Making Facebook “safe”

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin, who wrote, “Nothing that we didn’t know, but nice to find out that AT LEAST ONE Facebook employee has a conscience.”]

However, it seems to me that tons of Facebook employees have consciences, as do the people at the helm there who set the policy. In fact, they’re loaded with consciences, positively dripping with them. The question is: conscience about what?

The linked article discusses a Facebook whistleblower named Frances Haugen:

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” Haugen told 60 Minutes Sunday.

Haugen accused the company of placing profit above the good for the public, despite assurances from Facebook leadership that the company was working to make the platform safe.

I certainly agree that Facebook and other social media companies are helping to tear our societies apart. I’m not sure about ethnic violence around the world, though; it seems to me that was rife long before Facebook existed.

But note that word “safe.” To me that’s a warning bell, a tell of leftism. No platform that allows a free exchange of ideas can be “safe” in the way that the word is commonly used today. So in the name of “safety,” speech is limited. But what speech?

More:

“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen said.

In other words, they were acting like capitalists.

Documents revealed that Facebook’s own internal research showed that the company knew some of its products were harming the mental health of some of its users, most notably teen girls.

“Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use [Instagram] more,” Haugen said.

So that seems to be about the fairly well-known (at least, it’s well-known to those in the therapy field) fact that when anorectics get to compare notes online or elsewhere (including in person, in hospital treatment centers) they often exchange information on how to be better anorectics and get thinner and thinner, as well as learning more effective ways to evade the authorities.

If Facebook bans such discussions, it does so in order to protect minors. To me, that’s a different thing because children are involved. Protecting adults by banning such discussions is much iffier.

And of course it’s not as though Facebook is a small operation, or a personal blog such as this one that features one person with others commenting on the views of that one person. Facebook is a vast vehicle for the exchange of ideas among people with their own pages, and it has enormous reach and power. Facebook and other such platforms started out very committed to openness but have clamped down more and more as time goes on. It sounds as though Haugen would like them to clamp down more.

And of course, to clamp down on the viewpoints that tend to be on the political right:

Haugen, a data scientist with a computer engineering degree and a Harvard MBA, said she took the job at Facebook in order to combat misinformation after losing a friend to online conspiracy theories. But although she admits that the company took some steps to combat misinformation during the 2020 election, many of those policies were only temporary.

Gotta clamp down on that election “misinformation” more and more, so we’ll be “safe.”

There actually is a dilemma here. Protecting children is one thing, but censoring political views on such a vast scale is another. And when Facebook decides what’s “misinformation,” it certainly isn’t unbiased in its application of the standard. We already know that full well, and we know which side will suffer and which will profit.

Emotion in popular songs: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: There isn’t a previous post called “Emotion in popular songs: Part I.” But I realize that this one was actually Part I on the subject, and now I’m posting a Part II.]

Commenter “Brio” wrote the following on a post about the Everly Brothers:

Never been a fan of the Everly Brothers or the Bee Gees. I will listen to them when they pop up on the radio, but I would never spend a cent buying their music.

I prefer singers who sing with emotion rather than just mouthing the words. None of those three Everly Brothers videos show any emotion to me.

I have a very different reaction. To me the Everly Brothers, while not the most hyper-emotional of singers, certainly convey emotion. But emotional reactions to songs and singers are highly individual.

Brio added: “the feeling is more important to me than a harmony.” I certainly like both feeling and harmony, but for me, harmony adds its own emotion. Is it the emotion that comes from the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, the unity of the separate into the one? Is it just the extra beauty of the aural complexity? Whatever it is, I like it immensely, although by itself it’s not enough to make me like a song or a version of a song.

In addition, I tend to divide singers very roughly into Apollonian and Dionysian types. My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that a commenter such as Brio much prefers the latter. The quintessential Dionysian singer would be Janis Joplin, I think, although there are plenty of others. Nina Simone falls into a curious category of being both for me. Her piano playing has so much of the classical, her voice is so unusual and like an instrument itself (some sort of brass or woodwind instrument, I think), and yet she puts a lot of over-the-top emotion into many of her songs as well.

The Beatles vs. the Stones I think are somewhat Apollonian versus Dionysian. I like them both, but I much prefer the Beatles, although I am far from liking everything they did . But strangely enough, the more Dionysian Stones rouse almost no emotion in me at all except appreciation of the tremendous beat and power of their music. And (also perhaps rather oddly) only a few Beatles songs – such as “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby,” for example (both with string accompaniments) – stir any emotional reaction in me but nostalgia.

