for everyone to take lots of shots.
Let’s face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.
Look, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and I don’t know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they might not make enough money. But I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.
We all know we don’t succeed just by having a good idea or working hard. We succeed by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today. If we’re honest, we all know how much luck we’ve had.
Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.
We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.
Called it. Is Zuck going to run on the full communism ticket?
We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable childcare to get to work and healthcare that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as technology keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives.
Or… maybe we could work on making employment more stable and using UBI to let parents take care of their own children instead of treating them like consumer goods to be produced by the cheapest possible workers?
I’m kind of biased here because I went to daycare as a kid and hated it.
He’s correct on healthcare, though. It definitely shouldn’t be tied to employers.
Now, while I do think that we should actually take a good, hard look at our criminal justice system to make sure we aren’t locking up innocent people or giving completely unjust sentences, society doesn’t normally lock people up for “mistakes.” It locks them up for things like murder. Like the Newark schools, I fear this is an area where Zuckerberg really doesn’t understand what the actual problem is.
And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too.
That’s why Priscilla and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation. It was never a question of if we were going to do this. The only question was when.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a limited liability company founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan with an investment of “up to $1 billion in [Facebook] shares in each of the next three years”.[2][3][4] Its creation was announced on December 1, 2015, for the birth of their daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.[2]
The aim of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to “advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy”.[2]
Priscilla Chan’s Wikipedia page states, “On December 1, 2015, Chan and Zuckerberg posted an open Facebook letter to their newborn daughter. They pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares, then valued at $45 billion, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is their new charitable foundation that focuses on health and education.[3][12]”
If I were there kid, I might be kind of pissed about my parents celebrating my birthday by giving away my inheritance.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit,[15][16] spend money on lobbying,[15][17] make political donations,[15][17][18] will not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives[17] and have fewer other transparency requirements, compared to a charitable trust.[15][16][17][18] Under this legal structure, as Forbes wrote it, “Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative”.[17][18]
So maybe this whole “charity” thing is just window-dressing. BTW, one of CZI’s projects is Andela:
Andela is a global engineering organization that extends engineering teams with world-class software developers. The company recruits the most talented developers on the African continent, shapes them into technical leaders, and places them as full-time distributed team members with companies that range from Microsoft and IBM to dozens of high-growth startups. Backed by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV (Google Ventures) and Spark Capital, Andela is building the next generation of global technology leaders. Andela has offices in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala and New York.
So Zuck’s going to solve the problem of people dying of hopelessness after losing their jobs to automation by training and importing third worlders to replace more jobs. (Meanwhile, they’re skimming the most talented people out of the third world, leaving countries there with even less human capital.)
But back to the speech:
Millennials are already one of the most charitable generations in history. In one year, three of four US millennials made a donation and seven out of ten raised money for charity.
I’m going to call bullshit on this, mostly because charitable giving correlates with age, not moving around too much, and most importantly, religiosity. The nation’s most charitable state is Utah, followed closely by the Southern states. The least charitable states are in New England, which is highly atheist, and whose lower classes are notably clannish:
Southie was ground zero for anti-busing rage. Hundreds of white demonstrators — children and their parents — pelted a caravan of 20 school buses carrying students from nearly all-black Roxbury to all-white South Boston. The police wore riot gear.
“I remember riding the buses to protect the kids going up to South Boston High School,” Jean McGuire, who was a bus safety monitor, recalled recently. “And the bricks through the window. …
From the start of busing, police at South Boston High outnumbered students. Yet the violence continued. Then-Mayor Kevin White, making a rare TV appeal, declared a curfew and banned crowds near the school, but said there was only so much he could do to protect students and enforce the federal mandate. …
Law enforcement tactics toughened, and what had started out as an anti-busing problem soon included anti-police sentiment. Many of the police officers were Irish from Southie.
“I had never seen that kind of anger in my life. It was so ugly,” said patrolman Francis Mickey Roache (South Boston High Class of 1954), who was on duty at the school that first day of desegregation, when protesters turned on him.
“These are women, and people who were probably my mother’s age, and they were just screaming, ‘Mickey, you gotta quit, you gotta quit!’ They picked me out because they knew me. I was a South Boston boy, I grew up in Southie,” he remembered. …
A group of whites in South Boston brutally beat a Haitian resident of Roxbury who had driven into their neighborhood. A month later some black students stabbed a white student at South Boston High. The school was shut down for a month.
Then-Gov. Francis Sargent put the National Guard on alert. State police were called in and would remain on duty on the streets of South Boston for the next three years.
Maybe they should have sent the black kids to Zuckerberg’s school instead of the Irish schools.
Millennials frequently get berated for supposedly being selfish and not generous. Despite being the largest U.S. demographic by age, the generation of 18-to-34 year-olds donates less and volunteers less for charitable causes than any other age group.
But maybe it depends where you’re looking.
Millennials are the driving force behind a movement that is rapidly disrupting the $241 billion market in the U.S. alone for charitable giving. Crowdfunding is no longer just for indie film projects and iPhone accessories. The segment for personal appeals such as medical expenses, memorials, adoptions and disaster relief is soaring–an estimated $3 billion in 2014, according to research firm Massolution.
