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Leave TikTok Alone!

Thursday, March 30, 2023

I’m not a TikTok user or fan, but I agree with a common take on the current attack on TikTok by Washington politicians of both political parties. TikTok may in fact be spying on Americans, but as the other social media giants might say: “Who among us isn’t?”. TikTok is being attacked because it has succeeded where Mark Zuckerberg has failed, and Mark wants it out of the way and is lobbying heavily. Washington politicians of both parties are so out of touch they have no idea how unpopular banning TikTok would be, and that goes double for Democratic politicians.

Particularly for the Democrats, this brouhaha shows how the Washington bubble keeps our “representatives” ignorant of both our wants and our needs. The Democrats have the most to lose by backing this movement, but it appears that most of them are blissfully unaware of the political downside to this self destructive move. It reminds me of something that happened years ago, when Democrats lined up to condemn Moveon (I think it was Moveon) for running an ad that criticized David Patreus (remember him?) by, among other things, using the term Betrayus (it rhymes, don’t you see). It was, a no lose proposition for the Republicans, but it was a lose-lose proposition for the Democrats, as it turned off some of the folks who they should consider their base. Banning TikTok is likely to have a similar effect, except it will likely cause more harm to the Democrats than the Patreus situation.

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Is the earth round? Opinions differ!

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

When I was in college it was a given that the function of a teacher, particularly a science teacher, was to teach the facts. For instance, the earth is an orb, flattened at the poles a bit, but basically round. It was pretty much understood that if a student insisted on maintaining that the earth was flat, or that the sun orbited the earth despite what Galileo may have said or Copernicus may have proven, he or she would get a failing grade. But, at least in Ohio, that is no longer the case. Apparently a student may reach whatever conclusion he or she might like, without fear that that conclusion may be judged to be contrary to established science.

Ohio college and university instructors could be barred from teaching climate science without also including false or misleading counterpoints under a sprawling higher education bill that received its first hearing Wednesday.

Senate Bill 83, or the Higher Education Enhancement Act, seeks to police classroom speech on a wide range of topics, including climate change, abortion, immigration, and diversity, equity and inclusion — all of which would be labeled “controversial.”

On these and other subjects, public colleges and universities would need to guarantee that faculty and staff will “encourage and allow students to reach their own conclusions” and “not seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view.” 

Full story here.

Now, you can almost see the argument on some of those subjects, but at this point there is no scientific basis for denying the reality of climate change. Why would you encourage a student to feel free to draw a conclusion that flies in the face of established science? Isn’t the point of science education to teach people about objective reality?

This, by the way, is coming to us from the same people who are mandating that we not consider points of view that may “hurt the feelings” of a single student, like, for instance, exposing them to the possible conclusion that this country is infected with systemic racism.

End of rant.

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Fox argues again: we can’t commit libel because no sane person believes us

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Fox is once again defending a libel suit by claiming that no reasonable person could believe what they were hearing on its programs.

Erin Murphy, the lawyer, was defending Fox against a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in response to the network’s post-2020 election coverage. Dominion alleges that Fox knowingly and deliberately aired false information about the company’s voting machines and software, in a bid to win back viewers who were fleeing to right-wing competitor Newsmax.

Dominion claims that Fox attempted to draw those viewers in by indulging their incorrect belief that the 2020 election was rigged, a position held by former President Donald Trump and his lawyers. Private communications at Fox News revealed through the lawsuit show that on-air talent and top executives – including Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch– knew that Trump’s conspiracy theories about the hacked election were false, but aired them anyway.

Much of Murphy’s defense of Fox rested on her argument that a “reasonable viewer” could discern that Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and others at the network who provided a platform for Trump’s lawyers were merely covering newsworthy allegations, rather than presenting the false claims as statements of fact.

But Murphy’s defense of an interview that top star Tucker Carlson conducted with Lindell took a different tack. Lindell’s appearance on Carlson’s January 26, 2021, program, she argued, was so incoherent that Fox News’ audience would be confused enough to find him inherently unreliable.

