Freedom of speech is under attack from the big cybertech companies

The New Neo Posted on by

As Glenn Reynolds writes:

Note that I say “free speech” and not “First Amendment.” The First Amendment only limits government, but “free speech” is — or at least until very recently was — a broader social value in favor of not shutting people up just because we don’t like their ideas or politics. As for the “private companies can do what they want,” well, that’s not the law, or the custom, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s especially not true where the companies have, as these companies have, affirmatively represented to users and shareholders that they don’t discriminate based on viewpoints.

It’s a tricky question, because although I do believe that shutting down speech—even “hate speech”—cuts into the free flow of ideas so vital to liberty, I also believe in private companies having the right to control what appears on their site. Just as an example, I ban people and/or erase comments that I find especially offensive (not just somewhat offensive). I have no obligation to provide a platform for garbage.

But this seems like an ominous development. Roger Simon describes it:

I’ve spent about ten minutes of my life on InfoWars [note from Neo: that’s about 10 minutes more than I’ve spent there] and think Alex Jones is a boring blowhard of little interest except to those who want to spend their lives worrying about whether there was a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.

Nevertheless, the group censorship of Mr. Jones, led by our friends in Cupertino, the makers of the ubiquitous iPhone…is one of the scarier developments of our time, if not potentially the scariest.

Apple is one hypocritical organization banning the puny Jones. They — the first trillion-dollar company — are the people who are genuflecting to the Chinese, kowtowing (that is definitely the proper word) to Xi Jinping and Co., and making all kinds of accommodations to that totalitarian regime for access to their giant market.

From Glenn Reynolds again:

(1) This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all. (2) Aside from its free-speech implications, which are serious indeed, this also looks like an antitrust violation: Media companies, which compete with Jones for eyeballs, colluded to get other media companies to shut him down. Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit. This is more than arguably conspiracy in restraint of trade (and possibly a conspiracy to deprive him of civil rights).

And from Roger Simon again:

…[W]hat Apple is doing picking on the basically irrelevant Jones is a form of corporate virtual signaling, a particularly dangerous form if you believe in the Bill of Rights.

Yes, I know they’re a private company not subject to government restrictions, but they are bigger, richer, and more powerful than almost every government on the planet, maybe more, which leads me to their noxious and equally powerful comrade-in-tech-arms…. FACEBOOK.

The Internet behemoth — lest they be humiliated, I suppose, and not seen as politically incorrect — immediately followed in Apple’s footsteps, deleting all things Jones. They were joined rapidly by half a dozen others including Google and, bizarrely, Spotify. Did anyone have Alex Jones on his playlist?

But remarkably, only a few days before, Facebook’s founder, my fellow Jew (yes, it’s relevant) Mark Zuckerberg, had announced he was allowing Holocaust deniers on FB. From CNET:

He said content from Holocaust deniers should not be taken down from the platform because “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong,” he said.

“It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent,” he continued. “I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly.”

Yes, it’s hard to impugn intent. Maybe the intent of all these social media powers is perfectly great. “Intent” usually is. That’s why we tend to focus on process, the rule of law, and the defense of the freedom of speech even of those with whom we disagree. Tyrannies always cite their own good intent, as well. No one (or very few people) ever said “I’m going to censor that person, or I’m going to jail that person without due process, because I have bad intentions towards them.”

[NOTE: I’m writing this post rather quickly because the power company just kindly called with a recorded message saying that in a couple of minutes they’ll be turning off the power for about an hour. And here I was just about to do my laundry!]

[ADDENDUM: Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy believes that the survival of our democracy depends on these bannings:

This from a US senator? I think maybe the word “democracy” doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. By the way, I wonder why he didn’t use the word “republic” instead (that’s sarcasm on my part; I certainly know why he didn’t).]

[ADDENDUM: Double standards. Of course.]

#WalkAway: apostasy and shunning

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed this phenomenon a while ago—in fact, it’s was one of the things that first caused me to start blogging. But in general it is my perception that it’s gotten worse over the years in terms of its degree and the number of people it involves.