Just for the record, I detest the term “Millenials.” But let’s get back to Zuck:
Purpose doesn’t only come from work. The third way we can create a sense of purpose for everyone is by building community.And when our generation says “everyone”, we mean everyone in the world.
OKAY FULL COMMUNISM.
Quick show of hands: how many of you are from another country? Now, how many of you are friends with one of these folks? Now we’re talking. We have grown up connected.
In a survey asking millennials around the world what defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn’t nationality, religion or ethnicity, it was “citizen of the world”. That’s a big deal.
Here’s a little challenge. Why don’t you go live in China, and when they ask to see your passport, just loudly proclaim that you’re a “citizen of the world” and therefore don’t need a visa to be there? (No, not as Zuckerberg, the man with 63 billion dollars, but as a just a common millenial.)
Then move to Afghanistan and let the local warlords know that you’re a “citizen of the world” and going to live in their village, now, and would they please respect your religious and gender identities?
Try moving to Japan, North Korea, Bhutan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mexico, or any other nation, buying land, voting in local elections (if they have them,) and hanging out with your new neighbors.
Let me know how that works out.
Every generation expands the circle of people we consider “one of us”. For us, it now encompasses the entire world.
Zuck, have you even asked the people of Nigeria if they consider you “one of them”? You don’t speak their language. You don’t share their values (otherwise you’d have a lot more children.) You probably haven’t even spent a day of your life hanging out with your Nigerian friend in a poor neighborhood in Lagos.
I understand the naivety of a well-meaning young person who just wants to be friends with everyone, but adults understand that not everyone wants to be friends with them. Just because you like the pleasant idea of having a few friends from other countries does not mean that you are actually part of those cultures, nor that the people from those places actually want to you there.
We understand the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations — to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.
How did that work out when the German city states united into one country?
We get that our greatest opportunities are now global — we can be the generation that ends poverty, that ends disease. We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics. Progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.
But we live in an unstable time. There are people left behind by globalization across the world. It’s hard to care about people in other places if we don’t feel good about our lives here at home. There’s pressure to turn inwards.
Related:
This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowledge, trade and immigration against those who would slow them down.
Because we all know that Japan, one of the few nations that is actually dealing reasonably well with robotification by not adding more laborers to a shrinking market, is horribly un-free.
Trump supporter beaten bloody by “ideas”
This is not a battle of nations, it’s a battle of ideas. There are people in every country for global connection and good people against it.
This isn’t going to be decided at the UN either. It’s going to happen at the local level, when enough of us feel a sense of purpose and stability in our own lives that we can open up and start caring about everyone. The best way to do that is to start building local communities right now.
We all get meaning from our communities. Whether our communities are houses or sports teams, churches or music groups, they give us that sense we are part of something bigger, that we are not alone; they give us the strength to expand our horizons.
That’s why it’s so striking that for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter. That’s a lot of people who now need to find purpose somewhere else.
But I know we can rebuild our communities and start new ones because many of you already are.
Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.
Bowling Alone attributes these changes to a variety of causes, including TV and declining religiosity, but Putnam’s Wikipedia page notes:
In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30,000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although limited to American data, it puts into question both the contact hypothesis and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. In contrast, contact theory proposes that distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as “hunkering down,” avoiding engagement with their local community—both among different ethnic groups and within their own ethnic group. Even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be the prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust.
Lowered trust in areas with high diversity is also associated with:
Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one’s own influence.
Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
Less likelihood of working on a community project.
Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
Fewer close friends and confidants.
Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
More time spent watching television and more agreement that “television is my most important form of entertainment”.
Alexander Wienberger, Holodomor
Perhaps it is a sign of how far our communities have degenerated that today’s young adults imagine themselves to be as connected to people in China and Nigeria as with their own neighbors.
Zuckerberg’s not dumb, but I suspect he has spent his entire life ensconced in a very expensive cocoon filled with people who are basically like him, from his highschool, Phillips Exeter, to Harvard and Silicon Valley. Strip him of his 63 billion dollars and send him to a normal school, and Zuck’s just another unattractive dweeb whom women wouldn’t date and jocks would shove into lockers.
Communism starts with well-meaning idiots who want to help everyone and ends with gulags and mass graves.
That said, I think it’d be interesting to give Zuckerberg a chance to put his ideas into practice. Why not take his 63 billion and buy his own island, sign a semi-autonomy deal with whatever country’s jurisdiction it’s under, (probably in exchange for taxes,) and set up Zucktopia? He can let in whomever he wants–Africa’s top coders, Syrian refugees, Chinese gameshow hosts–start his own scientific and medical research institutions, and try to build a functional society from the ground up. If any of his ideas are terrible, he’ll probably figure that out quite quickly. If they’re good, he can turn his island into a purpose-driven economic powerhouse.
I don’t think Zuck has a good shot at the presidency just because he’s dorky and Americans hate dorks, but I didn’t predict Trump’s victory, either.
evolutionistx 