A “reasonable viewer would be puzzled on anything he is talking about,” Murphy told Judge Eric Davis, who is presiding over the case.

Fox actually got a cases involving Tucker Carlson thrown out by arguing that no reasonable person would believe that when Tucker Carlson states something as fact that it is fact, fact.

While I don’t pretend to know or remember all of the elements of a libel claim, I can see how the “reasonable person” (usually phased as “reasonable man”, of which there are fewer and fewer nowadays) standard made sense in the long gone days when those elements were first developed.

While I don’t hold out any hope it will happen, it would appear the time is ripe for revisiting those standards, because it is the unreasonable person from whom the libeled person has the most to fear. For while the reasonable person may think twice about what Tucker, Maria or the rest of them may say or implicitly endorse, the unreasonable person eats it up, and is quite likely to direct his or her ire against the person libeled. The unreasonable person is, after all, Fox’s target audience, especially after Fox had the temerity to tell the truth (for once) about the Arizona election results.

How many of the individuals exposed to baseless attacks, such as the poll workers in Georgia or the Newtown parents here in Connecticut, have been subjected to death threats and other forms of harassment committed for the most part by what we must conclude are unreasonable people?

Fox made an intentional decision to stoke the baseless rage of unreasonable people by amplifying and implicitly endorsing the views of people Fox knew were lying. There should be a remedy for that. There would be, if the “liberal media” were doing it, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the Supreme Court to hold Fox and other lying right wing media accountable.

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Two can play the censorship game

Thursday, March 23, 2023

When I read recently that Florida was considering a law that would allow any single parent to require that a book be removed from a school library, it occurred to me that it hadn’t occurred to the Florida Fascists that both sides could play that game.

Turns out there’s a similar law in Utah, requiring the removal of any book that has “pornographic” content, the definition of “pornographic” in the bill being quite broad, and in fact, as one in a Blue State where we don’t do these types of things would hope would happen:

A parent is arguing that if banned books like ‘Gender Queer’ are pulled from shelves, the Bible—with its sex scenes, incest, and murder—should be banned, too.

A Utah parent has filed a request to ban God’s most popular blog, the Bible, from schools, citing and ridiculing a law passed last year that removed dozens of books from schools and libraries last year. “Get this PORN out of our schools!” they wrote in their request for the removal of the book.

In 2022, Utah passed a law banning books with “pornographic or indecent” content. The initial list of banned books included many titles that feature coming-of-age stories that also deal with themes of sexuality and gender, including Judy Blume’s Forever…, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.

…

“Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” the parent wrote in their request, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, which obtained a copy of the request. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”

I once decided I would read the entire Bible, but I gave up after concluding it had no redeeming social or literary value. In particular, the Old Testament God is a very nasty fellow. It does, in fact, have quite a few nasty bits, as the linked article notes. Of course, the folks reviewing this request will likely find a reason why the Bible gets a pass, leaving it to some judge down the line to figure out a way to distinguish between “woke” porn and “asleep?” porn.

Oh wait, before putting this post to bed I did a bit more research and it turns out that the Bible is on the hot seat in Florida too.

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A low level rant

Sunday, March 19, 2023

I get most of my news from various blogs. While they tend to be left of center sort of places, I think I’m fairly good at separating the wheat from the chaff, that is, fact from opinion.

It occurred to me a few days ago that one must wonder why certain bloggers have not been elevated to positions in the mainstream. After all, people like Bret Stephens and David Brooks, who were elevated to the New York Times from conservative publications such as the National Review, are pretty much a fixture on the op-ed pages of the nation. It doesn’t matter that they are almost always wrong about everything they dribble out. See the various posts at Driftglass re Mr. Brooks to see his sins well documented.

One of the most impressive bloggers, if you can even call her that rather than an investigative reporter, is Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel. She has done an unbelievable job covering the various legal proceedings that have arisen as a result of the criminality of the four years of the Trump administration, along with other significant legal proceedings that have occurred. If I were a lawyer involved in any of those cases I would have read her faithfully because the chances are she would have caught things that I didn’t. Unlike folks like Brooks, she is usually, in fact almost always, right. I recall, for instance, that from the start she accurately predicted John Durham’s repeated failures while taking apart the flimsy cases on which he embarked.

