Justice Alito and the Wall Street Journal

While much of liberal ire with some of the decisions of the US Supreme.Court has focused on justice Clarence Thomas’s opinions, I have long felt that justice Samuel Alito is the most reactionary member of the court, the one most likely to offer tortured reasoning to justify what seems like pre-ordained conclusions based on his extremely conservative ideology.

Both Thomas and Alito have been the targets of investigative reports by ProPublica about the gifts and lavish vacations that they have been given, including travel on private jets, by wealthy individuals who, directly or indirectly, have had cases before the court. They did not disclose these trips and the private jet travel in their financial disclosure forms.

In the case of Alito, though, he went one step further than Thomas. As is customary with good journalistic outfits, prior to publishing their story, ProPublica informed Alito that they were preparing a story and sent him a list of questions to make sure they were being fair and accurate. What was unusual was that Alito used that to publish a ‘prebuttal’ in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal the day before the ProPublica piece even appeared.
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Jesse Watters to replace Tucker Carlson

Fox News has announced that Jesse Watters will be the permanent host occupying the time slot formerly held by the fired Tucker Carlson, the reasons for whose abrupt departure remain a mystery. Watters has been with Fox News for a long time. He has a juvenile sense of humor and no compunction about saying stupid, bigoted, and incendiary things.

The key question for Fox is whether he can get back the ratings that Carlson used to get and which have slumped since his departure. This will be a test of the model developed by the late Roger Ailes that their shows are based on a template and that the personalities who front them are just types who have specific roles and know they must follow the template because they can and will be replaced by another would-be clone if they fall short.

The template for the Carlson slot is the same as that of most other shows on Fox and that is to promote conspiratorial fear mongering with racist overtones. It is not clear if Watters can suppress and conceal his sophomoric frat-boy personality sufficiently, as Carlson was able to do, so that the dark vision will taken seriously by the typical Fox viewer.

Film review: Russian Ark (2002)

I recently watched this extraordinary film by Alexander Sokurov. It is set in the magnificent Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the entire film lasting 1 hour and 39 minutes was done in a single take, even though it has a massive cast of about 1,000 actors and 1,000 extras dressed in elaborate costumes and three orchestras, and moves though 33 rooms of the museum, making it not only the longest shot in film history, but also the first feature film ever created in a single take.

If that was not enough of a challenge, the museum would only close for 36 hours for the making of the film so everything had to be set up, filming done, and then removed within that time. Postponements were out of the question. Filming was begun on the afternoon of December 23, 2001. They had only a few hours of daylight in the Russian winter to complete the film. The first three takes had to be abandoned within the first 20 minutes or so due to glitches and that left them with just one final chance to do it. Furthermore, the camera batteries were also running low. But they managed to complete the last take just in time. There was just one cameraman Tilman Büttner to do the whole film and he had to lug around about 35 kg (over 70 lbs) of Steadicam equipment while walking through the vast museum and up and down stairs. He deserves a huge amount of credit for making it seem so smooth.

And yet the final product is a lush and opulent extravaganza that looks like it was filmed over months.
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The dangers of social media for young people

The US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has warned that excessive use of social media by young people carries serious health risks.

“Teens who use social media for more than three hours a day face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms, which is particularly concerning given that the average amount of time that kids use social media is 3 1/2 hours a day,” the Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

According to the advisory, 95% of teenagers ages 13-17 say they use a social media app, and more than a third say they use it “almost constantly.” The Social Media and Youth Mental Health advisory says social media can perpetuate “body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors, social comparison, and low self-esteem, especially among adolescent girls.”

Nearly 1 in 3 adolescents report using screens until midnight or later, the advisory says. And most are using social media during that time.

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How the internet went to hell and what to do about it

The internet is a mixed bag. While it has been an exceptional vehicle for increased communication and information access, it has also spawned a whole host of problems such as enabling the rapid spreading of misinformation and hate, and as big tech monopolies have used it grow their profits at the expense of the user experience.

Brooke Gladstone, the host of the radio program On The Media had an excellent conversation with Cory Doctorow, special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on what happened to the internet and what can be done about it. It took place over three weeks. You can listen to the podcasts and also read transcripts of each episode by clicking on the links but be warned that the transcripts are done by machine and these tend to be fraught with poor punctuation, homophone mistakes, are other errors that require listening to the podcast to correct.

In Part 1 (20 minutes) they discuss why every platform goes bad and why going online feels evermore more repellent—or as he calls it, the “enshittification” of online platforms.

He gives the example of Amazon’a business model.

So step one, buyers or end users are lured in with a good offer, but they’re also locked in with subtle things that keep them from leaving if the offer gets worse. And then things are made worse for the buyers to make things better for the sellers and bring in lots of sellers. But they too are locked in. And once you have buyers and sellers who are locked in and can’t leave, all of the good stuff is taken away from both of them. Life is made worse for them and life s made infinitely better for the shareholders who own the platform, in this case, Jeff Bezos and his pals.

