Zuckerberg is not the kid in the social network movie who's "not an asshole, you're just trying really hard to be one." No one has ever said a single good thing about him, or his partner Sandberg, in a long time. By all measures they seem to be selfish people who have nothing else in their minds other than keeping and growing the power they have now. The only other thing they are now famous for is how they manipulate good founders of great products with false promises and then kick them out to consolidate even more power. At least that's all you can tell from what little we know of these billionaire oligarchs lives.

In the end, I'm going to hypothesize that America became a great country because for a while some of its leaders and rich people at least tried to do _some_ good things to its people and try to be the better person now and then. Given the degree to which every single rich person and politician in power seems self-obsessed if not overtly corrupt, it doesn't bode too well for the life of the common man in America or anywhere else for the matter.

I'm not particularly worried about WW3 though, because I don't see any good country left behind to fight every totalitarian nation that's getting created now.

One view is authoritarian, a person with lots of power who can do whatever he wants.

The other view is democratic, a person employed by citizens to be a representative and have some managerial role.

In the second view, he should have (unless it's required by his job) exactly the same permissions as any other citizen.

Does it extend to foreign leaders? Is Facebook obliged to publish everything Xi says as well?

How far down the government does it extend? Cabinet members? Senators? Judges? Military?

Does it extend to other content that would be banned? Is Facebook morally or legally obliged to publish porn if it's from the Presidential account? Other objectionable images, violence, gore, goatse?

Does it extend to content that's false and harmful to Facebook itself? If Trump posts a fake FB stock price graph with "look at these LOOSERS", is FB legally or morally obliged to host that regardless of how many billions in shareholder value it costs them? Is CNN obliged to show Trump's fake CNN chyron? Is Twitter?

How circumlocutious does a death threat have to be for FB to still be legally or morally obliged to host it? What about "Someone should take care of this Zuckerberg guy" over a picture of a bullet?

It's also the case in this particular example the he is only the president of the US, not the president of the world. If a service has community rules that are world-wide in scope, then I would expect that at least outside the US, the rules are equally applied to all content published there.

He could be allowed to use it on the same term as anyone else. I don't know, but maybe to people in Europe it is especially disturbing to people in that he's been given almost free reign. In some ways, an omen of the darkest possible future.

The undeniable subtext of on one hand getting content removed for posting legitimate journalistic photos, and on the other hand allowing Trump to post hate speach that would be straight up illegal in several EU countries is truly disturbing.

Europe was where fascism got its face, we fear it for a reason, and Trump unfortunately helps actual fascist advance their influence here. He idolizes the instigator of the war, a war that across almost all of Europe countries had to sacrifice a sizeable fraction of their population to try to stop, and without US we might not have.

So, yes. When someone clearly has an agenda to cause suffering, conflict; and who revels in the the suffering of others, to give them a platform is immoral. There are no two ways about it.

I and many in this part of the world would very much prefer if anyone who in any way supports or embolden fascists did not have any venue at all to make their voice heard, moreso when they command what is undoubtedly the greatest single military power on the planet.

What Trump says would still be in the news of course, and we would be aware, but his outburst would no longer be algorithmically targeted at those who who have shown to engage with it.

Some speech might actually not be worth risking another 70 million lives or more on, president of the US or not. It's not at all the only problem that needs solving, but it's one that can be solved.

For your amusement, WASP self-parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 "haters like to ???? ?? our ivy league education / but they're just jealous 'cause our families run the nation"

(as far as I can tell, this commerical was only aired in New England. That's OK, the P-word is their word, they can use it. "Sloane Ranger" for our brit friends, I suppose. It's "Goldküstenmilieu" here. What is the term in your countries?)

How am I doing so far?

> According to McKenzie Wark when information becomes a commodity it means we will only be able to see the information produced by the vectoral class. This is because they are the ones whose profits depend on the scarcity of information. So when information becomes intellectual property we are bound to repeat the same commodity form, because this is what the market decrees. She states that the “hack” which monetizes information introduces the “vectoralist” class.

> It is the hacker class that produces new information, free from the restrictions of a property form. This however is then used by the vectoral class, who own and control the means of production of information on an industrial scale and mediates connections and access to information (Paolo Pedercini, the founder of the radical games project Molleindustria cites companies like Google, Uber or Airbnb as typical representatives of the vectoral class). The hacker and the vectoral class aren’t always at odds with each other. They can compromise on the free flow of information and the extraction of wealth from this information to fund its development. Think of the open source movement, Reddit and Wikipedia. McKenzie Wark believes that the hacker class should ally themselves with the other producing classes so that they together don’t have to answer to the vectoral class anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto

But I'm not super convinced vectoralist/hacker is that useful a distinction. I think Orwell called it correctly in predicting Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Where he went too far[1], perhaps because he grew up in a parliamentary system, is in not predicting that the Oceanic outer party would be dualised in two distinct thought-monitoring parties: the pitchfork party and the torch party. https://i.imgur.com/RlmIFzj.jpeg

[1] I haven't read anything but the Goldstein chapters, so all my knowledge of the rest is from pop culture. Is there anything there, or is it "fast-forward?" (Also, it seems pop culture overplays universal oppression: at least 87% of the population appears to be unaffected. Doesn't the severe dystopia only hit those readers who identify with outer party members?)