The woman in the following video describes the situation I’m talking about quite well. The whole thing is worth watching (it’s not long, either), but the part I’m referring to starts around 1:33:

The blog category label I gave to this post is “Leaving the circle: political apostasy.” The word “apostasy” was chosen deliberately many years ago, when I first set up the categories, although it may seem like it’s an inappropriate term for politics because it ordinarily refers to leaving a religion. But “apostasy” can certainly be used for politics, too, and especially for the “shunning” (another word often used in a religious context) of those who leave the fold of liberalism and/or leftism.

Here’s the definition of “shunning”:

Shunning can be the act of social rejection, or emotional distance. In a religious context, shunning is a formal decision by a denomination or a congregation to cease interaction with an individual or a group, and follows a particular set of rules. It differs from, but may be associated with, excommunication.

Social rejection occurs when a person or group deliberately avoids association with, and habitually keeps away from an individual or group. This can be a formal decision by a group, or a less formal group action which will spread to all members of the group as a form of solidarity. It is a sanction against association, often associated with religious groups and other tightly knit organizations and communities. Targets of shunning can include persons who have been labeled as apostates, whistleblowers, dissidents, strikebreakers, or anyone the group perceives as a threat or source of conflict.

It’s exceedingly painful, and it’s meant to be.

As Zimbabwe goes, so goes South Africa?

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever the reasons, it’s dangerous for governments to confiscate the land of citizens without compensation, as the leading party of South Africa is now poised to do.

Their reasons reflect the complex history of South Africa, a place where black people (historically around 75% to 80% of the population) were forbidden to own land in most of the country for a long time. When apartheid ended in 1994, which is now almost 25 years ago, the policy changed:

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC [African National Congress, the ruling party] has followed a “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model under which the government buys white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks. Progress has been slow…

Based on a survey of title deeds, the government says blacks own four percent of private land, and only eight percent of farmland has been transferred to black hands, well short of a target of 30 percent that was meant to have been reached in 2014.

AgriSA, a farm industry group, says 27 percent of farmland is in black hands. Its figure includes state land and plots tilled by black subsistence farmers in the old homelands.

That 1994 policy was equitable because both buyer and seller had to acquiesce, and the owners of the land were compensated. But “progress” has been too slow for many people in South Africa, and the ANC—which had until now refused to change the policy—is running scared and fears it might lose power. So it has caved on the issue.

More:

The 17 million people who reside in the former [black] homelands, a third of the population, are mostly subsistence farmers working tiny plots on communal land.

Critics of ANC land policy say that instead of seizing farmland from whites, such households should be given title deeds, turning millions into property owners. Reformers in the ANC have signaled their support for such a policy.

Seems like a better way to go about it than seizing people’s land.

The big question is whether the country will turn into Zimbabwe:

Analysts say South Africa is unlikely to follow the route of Zimbabwe, where the chaotic and violent seizure of white-owned farms under former president Robert Mugabe triggered economic collapse.

Ramaphosa has repeatedly said the policy will be implemented in a way that does not threaten food security or economic growth. ANC officials have said unused land will be the main target.

Governments say a lot of things. But once you go down this path it can have ripple effects that “analysts” don’t always foresee. For example, why would anyone invest in South Africa if it’s seen as risky? The South African currency fell after the announcement, and the bond market weakened.

Also, when you read the words of leaders of the more radical party, the [EFF], it is not reassuring, either about the financial future of South Africa or about the situation not escalating in a Zimbabwe-type direction:

There have been concerns among South Africa’s white minority that the motion will encourage attacks on farmers, and the EFF’s leader Julius Malema has previously been convicted of hate speech for singing anti-white songs like “Shoot the Boer [Farmer]”…

“In this process, white people ought to accept the crime of apartheid and colonisation and how these crimes impacted on black people,” Mr Ndlozi said. Whites could “show remorse by ceding land they inherited through anti-black racist dispossession”, he suggested, adding: “Justice leads to reconciliation.”

