Society - Frog in the Pot

June 2, 2020June 2, 2020

An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility

Dear Mark (if I may):

Recently in a Fox News interview, you said that your company, Facebook, would not fact-check any of the President’s lies, as Twitter has begun to do. You said that, “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

Many–likely many millions–of Facebook users are upset, even outraged, at your position, including many of your own employees, especially in the face of the President’s posts inciting law enforcement and other violence against the current nationwide protests of police murders of African-Americans. And it’s not only politicians’ speech that you are allowing to run rampant over the truth and divisiveness. Since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, Facebook and other social media have disseminated nonsensical conspiracy theories that Floyd is not dead, that the police assault on him was faked, and that George Soros was funding the protests around the nation. Continue reading “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility”

October 19, 2019October 25, 2019

The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President

That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery. Charles M. Blow, Oct. 13, 2019

[Dear Reader: While this is not a short essay, there is a 90-second version embedded in it. For that version, just follow the bold-faced portions of the essay. –PCY]

Told by a new friend, several weeks after I had entered a new public high school in a new state my junior year, that the first friend I had made there was Jewish, I was shocked. He couldn’t be Jewish, I said. Then an even more shocking thought RacismGraphic(2) occurred to me: Where did the first thought come from? To that point in my life, I had never, to my knowledge, met a Jew, having attended only Catholic schools and lived only among Christians before our family moved to the new state. Yet I clearly had imported into my subconscious some ugly stereotypes against which I had unwittingly measured the normalcy of my friend Alan.

Continue reading “The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President”

May 6, 2019May 6, 2019

Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’

In a recent email conversation with friends and acquaintances, two conservative correspondents sought to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change and its impacts by citing facts they believed undermined the accuracy of that consensus.

One tried to debunk the issue with a recent Wall Street Journal reprint of a 1989 news article in which a U.N. environmental official said that rising sea levels could eliminate whole nations if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000. Another raised a familiar ‘challenge’ by asking how we can explain major weather changes hundreds of years ago before industrialization and the invention of the internal combustion engine.

More substantially they also pointed to the NASA finding in 2015 that the ice sheet in Antarctica is growing rather than shrinking, contradicting other studies that found a loss of ice mass in that region as they have also found in Arctic ice. Continue reading “Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’”

April 18, 2019April 20, 2019

Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report

The much-anticipated (redacted) Mueller Report was released today by the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr. Here are five brief initial observations on it.

I. There is a very important distinction in American law between decisions not to prosecute crimes and whether or not crimes were in fact committed. Decisions not to prosecute potential criminal cases are commonly NOT based on prosecutors’ judgments that the suspects are innocent of crimes. Continue reading “Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report”

July 27, 2018

The GOP Abandons Democracy

Democracy is a fragile form of government. It consists of humankind’s loftiest principles supported only by rules created and monitored by altogether fallible beings: us. And we have proven over time to be unreliable and inconsistent caretakers of this precious system, at times even setting aside some of its central requirements in the service of very undemocratic impulses.

Both major American political parties have participated in these insults to democracy. We need only recall the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the gaming of Congressional voting districts (gerrymandering) to favor one or the other party. But never has a major party assaulted the premises and requirements of democracy so consistently, deeply and on so broad a front as has the current Republican Party. Continue reading “The GOP Abandons Democracy”

June 5, 2018June 5, 2018

Social Media, Politics and Us

Social media have changed the equation in American politics. From fake Facebook stories planted by Russian trolls to influence the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump, to Roseanne Barr’s deeply racist Twitter message this past week–to say nothing of the President’s constant barrage of self-serving, denigrating and false tweets–social media have made our national political dynamics more divisive, ill-informed and counterproductive. The premium these media place on bite-sized bursts of no-need-to-explain-or-defend assertions has only exacerbated this process. Continue reading “Social Media, Politics and Us”

March 23, 2018September 26, 2019

Do Conspiracy Theories Have a Conservative Bias?

There is a not-so-old saw that facts have a liberal bias. Here I am flipping this political aphorism to ask the related question: whether conservative thought is especially attracted to outlandish conspiracy theories.

First, let’s clear out some ideological underbrush. Neither left nor right in American politics has a monopoly on the truth. Nor is either immune to the attraction of far-fetched theories that appear to explain noxious or threatening political developments. Continue reading “Do Conspiracy Theories Have a Conservative Bias?”

February 2, 2018February 4, 2018

State of the Union: Freeing Slaves, Liberating Corporations? A Short Story

In his first State of the Union address, in January 2010, President Obama broke decorum and delivered a most unusual rebuke to the Supreme Court, six of whose members were sitting only feet from his podium. He was objecting to the Court’s decision only a few days earlier in which it extended corporations’ First Amendment rights to free speech to allow companies to fund their own advertisements for or against political candidates (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). In his address the president asserted that, ‘I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.’

The Court’s narrow, 5-4 decision overturned its own precedent in a 1990 case, in which it had ruled against such corporate political ads because of ‘the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth’ on our political processes.

Most careful observers will conclude that the Court got things right the first time. As it turns out, the Citizens United decision was built on both a historical irony and a Supreme Court error that dates back more than 130 years. Continue reading “State of the Union: Freeing Slaves, Liberating Corporations? A Short Story”

January 31, 2018

Are We a Nation of Cheaters?

For the past year the nation’s klieg lights have focused on Donald Trump’s dismantling of the norms of civility and integrity, and for good reason. Most Americans, including many who support him politically, reject his constant assault on empathy and reason, and on our basic democratic institutions.

Still, the question arises: Is Trump sui generis, a true moral outlier randomly imposed by the fates on a virtuous society? Or does he represent a sort of avatar of an ethically troubled culture, a natural outgrowth of a morally suspect country? Continue reading “Are We a Nation of Cheaters?”