Fit to Print

 

Every time I sit down to do another political piece I get overwhelmed. The war in Ukraine is a perfect example. There is more going on behind the scenes than I can imagine. Even if I study for an hour just on the specific news of the day, how do I know that what I’ve read is true? Once you realize that most news and information is propaganda, it makes it tough to honestly write about anything. I don’t mind changing positions when better information is available but what if nearly everything I’m told is a lie?

Not a lie in the 100% bullshit way. No one can get away with that for long. You can’t tell me it’s raining in Oklahoma on a sunny, clear day. I can look out the window and know it’s a lie. But even as I write that, the president went on TV today and got a booster shot. He then proceeded to tell people that getting the shot would keep you from getting Covid and spreading it to others. It’s an easily verifiable lie! His own CDC told the nation almost a year ago that the vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission. We’ve known this. So it doesn’t give me a lot of hope that the rest of the news is correct.

Mostly what I see is skewed stories that show a kind of partial truth, but wildly miss the real thrust. This is willful of course but extremely frustration. I watched about an hour of a PBS show called Independent Lens last night. Broadly it was about the tech industry and its manipulation of private data. TikTok was featured heavily. It’s a Chinese app that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) manipulates for their own citizens. In the US, Tik Tok is getting the can’t-be-trusted label because their servers are in China. We can’t really know what they are doing with all the data. But it’s a Communist country after all, the citizens have no rights and neither does private industry.

So far that’s fine. It’s true. But it’s also true of our own tech companies and only recently has Mark Zuckerberg starting dumping on Tik Tok. He didn’t make any inroads in China with his own platform, Facebook, and now he’s getting beat locally by Tik Tok. The film was upfront about this I thought. But all of these platforms work by collecting huge reams of personal data. That’s the trade-off that we’ve (citizens) agreed to in essence. They talked about shadow banning of individual accounts and outright hiding pages because of sensitive content. They only featured left wing accounts though.

As if, the Left isn’t allowed to share their content on Tik Tok without getting blocked or banned on a massive scale. They featured some high school girl who talked about the Uighurs in China. Tik Tok sent her a warning, then they disabled her account after multiple infractions. It’s a tragedy for sure, both the slavery of the Uighurs and restricting this girl from sharing it. But it pales in comparison to the manipulation of our own platforms.

The Right was summarily banned for nearly all of 2020 on most platforms. Facebook in particular, banned anyone from denying election results. Well, not the elections that Democrats lost of course, just 2020. That’s a lot of people and none of them on the Left. You can find a few individuals on the Left but it was a tidal wave on the right. They know this. The US government put pressure on these platforms to censor, ban or report countless Q followers known as “Anons”. All because they rejected the official version of the election, how is that different from what China does?

Some of the reporters tried to make a case that misinformation is a problem for regular readers. It's not. 

It's a problem for the government. It doesn’t want to compete with other sources. It wants to have the official version, just like Beijing. Whether the information shared is true or not is irrelevant. If Facebook wants to police it, good luck to them. But they’ve always claimed they aren’t responsible for what individuals put on their site. Fair enough …then why cancel so many people? They’re trying to have it both ways. When the government insists on something you do it or get punished. That’s what’s really going on with Facebook and Twitter and all the others. They don’t want to run afoul of Uncle Sam or get dragged through the courts like a pro life Christian at an antiabortion rally.

Having this Independent Lens show talk about the marginalized liberals was like explaining how the dust bowl was tough on livestock without mentioning the destruction of homes, soil and livelihoods. It’s not untrue but it’s a disgusting example of misdirection.

I wanted to write something about the Russia/Ukraine war but I don’t really know what’s going on.