Month: December 2018

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.