And then there’s the music of Leonard Cohen – he of the low monotone and no pyrotechnics at all, quite Apollonian in my book – which I find very emotional. The emotion is in the words and the music itself, and something evocative in his unbeautiful but resonant and full-of-meaning voice. And two other big favorites of mine, Richard Thompson and Mark Knopfler, are also emotional in their playing (guitar in both cases) and yet Apollonian in their physical stillness while playing, and in their singing voices. On the other hand, Whitney Houston and her vocal flourishes leave me utterly cold, despite that glorious voice.

And the Bee Gees? (You knew I’d get around to them, didn’t you?) They are a special case to me because they have so many voices and ways of singing. I have noticed that a lot of people find their singing very emotional, even perhaps hyper-emotional, expecialy the voice of Robin and especially in his 60s incarnation, where he sounds as though he is constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Nevertheless, the Bee Gees seem to me to be a very Apollonian group, because they exercise total and complete control of their voices and of their arrangements. Some people perceive it as too slick. But I love almost everything they do. Even their disco songs – so very strongly loved and hated – are IMHO the best disco songs ever made. I defy people not to succumb to the beat. The falsettos are in the disco songs not to be annoying (although some people find them so), but to heighten the urgency and the excitement; their regular voices were way too beautiful for that, and they wanted a different sound.

But they can do falsetto in so many ways it’s astounding, including a lovely sound that’s closer, for Barry, to that of a countertenor. “Too Much Heaven” evokes tears in a great many of the YouTube reactors, for example, and it often happens almost instantaneously (and somewhat mysteriously, because a lot of them are puzzled by their reactions).

“Nights On Broadway,” one of the Bee Gees biggest hits from 1975, is another love/hate song. I love it. It has a driving catchy rhythm, a tenacious hook (watch out!), and sounds upbeat. But the words are about a love that’s ended, and a hopeless pursuit of the loved one that amounts almost to stalking. The tune masks the darker words to a certain extent unless the listener is really paying attention (that’s also true of others Bee Gees songs such as “Stayin’ Alive”).

And in the middle of the upbeat catchy part of “Nights On Broadway,” we come to the hyper-emotional (although still Apollonian) bridge, in which the frenetic pace stops and we enter something quite different. The music slows and Barry says “I will wait…” and then we wait to hear the rest, which is (to me, anyway) transcendently and almost heartbreakingly beautiful and full of yearning (in this live version from 1975, the bridge begins at 2:57 and ends at 3:50):

“Singing them love songs, singing them straight-to-the-heart songs…”

Frei and Barnes on recent developments concerning the January 6th “insurrection”

The New Neo Posted on by

Or, as they now call, it the “flaccid insurrection.”

I’ve cued up about a 10-minute segment that I think is good. Some of this is a review of things you probably already know if you’re a regular reader here or on other blogs on the right, but some of it is new and it’s all a good summary of where we are at this point.

If you’re impatient or in a hurry for any reason, it works if you go to “settings” on the video and make the speed 1.25:

I agree with them that much more might be coming out about FBI involvement, and that one of the clues is that the NY Times is now reporting on some of this – which indicates it will come out in court and they are trying to “get ahead of the story” and spin it as much as possible to their liking. I also have started to think that the Capitol Police may have instigated some of the violence by attacking non-violent demonstrators, and Frei and Barnes indicate that apparently there is some video evidence of this. It would certainly be interesting to see what it might be.

Glenn Loury on race and a host of other things

The New Neo Posted on by

Take a look and/or have a listen. The full audio interview with Bari Weiss can be found at the link, but there also are printed excerpts. Here’s a bit:

BW: The word racism has been redefined, particularly by Ibram X. Kendi. First of all, it’s no longer about personal bigotry. It’s about any system that results in disparity. So if you have any kind of disparity between racial groups in any given institution, school culture system, it is evidence in and of itself that racism is present.

