Current Affairs – US

I'm going to be unfashionable here and not blame anyone but Harvey Weinstein for Harvery Weinstein's actions.

— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 10, 2017

…to believe that a sensible country should mandate participation in patriotic displays?
Jim Wright, as usual, summarizes it quite neatly:

Note also that the tweet from the POTUS contains the usual authoritarian, shrill insistent device of shouting by using all caps. Once again, I am reading somebody either trying to convince themselves they are right, or engaging in verbal bullying. The POTUS can go piss up a rope.

This paper written by experts (you know, people who actually know a lot about their chosen subject) written by the Strategic Studies Institute, although a few years old, does a good job of why North Korea has become the Land of no Good Options for the USA.
After reading this, it should be fairly clear why Donald Trump’s current tactics of public ridicule are unlikely to be productive.

This article explains the long and sordid history of faux-insurgent railing and ranting against “elites” by politicians. The results can be seen in the mind-bogglingly incompetent Trump administration, where competence is trumped by connections.

My brief daily tour of Facebook reveals, as normal, that a significant number of people appear to think that making assertions without any supporting evidence comprises a good discussion contribution.
Er, no.
If I read an assertion with no supporting evidence, these are the thoughts that immediately pop up in my head about the writer:

1. The writer is seeking affirmation, not discussion or discovery
2. The writer is lazy and/or uninformed
3. The writer has a fixed view on the subject and therefore believes that evidence and argument are irrelevant or superfluous.
4. The writer does not know how to discuss and debate, and is likely to be uninterested in learning

As you tell, none of those are exactly complimentary thoughts.

If (1) and (3) are true, then it is likely that the writer is not interested in a good-faith discussion. That is a contra-indication to my becoming involved in the first place. However, I may try to jog the writer out of their zone by asking them to provide some evidence to back up the assertions.
Good faith discussion is not difficult, but it does require some basic standards of behavior to be useful. Among those are extending the principle of charity by assuming that you are dealing with an open-minded person, not a close-minded idiot, and a willingness to actually process input instead of being emotionally aroused or triggered by it.
I have reached a point where I can tell within 2 or at most 3 exchanges whether a good-faith discussion is even possible. Quite often, working on the principle that life is too short etc. etc. if I determine that it is not, I walk away.
Walking away is an interesting action in itself, since it often shows how mature the other party is. If their response is “so you got nothing?” or “then I won”, (or, as in one recent case, an imperious demand of “why have you not responded to me?”) you know you are dealing with somebody who, to varying degrees, is behaving like a juvenile, or who believes that “winning” or being vindicated or validated is more important than learning. Since I don’t go into discussions to “win”, but to learn, responses like that tend to validate why I walked away.

…as FEMA stops showing “bad” information about Puerto Rico and only shows the good information.
I feel like I have just moved to Eastern Europe or Russia at the end of the Cold War. This is parallel universe stuff.

The interesting thing is that one can actually get all of the numbers from the Puerto Rico government website. But the official US government relief body is not being allowed to report them.

…lots of media outlets are not even bothering to remind readers of why NFL players have been protesting?

I went through a bunch of news stories reporting on “local people don’t like NFL protest”. *ZERO* mentioned the reason for the protests.

— Anil Dash, Your Pal (@anildash) October 5, 2017

I’m shocked, I tell you! Shocked!
Well. not really. The complaints and animus against NFL players were never anything to do with their protest. Most of the whiners pissers and moaners don’t give a flying fish about that. They either want their football event to be unsullied by “politics”, although they were presumably quite happy with the paid patriotism, or they reflexively think the protests are “disrespectful, in which case they are clueless about the First Amendment and freedom.

The field is getting crowded. CNN’s entry has appeared:

It is headline like this that easily convince the rest of the world that when it comes to personal ownership of firearms, the United States has lost its fucking mind.

This is still totally applicable.

Around a year ago I made the statement that I would be spending a lot less time on Facebook and focussing on other social media platforms. More recently I began signalling that this was happening.
I have not been entirely successful in keeping to the intent of those statements. I would have to grade myself a C on it.
During 2017, I have been trying to ensure that any original content that I post is posted to my blog and linked to on Facebook. I dislike the implied gift of IPR to Facebook in their Terms and Conditions. I also have taken periodic timeouts from the platform whenever the online temperature rose, which has happened two or three times since last year’s election.
I tried returning to The Well, one of my long-time favorite online hang-outs, but The Well is a declining place, with no updates to what is an antiquated UI. I am actually, unlike most people, prepared to pay money for curated well-managed social media platforms, but The Well is too archaic and clunky for me, so i let my newly re-activated membership lapse this Summer.
I am behind schedule on way too many other things in my life right now, so Facebook is taking a back seat for the time being. I have a book project to finish.
I recently joined Mastodon, which IMHO is a much better place to be than Twitter. I am winding down my personal use of Twitter, although my Corporate Realist and White Cat Publishing accounts will be active this year and next as I plan to publish Corporate Realist Volume 1 next September.
Mastodon has more character space than Twitter, which allows for a move away from the soundbite pathology that I heartily dislike.
In the current toxic and polarized social and political climate, I have little interest in spending time on media platforms that are actively adding to that level of toxicity by their refusal to understand that they have to curate content if they are to have any chance of surviving and remaining credible and relevant. Facebook and Twitter, in their different ways, do not care about that, because their entire business model is based on volume, not quality. They don’t care if their platforms are infested with bots, trolls and assholes, as long as the click numbers keep rising. Both platforms have essentially been compromised by cyber-subversion.
The announcement by Facebook that it intends to hire 1000 people just to screen adverts is laughable, since it misses the point completely. The problem on Facebook right now is not adverts. It is lies, misinformation and trolling. Those require aggressive content and user privilege curation, but Facebook does not want to go there because it will impact volume, and also because it will undercut their Common Carrier defense to copyright claims. Twitter is impaled on the horns of the same dilemna.
Right now, Mastodon is not infested with bots, trolls and misinformation campaigns being directed by malevolent actors. This could all change of course. If it does change for the worse, I will move on. The distributed instance model for Mastodon provides a measure of protection. it was designed as a distributed platform where the users can set up curated private instances of Mastodon that function as islands of sanity in a sea of madness. Whether Mastodon as a platform can evolve sufficient defense against cyber-subversion in the medium term remains to be seen.