Friday, July 23, 2021
Blog note
My Disqus notifications have almost completely stopped working properly. I need to figure a different way to keep apprised on comments, assuming there is one. That applies to both emails and inbox notifications. Some others are reporting the same problem to Disqus but I don't know when or if the problem will go away. In the meantime, if I don't respond, it is because I'm not getting notices of responses until up to 10 days later.
How political extremists deal with online free speech
This is about a personal online incident from yesterday.
I've mentioned several times here that a few months before the 2020 elections, I started to engage with seven large pro-T**** online politics sites. All seven wound up blocking me, some starting with my first comment, but none banned outright. My comments just stopped showing up, sometimes labeled as in moderation or being spam checked. The rest with no explanation at all. Clearly, T**** supporters and fascist pro-T**** sites cannot handle, or will not accept, inconvenient facts or sound reasoning.
A couple of days ago, a commenter here cited OffGuardian or OFFG (tagline: Because facts really should be sacred) as an information source. Since that one was new to me, I checked it out. I picked an article, The Propaganda War (And How to Fight It) because I'm interested in fighting propaganda. And, facts really are critically important in defense of good things including democracy, the rule of law and social comity.
The article turned out to be crackpot conspiracy theory and as deranged and fact-free an attack on the COVID vaccine as anything I've ever seen. It was a based on lies and argument that doesn't even qualify for motivated reasoning. It is almost as false, offensive and socially damaging as anything I encountered on the pro-T**** sites. The recommended anti-vaxx action item was this:
OK, here comes the big idea, which will only work if enough people do it. You probably won’t like it, but what the hell, here goes…
This is the red inverted triangle the Nazis used in the concentration camps to designate their political opponents and members of the anti-Nazi resistance. Make one. Make it out of fabric, paper, or whatever material you have at hand.
Put a big, black “U” in the center of it to signify “Unvaccinated.” Wear it in public, conspicuously.
The article went on to tell people to tell other people why they are wearing the U Nazi symbol in public and to encourage other people to also refuse the vaccine. The article indicates that although this tactic will not work on people who are New Normal segregationists, even those miscreants should also be told to refuse the vaccine. No, I don't know or care what a new normal segregationist is.
Being curious about this site and its loyal followers, I posted this comment:
People who could but do not get vaccinated are responsible for the deaths and social and economic damage they cause. The evidence is clear that vaccines work and are safe enough to be used to prevent COVID infections or reduce their severity. It is disheartening to see this kind of anti-vaccine disinformation-propaganda being passed as real information. What has happened to the a significant slice of the human race? It’s gone nuts. Facts are lies and lies are facts. Maybe we will self-annihilate. The seeds of it are in our minds. Those seeds are being nurtured by mass disinformation.
Some time later that day (yesterday) I got some responses, all negative. By then, my comment had accumulated 12 downvotes and no upvotes. At the moment it's at 47 down and 0 up. My three attempts to respond yesterday got blocked, allegedly to check for spam. My one attempted one sentence response today is also being checked for spam. I doubt that any will ever be posted.
From that wonderful encounter, I assumed that OFFG is a far left crackpot and conspiracies site. Having an inquiring mind, off to MBFC I went. Sure enough, it's crackpot in reasoning and sloppy with facts. MBFC comments in its rating of OFFG: "Founded in 2015, the OffGuardian is an independent news and opinion website that “takes its name from the fact its five founders had all been censored on and/or banned from the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ sections.”" Woof! From that, one can tell one that one is dealing with some serious firepower here.
Based on the anti-vaxx article, I would rate OFFG Tin Foil Hat & Quackery, with Very Low fact accuracy and maybe far left extremism (I'm not quite sure about it being far left - it may be too nutty to be categorized in any political scale way). But heck, that's just silly old me, where facts are sacred and so is sound reasoning.
One can wonder, what sites actually get Tin Foil Hat & Quackery, with Very Low? Those places must be enchanting. But that's for another blog post. But I digress.
In another way, this site is a lot like some of the fascist radical right sites that booted my sorry backside off in 2020. They sanctimoniously bleat that they revere free speech and are open to all ideas, but it just ain't so, i.e., it's a big, fat lie. This is some of the meaningless drivel from the OFFG comment policy page:
OffGuardian has a completely open comment policy. People can post without signing in or confirming their identity.We have never banned anyone from this site, and unless you are grotesquely racist, abusive or spammy, you will be able to post any shade of opinion you like here.Please note also that we do have an automated system that holds back any comment containing three or more hyperlinks. This is intended to help filter out spam. If your comment contains three or more hyperlinks it will be held back until we clear it, but it will be published eventually.
None of my comments had three or more hyperlinks. Like with the fascist T**** sites, no one ever openly banned me. My comments just mysteriously failed to appear. Maybe my one allowed comment was grotesquely racist or abusive to OFFG, but it seemed rather mild to me. Or, maybe telling the truth is too abusive. None of my attempted but now blocked responses to people who responded to me has been posted yet. People there responded to me mostly with insults, and/or derision, e.g., liar. On the bright side, they let me post one comment before shutting me down. A couple of the free speech loving, fascist[1] pro-T**** sites would not let me post even one comment.
What a fun place. /sarc
What an immoral place. /not sarc
Question: In view of the damage to society and democracy that sites like OFFG cause, should their taxable income be taxed at a high rate, or should they be required by law to pay a high monthly or annual license to operate fee, or should they be free to spew their divisive and damaging lies, hate and disinformation regardless of the consequences?
Footnote:
1. I know, I know. Free speech loving fascist is an oxymoron. Of course, that's not oxymoron if one defines free speech as only what supports fascism and the dictator and its supporting autocracy and kleptocrats.