I confess that there are times when she goes so deep into the weeds that I merely scan some of her posts, but that only proves how meticulous she is in documenting everything she says, and, in the process, emphasizing the important aspects of a case.

At the very least, you would think that a publication like the New York Times would get her to do a guest op-ed about the ongoing cases against Trump, but the likelihood of that is zero. On the other hand, if she started bloviating about Hunter Biden, with zero evidence to back her up, she might get such a spot.

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Looking on the bright side-a bit

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Regular readers know that I always look on the bright side, or at least I do every Good Friday when I post a certain clip from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. But I’m about to look on the bright side again, or at least speculate that there may be a bright side.

Nowadays, so far as Republicans are concerned, every bad thing that happens, happens due to people being woke. For instance, Ron DeSantis would like us to believe that the pigs at Silicon Valley Bank failed because they were woke, and not because they lobbied for a change in the law that allowed the corporate officers to stuff their own pockets while sending the bank into bankruptcy. They’ve been pounding away at it for more than a year now, so there’s every reason to believe that they’ve at least succeeded in getting people to believe that woke is bad.

Let me step back a bit, for after all, we need to define our terms. Well, here’s a fairly concise and accurate definition:

In November, when asked under oath what “woke” meant during a court case, Ryan Newman, DeSantis’ general counsel said, “Generally, the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Yet somehow, we are supposed to shudder at anything woke. Of course we all know that the sub-text of that definition is that we shouldn’t address injustice, we should perpetuate it.

Well, the bright side, if we can believe the USA Today pollsters, is that 56% of Americans consider woke a positive term, with 39% (Fox viewers all, presumably) consider it a negative. I take this sort of poll with a cube of salt, but still, it indicates that a substantial portion of Americans are capable of seeing through the bullshit. In fact, making the side even brighter, I think it means that for a substantial number of people, if something’s being pushed by Republicans, it is presumed to be bullshit. The fact that they are congenital liars is becoming clear to the American people, at least, looking on the bright side, we can hope that such is the case. However, we must never forget how P.T. Barnum noted that you can never go broke.

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This makes too much sense to ever happen

Sunday, March 12, 2023

I’m a big fan of economist Dean Baker, who used to have a blog called Beat the Press, but is now behind a Patreon paywall. I’m a subscriber, and I thought I’d pass along the gist of his latest, as I think it makes a whole lot of sense, which is precisely why what he proposes will never happen. The post is his take on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and he proposes an obviously good way to make sure such bank failures don’t affect the larger financial system:

We know that the view of most of our policy elites (the politicians who make policy, their staff, and the people who write about it in major news outlets) is that the purpose of government is to make the rich richer. But, there are alternative ways to structure the financial system for people who care about fairness and efficiency.

The most obvious solution would be to have the Federal Reserve Board give every person and corporation in the country a digital bank account. The idea is that this would be a largely costless way for people to carry on their normal transactions. They could have their paychecks deposited there every two weeks or month.

They could have their mortgage or rent, electric bill, credit card bill, and other bills paid directly from their accounts.

This sort of system could be operated at minimal cost, with the overwhelming majority of transactions handled electronically, requiring no human intervention. There could be modest charge for overdrafts, that would be structured to cover the cost of actually dealing with the problem, not gouging people to make big profits.

Former Fed economist (now at Dartmouth), Andy Levin, has been etching the outlines of this sort of system for a number of years. The idea would be to effectively separate out the banking system we use for carrying on transactions from the system we use for saving and financing investment.

We would have the Fed run system to carry out the vast majority of normal financial transactions, replacing the banks that we use now. However, we would continue to have investment banks, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, that would borrow on financial markets and lend money to businesses, as well as underwriting stock and bond issues. While investment banks still require regulation to prevent abuses, we don’t have to worry about their failure shutting down the financial system.

