Category Archives: Over the edge…

A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism

Over the edge...

A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism | Democracy Now!

This is chilling. I’m deleting my account soon… please contact me via comments here or email — john.feden@gmail.com—

–Read on:

www.democracynow.org/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how

So the very act of arguing against the crazy amplifies the crazy. It’s one of the reasons that Facebook is a terrible place to deliberate about the world.

If we really want to limit the damage that Facebook has done, we have to invest our time and our money in institutions that help us think, that help us think clearly, that can certify truth, that can host debate—right?—institutions like journalism, institutions like universities, public libraries, schools, other forms of public forums, town halls. We need to put our time and our energy into face-to-face politics, so we can look our opponents in the eye and recognize them as humans, and perhaps achieve some sort of rapprochement or mutual understanding and respect. Without that, we have no hope. If we’re engaging with people only through the smallest of screens, we have no ability to recognize the humanity in each other and no ability to think clearly. We cannot think collectively. We cannot think truthfully. We can’t think. We need to build—rebuild, if we ever had it, our ability to think.

— from the interview.

Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession with Russia —the Stories Not Being Covered in the Trump Era | Democracy Now!

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Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession with Russia & thestories Not Being Covered in the Trump Era | Democracy Now!
“— Read on www.democracynow.org/2018/7/27/noam_chomsky_on_mass_media_obsession

“Did the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke. First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done…”

Chomsky has such a clear take on all this. Sure, the Russians may have interfered- they routinely do that everywhere. Trumps collusion may be an issue but surely there are larger concerns.

He’s also great on the immigration issue, which they address in the beginning of the same interview. He points out that it’s our meddling in Central American countries that has created the problems in the first place.

Another larger concern which never makes it into the media or the national political dialog: the Empire is at the root of most of the international issues that the media skims over the top of, pitching sound bites that don’t make the power structure mad.

Boycott professional sports

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If you know what’s going on in the professional sporting world, you just can’t support any of it in any way. It’s apparently among the most racist of the cultural institutions in America.

I confess I’ve never been a big fan of professional sports anyway, so it’s not a great sacrifice on my part to decide to boycott them, but lots of folks who are big fans should start to speak up and stay away, because they’re folks who don’t really believe in what’s happening there, the exploitation of black people by rich white guys.

There’s not much excuse for it really. Blatant racism, blatant political and financial corruption, total violation of all of the basic values that America supposedly stands for, including most recently freedom of speech.

Shaun King lays it out pretty clearly in a recent Medium article (The Unbearable Whiteness of NFL Ownership): 31 of the 32 NFL owners completely caved in to Trump and banned free speech on their fields, under the treat of firing players, etc. In addition, King points out the lily-whiteness of professional ownership:

Of the 92 major professional sports teams in the U.S. — between the NFL, NBA, and MLB — there are only six teams with people of color as majority owners, and just one of them is an African-American.

One.

This is intolerable for me. It is the consequence, as King explains, of the process of integration into the dominant capitalist system. There’s big money made in professional sports, so the big money boys flock to it. Ain’t free market economics wonderful?

In round terms, the top one-tenth owns 20% of the wealth, and the top 10% owns 90%. That’s the root of the problem, along with the racism at the heart of all our institutions, which is a holdover from slavery and Jim Crow of the past. Combined with the recent fascist/white supremacy surge, we have an intolerable social and economic situation, of which the professional sports issue is just a slice.