Facebook's little social manipulation experiment

Facebook's back in the news in a negative light. Turns out they've been doing mass experimentation on manipulating the moods of their users by selectively filtering on negative or positive posts from their friends when building the filtered feed.

And it turns out people aren't too happy about that.

Pitchforks for Plutocrats

Nick Hanauer, one of the early Amazon investors, has a very nicely written article in Politico - joining the increasing number of the very rich who are not insane and are recognizing that America is going down a dangerous path towards oligarchy and away from a healthy economy.

False quotes

A fascinating thing you can trace nowadays that was once impossible is the fake quote. The one that bubbled to the top of my consciousness this week is this one, allegedly from Hitler in 1935:

This year will go down in history. For the first time a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

It gets cited a lot - and yet Hitler never said it. In fact, it's nonsensical, because guns were entirely outlawed in Germany after WWI as part of the war settlement, then registration was phased in by the Weimar Republic in 1928. Instead of Hitler taking guns away from his domestic population to control them, as gun nuts claim, in 1938 he did away with gun registration for people who weren't suspect: i.e. Jews, Gypsies, etc. couldn't buy guns, but Germans? No restriction except for age - and he lowered the age. [background]

Essentially, Nazi Germany is a counterproof to claims that gun control was used by fascists to control the domestic population. But this quote is still very often used against gun control. (Here's an example. Here's another.) It might be instructive to watch phrases like this to track them in the discourse.

What's astounding is the nonchalance people evince when checked on it - after all, it doesn't matter if he actually said it (sometimes people say exactly this!) because it's just something he would have said.

20 right-wing truths "you can't talk about in America any more"

(and yet right-wingers never stop talking about them).  Here. It's actually a pretty interesting compendium of right-wing beliefs. Here's the whole list, because this will probably evaporate:

1) People who want to change sexes should be treated by a psychologist, not deformed through surgery, given hormone treatments, and falsely told that they can change sexes.

2) Most people who remain poor over the long haul in America stay that way because of their own poor life choices.

3) Most black Americans are good and decent people, but percentage wise there are more black Americans in jail because percentage wise, black Americans commit a lot more crimes than white Americans.

4) As often as not in America, the people claiming to be “victims” are the real bullies and they don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy.

5) The reason most politicians in D.C. are shameless liars with no character is because most Americans will knowingly choose a shameless liar with no character who says what they want to hear over an honest man with morals who tells them the hard truths they’d rather ignore.

6) Illegal aliens are foreigners who knowingly broke the law to come here and Americans owe them even less than we owe other foreigners living in China, Sweden, or El Salvador because at least those people didn’t break our laws.

7) Life begins at conception and having an abortion is no morally different than strangling your baby in the crib.

8) Most liberals aren’t patriotic and they don’t love their country.

9) Our soldiers should make every effort to avoid civilian casualties, but when it comes right down to it, the life of an American soldier should be treated as more important than the life of a foreign civilian.

10) We’d be better off as a society if the people who are ignorant, ill informed, or who really don’t care one way or another, didn’t vote.

11) The only practical way to make peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is for the Israelis to transfer the Palestinians and take their land.

12) This is a Christian nation that has been successful because it adopted Christian principles and the more we move away from that, the worse off we will be as a nation.

13) Men are just generally better at some things than women, just as women are just generally better at some things than men are.

14) “Racism” used to be a big deal in America, but these days the people who cry racism are usually phonies trying to gain a political advantage or deflect from ethical shortcomings or poor performance.

15) Long term, the only way our country can pay its bills is by asking everyone who’s not dirt poor to pay as much in taxes to the government as they’re given in services if they want to continue to receive those services.

16) Nine times out of ten, a mother and father will do a considerably better job of raising a child than a single mother, a single father, two gay parents or their grandparents.

17) The Boy Scouts could never survive gay scoutmasters because no parents with a brain in their head are sending their male, teenage boy out in the woods alone with a gay man who may very well be attracted to him, just as the parents of Girl Scouts wouldn’t want to send their teenage daughter out alone in the woods with a straight adult who might secretly be savoring the opportunity to have her alone.

18) People who are homeless over the long term are overwhelmingly mentally ill or have substance abuse problems and the only thing we can really do to help them is round them up, put them into halfway houses and force them to get treatment in spite of themselves.

19) If you have good character, you should feel ashamed of taking food stamps, taking welfare, or being on a school lunch program.

20) We would be much better off as a nation if most of the immigrants to this country were well educated people from nations in Europe that shared our Western values as opposed to our current policy which brings in mostly less educated people from Third World nations.

Makes me salivate to write a semantic search engine, get down to brass tacks understanding, at scale, what people actually say they believe.

Lewis model of cultures

Richard Lewis, When Cultures Collide, defines three basic poles or types of culture:

• Linear-active (Germany, Switzerland): plan, schedule, take sequences of organized action
• Multi-active (Italy, Latin America, Arabs): plan according to the thrill or importance of actions, organize time according to the people they will interact with
• Reactive (China, Japan, Finland): react to their interlocutor instead of imposing their views

Pretty fascinating. He also has an article about the different views of time between cultures. In general, the entire book would probably be worth reading.

Legal pot having an impact on Mexican cartels

Unsurprisingly, decriminalizing pot in Colorado alone has had a beneficial impact on organized crime in Mexico. That's good news you won't hear from the DEA (who is fighting this tooth and nail, as they'll all have to go get real jobs).

The facts behind Roswell

An absolutely fascinating article by Robert Muller about the acoustic detector array suspended from balloons (flying disk microphones) to detect Soviet atomic tests - successfully, as it turned out. One set fell down in Roswell in 1947 and was obviously promptly covered up as it was a secret Cold War program - and we're still living with that conspiracy theory today.

Also from Muller is a little post about cheap information technology and how it brought down Communist totalitarianism, in a clear analogy to 1984.

Worst and best Bible verses

Ship of Fools asked their (Christian) readers to vote on the worst Bible verses out there, with an interesting set of results. To which Alternet responded by asking prominent atheists what their favorite Bible verses are - again with interesting results.

25 Rules of Disinformation

Nice article here!

Feffer on participatory totalitarianism

Nice article from John Feffer here.