“Justice”—for example, the “justice” in the US known as affirmative action—does not always lead to reconciliation. The people who own the South African farms now have certainly benefited from what happened in the past—the exclusion of black people from land ownership in most of the country, among other rights that were denied—but the present-day farmers were for the most part not the perpetrators of apartheid and they are the legal owners of their land. What’s more, they have skills in developing and tending that land:

“If you take away those role players and replace them with people that have no knowledge, have no experience, we are going to produce a lot less,” South African farmer Jannie Myburgh told RT’s Paula Slier. “And if we produce less food, the food prices will go up, and that will harm the people that are on the bottom of the food chain.”

The history of South Africa is tremendously complex, with many ethnic groups involved. Learning about it is slow going, but suffice to say that the problems there defy easy answers.

Lots of discord has been going on for quite some time in South Africa over these issues:

Ever since the Dutch colonialist Jan van Riebeeck first set his clogs on the shores of southern Africa in 1652, the issue of land ownership has been a cause of conflict — a stark, tense thread running throughout the tapestry of South Africa’s history.

Van Riebeeck, an employee of the VOC (Dutch East India Company), was sent to the Cape to establish a refreshment station for passing VOC ships.

The Dutch settlement was immediately at odds with locals: the pastoral Khoikhoi, and later the foraging San.

Through impositions of Western-style bureaucracy by the Dutch and a series of wars, the Europeans gained control of large swathes of fertile Cape land.

The arrival of the British in 1795, followed 25 years later by the first of the 1820 Settlers, only worsened the situation as the 4000 mainly artisanal British workers were granted land for farms in the Eastern Cape.

That’s how it started, and then:

The most severe insult yet came with the passing of the Natives Land Act in 1913, which restricted black property ownership to just 7 per cent of the land of South Africa.

Although this amount was later increased to 13 per cent, the land black people were allowed to own was restricted to rural “native reserves”.

But the real question is: what now? The country is a powder keg, and the specter of Zimbabwe looms as a dire warning:

Within 24 hours of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe’s announcement of a similar policy in 1997, the local currency was devalued more than 50% beginning a hyper-inflation of the nation’s currency.

Initially, the land expropriation program was a victory for ordinary citizens, Zimbabweans would pay dearly for it through eight years of economic decline that led to job losses. Zimbabwean economist, Eddie Cross estimated that the country lost $20 billion dollars in export revenues, food aid imports and economic growth.

Now, the Zimbabwean government is going back to correct its mistake. The government has established a compensation committee under its land acquisition act to allow for dispossessed white, former commercial farmers to be compensated for land seized 18 years ago, according to Quartz.

You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The only question is how best to go forward. South Africa is in trouble, and has been for a long, long time.

The disappearing photos

The New Neo Posted on by

Late last night I discovered that the vast majority of the photos on posts transferred from the old blog to this one have disappeared.

Needless to say, that was not a happy moment. I spent quite a bit of time trying to discover what happened and whether it’s fixable, but right now the jury is out on that. The subject awaits the attentions of the web developer, so any answer I get will probably come overnight.

My apologies. Fortunately, photos are not the main focus (pun intended) of this blog. Most of the photos are in fun, throwaway posts about things like fashion, or the “separated at birth” posts.

I’ll update when I know more.

Videos in posts written from the summer of 2014 to the present seem to be intact—except for those that have been removed from YouTube or their original sites, whatever those sites might be (an attrition that has nothing to do with the blog transfer). But videos from prior to that are iffy. I almost certainly will be able to fix those at some point, because I believe I discovered the glitch there and it’s a code thing. However, it will be labor-intensive to fix it (have to slightly change the code format for each video) and I don’t know when and even if I’ll get around to it. I do plan to fix it for the important videos, such as those in the “dance” category. As I said, though, after some time in the summer of 2014 the videos seem to work, so it’s only a problem in older posts.

The internet and blogs can be a frustrating place. That’s why I’m leery of change. However, you can’t stop change. As I wrote in an earlier explanation of why I made the switch to the new site, one problem was that my old blog design was so archaic that things were going wrong and couldn’t be fixed. The theme had been abandoned by its designer years ago and was not compatible with certain newer WordPress developments. The disappearance of the photos may have had something to do with the archaic nature of the old theme; I don’t know, however.