Let’s face it. For most of us, our bank accounts are not about saving money. They are about having a place to stash the money that is used to cover our mostly electronic payments. In fact, these days, most money never has a physical existence. It consists of an entry on a computer. There’s no reason why those computers can’t be maintained by the government. In fact, it would likely be a boon for the economy because at the present time the banking system extracts a cut from the seller every time someone uses a debit or credit card to make a purchase. Since almost all transactions are electronic, this has to force prices upward from where they otherwise might be. For that matter, it might bring us back to the days when banks were getting us used to ATMs, and didn’t charge us to withdraw our money from a competitor’s ATM. (Remember Yankee 24?)

If our money were separated from the risky stuff that brings down banks like Silicon Valley, we wouldn’t need to worry about banks collapsing, or about paying for their inevitable rescues.

Of course this will never happen, even if the Democrats get firm control of both houses of Congress. They’re better than the Republicans, but they still tend to see things from the perspective of the folks who line their pockets. Consider Democratic Senator Mark Warner’s statement today that he doesn’t at all regret making it easier for banks such as Silicon Valley to escape effective regulation. Elizabeth and Bernie would probably go for it, but not the “moderates”.

The probable end result of the Silicon Valley debacle is that the Fed will take some action that will put more money into the pockets of the already rich, while jacking up interest rates and throwing people out of work.

A bit off the main subject, but if you breach Baker’s paywall and read the full article, he has some interesting information about the amount of money the executives at Silicon Valley (according to Warner, a “mid-size bank”) were making. He points out that the CEO was making yearly what a minimum wage worker would make in approximately 15 lifetimes. They also handed out bonuses just before the bank collapsed.

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If they’re against it, they’re doing it

Sunday, March 12, 2023

One thing we lefties all realize is that the best way to figure out what crimes Republicans are committing is to see what they are accusing Democrats of doing. For instance, while they accuse Democrats of stealing elections, it is Republicans that are being convicted of voter fraud and Republicans that are suppressing the vote and gerrymandering the majority out of a say in how they are governed. Sometimes the hypocrisy is stunning, as we see Gym Jordan mewling about people ducking subpoenas even though he himself refused to comply with one.

But it’s often the case that Republicans attack others besides Democrats for things they themselves are doing. It’s almost as if they are compelled to magnify their hypocrisy. Latest example, but one of many, is the Tennessee Lieutenant Governor:

The 79-year-old East Tennessee Republican — who has presided over a legislative session defined by bills outlawing drag shows in public places and targeting gender care for the trans community — found himself facing accusations of hypocrisy after a progressive site, the Tennessee Holler, unearthed his social media interactions with a 20-year-old gay model.

Seems he “liked” the fact that the model was also a male prostitute who liked to smoke dope.

Or there’s this guy who, to be honest, I am assuming is a Republican, who spray painted the word “Groomers” on libraries who is now charged with seven counts of possessing child sex abuse materials. As the linked article points out, he’s not alone in accusing others of what he himself was doing:

In December, John Amato reported that QAnon leader Phil Godlewski, who made a fortune highlighting conspiracy theories about secret pedophile rings at pizza places outed himself as having an inappropriate relationship with a minor. Godlewski groomed a child. I’m starting to see a pattern here.I’m sure there are Democrats who engage in this sort of stuff, but I’ve yet to hear of one who has made a point of accusing others of doing so. One would think that one who is engaging in this sort of stuff would just keep their mouths shut when the topic comes up, but that’s not the Republican way. Another good example, lying liar George Santos actually had the nerve to tweet out that Joe Biden is a pathological liar. It’s almost as if every time they attack they are actually confessing.

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Something that might happen in an alternate universe

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

It occurred to me that there might be an opening in the GOP primaries for a candidate whose message is “I am sane” or words to that effect. I do think there remains within the Republican Party a significant segment of people who are not insane, but have simply failed to accept the fact that the Republican Party is now the party of conspiracists and fascists. You know, they inherited their party affiliation from their parents, who inherited it from theirs, and the idea of not being a Republican is simply foreign to them.