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
The Billionaires' Big Lie About Space
The Wrong Stuff
I'd like to frame this conversation in the terms used in two interviews on MSNBC. The first, by Ari Melber of a sober looking Neil Degrasse Tyson:
ARI MELBER: I put both questions to you what is the potential public good and research? I know you love research and what about the larger issues of inequality and ethics?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So we should make a few obvious first points, that there has been inequality and hunger and poor and racism and all these problems all that long predates anybody's attempt to fly in space. So to now look at success in space launches and say because we're doing that is why we have not solved the rest of these problems is kind of a false equivalence. . . In a democracy, an elected republic, we vote every year for representatives to then create a budget of things we value. . . We do things because that's the identity of the country we want to create and we're wealthy enough we can do it all. So don't just say why are we spending there when we should be spending [ elsewhere ] well let's spend it in both places period.
ARI MELBER: Now by the way I did the math on this i want to know how rich Jeff Bezos is. The 200 billion dollars is, at last I checked, his wealth. . .
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: . . . [ He's ] got plenty of money. He can do that and 20 other things, so if you want to complain about Jeff Bezos, complain that he's not helping the poor the hungry or his workers but that specifically wouldn't have to directly address the fact that he wants to go into space and . . . with Branson [ create ] an entire new [ branch of economics ]. . . This this is America. If you don't think that it should happen that way, that's a different country. . .
The second, by Mehdi Hasan of Anand Giridharadas:
MEHDI HASAN: One estimate suggests Bezos has spent around five billion dollars on his space quest so far, which is also ironically around what he would owe if an Elizabeth Warren style wealth tax were brought in. He's clearly got the spare change for it.
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: [ What ] we saw today was as you say an advertisement for wealth taxation in America, and for breaking up these concentrated fortunes. Because what you saw is literally the money that could have been paid as wages, should have been paid as wages, could have been paid as taxes. . . [ Bezos' fortune comes from ] monopoly money that, you know, wouldn't be there in that amount if it didn't have the abusive and precarious employment practices . . . [ We ] know where that money comes from, it comes from those antisocial and abusive, and frankly, anti-democratic practices.
And so the money paying for that jet fuel, the money paying for those rockets, the money paying for the PR . . . is the money that properly belongs to Amazon workers and the tax authorities. And something actually really important happened today on that score, which is of all people on Earth, Jeff Bezos acknowledged that in what might have been a slip of the tongue. He said Amazon customers paid for this, which is sort of an obvious thing to say, but then he said Amazon workers also funded that. And that is actually a stunning admission from a CEO [ whose fortune ] . . . is funded by withheld wages.
Even if one agrees with him, no serious person can be anything but embarrassed for Neil Degrasse Tyson. In one sense I do feel bad for him, as he's an astrophysicist who is clearly out of his depth on economic and historical matters. Yet however out of his depth he might be, he is both stridently assertive and blithe to the point of being willfully ignorant. He opens with what is plainly a non-sequitur, as the fact of the problems he describes as existing prior to the space program is irrelevant: money did pre-exist the space program. Neither is money so abundant that it cannot be said spending more on ICBMs ( an ulterior aim of the Apollo missions ) does not prevent us spending more on education or food stamps.
Ironically Degrasse Tyson complains throughout his interview with the all too sympathetic Ari Melber that the criticisms of Bezos's riches funding a private space program are not serious. He states, rather flatly, that the American democracy is responsive to voters wishing to reign in the power and wealth of Croesus himself, and that massive inequality is the American way - were it otherwise, it would not be America. One can't help but wonder if he agrees with Drumpf and Tucker Carlson that Ilan Omar ought to back to the country from which she came.
Where Degrasse Tyson constantly conflates state funding of original science research with three billionaires privatizing the profit from public expenses, Anand Giridharadas makes a cogent and concise repudiation of the entire project. Bezos's wealth, like Branson's, like Musk's and Suckerberg's and Bill Gates's, is possible only through paying workers less than the post-war average share of GDP. They can do this because like Bezos and Gates, they headed a monopoly. Or because like Musk and Suckerberg they were able to capitalize on the work of others, with Musk particularly benefitting from public expenditures. Now that he's profitable, he of course moves out of a state which has given him millions of taxpayer subsidies because, you know, they'd like to see a small part of that investment returned.
I think Giridharadas makes his point clearly enough that I don't have to dwell on it. I'd like to bring out another point: these billionaires aren't playing space age Wright brothers because they want to help humanity. In fact none of these projects will EVER meaningfully affect the lives of 99.9% of all Americans. They're doing it because they want more. Picture Christopher Plummer in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World.
And that "more" will come in the form of near-future competitions for US Government weapons programs. This is not about space tourism, as in Degrasse Tyson's adolescent and totally out of touch dreams. It's about more.
More money, certainly. But what these neo-aristocrats want more of is control. Is Gates "giving back" with his investments in failed approaches to education? Or is he solving problems as he sees fit, because he sees fit to do it? During the 50s and 60s the "space race" was ultimately about "conquering space," about weaponizing space to threaten terrestrial enemies. That's still the case today. But this "race" isn't being run with bland government officials liasing with private companies nobody's ever heard of, such as Thiokol. However much he profited from his various companies doing military related work, even Howard Hughes was nowhere near as personally associated with the space program of his era than Bezos is today. Why do you think that is?
SOMETHING IS WRONG AT FOX NEWS!
Hannity: 'I believe in the science of vaccination'
https://twitter.com/i/status/1417300107960094720
Fox Faces Rising Delta Variant Crisis: On-Air FNC Hosts Urge Vaccinations, All LA County Staff To Mask Up, Says Company
Even listening to Fox radio - briefly this morning - while on one had trying to mock Fauci and the CDC, the hosts were urging all Americans to get vaccinated!
WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON HERE?
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