I hate all the blabbing on and on about the technical aspects of the blog, but I figured that if you were reading in the archives you might want to know why on earth most of the photos were missing at the moment.

Evaluating a president—any president

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ariel” addresses these remarks by another commenter in this way:

…”but [Trump’s] policies are overall working pretty well” How the hell can you know that? I say this from watching George Bush blamed for the housing crash when it came from what Congress and Clinton did years before. It takes time, sometimes decades, to see what those policies create. You are no different than the Democrats that blamed Bush for what was done before he was President, they saw that it was good back then, but when it wasn’t they blamed someone else. What will you be doing when Trump’s policies lead to a crash in a later President’s term? Waxing exultant about how great was his policies and then clucking about what this other guy did to us?

I am so sick and tired of all of you because you fail to learn. What you do is root for your tribal leader and nothing more.

In this post I will offer a list of what I see as the hierarchy of methods of evaluation of a president. I’ve left out the first one (a method which I don’t see as “evaluation” at all), the one Ariel is alluding to as “rooting for your tribal leader and nothing else.” That style certainly exists, but it’s not mine and it certainly doesn’t fit the sentence Ariel quotes—“[Trump’s] policies are overall working pretty well”—unless there is evidence that the writer is applying that judgment in some mindless, kneejerk, party-line manner.

Here’s the list:

(1) surface style, which is easy to observe in a president (the wonderful crease in Obama’s pants, a la David Brooks) but quite irrelevant, in my book, taking a back seat to performance and results in the real world as president. Presidents are not figureheads; we’re not talking The Queen here, wearing a hat and carrying her purse.

(2) internal character—harder to evaluate than surface style, but not impossible. On this score, I think we can safely stipulate that Trump is not a role model. Internal character is more relevant in a president than surface style, but only so far as it affects job performance. For example, there have been presidents of good personal character internally (or seemingly, anyway) who were bad presidents or mediocre ones. For an example of the first (bad president) you have Jimmy Carter, and for the second (mediocre president) I give you Gerald Ford. On the other hand, we’ve had presidents who broke their marriage vows or were otherwise deceitful in the personal sense (bad internal character) and yet were considered good presidents by many historians.

(3) results in the external world. There are two types of results in the external world (a) short-term and (b) long-term. Regarding method (a) (short-term), whereas commenter Ariel is certainly correct that people commonly err when they ascribe credit (or blame) to the person who is in office when a phenomenon occurs, ignoring predecessors who may have set up the bad or good situation that led belatedly to the bad or good result, nevertheless despite its flaws and traps this is actually the best and most obvious way to evaluate a president in real time. Waiting for a time lag of “sometimes decades” is a luxury the voter simply does not usually have when making voting decisions.

Ariel seems to think that method (b) (long-term) is the very best way to evaluate a president. With that I agree, at least in theory. But unfortunately, that method is not available to us when a person has been president for such a short time. We can look back at that president years later, but by then all our voting decisions regarding that person will have been made.

We can, however, attempt to weigh the longer-term effect of the policies of that person’s predecessor, and decide how much those earlier polities have created the situation the later president faces. But you know what? Although better, that method has tremendous flaws, too. Political evaluation is not a science. Objectivity is rare, but even the objective can have trouble with evaluating history (see * NOTE below). To illustrate my point, just look at the incredible divergence of opinion among historians and among economists on just one historical issue: did FDR’s economic policies help prolong the Great Depression or help end it? About 80 years have passed since the Depression ended, and erudite opinions on both sides abound.

Of course, you and I may think we have the right answer; I certainly try to get at the right answer, objectively speaking. We lean towards one opinion or another that seems most convincing. But it’s not as though we know. We may indeed know more, and be wiser, about the far-distant past than about the very recent one. But we must, as voters (and as bloggers, or blog commenters) make decisions in real time, despite acknowledgement of the flawed nature of our reasoning. And we must depend partly or even mostly on the results we see of a presidency in real time, taking into account as best we can our knowledge of the past in making our decisions.