No doubt these folks are a minority of registered Republicans, but I think they exist. They may be interested in voting for a candidate who pledges to return the Republican Party to its saner past, though that past is usually said to have been in 2015 when in fact the party went permanently off the rails in 1980.

Of the Republicans whose names have been bandied about as potential candidates, other than the genius, there are two types. The first, represented at the moment by DeSantis and Haley, are people who are dedicated to appealing to the nutjob base. There may be more of that type waiting in the wings. It is quite possible that they, along with the genius, assuming he’s not in prison, will be dividing up the whacko vote.

The other potential candidates, such as Pompeo and Pence, are DOA, so far as I can see. They will be attempting to appear sane while catering to the base, thereby convincing no one. It won’t help that they embrace stuff like getting rid of social security. Sure, the other candidates probably agree with them on those issues, but they would rather concentrate on whining about the threat posed by the microscopic sliver of the population that is trans, even though trans folks pose no threat to anyone on the planet. That’s a continuation of a strategy that has worked for the GOP ever since Nixon. You always have to have a boogie man. The appeal to racists has been constant, either via dog whistle or out and out racism. But it helps to have new boogie men, because some tend to wear out their usefulness. Back in the 2000s it was gays and gay marriages that were vilified, but most people have gotten past that, so now it’s drag queens and trans people.

Okay, I’ve digressed. My point is that none of the potential candidates who are not totally committed to the conspiracists are ready to campaign against them. Someone who campaigned as a person who would both take back the party from the looneys and promise to leave the programs alone that both Republicans (even the looneys) and Democrats rely on, could take a decent percentage of the Republican vote, while the genius and his ilk split the remainder. While the crazies would certainly garner a combined percentage greater than my hypothetical sane candidate, my hypothetical sane candidate might well get a higher percentage of votes than any single nutjob thereby giving them at least a plurality of votes at a convention.

While it’s true that Bill Weld failed miserably in his 2020 attempt to take down Trump, remember that was a one on one battle against an incumbent. Trump was absolutely assured of every whackjob vote.

The question is: is there currently any Republican politician who is both sane and willing to run as the candidate pledged to restore the Republican Party to sanity. I suppose Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger are the names that would come to mind (e.g, example here), but I don’t think either of them would do and I won’t even get into the question of whether both of them are sane. They are both dedicated right wingers that just happen to believe in the democratic process, to the limited extent that they believe the person with the most votes should win, though they also both believe that it’s perfectly acceptable to make sure certain people can’t vote, and that if they do, it follows that their votes should be gerrymandered into insignificance.

So, depending on your point of view, there is no need to either hope or worry that such a candidate will make an appearance. That’s probably all to the good, since if such a person ever got the nomination, they might have a better chance against Biden than any of the other potential candidates.

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Lies and lying liars

Sunday, March 5, 2023

Over at Hullabaloo we read that Fox’s right wing competitors have utterly failed to cover the Dominion lawsuit and the unsurprising revelations that Fox’s on air personalities were knowingly lying to their viewers about the 2020 election, among a host of other things. Digby concludes:

This just shows how homogenous the right wing media sphere is. Even Fox’s competitors won’t show their audience what Fox did. And the reason Fox did what they did was because the audience was leaving them and going to those very competitors! I guess the right is just now all about the grift and actual competition and capitalism are no longer relevant. Amazing.

I’m sure Digby is also aware of the underlying reason why Fox’s competitors have remained silent. If they were to cover the story, they would have to turn somersaults to avoid letting on that the lies the Fox people were telling are the same lies they themselves are endorsing. After all, they are knowingly lying to their viewers as well, and the last thing they want to do is acknowledge in any way, shape or form that the election was not stolen since it follows as the night the day that they too have been lying to their viewers. Not that their viewers would conclude that they had been lied to in the past; they would instead conclude that they were being lied to in the present, and they would go elsewhere as they did to Fox when it made the mistake of calling Arizona for Biden.

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