We're extremely good pattern matchers, much more than we are aware of, but it stand to reason that as our more complex survival mechanisms seems to have close ties to how we perceive ourselves and maybe our "group", we become really terrible at correctly matching what we intuit, if "we" can be considered the perpetrator.

Hypothesizing that we are part of the victims is also a much more effective strategy for the group if we're in a fear/survival mode, as an erroneous attribution often only presents a post-facto moral dilemma for a few individuals, a dilemma we can shield our ego from by saying we didn't know.

That we didn't know is also often objectively true as long as we disregard the uncanny notion that research on social interaction has let us understand exists, that our brain doesn't always let (most of) us know everything that it is going on if it will harm the social interaction.

Most of the above is not much of a problem when that group is a group of people in the middle of a forest, but becomes very much a problem if it is almost the entire population of a country, and when we as in the current day and time is obsessed with polishing our ego.

What actually happened?

White people weren't immune to widespread addiction after all. (This would have been obvious if Americans had connected alcoholism to illegal drug addiction, or, well, black and white people not actually being biologically different in regards to addiction, but we weren't ready for that.) Our conscious decision not to treat the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health crisis, because of the racial associations involved therein, meant we were unprepared to deal with the opioid epidemic in an effective manner.

But this also serves as a nice example for what you've observed, because the way that the opioid crisis began to be handled once it finally came out of the shadows was directly informed by how America had seen blacks treated in "Drug War I". The impetus for the swift, soft policies that were put in place were 100% the result of reflection on the destruction drug-related incarceration and public and private divestment of black communities wrought on those caught in the first epidemic.

But I also want to point out that you're coming at the subject from a white perspective: "It happened to black people, so white people are scared it will happen to them." I want to hit you with the black perspective: "It happened to black people, so it is GOING to happen to white people unless you listen to our stories (and here are some examples of what happened when you didn't)." In this light, it's ironic that you would label me the conspiracy theorist. In a lot of these situations, white Americans are paranoid; black Americans are experienced. And it often takes a white person synergizing what we already know into academ-ese for people to take our warnings seriously.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250210715

Again, see you in November.

I agree that bad ideas should be allowed in discussions[1]. If we're still talking about the same poor idea, it's probably a good idea if one quashes the ideas (whether poor or good) that run afoul of a platform's violence[2] policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorification... "You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people" (maybe reword your poor ideas to avoid saying "the shooting starts" in a country that distinguishes between assault and battery?) before publishing on that platform. I believe Theodore Roosevelt found his office a bully pulpit (note: not a bully pulpit) despite his lack of FB and TWTR.

Thanks also for the clarification of russian culture[3]. That sounds more advanced than anglophone (I am guessing the UK is not significantly more advanced than the US on this front, as Orwell makes it abundantly clear in both his fiction and nonfiction that he is a product of the english middle class), but I have no good suggestions for anglophones beyond education, which takes time. (not to mention that in the world of unvaccinated coronavirus, a two-student schooldesk is unlikely to be introduced in the US), time which is probably beyond the US Buxton Index[4].

[1] an advantage earlier US politicians had is that journalists would routinely rewrite even their on-the-record spoken comments to be more palatable in print. ("more" is an important qualifier here; Earl Butz resigned despite the fact that his jokes had been edited for taste when being reported)

[2] one amusing thing comparing US and USSR 70's and 80's movies is the completely different censorship. On one side you get very little blood, on the other very few breasts. (as for beasts, they're either scary or befriended. both systems agreed pirates are always villains) I was surprised by the ending to White Sun of the Desert because it was the first I'd seen a soviet shoot-out.

[3] I've learned some russian from Lavrov's poetry. Does anyone have suggestions for which pieces of Pompeo I might improve my english with?

[4] I learned of the Buxton Index from Dijkstra. Something else that stuck with me is that he said, as a young dutchman, he was educated to never start speaking a sentence before one knows how one is going to finish it. Maybe the equivalent for twitter should be "don't start typing before you've thought through the 140th character?" More cynically, the old IBM slogan ought to be revived: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-f...

as well as cause for optimism: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/18/politics/peggy-wallace-ke... (about George "segregation forever" Wallace's daughter and grandson)

I know americans who truly believe it is a colour-blind country where everyone is middle-class. I hope they can make it so.