And that’s a lot better than voting based on the crease in someone’s pants. As human beings, however, we are all susceptible to and influenced by everything about a person, consciously perceived or not—including that crease. We can try to be consistent, however, in applying our evaluations and not just “root for a tribal leader.” But human beings will probably never get there, and most people don’t even try. If we “fail to learn” (Ariel’s contention), it’s because it’s the human condition, either to ignore history or to have trouble figuring out its lessons even when we do try to study it closely. [again, see * NOTE below)

During the 2016 campaign, I evaluated Trump based on his past, which did not include any political acts. That made it difficult to see how he would be going politically as a president. I had to use the evidence of his character (not good) and his words (inconsistent over time). I didn’t trust him and had no particular reason to do so, and I thought he would probably be not only inconsistent and a loose cannon as a president, but also relatively liberal. But so far, my observation of Trump as president is that he’s been relatively consistent in policy and mostly (not entirely) congruent with what he had promised, as well as one of the most conservative presidents (policy-wise, not personally) I’ve seen in my lifetime.

But I can only observe those things in real time, and discuss them and act accordingly. I try to take the past into account when trying to decide the effect of Trump—such as, for example, Obama’s previous economic policies. But I see what I see, which is that generally Trump has been pretty good and certainly much better than I expected him to be. But rest assured, if things go south under his presidency, I will (reluctantly) hold him to account. “Reluctantly,” because I want things to go well for this country and the world, as I always do no matter who is president and what party he or she represents.

[ * NOTE: In terms of the difficulty of evaluating and therefore learning from history, I am reminded of this from one of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera:

There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end, as surely as Tomas’s life, never to be repeated.

In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.

Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czech’s country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In countrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries. What should they have done?

If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to check the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses…

The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of all of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe are a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience.

I would add that that’s true of much history, not just Czech history.]

The FBI dismissed Steele as a source but kept using him anyway

The New Neo Posted on by

Byron York has been one of the reporters who has repeatedly taken on the difficult task of delving into the details of the Russia-Trump-collusion investigation by the FBI. What he finds usually isn’t pretty.

And this is no exception:

Because he had broken his agreement with the FBI, bureau procedure did not allow agents to keep using Steele as a source. But they did so anyway — by devising a system in which Steele spoke regularly with Bruce Ohr, a top Obama Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to search for dirt on Donald Trump in Russia. Ohr then passed on Steele’s information to the FBI.

In a highly unusual arrangement, Ohr, who was the fourth-highest ranking official in the Justice Department, acted as an intermediary for a terminated source for the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe. His task was to deliver to the FBI what Steele told him, which effectively meant the bureau kept Steele as a source.

Agents made a record of each time Ohr gave the bureau information from Steele. Those records are in the form of so-called 302 reports, in which the FBI agents write up notes of interviews during an investigation.

There are a dozen 302 reports on FBI post-election interviews of Ohr…

Congressional investigators have read the Ohr-Steele 302s. But the FBI has kept them under tight control, insisting they remain classified and limiting access to a few lawmakers and staff. Congress is not allowed to physically possess copies of any of the documents.

York quotes the House Intelligence Committee memo on another especially salient point connected with this:

…[I]n September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files — but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.

This would be shocking if we retained any ability to be shocked by the duplicitous machinations of the FBI in this matter.

The thing that strikes me as I read that—and it’s not the first time I’ve had the thought—is that, if the Democrats take control of the House in 2018 as often predicted, this investigation will cease. Of course, at least half the country isn’t paying attention anyway, or is paying some attention but doesn’t care, or thinks what the FBI did is just great because Trump has to be taken out one way or another, even if we have to “cut a great road through the law to get after the devil”—the devil known as Donald Trump.

The vindication of Clarence Thomas

The New Neo Posted on by

By Steven Hayward.

