If you’re a Facebook user, think about what you signed up for. I suspect that most of you are like me, you thought the idea of a hub for keeping in touch with family and friends was a good one, and that’s what you wanted — something like that old newsletter your Aunt Matilda used to send out every Christmas, only shorter and more casual and spread out over the year. Or like a bar where you’d stroll in and see friends from the community, and a few strangers, and you could strike up a little conversation. That sounds wonderful! Only it hasn’t turned out that way, because the barkeep has decided to be intrusive and obnoxious. He wants to introduce you to new friends, all the time, and it doesn’t matter if they’re a bit skeevy. He’s trying to sell you stuff on the side. He keeps asking you questions about your personal life, all with the helpful intent of trying to match you with more compatible friends (only he doesn’t seem to actually understand human interactions, and he’s more than willing to connect you to any guy who’ll tip him a dollar), or to better understand what he might be able to sell to you. And then he turns up the television news real loud because it’ll give all of his patrons something to talk about.

The problem with Facebook isn’t the idea, it’s the Facebook executives, like Zuckerberg, who want to control and profit from the conversation. It’s gotten so bad that even avaricious robots like Zuckerberg have noticed, but they haven’t realized that what the users want is for Zuckerberg to shut the fuck up and quit intruding.

In his February letter, Zuckerberg essentially acknowledged what was obvious to anyone who had a Facebook account during the 2016 election: the social network has not exactly enhanced our democracy. The News Feed, the main scroll of posts that you see when you open Facebook, fueled hoaxes (which were overwhelmingly “tilted in favor” of Donald Trump, according to an analysis by Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow at Stanford), and it overfed people stories and memes that fit preconceived notions. On social media, “resonant messages get amplified many times,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This rewards simplicity and discourages nuance. At its best, this focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it oversimplifies important topics and pushes us towards extremes.”

He talks as if he understands, but the wheels in his head are spinning, and he’s trying to figure out how to keep his hooks in his userbase while acknowledging that maybe sometimes he’s an obnoxious ass, a little bit, occasionally (really, it’s always, a lot). This is not an indication that Facebook is a good place to find genuine communication:

For example, by cross-referencing your behavior on Facebook with files maintained by third-party data brokers, the company gathers data on your income, your net worth, your home’s value, your lines of credit, whether you have donated to charity, whether you listen to the radio, and whether you buy over-the-counter allergy medicine. It does this so that it can give companies an unprecedented ability to post ads that are presumably likelier to appeal to you. (I asked Facebook whether anything has changed to make the Post’s report no longer accurate; the company had no comment.)

They have “algorithms” to figure out what ads you’d like to see. But their algorithms suck, and are easily gamed, and even more easily bought. Every time they glean some scrap of information, like that recently I’ve been looking up camera gear, they use a sledgehammer and start throwing buckets of ads in my face for inappropriate stuff grossly out of my price range or not at all related to my specific interests, but it has the words “photography” or “camera” somewhere in it. The bartender here has a motor-mouth and low intelligence and is prone to manic obsessions. How about if you back off and just let me chat with friends?

So I’m backing off from Facebook instead. I’m going to stop interacting with Facebook at all for a while; I’m still going to do blogpost links there, but even that will go away eventually. And after a while, no hurry, I’ll just close my account altogether. I might skim through it once a day to see what everyone is up to — in particular, I get grandbaby updates for Knut there, although my other grandbaby has a mother who is very tech savvy and has mostly abandoned Facebook already. If you want to have a conversation with me, though, Facebook ain’t the medium for that.

I’ve been looking for alternatives, and Diaspora looks promising. I signed up for Pluspora this morning, and it’s already better. Not perfect, though. I said on signup I’d like to see various #science-related hashtags, and first thing in my face is a bunch of anti-vaxx bullshit…so my first experience with it involved learning how to filter out the garbage. I guess even if you’ve got a nice bar with an unobtrusive barkeep who isn’t poking his nose into your business all the time, you still have to deal with other customers.

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Here’s an enthusiastic summary of the advantages of Diaspora.

I must protest. The movie Ralph Breaks the Internet is totally wrong. That is not how the internet works, with little people zipping around inside the cable. Also, the product placement was excessive, with all kinds of internet companies represented with big signs in your face all the time. Wasn’t this one of the many problems with The Emoji Movie?

But still, it was a sweet movie with a nice message. I also liked how all these little kids in the audience got up and danced in front of the screen during the closing credits. They were terrible dancers, but they were enthusiastic.

OK, maybe some times. A little bit.

Now that you are rested and reinvigorated, comrades, take up your tools with new determination and strike off the chains of capitalism.

On this day, I like to remember the best Thanksgiving Day speech ever given.

Unless, maybe, you think explosions are appetizing.

See? This is why vegetarian Thanksgivings are better. We’re just planning on getting a whole lot of Romaine lettuce, which is curiously inexpensive right now.

(Not really — we’re having a guest over, so we’re fixing a small ham, along with the usual crop of safe vegetables.)

Most of us recognized this problem long ago (who else remembers the “tone wars” on ScienceBlogs?), but it’s good to have a good summary of the problem with emphasizing politeness.

When used as a political rallying point, appeals to civility are often a trap, particularly when forwarded in response to critical, dissenting speech. Sidestepping the content of a critique in order to police the tone of that critique—a strategy employed with particular vigor during the Kavanaugh hearings, and which frequently factors into hand-wringing over anti-racist activism—serves to falsey equate civility with politeness, and politeness with the democratic ideal. In short: you are being civil when you don’t ruffle my feathers, which is to say, when I don’t have to hear your grievance.

Besides their tendency to be adopted as bad faith, rhetorical sleights-of-hand, calls for civility have another, perhaps more insidious, consequence: deflecting blame. It’s everybody else’s behavior, they’re the ones who need to start acting right. They’re the ones who need to control themselves. In these instances, “We need to restore civility” becomes an exercise in finger pointing. You’re the one who isn’t being civil. Indeed, the above NPR survey explicitly asked respondents to identify who was to blame for the lack of civility in Washington, with four possible choices: President Trump, Republicans in Congress, Democrats in Congress, or the media. Whose fault is it: this is how the civility question tends to be framed.

Just remember, Nazis can be civil. It’s not how they say it that matters, but what they say.

Prepare for Thanksgiving week by listening to Public Radio! WHYY has an episode this week on families that includes me, which at least in the recorded bit was me arguing that human families are best looked at as social constructs, rather than predestined genetic assemblies. I’m not sure what parts the edited version retains, because I haven’t listened to it yet. I really can’t stand listening to myself. (Those YouTube videos I’ve been making are killing me, because I have to listen to me in order to edit them, which is one reason I’m late making another one. Editing my voice makes me cringe.)

Unfortunately, for Thanksgiving, two thirds of my children are too far away, and too busy with babies, to share a table with their feeble old parents. But on Wednesday I’m fetching my oldest boy and forcing him to comfort us in our dotage for a day. I’ll make a big ol’ Thanksgiving dinner, but he’s the kid who doesn’t eat. Skin and bones he is, I’ll have to nag him to put on a few ounces.

Monday mornings are already bad, but can you handle even more horrible news? Orangutans are being captured in Borneo and sold into prostitution.

In an interview published in Taringa the veterinarian Karmele Llano denounced the finding in Borneo of a 12-year-old female orangutan named Pony, which had been completely shaved, washed and perfumed, and which had even been painted on her lips. The animal was chained to a bed, to allow it to be abused by customers of the brothel in a town in central Borneo (Indonesia) called Keremgpangi. According to Karmele Llano, they are mainly workers from the logging companies and palm oil plantations in the area.

The veterinarian recalls in her interview the difficult rescue of the animal: “When we tried to free her there was a revolt,They threatened us with knives and machetes. We had to resort to the state police, which sent about 30 agents to take Pony. “

Orangutans are also used in boxing matches.

So…humans are destroying their habitat, raping them, and forcing them to fight each other for our amusement. Wretched humanity, that we should bring such shame on our species.

He finally crossed a line: Maher finally sneered at something white men like, and the outrage has started to bubble to the surface. How dare he criticize Stan Lee and comic books?

That he’s an anti-vaxxer, that his whole smug schtick is to salt his panels with a couple of assholes and fan the flames…nah, that doesn’t matter. He can keep on inviting Jack Kingston, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, and all the other people he loves because they’re famous, all fine. That he’s a not very funny talk show host who was never in the running for any of the big broadcast late night shows, even with their relatively low standards of humor, tells you he’s kind of a flop who ought, at best, to be running an unexceptional podcast with a declining audience, instead of getting his blah words highlighted on Raw Story as if they’re news every goddamn weekend.

I thought it was good that he fought back, briefly, against the bizarre popular notion that terrorists are cowards who hate freedom, but those glory days are done. Retire, Maher.

Good. Here’s another article exposing the facile shallowness of the “debate me” crowd.

A famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language — of all the endless combinations of words in all of history — “debate me” is the most badass.

Or that’s what a cohort of online dudes appear to believe. The way a drunk roughneck might square up to you for a fight in a seedy roadhouse, the “debate me” dude pops into your Twitter mentions to demand a formal argument. Ignoring that people debate shit on the internet as automatically as one might breathe or blink, he is oddly constrained by the notion that disagreement has rules, or at least a chivalrous code of honor befitting a pistol duel in the countryside. Simply tussling over this or that question is beneath him. Debate, meanwhile, is a gentleman’s contract, holy ground, a noble anachronism.

I also appreciate the categorization of two kinds of debates: the ones where it’s solely an appeal to emotion (ironically, most of the online objective reality gang’s outcomes rely entirely on emotion — see Ben Shapiro for on-point examples), and the ones that rely on formal technicalities.

Besides, it’s not as if the lad insistent on a volley of conflicting ideas is willing to be convinced by his rival. He wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t assured a victory, and so the provocation signals the egoist’s pride — as well as the almost charmingly naive certainty that competing ideologies can be vanquished by scoring enough points in a virtual joust. Of the two main models for American debate — political and extracurricular — he favors the airless academicism of the high school debate club, where he first learned some of his favorite fallacies: straw man, ad hominem, the appeal to authority. Whereas a presidential debate is decided on the intangibles, with voters swayed by gut reaction, the after-school debates play out in the technicalities, with naturally quarrelsome young men learning to fetishize what they consider their powers of logic and deduction. If they do well, they may conclude that others lack such faculties. Indeed, the “debate me” dude often behaves as if he’s the last “rational” person on Earth.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with debate: it turns discussion into a contest that requires some method of tallying up “points” to determine who “wins”, and the methods never rest on substance. Shouldn’t there be the equivalent of a TKO when someone lies or misinterprets a source, or doesn’t provide verifiable evidence, or just yells a conclusion? There are an awful lot of creationists and Republicans who’d be lying flat on the mat immediately after the opening bell, so no, those will never be criteria for success.