A writer's miscellany
“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”
— Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823
“Police officers don’t face justice more often for a variety of reasons — from powerful police unions to the blue wall of silence to cowardly prosecutors to reluctant juries. But it is the Supreme Court that has enabled a culture of violence and abuse by eviscerating a vital civil rights law to provide police officers what, in practice, is nearly limitless immunity from prosecution for actions taken while on the job. The badge has become a get-out-of-jail-free card in far too many instances.”
The New York Times, editorial, 2020-05-30
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death we are again asking the same question we’ve been asking for more than five decades: Why are we letting this continue to happen? And everyone’s frustration with the death of yet another black man at the hands of police has reached the boiling point.
How did we get here? The above editorial is an excellent tutorial. It’s an important and insightful editorial. Please read it.
Understanding how we got here is essential knowledge for all of us if we’re going to forge a remedy to this tragic and chronic injustice.
Now we have to hold our lawmakers accountable for making this happen. As “we the people”, that’s our responsibility.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The White Queen to Alice, Alice in Wonderland
Below is an article from today’s The New York Times by Shira Ovide who writes the On Tech column for them.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Facebook had studied for two years whether its social network makes people more polarized.
Researchers concluded that it does, and recommended changes to the company’s computerized systems to steer people away from vilifying one another. But the Journal reports that the company’s top executives declined to implement most of the proposed changes.
Fostering open dialogue among people with different viewpoints isn’t easy, and I don’t know if Facebook was right in shelving ideas like creating separate online huddles for parents arguing about vaccinations. But I do want to talk over two nagging questions sparked by this article and others:
Continue reading “Facebook and Its Secret Policies”“The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the lordly ‘barons’ of the late nineteenth century, we call them ‘robbers.’
“Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them It reminds us that shared trust is the only real protection from uncertainty. It demonstrates that power untamed by democracy can only lead to exile and despair. . . . it is up to us to use our knowledge, to regain our bearings, to stir others to do the same, and to found a new beginning. In the conquest of nature, industrial capitalism’s victims were mute. Those who would try to conquer human nature will find their intended victims full of voice, ready to name danger and defeat it. This book is intended as a contribution to that collective effort.”
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, (Public Affairs, 2019).
Below are two infographics from a September, 2019 PEW Research Center poll that shows how Americans feel about citizen inequality in the U.S.
Majorities of Republicans and Democrats who say reducing inequality should be a top priority also point to inequality giving the wealthy too much political influence and access and being harmful to economic growth as major reasons why they think reducing inequality should be a priority.
So, if our Senators and Representatives in Congress truly represent “we, the people”, then why is so little being done to address the views reflected in the above poll figures? Do our Congressional “servants” serve us . . . or not? If not, then cui bono? Who does benefit from their actions? If not us, then who? Watch and read the news with a discerning eye. Be aware of what bills are passed in Congress. Perhaps more importantly, be aware of what bills are being held up in the Senate and are NOT being passed? Why aren’t they being passed? What does that answer tell us?
While more people are out of work now than at any time since the Great Depression, COVID-19 ravages through the country, and middle class folks are lining up in their cars at food banks, the following news items caught my attention.
I came across this article again recently: These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018, on CNBC. A lot has written about this since then, of course, but even though it’s nearly six months old, the truth of it still makes me seethe as my hair smolders.
Nearly 100 companies in the Fortune 500 had an effective federal tax rate of 0% or less in 2018, according to a new report.
The report looks at the first year since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 went into effect.
The list of companies covers a wide range of industries and includes some of the biggest companies in the United States.
And then there’s this recent news on CNBC:
U.S. billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the nation’s lockdown between mid-March and mid-May [2020], according to a new report.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains.
Bezos added $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg picked up $25 billion.
I was recently re-reading The Art of Questioning: Thirty Maxims of Cross-Examination by Peter Megargee Brown, former President of the Federal Bar Council and Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. (It’s an old book, published in 1987. I bought it on 29 January 1992 while I was working on my novel An Absence of Light.) In it Brown quotes the following question/answer routine often performed by the famed Minsky family burlesque team. It sounds very much like Donald Trump answering a reporter’s question: “Why are fire engines red?”
“Why are fire engines painted red? I’ll tell ya. Fire engines are painted red because newspapers are read, too. Two and two is four. Four and Four is eight. Eight and four is twelve. Twelve inches is a ruler. Queen Mary was a ruler. Queen Mary was a ship that sailed the sea. There are fish in the sea. The fish have fins. The Finns fought the Russians. The Russians are red. Fire engines are always rushin’. That’s why fire engines are red.“
Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modifications; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above; an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, (Public Affairs, 2019).
I just signed the campaign Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson started on Moveon.org. Check out their work and join us by adding your name to fight for safe and fair elections. Every name that is added builds momentum around the campaign and makes it more likely for us to get the change we want to see.
Go to When We All Vote and sign the petition.
After you’ve signed the petition please also take a moment to share it with others. It’s super easy – all you need to do is forward the link above. Thank you!
To help you understand your new world environment, this is essential reading. It can be heavy lifting sometimes. But stick with it. It’s extremely enlightening. And I found it to be a sobering message about the unprecedented challenges we face as citizen of this American democracy, and our new world of global surveillance. Highly recommended.
Novelists typically aren’t held to the same truth standards as journalists. Our “business,” after all, is imagining stories that have never been told before. Mostly, our truths are in the realm of authenticity, making our characters “ring true,” our dialogue seem “natural,” our stories tell the truths of human nature. But being factual isn’t necessarily an essential element to the larger truths we often try to address in our stories.
But lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about “the truth” in reality in this moment of our lives we call the everyday. This is a time in our history when curating “fact” is absolutely essential if we are going to survive as a democratic society and culture. Or, in this time of Covid-19, if we are going to survive at all, literally.
The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Today the digital revolution has made instant global communication second nature to all of us, and as a result recognizing an untruth, or partial truth, sooner rather than later, has become a critical survival skill.
To that end, I’m listing several fact-checking sites offered on the Internet. They are just a few tools among many we need to get into the habit of using in our pursuit of knowing the truth and recognizing the lie. This is excerpted from The 8 Best Fact-Checking Sites for Finding Unbiased Truth.
Media Bias/FactCheck (MBFC News) The website is a bias rating resource, with multiple fake news checking apps and extensions integrating these ratings into their own systems. The site’s reputation means that it has long been a resource that internet users can visit to check the bias in their favorite news websites.
Snopes Snopes started out as a site that mainly dealt with urban legends, myths, common misconceptions, rumors, and conspiracy theories. However, it has expanded to encompass general fact-checking of viral misinformation, including political statements.
PolitiFact A non-partisan fact-checking website that focuses on political claims made in the US. This includes statements by politicians, political topics such as immigration, and general political news. A global edition of the site tackles stories from other parts of the world.
PolitiFact is a Pulitzer Prize-winning website and was acquired by the Poynter Institute in 2018—a reflection of the site’s commitment to truthful journalism.
FactCheck.org Not only is FactCheck.org a fact-checking website with an established history of journalistic rigor, but it also partners with Facebook to combat viral fake news. It is a non-partisan fact-checking website which focuses primarily on US politics. It is also a non-profit project—meaning it focuses on information, not the pursuit of profit.
TruthOrFiction.com TruthOrFiction.com is one of the longest-running fact-checking sites out there. While it initially focused on looking at internet hoaxes and rumors, it has extended its range to include general fake news as well. This includes political stories and viral content.