Justice Clarence Thomas has long been a figure of ridicule and contempt, even hatred, from the left. Had he been a liberal, he almost certainly would have been their champion and hero: black, and raised in abject poverty with an extraordinary story that would ordinarily touch the heart. However, he’s not a liberal; not at all.

But it turns out that, jurisprudentially speaking, Thomas may have the last laugh:

Liberals have always dismissed Thomas as simply Scalia’s wingman, though no one who actually read with any care their separate opinions, concurrences, and dissents would think so. But the great thing about being a liberal is that you can just go with a cliche and skip the careful thinking part.

But now that the whole scene is in flux with the arrival of Justice Gorsuch—who, like Justice Thomas, believes that the natural law tradition in legal history stretching back to Roman times still has today what social scientists call “normative” value—the left is taking stock of things, and realizing that they are in a heap of trouble…

…Ian Millhiser, who writes about legal affairs for the Center for American Progress. He, too, thinks Thomas defines the center of gravity for conservative jurisprudence, calling Thomas “the most important legal thinker in America.”

The left still despises Thomas. But now they fear he was actually the vanguard of a way of thinking that could become far more dominant in American judicial thought. From that Millhiser article:

But if you’re asking how effectively Thomas helped sway Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy to his own views, you are asking the wrong question. In a series of opinions joined by no other justice, Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.

As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.

The author of those words is not at all pleased at the prospect.

Acosta plays ball

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP]

You may have noticed that so far I’ve skipped all the brouhaha about Jim Acosta of CNN and his anger at being heckled by some Trump supporters, and then having a testy exchange with Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

It’s one of those things that makes me weary, and besides everybody else is covering it. For example, here’s Ace on the first incident and here’s Bre Payton in the Federalist on the second. You can find excerpts from Sanders’ reply here.

That’s from the right side of the fence, and of course the left has a different take on it (see the Times, for example, where the coverage was actually surprisingly restrained compared to this sort of thing).

You can watch the video if you’re so inclined. Personally, I think Huckabee Sanders got the better of Acosta:

There there’s this by Andrew Klavan [hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”], about some fallout from the incidents:

“Jim Acosta has the sadz. The untalented little man who rudely shouts unimportant questions at important people while in the employ of the ninth most trusted name in news out of ten, got heckled at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. Sad panda. The hecklers chanted “CNN sucks,” which, okay, is true, but they were none too polite about it.

Acosta didn’t like it. He reported, “Honestly, it felt like we weren’t in America anymore.”

But, like virtually everything Acosta reports, this is just a reflection of his small-minded biases. The fact is, having a group of people scream at you and denigrate you is exactly what it feels like to be in America — if you don’t happen to be a coastal elite. It has felt this way for the last twenty years at least. Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman’s magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb-ass racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.

I was going to write in response to AesopFan: “I guess Acosta’s never been to a Red Sox/Yankee game.” Heckling, screaming, par for the course; an old American tradition, not a new one.

But then I thought I’d check out “Jim Acosta and baseball”—because who knows? Maybe Acosta’s a big Yankees fan or something like that.

So I found this tweet of Acosta’s from last May, which he posted to illustrate the American cultural assimilation of an immigrant, Acosta’s father, who came here from Cuba many years ago:

There are some very funny responses, such as this one:

And this:

Even I am well aware of the Cuban passion for baseball. It certainly does not take “assimilation” to the US for a Cuban guy to become a fan! It may even be the case that Cubans are bigger baseball fans than Americans, on the whole. In fact, Fidel Castro was a big big baseball fan, although he was not a good enough player to have been scouted in his youth as a pitcher; that rumor is false.

So what on earth is Acosta talking about? Is he completely ignorant about the history of baseball in Cuba? Or does he think we are? [emphasis mine]:

Baseball is one of the most popular sports in Cuba. It was popularized in Cuba by Nemesio Guillot, who founded the first major baseball club in the country. It became the most played sport in the country in the 1870s, before the period of American intervention.

Despite its American origin, baseball is strongly associated with Cuban nationalism, as it effectively replaced colonial Spanish sports such as bullfighting.

So, how ’bout those Red Sox?