GL: That is exactly what Kendi is saying. He’s not mincing words about it. What it brings to mind is George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he talks about how words and the meaning of words fall in the service of political programs. And people think they can make reality by playing with words. I don’t know why anybody takes Ibram X. Kendi seriously. That’s a silly book, “How To Be an Anti-Racist.” Kendi’s formulations are sophomoric. They don’t bear up under the least bit of serious, rigorous social scientific scrutiny. He’s not standing on any literature. He’s not citing any intellectual development that has any deep roots in anything. It’s pablum. It’s froth on the intellectual surface of our life. And it behooves us all to think pretty hard about why it is that we’re content with that kind of analysis. When civil disorder in American cities is consuming the lives of black people like a machine, our political leaders and intellectual class and journalistic representatives haven’t got a word to say about it. Black Lives Matter is almost completely irrelevant to what matters in black lives.

BW: And yet corporations and the entire elite establishment has taken up the cause of Black Lives Matter. And the cynic in me would say it’s just about the cheapest and easiest thing that they could possibly do.

GL: Nothing that Black Lives Matter is about has any intersection with the things that actually matter in black lives. What about education? The gap in the cognitive development of the human potential of African-American youngsters relative to others in this country widens. It’s a yawning chasm.

BW: Glenn, if one really cared about black lives and wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of black lives mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?

GL: I think self-determination and taking responsibility for our lives. I’d say education. I’m sorry this is partisan, but the public-school unions are poorly serving, on the whole, the places where black students congregate and the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well. But opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of black life in this country.

And the public safety piece of this narrative, that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it. Patriotism. And by that I don’t mean blind loyalty to a flag salute, I mean seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don’t stand off from it.

The social costs of left-to-right political change

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter David Foster writes:

Many people don’t like changing their opinions, and many people don’t want to lose jobs, business opportunities, and friendships by holding & expressing unapproved opinions. Such behavior becomes much easier to self-justify when the vast majority of ‘information’ flowing across one’s view supports the safe opinions.

I would add “and when almost everyone in one’s social acquaintance shares those opinions.”

I’ve spent about seventeen years chronicling, among other things, the social costs of such political change. It was nearly twenty years ago (!) that I made my own political transition – which, by the way, was from relatively moderate Democrat to somewhat-libertarian conservative – and the political climate was different then. It was already hostile and bitter, but not even close to as extreme as it is now.

Would I have done the same in the current climate? Yes. But I understand that one reason it’s so difficult to do, and one reason a person might adopt a stance of not wanting to hear information contrary to the beliefs that person already holds, is that it is now extremely threatening to make that particular change.

As David Foster writes, it now potentially involves jobs, business opportunities, and friendships. Sometimes it also involves marital tension and even dissolution, heartbreaking conflict with relatives including one’s own children, and even the threat of imprisonment depending on how activist one becomes. Social media shunning and viral calls for cancellation are also possible. The Gulag doesn’t loom – yet – and perhaps an actual Gulag as in the past will never arrive here. But if it doesn’t, it will be because it won’t be necessary. There are other ways to make people miserable, ways that don’t seem so overtly evil and yet nevertheless do the trick.

When I underwent my own political change most of this had not yet escalated to that point. And yet even back then I risked – and experienced – social disapproval and hostility from some friends and relatives. I had previously been so naive as to be unaware of even the possibility that that would be happening, and so it came as a real shock. For most people today, such a reaction on the part of their friends and family would almost certainly not come as a shock, because it would be difficult to be that naive in the current climate.

As I said, it wouldn’t have stopped me, but I think I completely understand why others would be reluctant to tread that path. Who wants to become a pariah? It’s easier to not expose yourself to views that could challenge your belief system, particularly when you’ve been told for most of your life (and almost everyone around you believes) that those sources are unreliable and even mendacious. To understand that it is more the opposite, and that the sources you have trusted your entire life are much more pervaded by lies and that you have previously swallowed them, is very very difficult to acknowledge. So most people don’t want to risk even the distant possibility and reject it out of hand.

Democrats refuse to pass law requiring illegal immigrants to be tested for COVID…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and yet it is reported that border guards will be fired if they refuse to be vaccinated by November 1st.

Not only that, but many of those untested and possibly-COVID-infected illegal aliens who are streaming across the border courtesy of Joe Biden & Company have been seeded throughout the country without consulting the communities in which they will be placed.

Here’s some information about the proposed bill:

Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks offered her REACT Act on Wednesday in the United States House of Representatives. Democrats, however, blocked the bill, which would require the Department of Homeland Security to give a COVID test to everyone crossing the border illegally.