One such offer is the so-called ‘free shipping’ of Amazon Prime which really means that you have prepaid for shipping. Once you have signed on, you tend to keep buying from that same source even as it gets worse because you do not want to waste that free shipping, which was never free. As long as it does not get too infuriating, you tend to remain.

Big companies have used such tactics for ages but the internet has made this practice much easier to implement, with just a few clicks of a mouse.
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The ‘town hall’ was not that great for convicted sex offender Donald Trump

The day after he was found guilty of sexual assault and defamation against E. Jean Carroll, convicted sex offender Donald Trump (CSODT) took part in a ‘town hall’ in New Hampshire that was broadcast live by CNN and hosted by one of their anchors Kaitlin Collins. I did not watch it but the general reviews were that it was a debacle for CNN because they gave CSODT a platform to spew forth a barrage of lies and insults to Carroll to an audience that cheered him on. As always, the media tends to take the attitude that anything, anything at all, works in favor of Republicans and that this shows that CSODT was not hurt by the verdict.

But is that true?

The biggest fault of CNN was in agreeing that the audience would be made up of Republicans. That makes a mockery of the concept of a town hall which is supposed to contain a fairly representative sample of the community. This was more like an indoor rally of partisans. New Hampshire governor John Sununu, himself a Republican, said that he was embarrassed by what he saw and what the crowd’s behavior conveyed about the people of his state.
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What to expect after Carlson’s departure

The circumstances that led to the firing of Tucker Carlson by Fox News are still murky. Neither he nor Fox have made any statement as to the precise reasons but speculation is that the abrupt nature of the firing in the absence of any obvious factors suggests that something serious had emerged to cause the rupture between them. We will have to see what that is. The one thing you can be sure of is that this was not a split caused by a clash of high-minded principles because neither party has any. It will be because of some grubby and tawdry issues. What I would like to see is a bare-knuckle brawl where they air each other’s dirty laundry.

As to what happens next, media analyst Jack Shafer says that nothing will really change after the departure of Carlson because what Fox does is not create shows around individuals but around certain types of people and it is easy replace a type. In fact, Fox has a deep bench of people who can step into Carlson’s shoes and pick up where he left off in targeting white nationalists and in incendiary rabble-rousing around culture war issues as well as race and gender.
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Fox News splits with Tucker Carlson

Fox News announced this morning that the network had severed ties with Tucker Carlson who attracted the biggest audience for the network during his nightly 8:00pm show. The network said that starting today, his time slot will be hosted by a rotating panel until a permanent host is found. A clue that the parting was not amicable can be seen in the fact that Fox said that his last show was the one he gave last Friday, which means that he will not be given the opportunity to say farewell to the many racist, bigoted, and white supremacist fans that tuned in to watch his daily message of hate. His ended his show on Friday saying “We’ll be back on Monday”. Famous last words.

I am as surprised by the development as anyone. While the lawsuit brought by Dominion had devastating internal messages by him that undoubtedly contributed to Fox settling for a massive $787.5 million instead of going to trial, he was by no means the only one fingered as systematically lying. Since the network was not required by the settlement to give an on-air apology, I thought that they would simply go back to lying as before, except leaving Dominion out of it and being more careful not to name entities that were powerful enough to sue it. In other words, just basically stick to their business model of pandering to racists and bigots by attacking marginalized groups.
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The aftermath of the Fox-Dominion settlement

As far as a I can tell of the settlement of the case, Fox News personalities who told all those lies about Dominion and the elections will not have to make on-air apologies.

It looks like Dominion wanted a large financial settlement more than they wanted on-air apologies from Fox, and Fox wanted to avoid giving on-air apologies and was willing to pay almost $800 million to avoid doing that. Dominion likely used the demand for apologies as leverage to get Fox to pay up. While this is a large amount, Murdoch media is used to seeing fines for wrongdoing as just the cost of doing business. While many of us would have liked to see all the Fox people squirm on the witness stand and show public contrition for their irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric, ultimately Dominion is a business, not a pro-democracy or media watchdog organization, and it made a business decision.

But there are other cases that in the works and it will be interesting to see what impact this result will have on those cases.
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The Roald Dahl books controversy revisited

There have been some interesting followups to the controversy over the decision of the Roald Dahl’s estate and publishers to revise his books to remove some language and ideas that are now seen as offensive.

One item that emerged was that Dahl in his own lifetime was willing to change his books in response to opposition and to accommodate the changing cultural ethos so that his books would continue to sell and be adapted to other media.

Amid the outcry over Dahl’s books being edited, many seem to have forgotten that the author previously edited his work himself to make it less offensive. He edited his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1973, just shy of a decade after its initial publication. Meanwhile, the edits took place just two years after the film adaption, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was released. In his initial book, the Oompa Loompas were depicted as African Pygmy people who were snuck out of Africa in crates by Willy Wonka and basically forced into servitude in his factory.
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