It coaxes companies to switch to its platform using highly inflated metrics and then those companies go bankrupt when the viewership and ad revenues are nowhere near what was promised, throwing people out of work.
Adam Conover, host of the excellent show Adam Ruins Everything, and who used to be on the funny online comedy show College Humor that was one of Facebook’s victims, explains what happened in this Twitter thread and calls for Facebook to be shut down.
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Seth Meyers takes a close look.
This exceptional journalist, who towered above most of his contemporaries, died on Christmas day. Jon Schwarz explains why his was such an important voice in the political media world.
Greider pulled this off because he didn’t care about the daily political garbage tornado. Instead, his focus was always on the huge subterranean battles that actually determine our lives, i.e., capital vs. labor, creditors vs. debtors, marketing vs. people, and capitalism vs. democracy.
The message running through his work is that, for decades, one side in these fights has been absolutely beating the shit out of the other. But Greider didn’t spend his life diagnosing America’s disease to make us despair. It was the opposite — he did it because he believed we can develop the cure, if we put in the work. He thought that normal humans were capable of understanding the world, and governing ourselves.
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In watching an earlier Democratic debate, I mentioned how surprised I was to see an ad featuring Ron Reagan, former president Reagan’s son, on behalf of the Freedom From Religion Foundation that argued for the separation of church and state. He began by describing himself as an “unabashed atheist” and ended with him declaring himself to be a ” lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.”
In general, I tend to be optimistic about the human condition but on occasion, I come across stories that shake that sense of positivity. The radio program The World had a segment on December 12th about the trauma suffered by content moderators tasked by Facebook with viewing videos on the site to see if they should be removed. Having to watch video after video of the most appalling things in rapid succession resulted in many of them suffering psychologically and Facebook did not seem to have in place sufficient resources to help them deal with it. Some of the moderators, who are contractors and not Facebook employees, are now suing Facebook. One of them Chris Gray, who worked in its Dublin office, was interviewed on the program.
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Recent events in the UK have resulted in a new word being added to the political lexicon and that is ‘Corbynizing’. This is the label given to the concerted effort orchestrated by the right wing Israel lobby in the UK, the Conservative party, much of the establishment media, and Blairite neoliberal members of the Labour party to discredit and undermine Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn by suggesting that he is an anti-Semite and/or a coddler of anti-Semites, in an effort to remove him from the party leadership and also to distract attention from the progressive platform that the party put forward.
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I wrote recently about how disconcerting it was when watching a film when the audio and video are not synchronized, so that the spoken words do not match up with the mouth movements of the speaker.
I recently watched a film where this problem was even more pronounced. It was an Italian film but they had dubbed it into English. Dubbing is usually bad and rarely done these days. When I was young in Sri Lanka, I recall seeing a number of so-called ‘spaghetti western’ films that were made in Italy that had one American star (like Clint Eastwood in the Man With No Name trilogy) or with Steve Reeves as various mythical heroes like Hercules, with the rest of the cast being Italian. So the star would speak in English but all the others in Italian with their voices dubbed in English. They were pretty bad.
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Mother Jones is the name by which Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), a legendary union activist and organizer, was known. The nickname was given to her by the workers because of the caring way she dealt with them especially during strikes.
Known as the miner’s angel, Mother Jones became an active campaigner for the United Mine Workers Union. A political progressive, she was a founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1898. Jones also helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. For all of her social reform and labor activities, she was considered by the authorities to be one of the most dangerous women in America.
Nothing could dissuade Mother Jones from her work. At the age of 82, she was arrested for her part in a West Virginia strike that turned violent and was sentenced to 20 years. But her supporters rallied and convinced the governor to grant her a pardon. Jones, undeterred, returned to organizing workers.
The right wing in the US have been on a campaign against first-term Minnesota Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, implying strongly that she is some sort of radical Muslim terrorist sympathizing anti-Semite while stopping short of actually saying so. In a profile of her in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Progressive magazine, John Nichols writes that the attacks based on this distorted one-dimensional portrait of her obscures the fact that Omar has a very wide range of issues that she is interested in.
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In 2000, there were 28.2 million cases of measles and 535,600 deaths. Thanks to massive efforts and vaccines, those numbers started coming down dramatically but more recently measles cases have risen again around the world. It is reported that in the last year alone, it went from 7.6 million cases of measles and 124,000 deaths in 2017 to 9.8 million cases of measles and 142,000 deaths in 2018, most of them children under the age of five.
It should be noted that it was in 1998 that discredited British physician Andrew Wakefield (who was later stripped of his medical credentials) published his now notorious and later withdrawn paper claiming a vaccine-autism link, that the British Medical Journal editorialized as an “elaborate fraud” and credited an investigative journalist Brian Deer with exposing it.
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