Miller-Meeks called her bill “commonsense legislation.”…

“[A recent DHS] report further stated that we recommend DHS reassess its COVID-19 response framework to identify areas for improvement, to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 while balancing its primary mission of securing the border,” she said. “Currently everyone legally entering the United States by plane is required to display a negative test for COVID-19. Why aren’t we requiring this of those who come here illegally?”

It’s not even as though this bill would require the deportation of people who test positive. It merely would require that they not be released from custody for a while. Also, it’s not as though other people entering this country from foreign lands aren’t being tested for COVID. They are. For example:

While the Biden Administration is testing individuals arriving from Afghanistan and vaccinating them for COVID as well as other childhood illnesses, it isn’t doing that with those crossing the border illegally.

Miller-Meeks also had this to say:

“We recently watched a debacle unfold in Del Rio, Texas where we have learned that DHS did not test any of approximately 15,000 migrants who camped out under the Del Rio Bridge, many of whom came from South America where they’re experiencing the Lambda Variant. We now know that around 12,000 of these individuals were released into the United States.”

I’ve looked and looked, but I have yet to find an article that explains the rationale the Democrats gave for blocking the bill. Maybe they didn’t even offer one – after all, they have the House majority and can vote without explaining why.

When queried a little while ago about why illegal entrants to the US aren’t required to provide proof of vaccination or be tested for COVID, Jen Psaki gave her typically nonsensical and even insulting-to-intelligence type of answer:

“As individuals walk across the border they are both assessed for if they have any symptoms, the intention is for them to be quarantined, that is our process.”

“They’re not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time.”

Sure thing. I thought the official administration word is that COVID can be spread even without symptoms, and I’m also under the impression that the people crossing the southern border illegally didn’t come all that way merely to have a cup of coffee and return.

The bill had originally been introduced back in March, when it was defeated. Miller-Meeks (who won her election by six votes, by the way, and whose seating was challenged by Democrats) is a military veteran and physician who for a while was the director of Iowa’s Department of Public Health.

Does anyone doubt that Democrats are hypocrites on the subject of COVID and public health? The evidence is overwhelming. And of course that’s not the only issue on which their hypocrisy shines forth.

At what point, if ever, will Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Biden administration translate into voting behavior?

The New Neo Posted on by

Polls certainly reflect that dissatisfaction – if you believe the polls. And there also are the “eff-Biden” chants at football games, although we don’t know what percentage of people share the intensity of that particular sentiment. But Biden has come close to running this country into the ground in short order, and people are noticing.

I haven’t yet had any in-depth talks with any of my Democrat-voting friends about all of this, but the superficial and brief chats I’ve had with some of them indicate unease and dissatisfaction on their parts. For example, they uniformly don’t like what happened in Afghanistan.

And yet I have no sense that any of them would even consider voting for a Republican. Let me emphasize that I don’t know, because – as I said – I haven’t yet had lengthy talks with them. But that is what my gut tells me, for two reasons. The first reason is that I well know how difficult it is for a lifelong Democrat to vote for a Republican. And it’s only gotten more difficult in the last two decades or so, as Republicans have become more and more demonized by the Democratic establishment and by the media as well as social media. Voting for a Republican is, in many people’s minds, sympathy for the devil.

The second reason is Donald Trump. For example, one friend I spoke to expressed a great deal of upset at the way Biden handled Afghanistan, and then said to me, “But hadn’t Trump agreed to do the same thing?” In other words, she had read in the news that Biden was just following Trump’s plan, and she had no source of competing information – except me, and I proceeded to explain the differences between Trump’s plan and Biden’s “plan.” The point is, though, that Trump has been so thoroughly demonized for so long – and so many of the people receiving that information don’t seriously doubt their sources – that any criticism of Biden can be countered with a “but Trump was the same or probably worse” rejoinder.

Each such discussion feels a bit Sisyphean, rolling that ball uphill again.

Jordan Peterson on the use of crises to curtail liberty, and as a religion substitute

The New Neo Posted on by

I put this portion of the following Jordan Peterson interview (about 17 minutes) up on the post I just published, but I also want to highlight it by giving the excerpt its own post here. If you find listening to videos too slow, I suggest you go to “settings” on the video and change the speed to a faster one: