Wired State

ChatGPT Stole My Jobs -- Just Like That. And They'll Steal Yours, Too

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

So, like everyone, I first fooled around with DALL-E and Midjourney (on the sample version) and didn't do very well myself, and saw that what it really was all about was: a) the prompts -- what flowery and detailed directions you give them and b) your ability to edit it afterwards. Both a) and b) are functions of actual artists; that would not be me. So I tabled it as an issue, although I was more than willing to hear my artist friends complain about it. I didn't especially like the AI art that some of them began doing, which I felt was kind of in the "fractal art" category.

Full of Fakes and Errors

When I first tested ChatGPT, it couldn't generate either my RL or SL biographies because I'm not famous or important enough. When I got it to generate a review of a musician friend, it attributed to her a song she had in fact never written. Where did it get the idea?! It sort of sounded like something she could have written -- and here's where the mobius strip of reflexivity enters in -- now she's going to actually write a song with that title, and even sampled a bit of it at one of her shows. 

I got it to write the history of the Battle of Ilovaisk -- it was credible, accurate, but rather dull and didn't really center the most important point: that Putin offered a "green corridor" for Ukrainians in a kettle but then, of course, was lying from the start, and they were picked off like sitting ducks the minute they lay down their arms and attempted to use the corridor. 

I had it write a review of Second Life -- it was adequate, not going to win any essay prizes.

I tried it again a few times on my own biographies -- finally it ginned them up, likely because there is actually a "mechanical Turk" behind the machine, real people goosing it when it sees Chat stuck. It then rendered a biography of me that simply made up some of the works I had translated, claiming I had translated authors I in fact had never even read much, let alone translated, in one case, and in another, had actually translated, but Chat had no way of knowing that because the information was not public.

My sense of Chatty is that it is scraping not from the wide world of Google, but only from Twitter. Or only from set of stock data bases somebody made up that aren't updated or corrected in real time. Nothing much is ever said about its sources (I have seen articles saying it doesn't access all of Google), but clearly it doesn't have the wide world to scrape that Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have. How long before Google itself puts in the equivalent of robots.txt to stop other companies from poaching on its turf?

Yeah, I get it about the "training" -- which also, to me, gives the lie to any notion of "artificial" intelligence. It's scientists and engineers, using tech themselves to get power over people, then claiming that tech is neutral. It isn't.

So here is how I lost two gigs to the damn thing.

Web Site Copy

The first few gigs with this company involved writing happy copy for the client's web site, and also in one staggering session, writing a humongous marketing document that also had tasks and equipment specs in it. It was in a field with which I was not THAT familiar, so that I had to look up a lot of stuff or ask what it meant. Hours were spent with the client while he tried to explain his ideas. He wasn't a very good writer; he, like a lot of millennials, he never learned to write in school or anywhere else, and mainly texted or chatted on his cell phone.

He had trouble organizing his thoughts and getting them down in a coherent way. He would sometimes be able to get a good outline started, but couldn't seem to work it or it would take forever. So the way he found that what worked best with me was to get me on the phone, talk about the thing, and then I would jot it down in real time on a screen in front of him in Google docs, and then we would both edit it. I would then work it some more on my own, and turn it into him for tweaking. Needless to say, this was time-consuming. At first I charged my regular rates; I ended up not doing this because of the time involved.

I churned out a number of these pieces over some time; some of them brought in more business as clients were very happy; some of them didn't seem to do anything; but since none of them had any negative impact, we kept going.

The client then mentioned to me one day recently that he had heard of ChatGPT, he tried it out with a task he had involving writing descriptions of both a company and various activities -- and was very pleased with the result -- and used it. Oops, there went one of the jobs I would do for him -- just like that.

I cautioned him that the problem with ChatGPT is that it can spout nonsense; it can make up stuff. It puts falsehoods into biographies, reviews, scientific papers as I had witnessed myself or seen others describe. Especially if you had paying clients, they would expect your copy about them to be factually correct and not bring them lawsuits. You had to be really, really careful! Maybe not use it?

How About a Lesser, Low-Paying Job?

Whereupon my client asked me if I now wanted the lesser job -- a much lower-paying job -- of vetting ChatGPT's rendering of a web site. I started looking at it -- and then said "No." It was a painstaking and boring job -- worse than fact-checking a news article others have written, which I have done numerous times, or copy-editing someone's news article, which I have also done endlessly.

That's because you know you are dealing with someone who doesn't care about the facts, feels no sense of liability, and will just say what they need to say. You have to become super vigilant, and also do a lot of your own research, if you knew nothing about the client or subject. It's almost like you'd have to research and write an article or write web site copy yourself, in order to vet ChatGPT's work. No thank you.

I suggested the client could ship this chore to Nigeria -- where he once had had a very competent copy writer for web sites, or Greece, where he has a good marketing guru generating ideas. Argentina, Venezuela, and Vietnam are the countries he sends photo and film editing -- people are desperate for work, and you can find very talented people willing to turn over jobs quickly for less. This is the global economy, and there's nothing you can do about it, really.

What I think may have happened is that no job got shipped. That's because nobody really sits and reads reams of web site copy. Like a lot of things in life, it's there to provide the "look" of something professional; it's filler; it's there to serve SEO in Google searches mainly, and get people to the page to see the offer as such -- everything arrayed around it is really fluff. That's why ChatGPT is perfect for this job. If some error crops up -- eh, you'll correct it.

My client could let it go, and not worry if something fake was in it, because basically, the job of providing fluff was accomplished, with superb SEO to boot.

YouTube Translation

The second gig was translation of a video for a YouTube training session. Translating videos is something that I have made into a certain specialty because I have had to do a lot of it. It can take twice as long to translate a video as it does to watch it, because you often have to go back and replay something. I don't mind the chore.  You often had to make the translation fit as sub-titles on the relevant screen -- something that is always hard to do with Russian, because it is about 75% shorter than the English translation needed to render it. The Russian language has no definite articles and other parts of speech as we know them, and instead are simply attached to a verb or participle or inflection in the voice.

I got into practice doing that shoe-horning of translation copy working with a caption-maker program for TV where we had to take Russian TV and squeeze it into American TV, dropping stuff along the way. Occasionally a grandma in New Jersey might call and complain about it, but it was, as our boss often said when we pressed "send" on the broadcast, it was "good enough for government work" (in this case, city public TV).

But this client's gig, oddly enough, was a task to go from English to Russian, which isn't the norm for me; usually the source language is your non-native language, and the target language is your native language. I can do it adequately, but don't like doing it and it takes longer. The reason for this was that it was a real estate video with the agent providing training to others and describing the meaning of English terms for the real estate business, some of which simply don't have a ready equivalent in Russian. That's because of the years of Soviet state control of land -- although today you find some English terms are now incorporated into the Russian language "as is". So this had the added annoyance of having to decide whether you used the Brighton Beach Angrussky for this purpose, or the actual formal term, i.e. in Russian, "real estate" is literally "non-moveable thing".

Done and Done -- And You're Fired

So I was starting to fuss with this silly thing, when all of a sudden the client came back and said it was finished. He had fed the English into ChatGPT, and it instantly created a very credible Russian text. This text I was willing to take the time to vet at least for a few rounds -- all the terms were correct. I didn't volunteer to check the rest of it because, as Loren Feldman's tag line in his podcast explains, "It doesn't matter."

No one will care. Russian emigres attempting to get real estate licenses need to learn the terms in English, and if they have only a vague idea of the Russian equivalent, well, "good enough."

ChatGPT is just the ticket for the generation that grew up reading "nothing bigger than their hand."

But imagine! I was screwed out of two jobs by ChatGPT, just like that. I didn't even know it could translate. Did you? When did it learn to translate??? It was better than Google Translate -- I checked. 

In this case, the loss was palpable, but not devastating -- this client is the kind of person who, if I am starving, will buy me some groceries or loan me $100 on PayPal, unlike most other cruel employers. 

Why???

This situation came about because children who were never taught to write didn't like writing, and made a thing to do their writing for them. They also were never taught foreign languages, and added that, too.

Why? No one valued it -- or gave up, in the face of the first TV-saturated and then Internet-saturated generation, and here we all are. I can see this not only in general; I watched it up close and personal with my own children, despite my best efforts, and their friends, and I have to say that the difference in ability really has to do with how long a child was able to stay in Catholic school, with its old-fashioned methods, and how good their public school was -- and that decides everything. 

There is absolutely nothing that can be done about this because it's too late; you can't isolate children from the culture they are saturated in, or remove the mobile phones from their hands.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph

Fifty-six years ago, I sat in Sister Sylvester's fifth grade class with my marbleized collegiate notebook, pen in hand, poised for yet another composition lesson.

As this was Catholic school, we always had to start by writing "JMJ" on the top of the page. This stood for "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph". Apparently the Holy Family, versus the Holy Trinity -- preserved for higher functions -- was good enough to get grade-schoolers to focus on the task at hand. They were to provide the inspiration for the job and make sure it got done. Even Catholic schools today have dispensed with this quaint practice, but it never hurts to think of some inspirational or higher power, no? 

Next, came the title of the essay -- this would set the scope and tone and really complete the job for you, if you got it right (which is why editors always change journalists' article titles because they never do the job right). 

So you might put: "The Foundation of Bolivia's Economy: Manila Hemp". Or you might write "Manila Hemp: Powerhouse of the Bolivian Economy" or whatever you managed to devise, as a 10-year-old, with a nun's pointer at the ready to rap your knuckles.

Next, came a big capital Roman number I. This was your main thesis -- this was the "say what you're going to say" out of that magic trio "say what you're going to say, say it, and say what you've said".

So here you might say: "I. Manila Hemp:  40% of Bolivia's Domestic Revenue".

Then there would be A, B, C, where you would explain that Bolivia had the perfect climate conditions for manila hemp and through innovative irrigation practices and ample population for menial labour had caused the crop to flourish (let's say -- I'm making all this up and if it was ever faintly true 50 years ago, today, in fact it's not true, just as a fellow classmate once made up an entire fake essay on Ceylon's main export -- manganese -- and got a "D" on the paper. His outlining technique was excellent, however).

You might describe how the hard-working people of Bolivia adapted to adverse climate conditions (we didn't know about "climate change" in those days) and persisted.

In II, you might describe the actual facts of the crop's component in the economy, citing sources, elaborating, etc. What are the uses of manila hemp? Well, rope-making is one of them. 

In III, you would summarize what you've said and analyze it in some way -- Bolivia was now poised to move into foreign exports; the crop, while not expanding rapidly, appeared to be a stable source of income; migration to big cities by young people might create labour problems. OK, this wouldn't be the scope of Fifth Grade, but you get the idea. And frankly, I believe we took on more in Fifth Grade  back then, than what children tackle today.

I will never forget walking into my son's Fifth Grade public school classroom and seeing a sign that showed all the ways you could spell "dolphin". They were all equal. They were all good. We shouldn't judge any of them. Children generated them out of their little brains; they got "A" for effort. With that brand confusion around the word with an "ph" -- in the absence of any phonics teaching whatsoever -- I wonder if the kids ever did learn to spell dolphin. Probably not.

Like diagraming sentences -- another Catholic school forte still taught today -- these lost arts weren't really valued or needed, so they atrophied.

Google Translate Didn't Take My Jobs - Why ChatGPT?

Google Translate did not put me out of a job as such, because I translate lots of different kinds of things -- books, catalogues, articles, memoirs, historic letters, legal documents, and generally I'm always going to be better -- and clients and publishers and editors know that.

But at one time, bread-and-butter translation work would involve simply writing letters for people or translating the letters they received back, in business and in personal matters like bride-buying abroad (after doing a few of those gigs, I quit because they were so horrible and exploitative -- often by both parties). Today, that sort of thing is accomplished more or less with Google Translate or Yandex (which is a lot better). I myself will pop a text in Google I need to write, translate it roughly, then take it to Yandex to type in what I know to be accurate. I will never help Google because I don't believe in doing unpaid work for tech behemoths.

A most despicable practice of Google is to go to a place like Kyrgyzstan, and recruit a lot of eager young people looking for high-paying tech jobs who have learned English, and get them to help fix up Google translation of their language into English for no pay. The tech world often treats translation as a subbotnik and won't accept that it should be paid like their programming is paid.

But ChatGPT instantly took me out of a job by having a better interface; by being willing to take longer texts in its box; by having different AI functions at work, I guess. I don't know the mechanics, but clearly it's a genius. Sure, we should see how it does with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but few people are going to pay you to retranslate them; the bulk of the jobs today are in news, technical, and legal translation. I get the feeling ChatGPT isn't so much fetching and carrying as "translate" literally means, but is manifesting the inherent English in a Russian text -- if that makes sense. Different.

Goat Herds

I have a vivid image before me of Elon Musk's demo of a robot recently, that was put to work on a Tesla assembly line. It lumbered out to the shop floor and went to work picking parts out of crates, then setting them up and assembling them on a conveyor belt.

But nearby was a man with a big hook like a goat herd. The robot would sometimes wander out of its designated path or get stuck or even start to fall over -- it's top heavy. So the robot herd would prod it back into place with the big stick.

And that's the kind of job that will be available to us with ChatGPT, which is yet another kind of robot, a robot in the hands of humans who want to take power over other humans and cloak it with the terms "fun" and "science" and "enterprise". You'll get to poke and prod the machines, being careful not to get stepped on yourself.

One of the jobs I saw go by on Upwork (which is an atrocious, low-paid slave labour place) or some other job ads service involved literally going over AI-translated texts and fixing them up. And not even with the full, coherent text in front of you; you would work with a huge stream of CAPCHA like nonsense texts.

Foxes in the Hen House

There is a tsunami of articles generated by tech journos who are totally craven to the industries -- they amount to payola. They assure you that ChatGPT (probably) isn't going to take your job. That's not how to cover this subject. It's like having foxes assess how secure the hen house is, and how well the hens are going to do in their presence.

Rather, send out queries about people who already lost their jobs, full-time or contract gigs. Fact-check the self-reporting with their employers. Ask people how they used GPT and see if it took away a job. Of course it did, and there will be more.

Right now the free version is over capacity and cannot be used. So I tried one of its competitors, Character.ai which has a persona to ask your questions from. The results are terrible and don't reflect the nature of the historical characters at all.

I can't see any mitigating factors here. That the free ChatGPT is "down" and can't be used is meaningless, as people will pay for it. That these Characters are silly and stupid is meaningless as people might even pay for that entertainment, too, and it will get better. 

Meanwhile, I assure you I will go on writing my blog posts myself, without robots, and you will go on not reading them.

On Unions and Rail Strikes and WFH

Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

So many people have converted the rail strike into something they think serves their cramped, socialist agenda that it's hard to say anything on this topic without be flash-mobbed but I'll try anyway.

This discussion started on Twitter ONLY because an anonymous and unaccountable agitator -- a dishonest fuckwit using terrible methods or a Kremlin troll, and you can't know the difference -- WORD-SEARCHED and found a comment about rail workers and strikes and pasted SCAB and CLOWN and every other derogatory term he could into the Twit box. It's a technique, and when you see these mobs forming you could just block them all -- or you could be like Mastodon and block the very ability to search on words at all (!) in order to prevent people from being mean using this method. I'm a grown-up, I can handle Internet fuckwits word-searching and flash-mobbing me. I either ignore and block them or I go a few rounds if the topic is worth discussing with friends and followers.

I then risk things like Vick Forcella telling me haughtily that some European countries have workers' rights and unions written into their Constitution, and then I have to laborously tell him that we have workers' rights in our New York State Constitution, etc. -- but unions have declined for all kinds of reasons (Google them) and life is different now. (A reason that DSA and other socialists don't focus so much on workers' rights any more, and have substituted them with identity politics, is because there are fewer and fewer unions, far less venues for them to agitate workers and PS they don't really care about them as you can see by this images from the comrades to the left of AOC:

 

Normally people like @altshlar aren't worth bothering with and often I find that if they followed me, on "Who Unfollowed Me" they are among the "deleted or banned" accounts because they are merely provocateurs. This is an anonymous provocateur who is busy harassing people he views as "scabs" or anti-union, who word-searched or saw an answer I made to his or the OP's post, and can tweet falsely about my views, claiming falsely that I "oppose the concept of unionization" which of course is sheer nonsense. I support unions, unionizing, and workers' rights. But this is Twitter; Elon's Twitter; and it's like it always was, only worse, I suppose.

Pro-Union

I'm totally fine with unions and blue-collar workers in the private sector need to join them and collectively bargain. White-collar workers in the private sector and municipal workers could arguably benefit from joining unions, too, but we do get to ask of society as a whole benefits. I do have some concerns about the amount of democracy in some unions; whether they are effective (especially teachers' unions); whether they are coercive; and whether they can solve by strikes what cannot be solved by policy or law. And I'm not alone in this. I would bet that most members of the Democratic Party today have this attitude, and even Working Families would have people with this attitude even if supportive of the unions they are in as nurses or truck drivers.

In either the NYT white-collar strike or the Amtrak blue-collar strike, I'm NOT hearing angry -- and COVID-sick -- essential workers striking because no one gives them time off when they are sick with COVID. That's because that's not what they are doing, and that is not their message. If that WERE their message, this might all be easier to understand -- and the Twitter-sized claims about workers being denied sick days -- period -- or denied the right to strike -- period -- would like you to think this is the correct understanding and frame of the facts and the news -- and it is not.

And yet, they are both striking because we've been in a pandemic for two years, and they're tired like all of us.

Still, it's not actually about COVID and they are asking about something different; they are trying to grab more; they are doing what everyone does and grab more when the time presents itself to grab most effectively. Who can blame them?

I'm with Neal Cassidy on this one -- "It's all a big grab from Moscow to Washington." Usually, we're to suppose this "grab" concerns Big Corporation or Big Government but it can also concern any organized force like a union, or Hollywood stars, or swarms on Twitter. The rail workers already have a benefits package superior to many workers so let's get a grip here.

So...I'm just not as jazzed about the particular issues these workers have chosen to strike about AND re: the NYT unions, I am lacking in enthusiasm in general about white-collar unionized workers with little interest in civil rights/human rights in general, much less any culture of tolerance, now trying to get us to support their list of demands -- which includes some typical worker demands and some demands for social change which can't be accomplished by unions, workers, or strikes. (The liberal NYT author Peter Baker has essentially said the same thing, that he thinks the union has packed too many social issues into a "rights" demand, which is why he is a scab breaking the strike.) I'm not particularly jazzed about rail workers obtaining MORE paid sick leave than THEY ALREADY HAVE by ruining everyone's Christmas and harming the economy. I don't have to be a rich bourgeois corporate exploiter for that; I'm a single mom in HUD housing. 

That's why I ask, cogently, in my view, the following:

My question to those of you who might be on the picket line striking at The New York Times. Have you ever, or did you now, become involved, in the Slack channel or in any other venue, in any effort to get any of your fellow workers at any level fired over their speech or writing on the nytimes.com servers or any other venue, yes or no.

I'd like a full account of this with a spreadsheet, please.

I have no doubt that some of these people were busy getting Bari Weiss or James Bennet or others more or less important than they fired in the known controversies of the NYT and unknown, and the nature of those writers isn't the issue.

Most of the people likety-liking this nutter's rants on @altshlar -- he'll have some other alt if this one is banned -- are as bad as he is, but since others watch these things and form opinions based on ranters, I sometimes bother with explanations of my views such as in this post.

We live in a world where 151 -- and counting -- people can "like" a tweet claiming to "dox" me as a "human rights researcher" and "name and shame me" as speaking "contradictory to my public role on an alt" without checking a single fact anywhere -- and even claiming I don't link my accounts, although you have only to click on the book title to see my real name, which is not hidden. I keep separate accounts not because I'm "afraid" of something being heard in one world or another, but so that I can read discussions and topics separately, and that's my right. If I were someone who wanted to hide behind anonymous personas to comment and follow topics -- I am not -- that would be my right, too.

Alex D. Rocca and the Potted Plants

I have no idea who Alex D. Rocca is; he seems to be some kind of "talent manager" -- which are legion in the US -- online harassment reduced him into making his Insta private and his Twitter comments only for a circle and now I can't even see his account at all because he likely just blocked anyone answering his original tweet. Isn't he somebody who works at home in a living room with WFH privileges amid the potted plants, too? I have no idea but his snipe at the type of person who does -- the New York Times worker -- is one that has a lot of resonance.

This fellow who is very likely self-employed and living from gig to gig and looking at a slew of 1099s in his mailbox in January, has no use for the NYT, unions, workers' rights,  train trips or anything remotely related because he lives and works on the Internet -- and BTW, so do you, so do shut up.

Whatever your beliefs or mine, I simply don't think any debate is served by using Leninist methods on Twitter of "freezing the target," "doxxing," heckling, harassing, deliberately missing the wider context, and in short behaving like the Kremlin troll you likely are, or the tankie you likely are if not a Kremlin troll -- say, you love worker's rights? I do, too. How's your position on the invasion of Ukraine? 

Union Family and Union Bug

I come from a union family, with family members in unions, and was taught never to cross a picket line, and so when I see one of those big old inflated rats by a store like The Gap or whatever in NYC, I don't shop at that store, even though I think the "rat" trope isn't useful in making the case. These unions range from teacher's unions to hospital unions to even the Teamsters, imagine that. Unions are not an unalloyed good, given the methods of coercion and violence they have sometimes used, and the ineffectiveness they have for solving complex social problems.

Likely that is among the reasons that there are far, far less unions now than when I was a child or even a young adult. I'd invite you to contemplate how your Internet caused that problem. 

Throughout my life, I always supported union printers and made sure the "union bug" was on every printed matter for which I was responsible in any NGO job.  I think few people even know what a "union bug" is nowadays, even if they have grasped the concept of "union label" which I do, still, try to buy on those rare occasions when I buy clothing.

But yeah, now a lot of this is gone and doesn't matter because of the Internet, which was designed by people who had no interest in workers' rights or unions or anything but their own technocommunist or technolibertarian agenda.

Whenever I got to DC and see "We are the 99 percent" shouted from banners on the SEIU building, remembering the circus of Occupy, which I covered, I can only say, no, you aren't, you fraudulent hucksters.

Not a  Union Member Because Too Low Paid and Unimportant

I've never been a member of a union because non-governmental organizations simply don't have unions, for the most part. They are low-paid jobs; if you don't like the conditions -- and many don't -- you don't work in those jobs -- and many don't. Even adjusting for inflation or changing cultural norms, my children and young relatives earn more than I've ever earned in my lifetime at any job because they aren't in non-profit groups but in corporations or government or self-employment. I've been involved at times by attempts by NGO workers to try to unionize; to try to get themselves accepted by sometimes seemingly exotic but technically related like the Seafarers' Union.

I have been in big non-profits where famous civil libertarians said if the workers unionized they would stand by the door and clock them in with a time stamper -- and thereby ending their enjoyment of 10:00 am arrivals and casual long lunches that sometimes were accompanied by working late hours but in general weren't always favourable to the employer. I've been in small non-profits that tried to unionize as a way to get rid of a horrible boss when hilarious methods failed, like sending his resume to other employers with fake letters about how he was "seeking other opportunities" to get him an invitation the hell out of there. 

New York Times Latte Drinkers

If the people who don't care a good goddamn about life below W. 43rd Street, who are indeed among the fica ferns and posed at the aerobic and ergonomic stand-up blonde wood desks, have a union, in which they seek even more affluence than they already have, compared to most city workers or people I know among friends, families, and colleagues -- I shrug. I'm not overly sympathetic to their "union struggle" because, while I'm happy to concede they deserve rights like any workers in New York State -- and they have them! -- I find it hard to believe that the people who constantly sabotage journalists on Slack and force them into unemployment and Substack subsistence -- and that's what a lot of the millenials and Gen Xer programmers, copy-editors, photographers and other media workers really do at the Times -- have worksite issues that I really need to cry about.

That's why I say this:

Except, that's what NYT employees *are*. They're not in the same union as the *drivers and deliverers* of the papers (like my relatives & friends) who have to lift heavy bundles and move them around. This - and municipal employees - are why unions have come to be hated. Deal.

— mastodon.social/@prokofy 🌻 (@Prokofy) December 8, 2022

And I stand by it and you can convince me differently possibly, but honestly, it's never going to move me. I see it's been converted into a race issue, as most things are these days, and maybe there's something to that, but some of these people are the same people who hound others out of their jobs over speech, so I can't get overly excited about their problems now. I think likely, the ability to shed identity politics and go back to classic workers' rights struggles is now atrophied forever in America and it will have to be fought out this way, I don't know. It can be fought without me.

But I feel this is class warfare. Unions did not get rid of class warfare in our supposedly classless society. I'm happy to fight it, virtually, without Marxism, even by my caustic remarks. I have zero respect for people who report on the dithering of yuppies over which million dollar co-op to buy, and occasionally on dying Ukrainians, or put up "neediest cases" every year -- but can't report on life as a subway worker, newsstand seller, hospital worker (except as a target of clapping people on the Upper West Side), etc. most days of the week -- much less the army of part-timers and 1099ers and gig workers who make it possible for their affluent life to be viable -- until it isn't because of a pandemic.

The New York Times isn't my local newspaper; nor is the NY Post. I don't have a local newspaper. I used to have Twitter. Now I don't.  

Do these people deserve one 30-minute break and two 15-minute break under New York State labour law (or whatever the standards are these days). Sure. Are they workers like most workers in NYC in unions? No. Are they workers like me? No. 

But...I know who got to wear the scarce masks during the early days of the pandemic -- and who didn't.  Don't talk to me about unions and workers rights when you never cared about them for years -- decades -- and substituted your Marxist categories with identity politics -- and only care about them now as a way to bully the Democrats -- who barely got a majority in the Senate -- to the left. Hey, not only Uncle Joe but AOC is a scab now! Whee! Great opportunity to flog your socialist worldview that no one subscribes to because you're an asshole.

Unions Have Changed and There's Less of Them

Why do you Bernie Bros and Gamergaters and incels and anonymous trolls willing to go vote for Trump and golf-clap school-shooters on 8chan want socialism? Let me suggest it's only because of the glee you get from culture jamming, not any actual concern for people.

White-collar or "intellectual" workers often don't have unions, except when they do, in some wealthy corporations where they are highly paid, unlike me, in the lowly jobs I've had through my entire life, whether babysitter, berry picker, casual clerk carrier (the "casual" is the workaround for hiring us outside of a union at USPS), clerk, typist, waitress, researcher, translator, news editor, etc. These are all low-paid jobs; they might pay more or less and even put me into the lower middle class at times but they can't build equity. Usually, as a 1099 employee, I get no benefits and no nothing because that's the nature of gig work. That's a separate discussion, really, so let's focus on "unions".

"Unions" and their dispute are not what they were when I was a child or even a young adult. They are no longer mainly for only people who perform manual or low-paid work for corporations, large and small, in the private sector. More and more, unions -- especially when they are in the news with disputes -- are for municipal workers of blue, pink, and white collar nature and white collar workers, as well as for well-paid manual laborers with real political and PR clout.

Is an expensive union, where you have to pay a huge price-tag for membership (like SAG); is a union like SEIU where you can't vote on every issue, and really have no democracy at all, as you might have had once in the old-time unions, a good thing? Is a union that picks its presidential candidate without your input really a viable, democratic form of protection of workers? Of course not. And that's how the right-to-work movement -- which is really a right-wing, conservative Republicab sleight-of-hand for corporativist types - could get legs. And you are responsible. Yes, you, with your sectarian socialist clap-trap.

We Take the Bus

Quite some years ago, I, like other people with low pay began taking the bus, because it's cheaper, and actually crashes less and gets you to your destinations often faster. Where once, I would routinely take the 3-hour Amtrak to Washington for my various jobs, as it was affordable for non-profit workers or the expense account of a non-profit could at least afford it; in the last decade or more -- really, since the Recession --  it got too expensive. It began to get as expensive as a shuttle flight -- until those got more expensive, too. I, like many others began taking the bus to Washington as it is 5 hours, but cheaper, and more reliable.  The end, that's all she wrote. We take the bus, which hey, doesn't have striking workers, but you take the train and you are therefore pro- or con- on this issue.

Do Rail Workers Get Sick Leave?

So let's come to the rail workers. Amtrak is universally poor in its performance; it has a lot of crashes; it has added to its many discomforts over the years; paying more for "business class" is no guarantee of anything.

Should rail workers, who are unionized, and paid more than non-union and other low-paid workers, have paid sick days? Of course they should. Do they not have paid sick days now? Of course they do. That's not the issue at all. No, my understanding is that they wanted MORE KINDS of paid sick days than they had, with COVID rampant still, and didn't get them.

Should they get paid medical leave merely to go to a doctor's appointment? I've never had that in any job I've ever had, even in the wealthiest non-profit or foundation. You fit a doctor's appointment in, or you go after work or on a weekend. That's what most people do. That's why we can't really get overly irate over striking rail workers if only "appointments" is their issue because it's not realistic.

So no, guys, I don't think, that for the sake of MORE paid sick days, and the right to have paid time for medical appointments, you should get to hold up traffic on Christmas during the holidays and harm millions of workers and their families, not to mention halt the nation's industry, which might be in the hands of capitalists you hate, but which also provide enough benefits for the public at large that they don't opt for socialism in elections, as they might in the UK or Russia.

So wait, all these ranters on Twitter, could I be wrong?

Did the rail workers have no paid sick days at all? 

Let's see.

And all employees have a long-term sickness benefit that can pay a portion of the worker's income for up to 26 weeks, the rail association said. But time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act is unpaid, according to the Department of Labor.

So they can HAVE family and medical leave -- which would cause most people -- including me in most of my jobs -- TO LOSE THEIR JOBS IF THEY TOOK THEM. It's just that they can't be PAID.

Further -- you know, read different newspapers with different perspectives and try to uncover the facts:

Why do railroad workers not get sick days?

The railroads refused to add sick time during these negotiations because they said the unions had agreed over the decades to forgo paid sick leave in favor of higher wages and strong short-term disability benefits that start to kick in after four or seven days and replace part of a worker's wages for up to a year.

So workers have paid sick leave, something that the legions of non-Americans ranting and raving about this and thinking we "don't get socialism" and we "need socialism" can't be arsed to find out. They even have 26 weeks of it.  To be sure, it looks like Workmen's Compensation for disability incurred on the job (let's see the fine print). But they don't want to use up their sick leave on pregnancy or child bearing or parenting or care of ill family members. 

They have higher wages, and if they are disabled on the job, they are taken care of, for up to a year. They can take sick days off without losing their job; they just aren't paid because they took a deal where they got higher wages instead of sick leave.

Is this formula, they once fought for, and got, and were happy with, no longer valid and viable in a pandemic, with Long COVID especially? Quite probably, but striking and paralyzing traffic during Christmas won't achieve the ends needed so the president intervened, because that's what you elect presidents to do and that's how our system works. Would you rather Trump intervene? 

Who Are Rail Workers?

Let's review what we mean by "rail workers". There are people who drive the trains; there are people who load trains and maintain them; there are people who take tickets, work the concession stand, and clean trains. Many of these people are Black; the job of the ticket-taker or conductor on trains was one of the first job that the Black men in this country could get to better their lives as the mass crime of slavery waned. Among these workers today are whites who didn't go to college or who managed to get a high-paying union job through connections while they work and save to do something else. 

Do I realize these people have a hard life? Of course I do, because of COVID and also because their customers are assholes who mistreat them often and make their lives miserable. I don't see reporting on the issue of COVID per say, and whether that is accepted as a job hazard. But hey, we're all worse off than we were, and rail workers have jobs with pay and paid leave -- they just want more to cope mainly with COVID, apparently, especially LONG COVID.  They have more than most folks because they have a hard customer-facing or heavy-labour job. But they are justly compensated as far as the eye can tell.

Do they get to have unions and strike and collective bargain? Of course they do, these are basic rights that I uphold. Do they get to disrupt everyone else's right to freedom of movement (travel) and the decent standard of living that comes with freedom of commerce (and often isn't available in the countries of "real socialism."). No, I don't believe they do.

The Nature of Amtrak

Can Amtrak accommodate these demands? Aren't they a rich capitalist exploiting horror, you know, a leech on the neck of humanity like Taibbi say investment firms are?

No. They can't. Understood. It's expensive to provide even more leave with these terms; Amtrak has long lost money; Amtrak is a kind of semi-state but private organization, etc.  Amtrak loses a billion a year - hey, too bad Elon didn't buy Amtrak, you know? And turn it into his profit-making fast train thing, right? Not!

Does this Guardian story featuring people demonstrating with signs saying "People Over Profits" make ANY sense? No it doesn't, because Amtrak loses a billion a year. Is your point that an Amtrak executive makes "too much" and workers make "too little"? Well, we don't have socialism and there aren't laws that can deliver that to you, so back to work making a socialist party people can believe in -- see who shows up. It's not a matter solved by a contract, collective bargaining, and a strike.

How to Debate

If you can't read basic news on this story from different perspectives and come to a reasonable conclusion, and need to rant that "rail workers don't get sick leave" -- which is fact-free, there is no point in talking to you. Bye, many Europeans I know. If you have read the papers, know the realities, and have a different opinion on this because: socialist worldview, great, you can deliver it in nuanced form or by sloganeering on Twitter and pasting linky-links or calling me names, but you aren't persuasive and I'm done with this issue now.

If you need to unfollow me, unfriend me, block me on social media or virtual worlds as a capitalist fascist warmonger because I don't share the exact same set of rigidly uninformed and cramped socialist views that you do, eh, go ahead.

Washington State Teachers

It's like those striking teachers in Washington, DC, remember them? People you saw who made $50,000 a year or more, with the entire summer off, with paid vacations and health care in addition. They wanted more than that. They were municipal workers, as I recall it. Most of us watching the antics of all this with the Republican governor Scott Walker refusing to accommodate them really couldn't take the teachers' side, even if we were Democrats. 

If socialists, Sandernistas, DSA types, Working Families, or anyone on the left tried to convert this into "workers' rights" or "unions" or "basic human decency," we could only laugh, because we never had a job that paid us $50,000 a year and a lifelong pension, health care, and summers off.

The nature of the job "teacher" needs to change; the concept of school as something with summers off needs to change; the nature of teachers' unions needs to change, because all these things, in their current configuration do not help children learn or prevent them from becoming liabilities to themselves and society.

Does that mean that there isn't a union, a job with a living wage, decent conditions, and civil rights in the picture? Or course not. There has to be. But we can't get behind this system as it is, and no, most of us -- look at the elections -- do not think the path out of this is socialism and socialist parties and enabling people to take a teachers' dispute and call it "about workers' rights and unions" because they don't like the GOP's policies on their real issues, which are abortion or free health care.

And no, it's not because we have a poor grasp of socialism, don't know how it is "really" defined, or think it's some old classic definition of "ownership of the means of production."

Often it's a cultural matter, and it boils down to how the proponents of socialist views seize on issues like this and try to name and shame and harass and heckle people into silence -- of accepting their limited and infantile views by force.

Like these anonymous fucktards in this discussion on Twitter.

I'm not anonymous; my accounts are linked; nobody needs to do more than click on a link to find me. I don't get "scared" or "intimidated" or "worried" that my "views on my alt" differ from "my views on my account for Russia work" because they don't differ. 

What is the answer? Well, Uncle Joe made a deal that most of the unions were happy with; I don't think nationalizing Amtrak would fix this problem, but maybe it would, let's hear the proposals for it. I don't think railroad workers should be able to strike during Christmas when many people have time off and visit families -- one set of workers should not get to harm another set of workers.

Nor do I think they should get to halt commerce over the fact that they can't get IN ADDITION to their paid sick leave, which is intended for illness, PAID leave for pregnancy/child bearing/parenting which isn't a sickness or more time to cope with COVID.

Finally, I'll ask. Who pays your bills? Mom? Dad? Drug sales? Your girlfriend, while you loaf around the house? Welfare (that's awfully hard to get on in this country, in fact, so congratulations). I've worked my whole life and paid my bills. I'm now on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid due to my illness. I only work part-time. I have no property, equity, alimony, royalties, inheritances or lottery winnings. I don't like Ayn Rand or Peter Thiel for all kinds of reasons and I was banned on Twitter like you.

One of the chief reasons I've advocated for a liberal democratic system under the rule of law with a free economy where business is regulated but not seized or suppressed by the state and not for socialism or democracy with "social" adjectives, is because I've never heard the people arguing for these systems use as terrible arguments as you do, or behave as badly as you do in real life and on social media. 

Oh, you want to argue about the UK rail strike? That's about pay and not about leave. I'm not informed enough to argue about that, sorry. Let's not confuse the two, they are different, in different contexts.

 

My Favourite Quote

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals—male humiliation?

Tom Wolfe

I Am Charlotte Simmons

 

My Little Daughter Born at 24 Weeks' Gestation Was Recognized as a Person and Given a Birth Certificate

THIS STORY USED BY ABORTION ADVOCATES TO EVOKE SYMPATHY MIGHT BE TRUE, BUT DOES BEAR CHECKING

 

So I like to check stories to see if they are authentic. When I first looked on Instagram, as you might, while I can find the person loririviere who purportedly liked this post (along with a million others) -- with a sonogram and a comment from a very rare sort of case (as I know from experience), the person who allegedly posted it chloe_a (https://www.instagram.com/chloe_a/?hl=en) does not appear to have the same picture, or be the same person, or to have that post on her Instagram account or anything like it. Frankly, it's very common to fake things like that for the sake of a cause campaign so it's worth checking.

 

So let's take a second look. Here is the post on Twitter:

 

Here’s how the abortion laws affect pregnant women who want their babies. For those still refusing to see how this affects ALL women, read Chloe’s story: pic.twitter.com/Jmpoyd1pEu

— Marlena Stell (@MarlenaStell) June 30, 2022

And read this woman's story while you are at it.

 

Those of you more adept at Instagram can come along and tell me it is possible for more than one person to have the exact same system name (not display name, system) on Instagram; Twitter and many services don't allow it.

 

Someone then told me that the name has to be spelled with three underscores. I still didn't find it -- and again, I believe in checking social media, from long experience working in the media.

 

Of course, one has to wonder why this person is shown with an infant, supposedly incompatible with life, is shown smiling, dressed, not in the NICU, and apparently healthy, but ok, I'm sure there's a good explanation -- likely it was another child.

 

VARIOUS ELEMENTS OF THE STORY CHECK OUT, BUT THERE ARE HOLES -- AND DO READ THE OUTCOME

 

So here's the link -- you don't have to wait long on social media! So Chloe, in a picture posted 7 weeks ago, as you learn from the service, was holding a young infant who looks to be less than 3 months old -- clothed, healthy, and smiling, and not in the NICU, is obviously NOT the infant in the sonogram.

 

But then...how was she able to immediately get pregnant and have another infant already at 25 weeks? That was awfully fast. I think the story bears checking. Let me think. I suppose she could have been pregnant with twins. It does happen very rarely that you give birth to one twin, and the other remains in the womb. Not an ideal situation.  She could have in theory had the healthy baby, then immediately gotten pregnant again but that would be an 8 week old gestational age, not 25? OK, I'm not good at math, you work it. I think it doesn't add up and there is either more to this story, or it's fake. Now that we have more data, we can geolocate her sonogram to Arizona, which only permits abortions up to 20 weeks, so that part checks out, and the sonogram was taken in a facility for high-risk pregnancies.  One Twitter user scanned her feed and came up with the alleged factlet that the baby in her picture before the sonogram post was born in August 2021, and the picture may not have been taken 7 weeks ago, when it was posted, but still, those pregnancies are awfully close together, and no one seems to have had a thought in their heads about the benefits of birth control.

 

NO WORRIES, THIS MOM WAS NOT FORCED TO ENDURE HORROR BUT RAISED FUNDS TO PERFORM AN ABORTION IN A NEARBY STATE

But in any event, no worries, Chloe has raised $20,000 on GoFundMe to pay for "the procedure"  -- hotel and medical costs in another state which she claims was "$17,000" at that gestational age. Oh? Well, there could be complications we don't know about at that later stage. She does admit she will have a "lot" left over to presumably support her other, healthy and live infant but she is going to generously give the $8500 she received from "another fund" to "someone else who needs it."

 

Ok. From what I can tell with cursory research, it seems there is a person who already has a child, and had this terribly fated pregnancy, and was not allowed an abortion in her state, but did go to the next state over. None of that story emerges from the first posting which has millions of views, and few will bother to track down the rest of the story. Nor will they admit it is RARE.

 

Perhaps, given the high amount of circulation of that post -- a million likes on an account with only a few hundred followers still -- journalists both pro- and anti- abortion will get to work on it, and perhaps some day we will get the story, for better or worse as it appears to me now -- still with some holes but possible -- or utterly debunked. That's social media for you.

 

TAKE THE MORAL AND FINANCIAL CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUR ABORTION CAMPAIGN, DON'T JUST DEMAND ANTI-ABORTIONISTS PAY FOR UNWANTED CHILDREN

 

But here's my point about all this. If you want to campaign for abortion, please take all the moral and financial consequences for doing so. Don't sugarcoat it. Don't cherry-pick edge cases like Chloe's that you think are compelling and will win Republicans over to your side. They won't. Who would ever want a pregnant woman to suffer in this way, carrying a baby who has either died or whose condition is incompatible with life?! But the GOP members are not all stupid yahoos as you imagine (I myself am a straight-ticket Democrat).

I know women who suffered such fetal demise, as it is called, but didn't instantly demand an abortion -- simply didn't want the extra trauma of a C-section -- trust me, if your baby has died in the womb, it will not take long for it to be stillborn. While it is theoretically possible for babies with conditions "incompatible with life" to go to full term, it is extremely rare for them to do so. So let's not use edge cases like this -- let's be truthful. Most abortions do not involve a case like this, and those who advocate abortion shouldn't cloak that fact.

 

IF ABORTION IS HEALTH CARE, SO ARE SUICIDE AND EUTHANASIA

Abortion isn't "health care"; it's not like removing a fibroid tumor. Especially at this later stage, it's far more traumatic, despite all the brave things its proponents, often people who never faced pregnancy, will tell you.

 

It's especially traumatic if you come to the realization that your baby is either disabled, or in a state incompatible with life, or even dead -- but that's not the reason for most abortions, and we must not pretend it is.

 

Even if you believe that a fetus is not a person even at 39-40 weeks right before birth, or isn't a person at 24 weeks or 32 weeks or whatever cut-off you design, you have to concede that removing that much tissue from your body is not something you merely fix with brief scalpel work and then a band-aid.

 

And ultimately, if abortion is "health care," then so is suicide, so is euthanasia. Again, have the courage of your convictions, and let the country and states divide, I'm all for it. Abortion is a solution. A solution for women whom you desire to have full autonomy that even cancels out the autonomy of their unborn child -- whom you have concluded is not a person. You have this position because you don't believe the fetus is a person. That's how you can live with what seems like a grisly belief system, and I totally respect that as a modern, Western liberal.

 

But here's my main point: You simply have to be willing to concede that a woman who wishes an abortion at any stage for ANY reason should be allowed to do so -- six weeks or 40 weeks.

 

We have known since the 2019 abortion in New York State that your concessions about limitations on abortion were just that, tactical. Not your actual belief, in life with the recent Harvard/Harris Poll.

 

That reason may be judged by society -- a reason like "my career" or "to hang on to a man I hope to convince to stay with me" or "so I can fit into my dress for the prom". ANY reason. Because "health of the mother" is NOT defined in New York State and many states and could be just about anything, when you factor in mental health. So if you want abortion, please be morally consistent and don't play up rare, terribly tear-jerking cases; admit that someone whom you find to be a "Wal-mart" shopper who could have gotten on the bus to the next state 3 months ago -- or ordered birth control online from Wal-mart, for that matter -- is going to be the primary beneficiary of this right you promote, and for reasons that may not make your cause look good. Have the moral consistency to admit that.

 

WHY DON'T ABORTION ADVOCATES MENTION BIRTH CONTROL, EVER?

 

I think many American Catholics, who use birth control and openly promote birth control as the lesser of two evils according to their faith, accept that abortion is the law of the land -- not as "a form of birth control", although it can be that, but because -- all kinds of reasons, good and bad.

 

And every Catholic I know from my church or network of friends and family is bewildered as to why the pro-abortionists never promote birth control, when even they, as Catholics, accept and use it, that's the fact. If the Pope ever decides to really crack down on this issue, he will find himself with a new American Catholic Church and likely other splinter churches as well. It's like how Putin, invading Ukraine and perpetrating a genocidal war, found himself not with a subdued part of Russia, but two new NATO members -- Finland and Sweden -- and another on the way to the EU -- Ukraine -- and likely NATO, too. 

 

And we have to conclude that abortion advocates never campaign for more and better birth control, because they don't want to concede that abortion is not so much a "choice," as it is the end state of a life without support from families, and without responsibility and planning.  Contraception can fail, but if that were the only reason for an abortion, and everyone used contraception, there would be orders of magnitude less of them. Pro-abortionists want you to take on the expense of care of infants and children; Democrats have never wanted to admit there's an expense on their end, as well, of young girls, single mothers and others who don't organize birth care or abortions before 15 weeks.

 

Pro-abortion campaigners -- we now longer have to hide behind the euphemism of "pro-choice" because they themselves have dropped this euphemism -- still don't want to concede that the beneficiaries of their desired right look bad because their choice didn't start with the choice of contraception for all kinds of complicated emotional and social reasons that generally are not really about the lack of access to contraception, which anyone can purchase online at Wal-mart. Or get from Planned Parenthood. Remember Planned Parenthood?

 

That would undermine their cause.

 

And 24 weeks rather than 40 seems "reasonable" due to the notion of "viability" -- but here's where my story and the issue of personhood comes in.

 

$500 FOR AN ABORTION OR $110,00 FOR NEONATAL CARE?

 

I can tell you that 30 years ago in 1991, we spent more than $110,000 trying to save our daughter born at 23-24 weeks' gestation -- who died after one month due to complications of prematurity -- rather than opting to spend only $500 two blocks away from the hospital to have an abortion (or to accept even Beth Israel's offer of an abortion, which they will do in an extreme case of placenta abruption and other "threats to the life of a mother."

 

That's why, if we're all going to trade profoundly traumatic and intimate experiences here, I get to share mine, too, and force you to think of the implications, just like you wanted me to think of the implications showing me this post on Instagram and Twitter above. 

 

Today, the price of abortions have gone up to at least $800 or more, and the price of neonatal care, like much medical care has skyrocketed, and is now more likely half a million or more for the equivalent services of 30 years ago. Advances in neonatology haven't kept pace with the price -- while a small percent more of severely premature babies can be saved -- and have good outcomes! -- it is really not so great because of the hard facts of biology: an infant at that age does not have mature lungs, even with additional medications to assist maturity and using respiratory therapy on them leads to complications. I was among the first persons to sign for experimental use of surfactant to assist my premature child; today it is routine.

 

CASES LIKE CHLOE'S OR MINE ARE VERY RARE

 

But...Do you have any idea how rare it really is to be in a situation in which a mother's life is actually threatened? Or to have a fetus that did not already automatically self-abort in miscarriage, which is common in general for pregnancies?

 

Let me suggest I do know what this situation is like after being held upside down in the Trendelenburg position for 3 days, on an IV with magnesium sulfate, unable to eat and later not allowed to drink, suffering from massive loss of blood. Even so, when nurses and doctors were arrayed before me like a Greek chorus offering either abortion -- which they legally performed at that gestational age -- OR the NICU and a possible life of profound disability for my child, I chose the NICU, because my child was born alive, crying aloud, kicking her tiny legs and arms, and had good APGAR scores.

 

I know at least some percentage of the ardent but abstract pro-abortion campaigners, had they stood next to me in that maternity room, might have had some qualms about their beliefs, looking at my child who was born alive. Fortunately, they are almost never put to the test because such cases are rare.

 

A US CITIZEN AT THE AGE OF 24 WEEKS GESTATION

 

As they rushed from the room, the doctors froze for a brief second and asked me her name. "Anna," I said -- and she was given a birth certificate and became a citizen of NYS and the US, and later had a baptismal certificate, of which I was proud. My daughter, who could have been aborted then and there, or two blocks away -- that's how you need to understand the profound contradiction here, if you can face the truth. Because the US postal service works so terribly, I had the trauma of receiving her birth certificate -- and the card on which her tiny footprints were stamped -- in a big envelope stamped 'DAMAGED DURING DELIVERY' which was more true than they knew.

 

I assure you we all treated as a person this little baby who in fact looked like her father. Why wouldn't we? It wasn't abstract. It was real. All my relatives and co-workers -- some of whom were pro-abortion -- came and donated blood because constant blood transfusions are required for these cases.

 

I tell you this so that you realize that this gestational age is indeed a person that anyone, even those who prefer not to grant a fetus personhood, would agree is a person, and the state of New York, in issuing her a birth certificate, agreed as well -- although to abort this infant at the exact same gestational age was also legal. Yes, it was a borderline case and rare -- like the cases pro-abortion campaigners use now to engender sympathy for abortion.

 

Again, read up on this topic and you will find that while there is significant progress made in rescuing severely premature infants, and I have friends who have made it through this incredible ordeal with children more or less intact and developing normally, it still is an enormous risk and the outcomes are not at all guaranteed (as I have colleagues who are enduring those outcomes as well -- children who are blind, unable to breathe on their own, and mentally disabled). If you feel compelled to tell me the story of how your uncle was put in a shoebox and kept warm and still lived, do have the courtesy to note that he wasn't at 24 weeks' gestation. If you want to tell me about how your baby made it out of the NICU, do be honest about his or her gestational age and chances -- likely it was at 28 weeks or later, which is a WORLD of difference. Did you know that 30 years ago, this is how the survivability rate was explained to me, in terms of race, going from most chances to survive, to least: 1) Black girls 2) white girls 3) white boys 4) Black boys. That tells you everything you need to know about our society and the great disparity in health care and much more. I have no idea if this grim statistic has changed. Likely not.

 

THE TORTUE OF THE NICU

 

My daughter died after one month of intensive treatment in the NICU, of complications of prematurity. I have seriously considered whether I made a tragic mistake in clearing her for takeoff to the NICU, given what amounts to the actual torture that constitutes treatment of such profoundly small infants. But I had never heard of an NICU and its works before and it wasn't in all the pregnancy help books at the time. 

 

To give you just one story out of a hellscape of 30 days: when my daughter had to have a serious operation called a "cut-down" to install a feeding tube directly into her forearm, because her little veins had collapsed at that point, I wanted to be present because I was told she would likely die on the operating table. By that time, she had already had several pneumothorax incidents (collapsed lungs from air pressure while on a respirator puncturing a lung). She had already had her heart restarted several time -- a process that on this tiny a creature involves only a light massage of a doctor's single finger. I was told of course I couldn't be present. So I hid in a treatment room, right next to the NICU where the operation was taking place, a treatment room with a window and a curtain over it, which you could still peak through. I watched with a terribly sinking heart my tiny girl turn blue, as six doctors worked on her in a room with the temperature made cold. They believed she was a person they had to save by that point, not a mere fetus they should have let go -- or should I say, they were mandated by law in the Reagan era. After about 30 or 40 minutes, I saw they were finishing up and hurried to exit out of the side room before they caught me. As I reached the door, the chief physician walked by, his face looking utterly worried an exhausted, as he said:

 

"The instruments they make for the NICU are not small enough to use on an infant of that gestational age."

 

Imagine how I felt hearing that information. Rationally, I would then comment that therefore, you must not perform such operations and declare them futile, a medical concept often invoked. That wasn't the culture of NICU doctors, however; I was shocked when I got a mass mailing from the hospital seeking donations, saying they were able to save infants as low as 1.5 lbs at gestation, which was their latest historical record. That was my baby in that junk mail, "Superwoman," as the doctors dubbed her. Although not for long.

 

This rather heavy handed cut-down installed with an instrument too blunt for the task at hand bought my daughter another few weeks of life -- and all this time there was always the hope and the progress report from doctors that she might turn the corner as she began to regain her birth weight. I was pumping and freezing my milk. Nurses began to tell me that they were going to move her from the isolette -- a hell-box with glaring lights and literally plastic wrap over it to make it easier for for doctors to quickly reach her -- to another kind of incubator with a proper cover, less light, and less noise in the corner. Her brain was not damaged from IVH.

 

Yet.

 

Then some time later came the news that our daughter suffered an IVH, and now was expected to suffer from cerebral palsy and brain damage from "iatrogenic treatment" and indeed, her tiny legs now ceased to move vigorously, and moved stiffly if at all, as if in a slow motion movie. I put my head down on the doctor's desk and wept, as did her father. Ultimately, she died of what is known commonly as "thrush" -- a healthy baby gets over a common nursery infection. A sick baby who has undergone multiple procedures does not -- even her heart muscle was infected.

I assure you I will never forget the most powerful force I have ever experienced in my life -- my tiny daughter, gripping my finger with her tiny hand in an infant's reflex.

 

I was fortunate that after that ordeal -- fast forward -- I had two more "take-home babies" who are now in their 20s and have careers and partners and full lives  -- and they even mainly sleep through the night, although it took some doing! 

 

SHOULDN'T ABORTION BE KEPT AVAILABLE FOR RAPE VICTIMS AT LEAST?

 

If you want to have abortion for rape victims, I can help you there, too. I have looked into the face of hell. I will never forget a small elementary school girl, no more than 12, in a New York psychiatric hospital who was severely psychotic, raging and screaming. She had been raped by her stepfather, and was very close to childbirth. If ever there was a case for abortion even at a late stage, that would be it, but in that era, not only NYS law forbid abortion past 24 weeks, the Reagan Administration had passed a law that in fact was a form of disabled rights, ensuring that infants suffering from disability would not be deliberately euthanized or left to die. In a case where a child is bearing a child, you'd want to make that exception, no?

 

If you feel that society can take on the care of her child born in such horrific circumstances, what's your plan to care for her, too? Shouldn't you have one?

 

How about an infant born without a brain at all? This does happen, although rarely. I saw such an infant allowed to die by being moved from the NICU to a step-down room from which he never stepped, given only hydration, with a blanket put over his incubator so no one watched. That's how it is done. And that's rational, because it's not like any amount of intervention is every going to make up for the lack of a brain. Or are you for keeping such a profoundly disabled infant alive forever, spending hundreds of millions of dollars? 

 

BE HONEST ABOUT THE REASONS FOR ABORTIONS

 

So I'm not without sympathy for exceptions; I just want to ensure that you grasp them and realize they are RARE -- like abortion itself should be. I just want you to read up on the actual customers for abortions. They aren't these cases. They are, all too often, as I know from my own girlfriends and family, women who are actually in a place of profound, profound, unchoice. They are trying to hang on to a man. If you think this isn't the case in our day and age, you are being dishonest. That's my experience, and it is valid, just as your Googled-statistic showing a variety of reasons, not just that one. Individual experiences are valid, remember? You are promoting an extremely rare case of an individual with a disabled fetus incompatible with life -- so even if you view my collection of stories from friends and family trying to compel a man to stay as "rare," you should accept it, right? Let's all acknowledge rare stories here.

 

Maybe that's why polls show that men are more likely to oppose the Roe rollback than women, you know?

 

Let's be adults here, too. Promote birth control. Promote women's rights. Make abortion "Safe, legal, and RARE" as Bill Clinton phrased it. Remember that RARE part of the "choice"? That's been dropped out. The "RARE" comes when a) you use birth control effectively b) you organize your abortion before 15 weeks. Even if you do not realize you are pregnant (and I know what that's like!), by 15 weeks, it is unmistakable, and easily confirmed with a cheap drugstore test. Again, the tiny percentage of edge cases that abortion rights' campaigners wheel out are not at all the norm even among their cohort of those who have had abortions. I'm not for letting them get away with propaganda. I want them to be honest about their cause, so that the people can decide this democratically.

 

MOST CATHOLICS ARE NOT ABSOLUTISTS

 

I think few people realize that Catholic are not absolutists. If I had opted to permit an abortion of my infant in my rare and severe circumstances, I do not believe my parish would have excommunicated me. Few secular influencers ever want to study actual Catholics, who perceive abortion not just as a matter of fetal personhood, but as a matter of preventing a lifetime of sorrow and regret for women. They don't see it as a dystopian world where unmarried, childless men who are child predators tell them what to do with their bodies. A church in my area regularly holds a ceremony of prayer for loss or unborn infants, and doesn't ask whether they died of abortion or rare situations like mine. The focus is on sorrow -- as part of respect for a woman's body that you imagine Catholics don't share. This is a very refreshing article -- wow, how did the NYT editors ever get that past their Slack Millennials? 

 

And Catholic ethicists are not the Medieval scourges many imagine. I consulted one at Notre Dame as I sat hour after hour with my very tiny infant in the NICU for a month, urged at times to sign a "DNR" order if needed. I didn't. My daughter died anyway. But this professor told me that the cost of sustaining such an infant can go beyond a half a million dollars, to a million -- perhaps more for life, thus causing severe damage to existing or future children and other family members, and that when this is weighed, the Catholic will not advocate extreme measures, even being pro-life. 

 

It's generally not the Catholics advocating that a child raped and expecting another child; a woman pregnant with an infant with no brain; a mother bleeding profusely from placenta abruption are all cases that you turn you back on and allow to suffer in the name of "life". My understanding is that the evangelicals are more absolutist about this matter but even there -- did you really ask them?

 

WHAT HAPPENED TO SAFE, LEGAL, AND RARE?

 

Even ardent pro-abortionists would have to concede that the edge cases they dredge up of rape victims and women with disabled fetuses are rare, and the measures needed to intervene beyond 24 weeks are extreme -- and also rare.

 

So abortions either have to really become rare -- something I see no signs of in the pro-abortion campaign any more -- OR they have to concede that they are not just for rare cases when a baby dies in the womb or a schoolgirl is raped by her father. They are now for anybody at any gestational age in NYS due to the broad notion of "health". Abortions are not just for cases of even children being raped. They are for anybody at any gestational age in NYS. Abortions are not just for cases when a mother might die from loss of blood. They are for anybody at any gestational age in NYS. These highly rare cases are the cases you cite, and even some states are going to take away those rare exceptions. But they are rare, so stop trying to gin up sympathy and disguise the nature of your movement if you are pro-abortion. And stop citing the mothers of other children who have abortions to devote what resources they have to their existing children.

 

IF ABORTIONS CANNOT BE RARE, THEY HAVE TO BE FOR ANY REASON FOR ANYONE

 

A large percentage of women who have abortions do not have other children -- 40% according to the respected Guttmacher Foundation, although the New York Times claims the "typical patient" is "already a mother" even admitting that this same typical patient is "in her 20s". Misleading, to say the least.  By using the term "typical," the NYT can evade the responsibility of admitting that as many as 40% do not have children -- "typical" can just mean "many". I'm sure if we keep Googling around we'll get all kinds of massaging of these numbers in different directions.

 

So let's cut to the chase and not play that game, please.

 

PRIVACY TRUMPS EVEN MURDER

 

If you are pro-abortion, you support abortions for any gestational age, for any reason, full stop. Few pro-abortion leaders are stepping out NOW and saying "except for XYZ" in a climate where even "XYZ" may not be conceded any more in red states. They have so emphatically dropped the term "pro-choice" that you have to wonder if they still believe it is ok for women to choose NOT to have an abortion, even if they find out they are expecting an infant with Down's Syndrome, or it's still ok for a family to support to term a child who has been raped and accept care of her infant. Do all women have autonomy over their bodies, or only Democrats?

 

Women are not required to explain why, under the Western liberal notion of privacy. They are not required to prove any exceptional status. Yes, as I have demonstrated, abortions do involve the murder of persons who could under other circumstances get a birth certificate. So if you want that kind of new world, be brave about it. And tell the truth. I can accept that we have different views and different beliefs about this matter and that it can be adjudicated by law democratically.

 

That's why I personally oppose abortion, but I'm fully aware that -- again, with the precepts of Western liberalism -- other people have very different beliefs and there has to be space in society for us and them. I don't look to Catholicism or any religion to take over all society and compel beliefs by force -- that are simply not shared. I think the problem of the public square is tolerance of pluralism, not the state taking on paternal responsibilities.

 

People have different belief systems and freedom of the pluralism of religion has always been the bedrock of America. Religious traditions have different beliefs -- if you don't like the Catholic judgement on LGBT, go over to the Episcopalians who are very similar, but tolerate even gay priests. And in organized religion or not, individuals have different beliefs. Like the Jewish woman next to me in the hospital who had what she called "a termination," and 10 years later, when she now had a job and a partner, had a little girl she will treasure. I treasured my little girl, now 26, enormously, too, having lost her sister. 

 

DEMOCRACY IS DEMOCRACY

 

You are for democracy, right? And truth and factual news? Because with the abolition of Roe, we aren't all donning white hoods and wearing red capes and sequestered in a dungeon forced to give birth after birth. What's happening is that some people will have to take buses, and will need support. A number of large corporations have indicated they will provide health care for this cost now of moving out of state for abortions. Various NGOs and no doubt even churches and other non-Catholic religious institutions will help, as they do with refugees and all the other vulnerable people in our society. Maybe by campaigning hard you might get those "red states" to drop their absolutism, but since you haven't dropped yours, maybe you should campaign for secession. In any event, I do hope you will get off your soap boxes and stop your screeching with edge cases, and get back to far more pressing issues with real masses of people involved: the war in Ukraine, the refugee situation at our border; the drug epidemic; even COVID. 

 

And promote birth control just as hard as you do abortion for any reason at any age. Because if you care about women's health and autonomy you should not put them through any trauma such as abortion at any age or any regrets, such as can come reflecting on a story like mine.

On Anti-Fa

It's very hard to document the activities of Anti-Fa because anyone who attempts to criticize them or cover them will face a deluge of hate and propaganda. (Yes, I capitalize this term where many don't because I believe it to be a cadre secret society, a cult, organized, resourced, determined, duplicitous, and conspiratorial.)  I have watched these groups for many years, in Europe, the US, and Eurasia, and I have formulated this conclusion.

Most journalists don't want to ruin their careers with accusations that they are "neo-cons" or even "fascists," naturally; while it is easier to dismiss the latter charge of "fascist" as overblown craziness when applied to liberals and leftists, the former charge of "neo-con" is one that all too often sticks, despite the fact that actual "neo-cons" are very few in number these days, have very few media personalities, and their supposed influence in "starting wars" seems to be diminished as first Trump pulled out of Syria and planned to pull out of Afghanistan; then Biden pulled out of Afghanistan to a chorus of angry and anguished objections, and the war in Ukraine was so very, very clearly started by Russia -- and in fact eight years ago.

Among the worst propagandistic mantras in the US, the Anti-Fa thugs wield is the notion that they somehow represent the heirs of those who fought fascism before, during, and immediately after World War II.

They don't.

They find it harder to get away with this in Europe where people are more educated and experienced and grasp the nuances among those who fought fascism.

There were lots of movements and formal armed forces that fought fascism. Among them was the Communist International, a front of the Soviet Communist Party which purported to fight fascism to promote communism, called anyone even on the left a "fascist" if they didn't agree (Lenin said, "Social democracy is social fascism"); and murdered any socialists who were critical of Moscow. You're really lying through your teeth when you show a picture of the American soldiers landing on the beach at Normandy and claim that they are "Anti-Fa". Um, no, because they aren't socialist thugs. They are US soldiers, generally more conservative as a social category. Like a boss I once had, injured in the battle at Normandy, who had a distinguished career with Russian language skills at RFE/RL, the CIA, the DoD, teaching at West Point, and working at various non-profits who helped refugees and immigrants. He would be horrified at the thought that throwing a Molotov cocktail at a courthouse in Portland is "like" fighting the Nazis in France because he also fought the Soviets. Did Anti-Fa? No. No, because the Soviets created and/or backed and funded them in many places.

Anyone who has followed the violent socialist movements of the last 100 years and seen their outcome with the Bolsheviks in Russia and beyond doesn't have trouble recognizing the patterns in effect here. I have suggested reading Double Lives which provide in copious detail information about the workings of the KGB and the infiltration through the Comintern of leftist and peace movements abroad. There is the story of Willi Munzenberg who began as a leftist German Communist, exposing the Nazis for accusing Communists of starting the Reichstag fire. He himself was involved in undermining and turning leftist groups in Europe toward Moscow. But he ended up critical of the Kremlin when he saw the reality of what was happening in Soviet Russia on visits -- and ultimately he himself was assassinated, likely at their hand as the author, Stephen Koch, explains. Double Lives is dismissed as too overly zealous, yet Stephen Koch has gathered enormous amount of historical documentation and bothered to interview figures like Munzenberg's widow when others have not. Seriously, did any of you ever go talk to Munzenberg's widow?! Ok, then. PS I recall Stephen Koch at a lecture in NYC many years ago where he was very early in explaining that Putin was, indeed, corrupt -- but corrupt with the Germans, viewed as less corrupt than other nations, so it was all good. And here we all are now.

It remains the case that most documentation of Anti-Fa is done by those with an axe to grind -- conservative or even neo-Nazi figures who want to focus on Anti-Fa violence to distract from right-wing violence. Even those who may have begun in good faith may end up unbalanced especially after the harsh treatment meted out to them by Anti-Fa cadres. Then there's President Trump himself, who called for Anti-Fa to be designated as a terrorist group -- thereby ensuring that they likely never would be. The threshold for getting the US government to designate a group as "terrorist" is rather high, and can be politicized. I'm not sure it can be met for Anti-Fa even with a rigorous, unbiased investigation.

It is very hard in a climate when the president of the United States made ill-informed and unlawful calls like this to go on criticizing Anti-Fa -- whose violent acts are real and which are then inevitably seized on by Trump and his followers. Rather than documenting and condemning Anti-Fa too, most of the liberal media inevitably addresses this situation by diminishing and down-playing Anti-Fa. You know you can find that a group espouses violent goals and means and an extremist ideology and condemn that surely, but it is another step to prove they are terrorist in nature, i.e. to go beyond throwing a Molotov cocktail at a symbol of what they view as injustice such as a court-house; even to randomly burn down an immigrant-owned store; or to even shoot one of their own -- to shooting a mass of strangers at a supermarket or a school or an office, or set a bomb to kill random strangers at a large event like the Boston Marathon.

Anti-fa uses the classic Bolshevik and KGB disinformation tactics that are familiar to many who study these movements. Whether its Leninist precepts, KGB manuals, or Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radical," they amount to the same thing -- and PS Alinsky doesn't have to be affiliated with the Communist Party or the KGB whatsoever for these leftist methods to percolate through social movements and become practical tactics. The main themes are to "freeze the target" -- emphasize and exaggerate one part of the enemy that will help discredit him (why are you voting against abortion rights when you helped pay for your mistress to have one?); find things that he values and then shows how in fact he doesn't value them and is hypocritical (you're all for opposing abortion, but you just cut funds on school lunch and after-school programs); find things he values, then show that the leftists in fact value the same thing, but more altruistically (we have our own Socialist Gun clubs), and so on. These methods have become so pervasive that nobody remembers where they came from, especially as they migrate over to the right. I do. I have translated KGB and GRU handbooks and followed the countries where Russian intelligence is active, including our own, for decades.

Hence the plethora of posts with the meme of the troops landing at Normandy, fighting the Nazis, and the sarcastic comments that these were the first "Anti-Fa," i.e. fighting fascists -- what, we're going to call them terrorists, too? This takes even more ridiculous forms with a meme asking sarcastically whether Trump will now disinter World War II soldiers' graves as they are now declared terrorists. The method is designed to trip up and shame anyone who might be critical of violence and extremism by doing a switcheroo to claim that Anti-Fa is "like" those revered in the US who fought the Nazis, such as the US Army. 

No sale.

I respond by pointing out what a bad argument this is; troops in Normandy didn't loot stores, break windows, torch banks, and cover monuments and government buildings with radical graffiti, nor deliberately target civilians. It's absurd. Yet the absurdities of these arguments on Twitter know no bounds. I was once pointed to the bombing of Dresden as an example of how US troops at Normandy weren't the heroes imagined (they wanted to pick a World War II event).

OK, who could justify the bombing of Dresden and killing of civilians? But wait a minute. Wasn't your point in sardonically calling the landers at Normandy "Anti-Fa," to play off their hero status? So hey, since they aren't heroes because of Dresden how can you use them at Normandy in sarcastic memes? You see how this works? You're juggling memes to try to keep your opponent off balance and we realize: it doesn't matter. You don't care. Internal contradictions in your propagandistic messaging matter not to you. You aren't real. You are thugs, trying to obtain power and smash things.

There are plenty of posts on Twitter showing how Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists and supporters who protested along with them, called out Anti-Fa in the midst of  vandalism and graffiti in many cities. How can you tell these vandals are Anti-Fa? For one, there are clearly more white members of Anti-Fa visible at demonstrations than Black. But that's not really the point.

Because they reiterate the slogans, colors, markings of Anti-Fa and even self-identity -- that's how. But oh, you say, Anti-Fa is a loose organization that anyone could ally with, so you can't tell. This is repeated again and again, as it was for Occupy and before them Anonymous and 4chan. Yet behind these "loose-knit groups" are always organized cadres who have a detailed and definite agenda and the ability to manipulate others who are clueless. and their chief modus operandi is to deny the obvious of what they do -- commit violent acts. Deny, deny, deny. You must be imagining things. 

These supposedly fluid and free movements have surprisingly little actual internal freedom and democracy; there can be cult-like obedience to strong figures who emerge and outrageous punishment to those within the ranks who object to any method or meme. When no one has a name and no act has consequences, the GRU or the Proud Boys for that matter can easily enter and manipulate young and clueless people online, or even golf-playing executives in their 40s with families -- but with no education in civics or literature or religion.

Polygraph is a column run by Voice of America which analyzes propaganda and exposes it. Most of the posts are about Russia and its allies because that is where most of the disinformation is practiced. But because they are under pressure to be "balanced", VOA covers some US propaganda as well. That's fine. I worked for Polygraph some years ago back when it was a joint project of RFE/RL and VOA; when VOA took over the column completely, those of us contracted by RFE/RL were let go and our contracts not renewed.  Of the two US-funded broadcasting stations, I have a lot more respect for RFE/FL, for which I have worked in various departments over the years. I would not work for VOA, because I find there is a decided effort there to "balance" to the point of excusing authoritarian regimes abroad, and a kind of entrenched, rabidly ideological bureaucracy -- unchecked -- that survives all presidents and resists any change and tends to produce more anti-Americanism than it stops. I was entirely dismayed when a long-time cunning Kremlin apologist was hired  at VOA -- and yes, that "Kremlin apologist," sometimes called "Putin-whisperer"  is how to understand this elaborate shtick that endlessly finds fault with actual critics of the Kremlin, feigns to criticize the Kremlin on a few days to round out the legend, and generally distracts and confuses. Why? Sometimes this type of persona is explained by vanity, the desire to row against the tide, the desire to be appear "balanced" and more clever than your yahoo neo-con bumpkins online, and so on. And sometimes it is more sinister. 

I continue to re-post Polygraph essays because I think they are very professionally done for the most part and I know their fact-checking and editing is rigorous. They accurately expose the propaganda that is clear to the good-faith analyst at home and abroad.  I praise Polygraph, for example, for calling out apologist Mark Bray's deceptive and contradictory statements about Anti-Fa (most news outlets never get past breathlessly quoting him as an "expert" although he is a zealous apologist). But then I question why the conclusion is that "there isn't any proof" that Anti-Fa is causing violence. There's plenty.  For one, there's that same Portland police force and state government that occasionally prosecutes Anti-Fa, even if they let it off the hook on too many occasions. If you are enamored with Anti-Fa, I doubt you'll accept any evidence anyway so I won't spend time on it now.

It's hypocritical that so many accept Mark Bray as "having a beat" -- writing a great deal on one topic, from his perspective, which is pro Anti-Fa. In fact, I would have to agree with this take that journalists writing on Anti-Fa are "pro".  Meanwhile, others who write on Anti-Fa from a critical perspective are not viewed as legitimate and vilified -- again, as the Bolshevik tactic described above.

As long as there are so few journalists willing to write critically and do unbiased research on Anti-Fa, I'll RT Andy Ngo. Sure, he is simply wrong about some of his claims which can be checked, e.g. that there were all these Anti-Fa in Portland who were school-teachers. Some were, but for college and not high school; and maybe a few were substitute teachers or something. But all too often he digs up a case of someone arrested for actual violence that can't be disputed. Is this story true? Well, I'd want to check it, calling the group, calling neighbours, calling the police, trying to get more to the story and find out what happened.

But what, this story isn't true?  Likely it is true because the source is a police web site. But sure, check it as a real journalist should by determining what priorities the police had on a busy night which might make sense, how many officers to deploy, etc. How about this story? Well, I don't re-tweet snapshots of tweets generally; I try to see if that person really tweeted that. I totally get that the screenshot is tweeted because of the problem of how people at the other end of a "gotcha" might delete their tweets. I did see that this person did in fact tweet such a claim. Let's leave aside the question of whether this person in RL, distinct from their Twitter persona which is deliberately provocative, could actually biologically become pregnant or reach the Supreme Court rather than taking a bus to a neighbouring state where they could obtain an abortion, if that's the issue. Is it an incitement to imminent violence such that Twitter should remove it? They have 350 followers.

In any event, will mainstream or independent media follow up on such local violence indeed incited by in fact an organized group? Unlikely, for all kinds of reasons. Until it comes for them, as it has in a few cases.

Oh, you say Anti-Fa isn't organized and is fluid and has no address? That's completely ridiculous; of course it is organized and PS not so fluid and likely in fact undemocratic and authoritarian in its beliefs and practices, just like Anonymous or 4chan. Say, 4chan isn't so edgy and cool any more, is it? Type "Socialist Gun Club" into Twitter and give it a look-see. Oh, you say, how can you prove these lefty gun clubs are precisely Anti-Fa? There's a frank admission that John Brown is "Anti-Fa" based, as are others.

But look, this is not my cause on which I want to spend time, tracking down, checking, and publishing stories of Anti-Fa violence which I know to be the case from the research I've done so far. Because I think the FBI is correct, as well as the liberal media, that the problem of white supremacist extremism and terrorism, such as the person who shot dead Black 10 shoppers in Buffalo, indicted as having committed a hate crime and terrorism, are the far greater problem. If the media and the government want to spend their resources on a far greater problem that is growing worse, that's fine. 

Will this remain the case? I don't know. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ankle-Biters or Why You Need to Take a Harder Look at Your New Twitter Friends

Ankle-Biter

 

For the kids born after 1995, or those Barney-watchers at heart, here's the short version, so you don't have to read anything that is tl;dr or bigger than your hand:

 

A Canadian music-loving Granny on Twitter who wanted to school me about my possibly incorrect views on policing in the US, who could try to guilt-trip away my suspicions concerning her new birthdate on Twitter and her low follow/followee count, was unmasked finally as someone who had photoshopped a mug with RGB's picture and initials on it into her wrinkled granny hands -- but even then, had an alibi. They always do.  Her dear friend on Facebook did photoshop the RGB mug -- but that was only because he couldn't bear to see RGB's initials reversed as it would be in such a photo and felt he must photo-shop his friend's profile pic to honour our Supreme Court judge. Of course! Great story!  Low follows and bad behaviour and meme pushing and harassment are alone proof that someone is inauthentic and not worth your time -- by all means use these as markers, and don't let them guilt-trip you into thinking they are legitimate. But with a little work you might discover they are very fake. My purpose is to get you all to stop talking to people born in 2009 with 31 followers or born in January 2021 with 31 followers, even if you continue to talk to people who have fake names. Improve Twitter. Make your life better. LOOOOK at the person heckling you and calling you names. They are not Intercept journalists or Fox TV anchors but Ankle-Biters.

 

So I like to take a closer look at my new "Twitter friends" when I ask a simple question about a picture, pushed at me when I expressed a view or a question, and meant to trump all political arguments. I like to try a hypothesis and see if I can get answers, although that's really not what Twitter is made for, or used as. So for now, set aside the actual debate, which was around the troops deployed for BLM versus those deployed on January 6. I voted for Biden; I'm capable of deploring both the excess of one and the absence of another. I try to make up lists of criteria and study events and form a judgement, excuse me. A photo of a few dozen federal troops, as scary as it might seen, as inappropriate as it might be as use of force, as excusable as it might be protecting the Lincoln Monument, is not an end to the debate about what would have been appropriate to ask for and deploy January 6, and what was clearly insufficient. I can lay all that out in another blog post but who needs me to do that? Go on Twitter and find someone who shares your views and cheer them, and harass someone who doesn't if you like, this post is about something else. The spectacle of hundreds of people shouting at you under a tweet like that, accusing you falsely of racism and Trumpism and genocide, screaming nonsense -- most people fear that, most people don't walk into such hornets-nests, most people think if you do, you must be crazy. I'm not afraid. I don't walk into them normally. I do today, just to make a forensic point about such things. I know 99% of this hooting and hollering is fake, and you need to learn that, too.

 

Here They Are: The Ankle-Biters

 

What I've always noticed in my 14 years on Twitter (I was an early adapter) is the pernicious and repetitive and growing behaviour of a group of people I call the "Ankle Biters". So you're a person who uses your real name; you are tied to a real identifiable blog and perhaps even a real workplace, but they are anonymous an unaccountable. If you call out that fact, you might get them to back off, but then they will have a guilt-tripping tale about either how their RL abuser will find them and kill them, or you will, because you disagreed with them. They have "trumped" your argument by playing to sentiment or even logic, so while you may attempt to invoke that as a reason of lack of credibility, they turn that against you easily.

 

So what am I talking about? Not day-old accounts that swear at you and say they know where you live -- your or others might AR them and they get gone. I'm not talking about supposed call girls who follow you and then push porn at you as a way to harass you or use other Internet tricks. Those low-lifes haven't got the memo yet on how to be more successful at harassment -- Good!

 

I'm talking about the more sophisticated and in my view, organized accounts who do this:

 

When you are debating a point with other people with even Blue Checks of verified status, or other people who perhaps have no tie to the real world in their Twitter persona, but maintain a steady and respected pseudonymous presence over time, known and respected by you, these people show up to incite, harass, and generally stir up shit. You don't know them, they are "not followed by anyone you know" much of the time. That's one clue. Or if they are, it's random.

 

You could say they are Kremlin trolls organized by the GRU, and maybe they are, but I actually think they are just groups of accounts wrangled by fatherless overweight children sitting in mom's basement a lot of the time who like to annoy. They have a view of themselves as "on mission" on Twitter -- that they go on Twitter to battle Trumpkins "effectively" or own this libs and believe this battle is actually making a difference. Twitter does that to you. It makes you think you are in civic struggle, one appropriate to our time, especially in a pandemic, and you don't realize that maybe the venue is pointless -- even when a poll shows that only 28% of voters -- or whatever the figure is, it's low -- are on Twitter. 

 

I came to this sort of realization back during the Iranian Revolution when I was valiantly RTing information about which foreign embassies were safe to go to, so that Iranians on Twitter, left on even during Maintenance Day (just like in a MMORPG) by the State Department guy, could get this useful information from me, a helpful human rights activist sitting in her pajamas after helping her kids do their homework. That is, instead of, oh, I don't know, trying to get a meeting with the Iranian ambassador (I did that...once...and let me say they have figured out how to make the pistachios saltier than the tiny jug of lemonade for 40 people can address). I imagined that I was really helping people in a crisis. Of course, intellectually, I knew that as I typed the name of a save haven, an Iranian secret policeman was seeing it on Twitter and blocking it. I knew intellectually that the fleeing Iranian was either dead, or smart enough (unlike me) to get off Twitter in a crisis. But Twitter has a way of making you hallucinate like that. Remember that American student saved from an Egyptian jail "by Twitter"? Well, I knew enough to ask about his Egyptian fixer. He stayed in jail. He wasn't saved.

 

Most Twitter skirmishes aren't of this momentous nature of life and death, but people still feel they are "on mission" when they indulge in them. I've taken notes on this for years, so now I'll publish them before reading a book.

 

The Majority of Voters are Not on Twitter

 

I once talked to a Senate staffer about someone who had written some terrible thing on Twitter. This was a non-event. He said he had never heard of him. He didn't even watch Twitter -- it's not just voters, but assistants of elected officials who are savvy but just busy. But, I said, this guy was widely known on Twitter. This drew scorn. I persisted, and said, "But he has a blog and got himself on Huffpo sometimes." This guy said, "I don't read blogs." I mean, this is an anecdote not about clueless staffers, but people who have to worry about, I don't know, how COVID is doing or whether Turkey runs to the arms of Russia or the EU. You know, bigger things. Yet neither you nor I behave as if we have absorbed this fact and live by it, so let's try to at least "minimize harm" and do "harm reduction" for Twitter addicts, shall we?

 

Why No Followees, if Not Followers?

 

So these Ankle-Biters -- they could be a nuclear state with big budgets to do harm; or they could be from Bayonne, NJ. You can't know the difference, but you don't need to. The one thing you *can* do is simply never argue with or respond to people either born yesterday, literally, like a day-old Second Life griefer, or born in 2009, yet with 1 million tweets, yet only a handful of followers. Their obnoxious behaviour may have lowered their count, but really? you only have 31 followers, comrade, after 11 years on Twitter? But more to the point, you only have 29 people you follow? I mean, you aren't following the people you harass at least until they block you? What's up with that?

 

These numbers are a "tell," I have lived through 14 years of Twitter, and it is indisputably verified for me -- and should be for you -- that low follow/low followee, combined with heckling in the midst of a debate or after your tweet of your controversial article or blog post, is a red flag, and it's ok to admit that, and either ignore or block people. Trust me, if you have been "entertaining angels unawares," and that low followee is @jack on his alt or your boss at a real job, you will learn that soon enough. But most times, it is not.

 

AGAIN and PLEASE LISTEN. This is a legitimate way to assess any account, and if you missed a non-Blue-Check who in fact is a famous person and a legitimate commentator who just happens to have a Simpson's cartoon character as his persona and nobody even who likes the Simpsons to follow him, and it turns out the guy actually does voice-overs on the Simpsons, well, so what? He or others will correct the record in due course -- and maybe it doesn't matter, if he talks like a Kremlin troll and behaves like a GamerGate regularly, even if he is famous for something.

 

You know?

 

Difference Between Twitter and Facebook

 

On Facebook, sometimes the method of your "new friends" suddenly fascinated with your article about the KGB, who may be in a chain-smoking GRU agent in a basement in Moscow or -- again, Mom's Basement in Bayonne, and you can't know the difference -- is to take the photo of an actual person in the real world, say the commander of CENTCOM, the US forces in Europe, and send you a friendship request and put on his profile that he is a widower and likes children and dogs -- even as he is inspecting those troops in Estonia or Afghanistan or wherever in real life and -- well, with no dogs. There is far less of this on Twitter because Twitter has more techs and pols and just more savvy people and this doesn't work on them. On Facebook, with more soccer moms and pandemic papas, it can work better and does.

 

CENTCOM Commander Has Time for Moi???

 

I mean, your first clue is that this very busy fellow who you know is running an army isn't likely to find time for YOU, while you may be terribly flattered, but then if you are diligent, you can look up his real profile in the real world and discover far from being a widower, he's happily married with children. He doesn't seem to like dogs, actually. Or he does, but it's a different dog picture.

 

These "different dogs" aren't so hard to find, people. These "friends" aren't smart enough to fix obvious errors like that, and it's especially awful when they either use the photo of a person who was killed in a car accident, or noticed your condolences on Legacy.com to the widow of your dad's army buddy, then wrote you to be your "friend" in your hour of sorrow, not realizing that the army buddy was 87 with Alzheimer's, so the fakester's claim that he always talked about how much he loved playing chess with your Dad in his last years, was likely fake -- and PS there were other clues like a) your father is long dead b) he never played chess.

 

I've had these grotesqueries happen, and on FB it's hard to abuse report them because there isn't a box on the form that says "Is using photo of dead person" or "Is claiming to have talked to Dad who died years ago". They only view these things in terms of "Has this person bothered you?" and then told you, "Well, block him then." Facebook is very, very inadequate to the tasks of the day but that's another story. Fake FB friends also pepper your unsuspecting friends with requests, and therefore may have 6 of them who didn't take a closer look at their fake photo and legend, adding to the sense that they are "ok".  I now don't take any friendship requests because I have been bombarded by so many dead people, famous people, people who are supposedly friends of my friends, that I have to just default to blocking all of them unless a real friend in the real world calls me and says this old guy trying to friend me is actually a former correspondent they know who wants to ask me some factual thing.

 

On Twitter, the set-up is different, the friends aren't quite the same, etc., you know the drill. The chances of someone using the RL photo of a person they are not aren't non-existent, but they are less because people are jaundiced and savvy.

 

Fake Accounts More Sophisticated, Work Better

 

So it's easier to make fake accounts in some way on Facebook and Twitter, and it's easy to eliminate the shoddy fakes on Twitter, anyway.

 

But you don't need any special software or knowledge to realize that people with these aspects of their social media portrait are, shall we say, "organized" or "instrumented" or just chronic jerks. You could point out their mode of discourse, which is to accuse you of not just racism but genocide and CIA employment if you disagree with them, is not very persuasive. People say "don't feed the trolls," but I see very respected and smart journalists answering them, merely to put something on the record. Because they are skilled at this other thing, which is to take the nasty and false claim they made about you, and collect a zillion "likes" and "retweets" on it even though your answer to them should have flattened them (none of their likey-likes are from people who have read your answer or will ever answer it -- it's not in the view). This ability to get their followers and other key-word searchers to amp their response to you, without your original statement being seen, or you subsequent response, is the mark of an Ankle-Biter and the only way to win the game is not to play. Playing seems necessary to put on the record rebuttals of atrocious things said about you, and I get it, and I do it myself. But you can also spot the signs of an Ankle-Biter -- which are different than the classic troll at times, and just cut it short.

 

I believe that the way to tell fakes or "Invalid Interlocutors" is not, at the end of the day, to become adapt at techniques, and skills, and methods because I think those things only embed you more into the madness of Twitter. I think bad behaviour, bad-faith arguments, ill-will -- old norms of behaviour violated -- are more important to watch for and block for. I've had Twitter send me emails telling me as a public service that this person I talked to and interacted with for years turns out to be a Kremlin troll helmed by a state. So even people like me who watch for the signs of fakeness can be snookered, and the point is -- not to care, and to get your news and sources not only from Twitter. There is no other solution.

 

I think it's important to get more study of this phenomenon of the Ankle-Biter, because it is so pernicious, so many people feel they can't brush it away without looking like Blue Chekist or Followist elites and jerks, and so they disarm people not persistent enough to tell them to fuck off because their behaviour is bad. They will endlessly go on calling you a racist and elitist and whataboutist anyway, and won't stop, and sometimes this will stick.  But you can at least BE AWARE that these people are not legitimate, have needlessly gotten your goat, and have no validity in more ways than you imagine.

 

So you get a guy like this, whose snarky stage name ought to have been a marker to actually skip him on Twitter and not answer:

 

 

 

My problem, as with other writers I see on Twitter, as unlike, say Facebook, or Second Life, I haven't internalized the analyzing of profiles to eliminate interlocutors, using the dozens of social markers you develop for those purposes.

 

Why?

Because I don't look at profiles. I feel if I did, I'd fall down a rabbit hole, and that I can't win an argument based on a low follow count on a suspect profile anyway, so I might as well answer "in good faith."

But why? Looking at profiles quickly and seeing tell-tale "Ankle-Biter" status features will help you live your life on Twitter. Do it. 

 

So when you look at this sort of account, you can imagine that @pglover with his lovely sayings and doggy photo is "just a guy," but I wonder if someone who joined in August 2008 -- 13 years ago -- and has managed to send out 13,500 tweets -- not a lot, but still, about 3 a day, which is enough to stay, so to speak, "au courant" can realistically have so few people who follow him. Nobody else I know who speaks in earnest and good will, with that many tweets, or even many times more, has such a low figure.

 

The figure of 91 is low, because many consultants and media people and various other Internet dwellers follow back anyone who follows them to get up the ladder and crack the ceiling. That's the normal ecology of Twitter.

 

But the Ankle-Biter has a different mission. He wants to influence someone by heckling them in the interstices of a debate between two people who have accepted each other as interlocutors, and knee-cap their arguments that may seem "elitist" about low followers or anonymity. That's the game. That's it. You can stop reading now if you like.

So why don't you follow more people and get more followers? I ask, knowing the normal flora and fauna of Twitter.

 

Why?

 

Why Hasn't the Ankle-Biter Hit the Ceiling?

 

So, again, with his passionate interest in correcting people who are wrong on the Internet, why does he only have 91 followers? Is he, shall we say, "not nice"? And why only 634 he himself is following -- and that is not the ceiling? Famous people pride themselves on have 100 million followers and only, say, 13 they follow including their children and their hairdresser, and people in good faith often just prefer not to have a firehose of information, but people in the sort of professional bothering business would follow their targets, no? Until they were blocked? or follow news sites to get ideas? Something? 634 isn't a bad number, but the ceiling is like 2000.

 

I've had to tweet for a living at different jobs for years, and I'm not an expert on Twitter. You can find them online. What I will say is that when you make a new account for some cause you believe in, say, Belarus, or stopping child labour in Uzbekistan, you can't instantly get followers and get noticed unless you buy them, which is a) illegal and b) going to give you a lot of no-shows, creeps, and pornography pitchers in the mix.

 

So you need to get "native" or "organic" followers by the mantra of "you gotta give to get". So you go and follow people in your field and news companies. The system at first stops you at a certain threshold, I believe it's 200 but they change it, or fix it to an algorithm. You can go on more slowly following people, as long as they follow you back, thereby creating more "points" for you in their internal system enabling you to follow others. Work at this a few hours a day, maybe you have 432 in a month. Maybe you double that, maybe you get to 2000 -- which is the hard ceiling for even diligent work, after, let's say 3 months, if you can't work all day at it but have perhaps 45 minutes a day.

 

But then...There you sit, watching accounts leave or join as follows, and you can't get over the 2000. I think the Twitter management should remove or raise this, if they have already policed the system for bots and purchased followers, because it's damn annoying and you can't compete with others in the field who collect followers by following people unrelated to them or their topic or anything, just to goose the system. Or people who get followers not because of Twitter, but because of television.

 

Therefore, if someone who harassed me has 1999 he is following, and only, say, 199 of his fellow jerks following him, that's actually more persuasive than being born in 2008, and having 31 followers. My thesis is that the 2008-born is a purchased account, or an account made by bots, or wrangled by bots or ill-wishers, from whatever entity with whatever agenda, and you should stop paying any attention to them, just like you don't pay attention to day-olds. Somebody bent on proving you wrong in a heated argument who shows up out of nowhere, who can't also collect more than 30 followers or more than 90 he's following over 6 months, let along 10 years, is someone who, shall we say, may not be what he seems. And we can't let the fact that real people with real geolocation may have those features and will be haughtily insulted, the purpose of my post today is to get you to see that there are millions of these accounts, with thousands of them harassing you and others every day, and you need to get better at instantly ignoring them or blocking them.

 

Invalid Interlocutors

 

So this guy @pglover in my mind is, if not suspect, at least what I call "An Invalid Interlocutor". The stats of an account are part of what make up the concept of "Invalid Interlocutor" for me -- I have dozens of other concepts I have formulated and written about and I'll post on that another day, but today, let's focus on just the stats.

 

Because I don't want to talk to anonymous people with a zillion tweets who can't get followed even to the normal point of 400 or 2000. I've been on Twitter since 2007 and have less than 4000 followers. That means a) I didn't work at it b) I have controversial opinions people don't like. That's fine, you may, too, and the Ankle-Biters may, too, but I actually think there's more to them which justifies are blocking of them more quickly.

 

But I wasn't born in 2007 or 2008 and have only 31 followers. And neither were you. So let's make these accounts invalid socially, and force them to do better at faking and harassing -- where they will be more obvious, or less, but at least not able to use THIS gambit.

 

The Lady Doth Protest Too Much

 

Anyone who starts carrying on with an objection to your elitism because you invoked their low follows is someone who is not organically in the real low-follow column because such people will say, "I don't have time for Twitter," "I'm disabled and on oxygen and can only type 30 minutes a day"  or "I'm here to learn," or something that may be authentic, or may be fake, but doesn't require another answer from you.

 

The "geniuses" who guilt-trip you, who claim to think that means you are being haughty and "followist" by thinking that only people with lots of followers or even the Blue Check "count", is a social engineer. He knows that by turning your suspicion of low follows against you, he has triggered you into self-defense and guilt about your followist values, thinking only people with 100,000 followers matter. Listen closely to the point here: this is not about arguing what the true merit of follows are. It's about realizing that manipulators goad you and try to turn a valid suspicion into a social commentary you feel called upon to answer, and sometimes, through many rounds. The real person without time or in a wheelchair doesn't feel that need -- he doesn't goad and doesn't engender a follow-up.

 

Because people are so invested in followdom and put it on their resumes, and then feel guilt-tripped or feel they have to justify themselves to the little people, they can get faux-angry as the Woke do if you question low follows. So they join the Ankle-Biter in harassing you and querying pointedly why you have these bourgeois, elite values -- values they have with a Blue Check or a million followers, of course, but ones that they think you can be crushed over and not them. It's sneaky. It's hard to get out of this feedback loop.

 

But that's not what I mean.  Let's try to set aside elitism, Blue Checks (some people have them to prevent harassment by "False Dmitrys" and not vanity).

 

I mean that in a world where people interested in a topic or a cause can get 2000 followers, or let's say 432 and then 864 by due diligence, as I have done in various NGOs or at media sites myself, then they should not have only 30 or 91 or 123 at the age of 11 or 13 in Twitter years. They should have more. So it's not about prestige. It's about trust, which is not built when someone has not just 30 followers, but they've only been interested to FOLLOW 30 people as well. So I want the Kremlin trolls and the vested in Mom's Basement to have to work harder at harassing me -- I want them to have 2000 witnesses to their bad behaviour, or at least to have to lose time faking that with their machines or their time budget.

 

How Do Ankle-Biters Find You?

 

So, you ask, how did they cross the street to come heckle you about, say, the troops deployed before, during and after January 6 and your attempt to understand this and form a view about this? If they are a followers of yours, or you follow them, or they follow someone you re-tweeted, understood. But that's not who they are.

 

Because they sit and key-word search all day. So they find these conversations and interrupt them. This stands out more on Facebook so that when you and a group of your close friends who go to your church are debating a topic like abuse by priests, and they show up with not only no friends, the picture of a famous person who ought to have friends, and begins barking at you, they stand out, so you ban them. On Twitter, there are too many millions of Ankle-Biters, so you can't control them, seemingly, by blocking. There's always another.

 

Examine your own behaviour on Twitter which you yourself know as authentic, to assess the behaviour of Ankle-Biters.

 

I seldom key-word search unless someone has died and I'm attempting to see if anyone put up the news yet, or I have in Russian a notice that someone is arrested, and I don't want to sit and translate it, so I'll see if it is in English. That is sure, I keyword search for cause, for a purpose, for news.

 

What I don't do, and I think most people of good will don't do, is say, hmm, I have an opinion on January 6, or I have an opinion on abolishing the police, or BLM, let me sit and keep searching and Googling on those terms like "BLM" or "Jan 6" until I find someone who says something I don't like, and heckle them. It's THAT behaviour that stands out for the Ankle-biters.

 

Why Ankles?

 

Why "ankle-biters"? They seem to bite your face, who you are as a person in the real world who has given your identity, so why "ankles"? Because when you state your opinion on Twitter as a real person findable in the real world, or when you put out a fact you have researched that someone doesn't like, you are on a ledge. You are "out there". You are walking a tightrope. And when you do that, there will always be people who want to bite your ankles and make you fall down. Keep walking, and block them.

 

The cost that Ankle-Biters can inflict is very high. If you study the situations where people are fired from their jobs, embarrassed, harassed, forced into apologies, sure, sometimes it's their actual assignment editor or managing editor or boss or some real figure like that. But sometimes it's somebody with the name of a cartoon character born in 2008 with 31 followers. Why do they count? Why do people let them count? Why does ANY editor allow them to be embedded in a news article of a respectable outlet EVER? Why are they stampeded into "followism" concerns and unable to ask questions about why someone has so few people to follow -- if not followers they've attracted -- in 11 years of tweeting 1.5 million times? These are warning signs. Look at the accounts of people you dislike, but who have real names in the real world. That ratio doesn't hold for them. Look at people who are maybe your aunt who is timid on Twitter but who you know is real. She won't have tweeted 1.5 million times, she won't have harassed people, she won't have deleted her tweets, she will lurk and have 32 follows and among her cat pictures might be an opinion on 1/6, but it's not the profile I'm calling out here.

 

Who is This Guy?

 

It may be that @pglover, or "Skip Intro," one of my hecklers (he might follow me to keep heckling me, or might not) really is a designer of video games, a GamerGate famous person, or a dog lover, or a lover of silly Internet jokes about butts, and that's all there is to it. He has tweets that seem to indicate this. Maybe he's a health care company employee, or maybe bug catcher for an IT department, or maybe merely a patient, who knows. Maybe the other guy with the forest picture is the real Derich March, a CEO, a man with that name you can find. Or this guy (are they the same?) But I don't think so. Because I think that real Derich will care more about follows and following, you know? That is the "display name" of "Derich March" on this account created with this handle might or might not be the REAL "Derich March".  I frankly don't have time now to go research whether he is or isn't. BECAUSE IT DOES NOT MATTER IF HE IS FAKE OR REAL, PSEUDONYMOUS OR WITH A REAL NAME, HE'S STILL AN ANKLE-BITER.

 

I don't have time to Google him or @pglover today, and you don't need to. Maybe he's a real guy, or his typist here will express faux-indignance at my distrust. But I view him -- real or fake -- as a warrior in the Twitter wars in which some people have created or wrangled bot or account armies, and I'd prefer Twitter to be a civilian struggle. That is, he could be a sentient being who entered into the Twitter wars as a real soldier, not a bot, not a wrangled account, but he still has signs on his profile that mean YOU DON'T NEED TO TALK TO HIM. 

 

His follows are low, so when @pglover snipes like this, not even getting the point, thinking he's "laid you low" by invoking the Soviet "whataboutism"...

 

 

with the typical argument meant to guilt-trip a "followist" you move on:

 

 

You can move on. To the next one -- or not.

 

 

 

 

I take him as an example but he's an account of somebody nagging and heckling me, but he is much newer. Not even a year.  Would that real CEO or that Cisco guy "Deric March" have only joined Twitter NOW? Really? Maybe he didn't like Twitter. Not born yesterday, but bored in the pandemic, possible, a lover of green spaces, who has put Woody Guthrie's guitar as his photo, a signal that not everyone will understand, but which means he's a lefty folkie lover and against the Vietnam War or maybe the Iraq War. He puts "Dad" so you know he's a good guy, and maybe he is a dad. He puts "entrepreneur" so you don't think he's in the German or Russian Communist Party and his arguments come from their ideology, although they may very well come from such things. Etc.

 

While Andy Greenberg is not old enough to remember Woody Guthrie's guitar in real time, he made his book on WikiLeaks a version of this title; it's popular. So this "Derich" or fakester may or may not be real-time or tech-familiar, but still, it's not typical. Most people do not use this guitar from real-time or its modern invocation. And if they do they follow more people.

 

And as an aside: I refuse to get into a debate about what "heckling" is, and somehow concede broad-mindedly that someone who talks to you when you have not talked to them, who keeps arguing with you even though you haven't sought further discussion, is not a heckler. Because he is. You don't know him. You don't follow him. He found you in a giant thread of a famous person, or key-word searching, he needs to "call you out" and "set you straight" -- has has Ankle-Biter status. No question. Our job here is to AVOID ANKLE-BITERS, NOT FIND PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS FOR THEM.

 

So I really do not give a good goddamn whether this guy is that actual CEO tech guy of that actual company or what-the-hell and turns out to be a jerk -- or a fake using his name. I don't NEED to find that out; I don't need to do forensics; I don't need to call California. Because this guy has a "tell" which is LOW FOLLOWS and that is LEGITIMATE.

 

Guess what, there's another count with that display name who is also born in 2009 and also has low follower numbers. 

Maybe THAT Derich Marsh just doesn't like Twitter. Understood.

 

So, looking closer, bored Pandemic Lost-His-Business Dad  Derich Marsh (let's say, to ascribe to him some actuality in the real world)....still has only 61 followers, despite a relatively sizeable number of tweets. Why? With his passionate desire to enter the conversation you are having with the one pseudonymous, although at least polite and credible interlocutor you've found to debate the merits of troop deployment.

 

Mind you, these chats take place under the tweet of a giant among Blue Checks, Michael Bechloss, with his zillion of followers, his books, his deep knowledge of presidential history, and his ability to plant provocative tweets while he spends the day in real life, making real money, and not carrying about the havoc among his Twitter followers, because none of them will ever, ever get him fired. Bechloss now has 6,236 retweets, 634 quoted tweets, and a whopping 37,600 "likes". His reach, which is gadzillion more numbers of accounts has been assured by Ankle-Bitters that came and sniped at people RTing or quoting him. That's how Twitter works. That's the insight. Twitter is based on empty calories which is why Bechloss still writes book to influence people, still gives talks to make money, and has real meetings with real people in meat-world if he actually wants his insights to influence people. On Twitter, he is merely throwing chum to sharks.

 

So maybe Pandemic Dad just found you because you answered Bechloss -- which means he had the patience to scroll through literally thousands of answers. (YOUR view of your own answer is at the top -- his view is NOT).

 

That's another sign. Who does that? Who has the time? Who LOOKS FOR an answer to a Blue Check 1,000 lines into the "thread" which isn't really a thread (it's one provocative tweet with jillions of answers) -- doesn't like that answer, and decides you need a talking-to? Only -- now we're talking -- he could be someone instrumented, with an agenda, and for that purpose, using fake accounts or wrangled accounts. A real Dad with a real Woody Guthrie guitar ethos with a real Google-findable company will not have the time to do that or even the inclination. Why? Because he will follow people. Lots more of them. He'll follow people he likes. He'll get followed back by other Guthrie lovers who oppose wars. He will have a modest but reasonable set of numbers. 

 

I want common sense, logic, and above all -- your own knowledge of your own authentic Twitter behaviour -- to guide you here, so that you stop letting a goof like this make you feel defensive when you call out his low numbers. His low numbers confirm his Ankle-Biter status -- don't bother with him any more. You can block him, and listen to 10 other of his fake pals call you out for "not being willing to hear the truth," or you can ignore him and not bother to block him and give him that pleasure. You can "mute" him so he doesn't appear in your feed, but doesn't know he's blocked. I don't care if Robert Scoble himself calls me and tells me this guy is real and legit and lives next door. He's identified as an Ankle-Biter -- you know what to do.

 

Why Haven't I Called This Out Earlier?

 

Now, why haven't I written about this phenomenon I noticed back in 2010, if not earlier?  Low-follows = fake. Low-follows= still a jerk even if real. Same with followers!

 

Yet I've often treated each skirmish as a one-off, saying sometimes in shocked realization (because I don't first study a profile before responding -- everyone should!), oh, you're a low follow! You're born in 2009. These two factors are enough to discredit nearly everybody who harasses me; they ought to do the same for you.

 

But...who wants to give them ideas, so they make their fake accounts better? Because at this point, seeing too many journalist and NGO friends wasting time on Ankle-Biters, I want them to get a little more discriminating. Yes, if the fakesters get better at making more realistic accounts that oldbies like me on Twitter can't see through, that's not good. But my thinking is that along the way to doing that, they will have to get real followers, and follow real people, not just fakesters like themselves. That is sure, the Kremlin kitchens have the ability to get fake accounts to sit and follow each other day to be more persuasive, but various other non-state actors may not have the time or scripts to do that.

 

It's within our power to make Twitter better, not by giving it up for Lent, not by scolding ourselves for being addicted, not by never posting, but by becoming aware of this simple phenomenon which pertains in the majority of nasty encounters on Twitter, and can be made less, if not eliminated, by just more awareness.

 

History of Twitter

 

And again, it's important to know: Twitter did not police scripts and bots before X date. 2010? I don't know. But certainly not 2007, 2008, 2010. (If you need to Ankle-Bite on THAT topic, that's fine; if you don't know that and don't believe it, go and Google it).

 

I was there, however. I stood witness to the debates on this; I saw big guns in Silicon Valley purchase followers and use those scripts to add followers because they could, because their behaviour with a new tool is to kick the tires until it breaks, they like doing that. That havoc is left for the next 10 years isn't of interest to them, they left Twitter for Facebook and now they are in Clubhouse. Whatever. Read my old post about my concern regarding Robert Scoble's conversion of Congress to Twitter; I felt someday, there would be a senator or a president who would have followers he could block, thereby rendering "the right of the people to assemble" and "make known their concerns" etc. would be thwarted. Well, was I wrong about that?

 

So frankly, anybody from 2009 that I didn't know from Second Life or a Tech Crunch conference -- the only people really caring about Twitter back then -- is not someone who I want to be my "friend". Because: scripts. Sure, tell me about the new bots and the new scripts etc. etc. I get it as a concept but I don't need to hear all the details. Yes, I remember once I picked out the fact that a certain publication from Crimea was on the desk of a certain very popular Internet figure. But he didn't know Russian. But he wasn't Russian and didn't seem to be a Russian plant. So why? Because that shopper had ads for bot farms you could buy. That was my theory.

 

Breaking Bad with an RGB Mug

 

Now let's come to Gretchen, who has the name of a "Breaking Bad" character - yeah, by one letter difference. Of course, this is possibly a real name in the real world. Will it be in Montreal, where there are a lot of French names? Sure, Montreal is a big city with all kinds of people in it. That's not a marker. Still, if you see a "Breaking Bad" character's name -- not one of the main characters, so people may not notice it unless they binge watched, and even one letter off -- if you see a capital of the world where a lot, if not all, are Francophone, well, put up your antennae a little? You know? It's ok.

 

 

 

Here's a newbie Tweeter, two months old, old enough not to have been banned for harassment and violating the TOS, but still, suspect, because, as I keep on saying, if you care about politics and things like troops and January 6, why are you following only 159 people? You CAN follow more. You didn't, because either they blocked you or you don't care, you are not there to really engage authentically. You have so few followers because people don't like being harassed on Twitter or talked down to or at the receiving end of a pushed meme or canned thought.

 

Are you trying not to be noticed, except for those times when you come into the interstices of a debate like I'm having, and heckle me? So, go through the routines -- which I'm not afraid of -- and call out low followers and "Montreal" and "Breaking Bad" and hear all kinds of "legit" answers to those markers of fakeness. I am fearless and can't be fired from a job, I don't have one. Are you? Do you? But at least be curious about "31" in a case like this.

She's going to try to be "sophisticated", however, and first play the "granny" card which will disarm people; she will say "Montreal" so that no one will ask whether she is in a Blue or Red State; she will say "music" which is a crowd pleaser. Yep, checks all the Kremlin troll or bot farmer boxes, but what if she really is a music-loving granny, and your jaundiced eye questioning her followers or anything about her whole shtick is wildly wrong? 

 

Mugs on Mugs 

 

 

Well, long-time Twitter users, not just observers of Kremlin fakes and such notice an obvious thing -- her mug does not fit on her face correctly (and trust me, I am NOT an expert on this; I am not formally trained; I used to do this job for 5 years but don't now, and don't wish to for lots of reasons). A little observation with a little naked eye will get your spidy sense up that something doesn't sit right. I've reversed the photo to help see it better, that helps sometimes.

 

 

A real mug on a real face, which you can find anywhere among your real friends "places" better and doesn't block the hand or fingers supposedly holding it and is in better proportion to the face, even if a big mug. There's another obvious thing about it but because I didn't blow it up and really go at it, I didn't notice.

 

Pushing Further

 

So the basics are, you just Google search a photo like that -- will you discover she has taken this photo from a car accident victim? No, she's not that stupid.

 

Second, just cut out the eyes, because the mug is "funny," and the eyes may match. Then reverse, search for that, too. Search with key words, etc. Nope, they don't turn up anything, again, they aren't stupid. These are old tricks that now they compensate for. You may still find people who have been careless enough to harass you and learn your home address who forgot their photo was taken from a beloved granny who died 10 years ago, but there are less people like that now.

 

 

Then you reverse the photo of the eyes or segment again, always an important step in examining anything that looks funny, because the laziest trick of fakers is just to reverse the image. So go on Tin Eye or reverse it yourself on Paint or a free program, then search again. Many a "tractor driver" claiming to be "from Donbass" would forget that reversing his photo was not a "thing," that any idiot could un-reverse him and find he was in Tambov really, from birth, except for his "summer vacation".

 

So now what? No searches come up. Seems like granny may be legit. Her mug doesn't sit right, but you didn't find another granny without a mug. If you say "your mug was photoshopped," she will find another photo of herself with the mug and the web site she ordered from it. This will go on for days, weeks.

 

If you are motivated, by something like the invasion of a country, you might dredge down in the Google results or try some other stuff (and no, please, examination of "metadata", as I generally find, is USELESS as fakes on Twitter are smart enough to STRIP THAT OUT or distort it, as anyone can easily do. This one says NO METADATA, for good reason).

 

Mugging the Mug

 

Well, let's go back to that funny mug. Run it through one of the free programs all over the Internet that show you what MIGHT be fakes but which are NOT definitive. Still, the white mug here stands out as having been, shall we say, "parachuted in". It has NO metadata because it's been stripped. It has all that other stuff you can study and write dissertations on, I'm not interested, I don't play Twitter much and I don't play THIS Twitter came for fun or profit. I feel citizen journalists are neither citizens nor journalists, but I'll talk about that another day. 

 

But what it does have is a funny white spot.

 

 

So now comes time to ask "Gretchen" about her dropped-in white mug. Remember, I haven't even noticed the MAIN THING about this photo which the smarties would have seen because I have not LOOKED. Life is short, then you die.

 

I've just concluded after using this tool and reading up about it -- though sure, I could be horribly wrong, that there is some tinkering here.

 

She can argue all kinds of things. The free "forensic" photo service is flawed, here are 10 real grannies harmed by it (they try this ploy often). Or, that doesn't prove anything (she's right, it doesn't). Or, the forensic service is owned by evil Facebook or evil CIA and their software is destroying society. Whatever distraction is possible, she might deploy, but still, there is is, that funny thing -- the whiteness of an object in the environment with no gradation, just "popped in" to the photo, indicating "Photoshop".

 

"That One Time, On Facebook..."

 

Aaaannnnd....here's the conversation:

 

So, hilariously, she reveals MORE information on the way to trying to deny what little actual suspect stuff you've found. I didn't notice that in the real world of real selfies, your "RGB" on an RGB mug would look this this, with the mirror effect: 

 

 

Or maybe not, depending on how they took the "selfie" and with which program, but her "cover story" here does win the prize today.

 

But here's her conversation, ringing all the chimes on all the themes you'd expect -- all using the Saul Alinsky methods -- which are actually synthesized Lenin methods -- to put you off balance.

 

 

 

The last, is my re-focusing her on her first comment to me, which kind of gives the lie to her idea that she's "not trying to set anyone straight".

 

So now, comes the icing on the cake, a contorted admission that is as phony as a three-dollar bill, along the way with some valiant efforts to make jabs about spelling (calculated to induce guilt or embarrassment). That is, the GRU or the kid in the basement who is just annoying (and you can't know the difference -- no you can't) is going to go find a real granny in Montreal and produce her for you, because that may be part of the operation. And that's fine, because tricks and tips and tools are fine in their way, and useful to undermine something like this, but the real "tell" was more about how people really talk in the real world -- and you've lost touch with that, and even before the pandemic.

 

 

 

Oh, gosh. Who among us hasn't had one of those OCD friends on Facebook who contacts you about your account photo and says they've been bothered by that reverse "RGB" for months -- years -- and want to fix it as a sign of respect to the late and great Supreme Court judge.

 

Why, surely you have several people IMing you even as we speak! LOL  

 

Don't let the fact that there is no Gretchen Swartz on Facebook with this picture stop you from indignation!

 

A "Reverse RBG" in SO Many Ways

 

But the comedy gold was that once you stand up to a person like this, and unmask them, they may tell you something more. I didn't even notice the backward "RBG" but she now thinks I did, and has contorted her "cover story" accordingly. Fascinating? She could have just talked about the dropped-in white mug (or the stencil of one mug on to another) -- which is dropped in to cover a face, which may or may not be real, or not originally an RGB mug but one with BUT FIRST, COFFEE stenciled on it. She could have just talked about the mug. Instead, she talked about the reversed RGB I didn't even notice, my eyesight isn't great.

 

So now you see how contorted her stories are, and her alibis, and that alone tells you are dealing with a) an organized, instrumented force like a state or b) a kid with lots of time on their hands who enjoys picking wings off flies.

 

A person like this will go on lying like a QAnon for days and weeks with ever more convoluted back stories but as I said, not playing Twitter. "Not today, Satin" as the kids say.

 

I could tune in 2 weeks from now just out of curiousity -- are any of these people banned? When about once a quarter, I check "Who Unfollowed Me," it's odd that so many of them are in this category from that utility: "23 people have unfollowed you who were removed from the system," i.e. after heckling you for days on end, they must have committed a Twitter offense, mild or severe, buying accounts or botting, or harassing people, and they're gone. They unfollowed me, then got b& as the kids say.

 

I'll just park this one here now, because I see ANOTHER one of these Ankle-Biters, "@DeboraMaffei2" is still nattering responses to comments about her fake name, which is unable to be found anywhere in the known universe, saying it could be a real name or maybe just a name to protect her from stalkers blah blah blah, even though yesterday, she said "medicine" as if to imply the one person who had a name like that WAS her. Real doctors don't have time to heckle people on Twitter, however.

 

 

Deep Storage

 

Another fun experiment is to take a person who harassed you, who has 31 followers, and only 1900 tweets, and then see a month later if they go dormant and never talk again for a year. Because she's in deep storage until she is trotted out on another ankle-biting mission. If they have Tweet Deck, and multiple browsers and computers, people can play this all day long with hordes of accounts, retiring and activating them at will, and never worrying about follow count. It may be automated with the ability to talk normally. Or not. I don't care. What I want you to do, is to make it harder for people like this to do it, and guilt-trip you as a followist.

 

Real Interlocutors

 

Twitter should be a place where you talk to not just real people in the real world as you should on Facebook, but something different, if the person doesn't use their real name. Any Ankle-Biter trying to make THAT argument -- as one is now as we speak -- doesn't get it that I have been deeply immersed in studies of pseudonomity and its uses since before they were born, and that's NOT what Ankle-Biters are about, nor should be credit for, or given the benefit of the doubt about. Real pseudonyms do not protect manipulators -- because they don't manipulate. Real pseudonyms don't keep people from accountability -- because they are accountable. You know?

 

Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall know them." That ought to be all you need in the way of training to be on the Internet and have a useful conversation, and avoid idiots and people who will harm you. But people don't read the Bible, don't go to church, and don't think about parables any more, and prefer having forensic tools that enable them to swagger around as -- what I've said before and will say again -- citizens who are not citizens, who are not civic or civil, far from the scene -- and journalists who are not journalists, and have no ethics or skills or editors.

 

So yeah, I'll talk to people like this even if they have pseudonyms:

 

o a person who has a persona, but who is consistent -- they don't play anti-Kremlin for 3 years then bite you if you criticize Snowden and the next thing you know they are celebrating Steve Bannon. That's a red flag. Real pseudonymous people don't criticize Snowden in 2013 and worship him in 2021.

 

o a person who doesn't argue that you are suspect for suspecting fake names because you don't understand pseudonyms -- real people with monikers for the Internet don't feel the need to heckle you on this score.

 

o a person who may have a pseudonym, but doesn't just push memes and photos and slogans but talks reasonably in coherent sentences. That is, real pseudonymous people don't think a photo trumps every argument.  How could it? The observant will have noted it has 40 soldiers in it, not 400 and not 4000, and the space they occupy is only one part of one side of a building that is 27,336 square feet, not a city block typical of, say, New York City, which is 660 by 330 or 217,800 square feet, and (for extra credit) faces out at possible demonstrators not in the picture, but has no demonstrators in the building behind them.

 

This photo is emblematic of many things for many people, and sometimes completely opposite things, but it may not make your argument in the best way, and you can be more curious. Questioning this photo and its forensics or social meaning, doesn't mean you can't condemn the killing of a demonstrator in Charlottesville; of course you do! Or that you can't condemn the looting of stores by Proud Boys in December 2020; that you somehow endorse the abhorrence of January 6. Of course you do. You just think it's ok to debate the size of troop deployments for different occasions.

 

It just means that you want to have a critical conversation about what factors go into troop deployment; that you have read newspapers and Wikipedia articles that show enormous amounts of damage from looting and rioting by seeming BLM supporters, if not actual BLM marchers, who were mainly peaceful. That you are trying to get the information to make a balance sheet, not be moved -- or threatened into silence -- by one photo.

 

That you want to THINK. That you want to understand why the Black Mayor of DC did not request the troops, or find out who is supposed to request them if not she. Etc. Etc. You may, or may not, after the kind of deliberative thinking that goes into that process, if in good faith, say, yes, federal troops are racist because they overdeploy for BLM and underdeploy for Proud Boys. I actually am not making such a glib pronouncement because I believe it is complicated. I think I'm capable of showing concern about deploying federal troops to Portland where they don't belong, yet ask why Portland's leaders let get things out of hand. I'm capable of supporting BLM broadly but still asking questions about the enormous amount of lost livelihoods of immigrants and BIPOCs which were destroyed by their supporters. People don't like balance sheets that might seem to pit one killing at one demonstration and a few looted stores against two killings at another demonstration with no looted stores by different parties, even if they can go back years. I don't care. I want to think. I know that calling a group of federal troops that may include Blacks among them or not "racist" is not to end racism.

 

But the FBI...

 

Yeah, I'm able to read, too, ya know?

 

The FBI has said a contradictory thing: it does not monitor ideology and police thought, and only looks at crimes against persons and property, and therefore can't tell you about anti-fa's guilt. Yet it has also said that it can tell you that the majority of cases of violence and terrorism in the US are perpetrated by white supremacists. So I can say I accept that, as you should, since by all forms of evidence in the media and by credible groups, it appears to be true, but I can also point out that it is contradictory given their claim that they "can't" tell which violence is perpetrated by anti-fa (when they can by white supremacists); that it raises issues about political surveillance and the legacy of watching MLK. 

 

I can do this without taking shit from a grandma from Montreal who loves folk music who has photoshopped her RGB mug on to her own mug, surely undermining her credibility, whatever her crazy cover story is. I can do this even if I can't prove she did this because she has 31 followers and was born 2 months ago, or 11 years ago and has been silent. I can do this, without playing "citizen journo" all day on Twitter and becoming as bad as the perpetrators in the process -- and so can you.

 

 

 

 

So some of the people who harassed me in this conversation, who have funny names, pictures that look fake, but 4000 followers and the ability to stay on topic and be polite, I might continue to "friend," but honestly, as I said, I can't play Twitter for long. It's enervating.  I will come on daily, I'll try to stay "current", I won't let the threat of job loss intimidate me into silence. 

 

Twitter, Your Boss

 

Twitter is still the assignment desk for mainstream and alternative media. That isn't going to change although it's appalling. Twitter putting Net Nanny crap in to tell you to read an article that you just read -- or, hilariously, may have even written -- is not going to curb this.

 

Closer examination of "Friends" with Internet tools or common sense -- frankly, that's not worth much, either. And people playing this game live for their new endorphin rush, which is finding out "Granny" has a photoshopped mug and her comments in favour of Russia in Ukraine, let's say, therefore are "sus" as the kids say.  There are a  lot of people who get a lot of adrenalin rushes from exposing fakes on Twitter, and I fear the fakesters know that and keep their victims hooked deliberately, waiting for the day when they can really poison them well and truly.

 

I think if you are a journalist, you need to put on two masks and pad out to the neighbourhood or go to the thing, and report, and wash your hands well afterward, if you aren't in a risk group. You need to call on the phone and try to talk to a person. If you can't or won't do those things, then at least craft a more substantive email and try to get answers to it. Don't get it all from your new friends on Twitter.

 

Low follows/followees discredit people. They always have. They always will. You need not talk to them. They need not guilt-trip you. Let's have arguments with people who are accountable and have witnesses and play Twitter in good faith. Not fake accounts put in storage for 11 years and wheeled out only once to harass you before they go to sleep again. Let's have conversations with real people, even if they have pseudonyms, who behaved well enough, and were interesting enough, to have even a modest number of normal followers.

 

Obama Fisks His Way Through Romney Challenge on Benghazi

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

This was written back in 2012 during presidential candidate debates, but not published for some reason, so I publish it now re: Obama and terrorism.

It was really quite a moment -- the debate was really real at that moment and not canned presentations of pre-packaged statistics and anecdotes.

Romney rightly challenged Obama on his failure to forthrightly state that the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi were organized by Al Qaeda -- were terrorist attacks -- and not something that evolved spontaneously out of demonstration by angry mobs insulted by the anti-Muslim video.

It did indeed take days -- weeks -- for the White House to finally come around to admitting that the attack on the embassy was organized and planned and not spontaneous -- it was on September 11, after all -- and was done by Al Qaeda, not ordinary people angry at a video.

It was wonderful to see Romney simply and sincerely keep coming back and challenging the president directly.

Glaring like a trapped animal, Obama said it wasn't true, and to get the transcript.

Romney held his ground and didn't budge -- really? he said. Because he knew the truth and that the transcript would bear him out.

Unfortunately, Candy Crawford, trying to ameliorate what she must have felt was an uncomfortably raw fight between two males, butted in then and claimed that the transcript would show the president was telling the truth.

Crawford then somewhat compensated for her blundering in to this very important challenge by saying that it was true it did take the White House 14 days to get to the point where they dropped the "spontaneous mob" bit.

The transcript is easily found online.

And it to be sure, it does contain the search string "act of terror" -- and the geeky gotcha gang might thing it's Romney who lied, not Obama.

But Obama is -- let's at least say prevaricating, and certainly literalizing and Fisking -- that is, taking something isolated out of a claim when challenged that is very literally true in a narrow sense and flogging it as if it were true in the larger sense -- so named for the master of this annoying know-it-all debating technique, Robert Fisk.

Because when the president says "no act of terror" at the end, it's a generic phrase, a coda about all such acts, not a specific acknowledgement that Benghazi was such a terrorist attack. No way.

Commentary had this analyzed days ago thoroughly, and also took us through the various pundits out there who sided with the president and wouldn't admit the larger point, either. It's like the efforts Obama and his Truth Team made after his "you didn't build that" speech to try to spin it back to whether it didn't sound so bad.

The "no act of terror" comment at the end of the Rose Garden speech was not an admission that the attack wasn't due to a spontaneous mob, but was planned by Al Qaeda. Not at all. Read the transcript. It's unmistakable.

We know it. And at some level Obama knows it, judging from the fierce and angry glare in his eye when confronted on this.

And if you aren't happy with what's an obvious generic reference that isn't at all what we mean by an admission about Benghazi as terrorism, go over to Obama's UN speech, where he keeps referring to the hate video. The word "terrorist" appears once -- in relationship to Iran only.

Not Benghazi.

Obama said, "That is what we saw play out in the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world."

He didn't say "Al Qaeda". And worse, while Obama said this rightly:

It is time to marginalize those who -- even when not directly resorting to violence -- use hatred of America, or the West, or Israel, as the central organizing principle of politics. For that only gives cover, and sometimes makes an excuse, for those who do resort to violence.

-- he also set back years of efforts to prevent a global blasphemy resolution at the UN with this zinger:

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Er, "slander" the prophet? Who gets to decide what that means? The OIC? Mobs outside embassy gates?

Obama's handling of the attacks in Cairo and of course Benghazi and other Muslim cities was weak and emanated from an unsound foreign policy to begin with dating back to the apologetic 2009 Cairo Speech. And Romney is right to call him out on this.

 

No, Jeremy David Johnson, "Sean's Smith's Last Words in a Game" is Not a Conspiracy Theory

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I'm always fascinated that anyone quotes my little blog in their article or book, let alone scholarly dissertation -- and often, given their wild prejudices in the Silicon Valley milieu so uncritical of tech and the Internet, they get it absolutely wrong.

So let me refute the many errors in this thesis by Jeremy David Johnson, published in 2014 regarding my own blog. It's scary to me that an academic could get a degree based on false reading like that, and today, be teaching others, and it doesn't matter. It's yet another indication of how people don't read online; they only scan for search-strings that fit their limited preconceptions .

Not a Conservative

There author is puzzled why "the conservative writers" for this site would quote the left-wing Guy Debord. Well, that's because I'm not a conservative writer (PS, there is only one of me, and no other authors here -- most people don't click on "about me" and they feel articles are "anonymous," which is silly, given that my name is under "about me," but that's why I try to remember to put in a by-line.) How did Johnson get the idea there were "conservative authors"? Because he didn't bother to click on "about me" and discover there was one. But more than that, he assumed that if somebody said something -- anything! -- critical about the Obama Administration's handling of the Benghazi tragedy, they "must" be conservative -- or worse! If they raised gamer Sean Smith, who died serving his country in Benghazi, as apparently Glen Beck has (although I hadn't seen anything from Beck at the time or now), my blog "must" be a "conspiracy theory". It's a very good example of force-field interpretation. If you say something "like" what someone has said in some other political grouping, regardless of what you actually said on that point or numerous others, you "must" be associated with that same political grouping. It's called "cluster thinking". I'm not a cluster thinker.

I'm a registered Democrat; I voted for Hillary Clinton. Some of my criticism of Russia, socialism, technology, open-source culture, etc. feels like it is "conservative" to some readers. I would suggest then that they do not have a very grounded understanding of the humanities and particularly human rights principles; I think my critique is liberal, not conservative, but ultimately I don't care, as I read conservatives as well as liberals and leftists every day and don't feel compelled to defend an identity. But clearly for Johnson, anyone criticizing any Democratic official, even someone who voted for the Obama Administration, must be "conservative". There can't be criticism!

But I don't have a conspiracy theory about Benghazi, and don't think it's a cover-up by Democrats.  I do think it was a planned attack, not a spontaneous riot reacting to a movie that offended Muslims -- it seems the planned nature of Benghazi on the part of the terrorists is not in dispute now, but was at the time.

Benghazi Was Not Spontaneous But a Planned Terrorist Attack

THAT was the issue at the time I wrote the blog -- a "version" of the story put out initially by some elements of the Obama Administration, consistent with their beliefs, that the attack was "spontaneous". It was not. And that is no longer in dispute today. I voted for Obama for his first term (and voted for Romney because of Obama's awful policies on Russia and Iran). I'm as critical of Victoria Nuland as anyone (including most bashers of "neo-cons," which I am not, either -- although I have absolutely no problem with her handing out bagels to the demonstrators on Maidan). I fail to see why we can't question statements coming out of the Obama Administration then or now, regardless of our political persuasions.

As I've made clear in another blog post, I think the tragedy of Benghazi isn't about what most people debated -- whether or not President Barack Obama was soft on terrorism and he and the State Department failed to hear warning signs or covered up the true nature of the tragedy. Yes, there are debates to be had about what happened in Egypt and the US Embassy there, and in general about Obama's reluctance to condemn terrorists, but that's separate from the facts on the ground about Benghazi as such. Yes, Rice gave out a version of the story based on her own internal briefings that does not seem a full account of the indications of the planned nature of the attack, which you can later read on CNN, if you don't want to hear it from me.  Eventually, Obama's own director of national intelligence said that in his report that the attack wasn't a spontaneous mob, as initially believed (due to events in Cairo) but was a planned, terrorist attack. So what? State Department briefings, like journalism, are a first draft of history.

Liberal Do-Good Mindset

I personally think the tragedy is rooted rather more specifically in the ambassador's -- and State Department's -- liberal culture of do-goodism and better-worlding. There is not enough understanding of evil and evil actors in the world, and too much assumption that these evils are fixed with improved nutrition, one laptop per child, Internet access, and clean water.  Meanwhile, the reason the UN calls a situation like Benghazi a "complex disaster" is because it is complex, i.e. man-made as well as natural, planned as well as random.

And it is a tragedy -- a story of human error -- and not a conspiracy, as far as I can tell. I myself have some insight into the "do-good culture", because I have been immersed in it in the human rights movement my whole life. Few want to blame the ambassador or his immediate superiors -- they wanted to blame Hillary Clinton or Susan Rice -- neither of whom are to blame whatsoever in my view, despite their roles at the time. (The lawsuit by the victims against Hillary failed, and that's as it should be.) Nor is Obama -- except to the extent that he is part of this overall culture of misplaced optimism about foreign places at war.

Declared Unsafe by the UN, Attacked Before Benghazi

It is much more about the local story, and what shaped the perception of local factors. If you thought you could ignore the UN in Benghazi, whose staffers explained that it was not safe there and their convoys had been attacked in April (5 months before the September 11 Benghazi attack), then you either hate the UN (a common position among US conservatives) or you are more liberal or less informed than they (it happens). The ambassador went out jogging alone in a place where Ian Martin of the UN said was not safe -- I know Martin and have the utmost respect for him. (Later Martin said the attack on the compound and the murder of Amb. Stevens and others was a "wake-up call" -- but he had given the "wake-up" call earlier when he was there himself to discuss the "transition to democracy" and his convoy was bombed). If you thought the war was over, and it was time to have hospital wing openings (Amb. Stevens was to attend one, but ended up a deceased patient there), it was because your belief in the ability to have democracy-building trumped the reality of reports -- including UN reports -- on the ground.

Not the Marines, But the Martyrs

The single most telling factor in this tragedy, to me, is that it was not the Marines guarding this American compound, which was shy of a consulate or embassy, even with an ambassador.  Normally, Marines DO guard embassies abroad. Why weren't the Marines there? Because Libya did not allow the Marines into the country to provide this duty; they did not want US troops there. I've been to many US Embassies abroad and heard many UN briefings about UN missions abroad, so I have some understanding of this issue. While sub-contracted to a Wales group, the guards included members of something called the 17 February Martyrs' Brigade who, not surprisingly with a name like that, turned out to be related to Al Qaeda.

The "Police"

My point in the blog about Sean's last words is that he describes his doubts about these guards -- he called them "police" in quotation marks in game chat, and noted they were taking pictures. That was suspicious behaviour, surely. Why were they taking pictures? They may have used them to plan the attack later. MY ONLY POINT is that Sean flagged the suspicious nature of these guards in his game chat. That meant he (and possibly others) had developed qualms about that. There's nothing in his words, or my reporting of them, that suggests any government conspiracy! How did Johnson pull that out of my blog?!

Because he had a default set to combing the Internet for writings that he felt fit his thesis about conservatives who engage in conspiracies and thus misunderstand personas online.

EVE Online

I asked questions about why Sean was playing EVE Online instead of doing his job -- that's perfectly normal, and not about a conspiracy. But I also pointed out that we cannot be sure of the time he was playing and I delved into all the mechanics of the date stamps, which are meaningless because they can be set to game time, i.e. where the developers are located; your local time, or just a random date stamp set when you make an account which you are supposed to change but may never have done so. It's not forensic proof of anything. There's also the fact that Sean could have talked on Jabber literally at any time, on a computer or phone (although cell phones were less ubiquitous then) without actually being logged on to the game -- that is common gamer's behaviour.

At no time do I suggest that this game chat constitutes proof that Sean was "playing a game" DURING the attack. We do not know that, and can't know that without internal data like his log-on times that his compound's computer systems might show. It seems unlikely he would be sitting a computer DURING an attack. In fact, his chat, if anything, internally, points to a time hours before the attack, in the morning or afternoon. Sean writes grandly if ominously, "assuming we don't die tonight," suggesting that "tonight" is still some time in the future. It's the sort of swaggering thing people in RL government and law enforcement say in games all the time -- it's a personality type. Let me suggest that if Sean was actually already in a position where he was under attack and could die, he would be running for his life, not sitting at a computer.

I make it clear, from my extensive delve into the time stamp details and so on that WE DO NOT KNOW when his chat was. ALL we know is that he was suspicious of the police. And you don't need a conspiracy theory to accentuate that point -- it merely bolsters the facts of the story that are not disputed, that the guards hired by the US for their compound in Benghazi turned against them, and that their idealized understanding of their mission in Benghazi as already in the "transition of democracy" phase instead of the "war-stopping" phase got them killed. There's no conspiracy or cover up here, nor did I claim there was one; these are the facts on the ground.

Conspiracy Theory About Sean

Johnson writes:

The insinuation here is that Smith was actually a plant for the State Department (or CIA if you ask Glenn Beck) who helped to fan the media flames by talking about the attacks within the game. In the strangest part of the death of Sean Smith, EVE Online becomes, at least for some conservatives, a tool
through which the United States government enacts fraud and treachery. Smith's death and his conversations in EVE Online are, for them, evidence of a conspiracy to fabricate an attack. EVE, then, is not so separate from the “real” world—it is a tool of politicians to shape world events.65

I don't make any such insinuation, and I really am baffled how Johnson could pull this out of my straightforward blog -- except that clearly he started with a deep prejudice. At the time I wrote about Sean Smith's words in the game, NO ONE had covered the topic. I did not see it in any news reports or anything at the time. I don't think as much attention was paid to games and gaming culture at that time -- this was pre-GamerGate. People forget how news progresses and information and conspiracies form. I didn't see anyone making any such claim about Sean nor did I make one; if they came later, that's on them.

Sean was an employee of the State Department, and not a "plant" for anyone, and I make no claim whatsoever that he is a "plant". He is merely a personality type who brags in games about RL, which may not be quite as glamorous (information officers are not CIA commandos) and who happened to say a telling thing about the "police". The ONLY point I wanted to come out of this was that Sean had an important piece of evidence about these "police" -- and studying them, their suspicious behaviour, their provenance, etc. was the direction the investigation should take. 

CIA Cover?

Is there some indication that Sean was working a "cover" position and in fact was in the CIA? I don't see any evidence of that, nor did I say that. If anything, a real CIA agent would be more trained in tradecraft and wouldn't brag about his RL position in a game.

As for some conspiracy about EVE Online and the US government, I find this preposterous, and I've never claimed anything remotely like it, and if someone has, I wonder how they could concoct it. I made a character in EVE Online years ago, but I never got beyond the spaceship -- I am not a war gamer and couldn't figure out how to do battle and just gave up, bored. EVE Online was sort of a niche game that did not have a lot of players -- while larger than, say, "Tale in the Desert," it was a more elaborate social game than World of Warcraft or other MMORPEGs.  I thought EVE had some elements of mining or strategy that might be compelling (I had read about game properties trading for huge amounts of money); EVE was discussed a lot in the Second Life circles where I was at the time and some of my friends played it. But it's a game created by a developer from Iceland, who I think playfully called his company "CCP" (Star Wars? USSR in Cyrillic? Something else?) and who has nothing to do with the US government -- quite the opposite. (EVE Online was sold last year to a South Korean game company). Did the CIA or DoD use EVE Online unbeknownst to its makers or players to do some kind of nefarious spying or RP games? I don't see any evidence of that, either, although it is always speculated about all games.  And absolutely nothing in my text made any conspiratorial point like this -- it is merely Jeremy David Johnson "reading into" it with a set of knee-jerk prejudices.

Was Sean somehow "narrating" or "anticipating" some dark, manipulated event by making his comments about his RL situation in-game, as Jeremy implies I have said (wrongly) or some conservative at all? No, not at all, and I don't say it. He's merely chatting because for him, these worlds are seamless; his friendship and socialization are real, even if based in a fictional world. So he talks about RL, as all people in such situations do. Perhaps young Jeremy has never been in a game.

Bragging In-Game

Regardless, there is only one subject here for me, and it's a narrow one, and my blogs made that clear: Sean Smith said something in game chat that indicated the attack was planned, and not spontaneous.

Johnson also writes that the following paragraph from my blog is "bizarre":

It's clear that Sean Smith was inured to danger, and his game buddies even bragged about how he told them of his dangerous assignments, which added to his allure -- it's typical in these anonymous virtual scenes that people use the coin of real life or "RL" as it is known to trump game-acquired skills and amplify them. Through the acceleration and amplification of virtuality, somebody who is an information officer can become Kissinger
or Brahimi.64

Why bizarre? Anyone who has played games, or merely studied them at least somewhat, understand this dynamic all too well, and I shouldn't have to explain it or defend it -- Johnson is the one misreading this and out of step here.

Indeed, real life is often used as the coin of the realm in virtual worlds to trump various things inside the virtual worlds. If someone is a "real" musician or "real" author in real life, they get more respect than those who play music or write stories only in Second Life. If someone is a real-life law-enforcer or military veteran, they are viewed as "better" in World of Warcraft, which may or may not be true. It also seems clear to me that Sean was inured to danger because he was in Benghazi! Hello! He had served in Iraq! Yes, State Department officials can be under great pressure to go serve in Iraq, for example, or see their careers stalled. But they can say "no". Someone who writes "we may die tonight" is somehow who has a somewhat valiant and idealistic view of both the danger of his situation and his role in it as a brave person.

I actually think that while Sean was uneasy seeing those "police" take pictures -- everything he knew about war zones and embassies would tell him that, and he was experienced -- he didn't think really they would "die tonight" at that moment. He said it merely as speculation to relieve his anxiety. After all, he hadn't been under constant gunfire at that point, like a combatant in Afghanistan. He was an information officer in a temporary US compound.

Why is this "bizarre" to assess his behaviour in this way? It's simply basic assessment of human nature. BTW, it's not a slam on Sean that he went into this situation, likely believing he was doing good and doing his duty, and that he played EVE. It's a type -- a common type in our world, to such an extent that people talk about how casually dropping that you are a Paladin in WoW or whatever can help you in certain types of job interviews. Critiquing this isn't "bizarre"; what's bizarre is not finding anything troublesome about it. THAT is what I mean about professors of communications these days, and how biased they are, and how uncritical of the Internet and Silicon Valley they are -- tending to ascribe any such criticism as "neo-con" or "the GOP" -- or worse!

Yet I'm just not following this strange thesis of Johnson -- my blog doesn't make claims for any fabricated attack designed in games by the US government or any of its officials -- that's insane. I merely pointed out that Sean's game chat is important to take seriously as indication of the true nature of the "police" -- a point which isn't about any conspiracy, but more about all the factors that went into this compound, which was not viewed as "permissive" for the US Marines. Let me suggest that such an environment that cannot stand US Marines is not one that is really in a "transition to democracy". I hope the US government, whether Democrat or Republican, understands that better now.

If Glen Beck picked up this theme of EVE Online, I didn't notice it at the time -- Benghazi was not an obsession of mine. I will have to go and study this at some point. But I assure you at the time I wrote -- which is clear from my blog and its links, and my other post about Benghazi -- Sean's "last words in a game" are only about his last words, and not the game, and not a conspiracy. The games are only a setting. We even have these words because he bragged to his pals in a game -- he was a type of personality that does that. It's normal and natural.

Real vs. Virtual

Johnson goes on at length debating whether Sean Smith the real human person was "like" his character "Vile Rat". Well, in the literal sense, no, because, um, he's a character in a game. He's like an author's fictional character, although a game is different, because the "typist" as they are often called is a real person wielding the character in real time in an immersive 3D environment -- that's not like a book or a movie experienced more passively.

But my blog isn't about the exploits of Vile Rat. It's about Sean, on Jabber (in or out of EVE Online) in which he was "OOC" or "out of character" talking about his RL job and compound security. My focus is only that, and that's not about his character. I don't have the patience to study "Vile Rat" as he is not material to this story; yes, people make characters that are extensions of and expressions of themselves, but the only thing relevant to the Benghazi investigation would be if he happened to give any other clues about the security or personnel at the compound, and it appears that he did not. End of story.

Johnson's 174-page thesis appears to be about how we "shouldn't" accept various writers' online personas as "the same" as they are (he goes into detail about Edward Snowden and his persona TRUEHoohah). I don't have time to read it now but I suspect I may disagree, as I treat game characters with much more skepticism and don't indulge in breathless and idealized theories about their "transgressive" nature that somehow decouples them from real-life responsibility. it doesn't.

Jeremy David Johnson Got It Wrong

I'm just setting the record straight on this one misread of his regarding my writings on Sean Smith. He got them very wrong, and it was because he started out with a deep prejudice not uncommon among those in his field, and suffers from "search-stringitis" common to people cruising around the Internet and clipping things that "fit" and not reading seriously for context. Today, he, as we can find on his web page, he is a lecturer on communications at the University of Pacific in Stockton. His Twitter feed contains some things I agree with, some things I'd like a second opinion on, and others I don't agree with, like the idea that the GOP "deliberately" freezes upward mobility -- which sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. This accidental online encounter has only deepened my sense that such academics, like journalists with similar prejudices, are not honest brokers in devising policy about Silicon Valley; no, I don't have a copy of Rhetoric as Posthuman Practice handy. Sigh.

To re-cap, for the tl;dr crowd:

1. Jeremy David Johnson claimed I was a conservative merely on the vague sense that if I said ANYTHING critical about Benghazi I must be conservative. I'm not. I'm a Democrat and have voted straight ticket pretty much forever. Understanding my text shouldn't depend on my political categorization, and I shouldn't have to invoke it to defend myself, because:

2. Nowhere in my post do I espouse any conspiracy theory about Benghazi, having to do with any cover-up, or even some sinister master plan somewhere in which the victims are mere puppets and "Hillary" or "Obama" the puppet-masters. They aren't. Nothing of the kind can be found in any of my text. Instead, I said that do to a certain ideological mindset of do-good liberalism -- a mindset perhaps not unlike Johnson -- the parties to Benghazi tragedy did not heed the signs of danger and a decided "not transitioning to democracy" environment. 

3. Nowhere in my post did I say that Sean Smith was a CIA agent, or in some kind of conspiracy or was some kind of hidden actor in a staged drama carried out through an online game-- what I say is that he is a gamer and a law-enforcement/government type who tends to emphasize his valiant nature -- and that he did when he said "assuming we aren't killed tonight".  Nowhere do I say that he was chatting in the game at the time of the attack because I explained we don't know that, and it seems unlikely.

4. The only point to be gleaned from Sean's speech in a game is that Benghazi was planned, and not spontaneous, and the work of terrorists, not irate townspeople. He was suspicious of "police" who were taking pictures of their compound. And that's a fact, and that got more attention later.  Since Johnson is writing in 2014, two years after Benghazi, surely he could concede this.

5. Nowhere in my post do I make any "bizarre" points but merely point out that a certain type of male who goes into danger zones in the military and plays war zones tends to brag about his exploits -- a normal point, and not "bizarre" unless you think there is no male bravado culture at all in reality or virtuality. I said that people brag about their RL to increase their reputation in games -- and in this game, Sean Smith played an intergalactic diplomat while in reality, he was an information officer in a remote US compound, to be sure, a war zone, but one in which the parties did not seem to fully assess as a war zone.

6. There are no references to any conspiracies, figures like Alex Jones or Glen Beck or anything of the sort in my blog. At the time I wrote it, I was the only one writing about his words in a game outside his gaming buddies. 

So that's all there is to it. Instead, my search-strings have been harnessed to the cause of trying to prove how conservative narratives online distort reality, and how (to compress what Johnson likely feels is a very precious and nuanced thesis) people's characters in games should not be taken as who they really are. So what have we learned here, once again, as we did with the Covington boys and a host of other stories? Liberal/leftist ideological blinkers funnel the world their their prisms and distort reality as much if not more as conservatives.

The Strange Story of the Capital One Hacker

News stories about hackers stealing personal data are legion.

Some of the threatening email which my spam filter blocks are from supposed hackers demanding ransoms in bitcoin. If you go to the bitcoin account they claim you must pay in order to avoid having your "pornographic" files exposed, you find that it has been suspended. Since I don't have any such files, I realized the whole thing was fake, then learned that the same blackmail has been sent to friends and relatives. They don't even have to be the original hackers -- they can just take advantage of the ubiquitous nature of hacks now, so that anyone can vaguely sense at any minute that maybe it applies to them.

A Woman Hacker?

Since I was once a Capital One customer, I paid more than a minute of attention than usual to this story about Paige Adele Thompson,  but I thought it was curious that it was a woman hacker. Usually, hackers are not women, even if there are plenty of women coders around today (and I know some who go back decades). She had reportedly stolen 120,000 bank account numbers and 77,000 Social Security numbers. Capital One didn't do any mass mailing to customers, although they put a notice on their web page.

Based on our analysis to date, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

Importantly, no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised and less than one percent of Social Security numbers were compromised. Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual.

The largest category of information accessed was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for one of our credit card products from 2005 through early 2019. This information included personal information Capital One routinely collects at the time it receives credit card applications, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.

Beyond the credit card application data, the individual obtained portions of credit card customer data, including:

• Customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information.
• Fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018.

This information has been shared on Capital One’s website, servicing portal, press release and 8K filing.

The individual also obtained the following data:

• About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers.

• About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers.

  We will directly notify these customers through the mail.

  For our Canadian credit card customers, approximately 1 million Social Insurance Numbers were compromised in this incident. We will directly notify all Canadian customers affected.

Someone can perhaps explain to me how 106 million people in the US and Canada are "affected," but "only" 140,000 SS numbers, 1 million Social Insurance Numbers, and 80,000 bank accounts are "obtained".  What does this mean? That people's home addresses and salaries were stolen?

Victory-Dance Leads to Capture

How was this Seattle-based hacker caught?

Strangely, this hacker -- whose handle was appropriately "erratic" -- was not secretive, but bragged about her hack on various social media and GitHub, which enabled someone to send a tip (maybe she herself?) to Capital One to show them the admission, and offer to help. 

 

Writes Heavy:

The FBI listed in the criminal complaint all of the online platforms investigators uncovered that appeared to lead to Paige Adele Thompson. The original GitHub profile linked to a GitLab page, which included Thompson’s resume.

Investigators further uncovered a Meetup group, a Slack channel and a Twitter account all affiliated with Thompson. The user “erratic” posted on the Slack channel on June 26, 2019, a list of files they possessed.

The complaint states that Thompson appeared to brag about the information she had accessed related to Capital One. The FBI agent wrote that Thompson had “made statements on social media fora evidencing the fact that she has information of Capital One, and that she recognizes that she has acted illegally.”

Why would Paige want to distribute those Social Security and Social Insurance numbers first? To what end? To whom? Random thieves? Are we quite sure that in fact while she was openly discussing this, others didn't obtain these files?

Swat Team

Quite a display of force was used to arrest her  -- although it's not clear how the authorities knew about the weapons in the apartment before the raid. This elicited a great deal of ridicule of the police for overkill and poor tactics,  snarky comments about Capital One, haiku about hacking, and almost no condemnation of the hacker (although there were still a few, which was something):

Managed to get video of the raid in Seattle that lead to the arrest of Paige Thompson, 33yo software engineer accused of hacking databases and stealing info on 100 million credit card applications for #CapitalOne in a major breach. Housemates share details @ Noon @KIRO7Seattle pic.twitter.com/NXsjfAOInn

— Ranji Sinha (@RanjiKIRO7) July 30, 2019

It was said that Paige Adele Thompson, a software engineer for various companies according to an online resume, had "threatened to shoot up a California social media company". Twitter? (Her account there was suspended). There are 30 top companies and zillions of others.

Then, it developed that Thompson was found not only top have breached Capital One, but "30 other organizations". That sounded like one of those crime stories common to Russia, but not only Russia, where the police pin a bunch of other crimes they haven't solved on the one culprit they've caught. Furthermore, the data wasn't only of the personal type, supposedly:

"The servers seized from Thompson's bedroom during the search of Thompson's residence, include not only data stolen from Capital One, but also multiple terabytes of data stolen by Thompson from more than 30 other companies, educational institutions, and other entities."

US prosecutors said the "data varies significantly in both type and amount," but, based on currently available information, "much of the data appears not to be data containing personal identifying information."

Then it said that while the hacker had stolen these millions of accounts, she hadn't exploited them, i.e. used the credit cards to steal money or buy things online. Then the news stories said the hacker was mentally ill because they not only didn't exploit the data, they admitted it freely. Reports had begun to emerge from friends that she "struggled" with mental illness. All that seemed strange. You're depressed to you hack a zillion files and risk arrest?

A Trans Woman Safe House

Now, the latest stories say that the hacker in question is a trans woman who has demanded that she not be kept in a regular jail facility with males (that seems perfectly reasonable as she would indeed be in danger). Some redditors got mad over the lag between the first reports about a "woman" hacker and the later reports of the "transwoman" report -- because, so they reasoned, this artificially inflated crime statistics regarding women.

Then, we learn about her room mate, Park Hang Quo, who was arrested for illegal fire arms, who in the past had done jail time for illegal weapons' possession and attempted assassination (a Silk Road user?) and had been released after cooperating with authorities. He, too, admitted his crime and admitted his room mates (there three others besides Paige) could have access to the arms, and that the original hacker wanted to commit "suicide by cop".

The other room mates -- who included a woman Navy veteran and two other military veterans -- said they knew there were guns in the house in this media report, but that they didn't know Park Hang Quo was a felon with a past conviction on arms.

How is it that these five people, four of whom are military veterans, (at least) one of whom is a programmer, meet each other and become room mates in a home where there is not only such a firearms arsenal but an Airstream RV and large box truck -- a home where it turns out a hacker stole millions of personal files?

We don't know if there are others behind Thompson involved in the hack, if Park is related to it, or the role of the other three room mates, although the hacker is said to have "acted alone". How did she hook up with a room mate who possessed illegal firearms and had a history of a jail sentence for involvement in an assassination isn't explained, as well as three other veterans? There doesn't seem to be much curiosity about any of this from the media. Who are these people? 

There is one explanation buried in the Seattle Times story for how they all ended up together:

The roommates, who like Thompson are transgender women, said she used to be a systems engineer at Amazon but lost her job in 2016 after she began drinking at work to deal with harassment from a co-worker. She hasn’t worked since, the roommates said, and was living at the house rent-free.

So this was a kind of safe house for transgender women in tech and the military, who faced harassment and difficulties in their lives -- like Chelsea Manning.

Has this story gotten thoroughly weird yet? It has. I don't know what to make of it. 

Flight Risk

The judge has not released the suspect on bail because of the problem of flight. Petition to have her stay at a half-way house was denied because as a person without a job or a home (her room mate said was not welcome back at her previous home), she was a flight risk. An indication that in the past, she was addicted to drugs also came up -- although defense said this was "over".

But the threat of harm to herself and others and the "suicide by cop" wishes mentioned in news reports are a reason as well to deny bail, said Judge Michelle Peterson:

“You are highly talented,” Peterson told Thompson, “and have the means and ability to create havoc in our banking system.”

Why would someone who was smart enough to break into those accounts get caught? Why would they break into them if they weren't going to use the stolen data? Why would they hoard millions of these files in their home? Fox news quotes a local tech who explains this as "accidental"?

But on Friday, Thompson’s long-time friend Tim Carstens, from the tech community, showed up to court in support of Thompson.

Carstens said Thompson is not the tech mastermind the government is making her out to be.

He says she breached the data by most likely snooping around randomly. He says she didn't even know what to do with all the stolen information.

(The surfacing of Carstens is yet another odd detail in this story. Tim Carstens said he knew Thompson since she was "a teenager" [in Arkansas? where she lived with a now-estranged mother and dad MIA]. Tim is said to have written "the" white paper on Bitcoin [a joke?] and once worked for "Uncle Sam". ?) 

Hacker "Altruism"

The answer suggested to me, from following past hacker exploits, is that this hacker believed she could prove a point -- "it can be done" -- and expose the flaws of big corporations -- which can be loathed by these anarchist types. And -- a variation on this "altruism" --  that discovery of this hack would force these companies to have better security. That hackers actually "help them" -- when they don't bring capitalism to its knees. It's all pretty jumbled, ideologically -- but to say it is "accidental" is to defy reason. You would have to be intended to breach the system to find such vulnerability.

And sure enough, this "hacker altruism" seemed to be part of the story, according to the Seattle Times. She was said to have made warnings to Capital One and been ignored, and then in a fit stole all the files. 

“Paige is very, very skilled. If she wanted to, she could hack foreign governments,” said another of the roommates, who like the other two asked not to be named to protect their privacy and because they’re still shaken from Monday’s raid. “I didn’t know exactly what she had done … We never heard anything about it. She probably didn’t think it was a big deal.”

She described Thompson, who is also know by the online handle “erratic,” as a “white hat hacker” who tried to warn Capital One about vulnerabilities in their firewall but was blown off. Thompson posted links to the company’s data “to teach them a lesson,” she said.

So black hat felons are merely white hats yearning for recognition?

When hackers smash big companies supposedly in the name of altruism, why don't think care about the little guy, the people harmed by hacks with identity theft and further disruption of their lives?

So far, the mental illness of this hacker has not been established by a court of law, and it is only a supposition.

Sometimes when I read news stories of massive hacks or mass shootings, I wonder if foreign states who are enemies of the US -- Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others -- go trawling around for these disturbed and vulnerable individuals online -- they're easy enough to spot on social media -- and then incite them, and guide them, and "hands free," let nature take its course. That's because there are so many of them, sometimes one right after another, that they seem planned. 

But there are plenty of factors within our own society to set up the tragic chain of events that set off these mass crimes, without any foreign actors or need for conspiracy theories. 

Disgruntled Former Amazon Employee

We talk a lot about our tech overlords but perhaps we have less awareness of how their own employees want to rebel against them, too:

Capital One is a major customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Seattle commerce giant’s cloud computing business which provides companies the ability to rent computing and storage power on Amazon servers. AWS’ website touts Capital One’s choice of its cloud computing services, quoting its chief information officer saying, “We believe we can operate more securely in their cloud than in our own data centers.”

While the federal complaint against Thompson does not name AWS, it does say that Thompson worked at the cloud hosting provider Capital One uses. Thompson’s resume, posted on multiple online platforms, indicates she was a level 4 systems engineer at Amazon from May 2015 to September 2016, where she worked on the “build-out and deployment of new load balancing capacity for S3” — AWS’s Simple Storage Service, which allows AWS customers to store and access data from anywhere online.

Amazon had no comment. Funny how it's only a site like this that puts "former Amazon employee" in the headline -- mainstream media does not, and if it even includes that information, buries down in the story.

Yes, Amazon wanted to distance itself from this former employee:

A person familiar with the matter said there was no breach or malfunction in the underlying AWS infrastructure, and the fact that the accused perpetrator had worked for AWS was not relevant to the hack. Instead, the hacker apparently exploited Capital One’s faulty firewall. Capital One said it was informed of the vulnerability July 17 and discovered the hack exposed personal information of as many as 106 million individuals in the U.S. and Canada.

Yet, there may have been a breach of Amazon, after all:

Thompson’s posts on Twitter suggest she may have accessed other data stored on AWS. Computer security researcher and reporter Brian Krebs reviewed posts on a Slack channel attributed to “erratic.” One post, on June 27, lists “various databases she found by hacking into improperly secured Amazon cloud instances,” Krebs wrote on his KrebsonSecurity blog, adding that a screenshot she posted suggests “she may also have located tens of gigabytes of data belonging to other major corporations.”

That said, Krebs saw no postings suggesting Thompson “sought to profit from selling the data taken from various Amazon cloud instances she was able to access.” Capital One, in its statement, said it was “unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual,” but it continues to investigate.

Even so, it doesn't seem like the discovery of the "improperly-secured Amazon cloud instances" was accidental, like you just clicked something on Pastebin heedlessly.

Mental Illness

Thomson's defense -- like Manning's -- as possibly "my transgender made me do it" is already being outlined by a friend -- and if it isn't a "suicide by cop" attempt, it's a "obtain mandatory inpatient mental health treatment" (which can be hard to get) by cop:

Aife Dunne, an online friend of Thompson’s, told The New York Times Thompson struggled with her transition to a woman, discussed suicidal thoughts, and would sink into dark phases with little support outside her online communities.

According to her online resumes, Thompson studied software engineering at Bellevue College and moved through nine Seattle-area IT jobs over the last 14 years. In recent weeks, Thompson posted photographs of the Viaduct demolition, her various technology projects and of her cat Millie, who died last week.

She also wrote about having a therapist appointment and made reference to something momentous that was going to result in her losing her freedom.

“After this is over I’m going to go check into the mental hospital for an indefinite amount of time,” she wrote on Twitter. “I have a whole list of things that will ensure my involuntary confinement from the world. The kind that they can’t ignore or brush off onto the crisis clinic. I’m never coming back.”

 

That explains the references to the dead cat -- which supposedly enabled the FBI to track down Thompson -- she had been forced to put down her beloved pet, and posted a notice about this that contained her address. (Other news stories say it was a resume attached to her GitHub account that outed her.)

All's well that ends well?

Well, Paige faces only up to 5 years of jail and a $250,000 fine because of the lack of evidence for use of the cards -- and she may not be found unfit to stand trial and get the psychiatric care she wants and needs.

I'm all for hackers serving their sentences to the full extent of the law and I don't think "hacking while transgender" should be permissible as a defense as it does a grave disservice to all the transgender computer people who do not hack company servers. Mandatory psychiatric treatment might be the most humane thing in this case, however, especially as friends who got her into short stints of mental treatment multiple times were unsuccessful -- and Thompson only harassed them, geolocated them and harassed them more, to the point they were forced to move and get a protective order (!). She did, after all, knowingly live with a person with firearms she could access in theory.

Russian Propaganda Response

As I learned from a conservative blog, RT went beyond its usual glee at US misfortune with this story -- making a point of mentioning Amazon as the hacker's former employer and the "cloud computing company" not mentioned in earlier reports. At 2:56, the anchor even jokes for his audience that he believes "doesn't watch" CNN or ABC, that likely those networks are already blaming this hack -- whose damage is assessed at $100 million -- "on the Kremlin". (In fact, no US media report did that).  He also drills down on the hacker's possible motives -- somebody who is actually greedy? Or who wants to expose the greed and carelessness of corporations? His colleague doesn't answer.

 

He then returns to the topic of the hacker's nature a third time:

Do we know how often it is a person, a group of persons, versus an institution, a nation-state, a group...how...what...have you looked into the whole hacking thing that seems to be in the news now?

Of course this doesn't mean Russia is behind Thompson's hack -- but it is Russian state propaganda trying to distract from its own state-sponsored hacking, to make it seem like America and its big corporations are to blame?

His fellow anchor makes the point that this is just days after the settlement of the Equifax breach that affected 170 million people.

Maybe it's about cloud computing or about single actors getting more attention? she wonders. Say, does the Kremlin want to get into the cloud-computing business in a bigger way?

The two anchors have a thinky philosophical discussion that might have been lifted from a Soviet class on Marxism about the motives of capitalism and how security your data cannot get in the way of their profits. The male anchor asks if we should be worried that Capital One can just write off the cost of $100 million to "make this right" and it isn't much of a dent. This plays very well in the hundreds of comments -- and is a good example of how often Russian propaganda is anti-capitalist, although supposedly the Kremlin "dropped" the communist ideology:

Maybe this means this particular model we're using is suspect?

I think this is a great point? It's always the case in a profit-based system that you will make decisions based on profit. If securing your data falls lower on the list of priorities than making money for you, then that's the way it goes.

Evil American corporations and their disgruntled former problems, not the Kremlin! BTW, I see various hacker sites have already published the details of how Thompson did this hack, provided step-by-step instructions of how to implement it elsewhere, and congratulated Google for removing a vulnerability that apparently Amazon had not.

Update: So, not surprisingly, this hacker was released, and the trial is still ongoing.

How to Fix Silicon Valley -- And It's Not How You Think

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

There's a flurry of solutions offered for how to fix the real or perceived evils and woes of Silicon Valley's takeover of our lives, from breaking up monopolies to more training in the humanities (or not), to conservative legislation to remove reported bias in news offerings to libertarian protection of the controversial Section 230, supposedly the "26 words that gave us" this Internet. And while some or parts of all these solutions may actually be implemented, I never see one obvious one, that might seem counter-intuitive:

Make social media platforms charge for their services.

Carpet Bazaar, Cairo, 1887 by Charles Robertson

This idea flies against the core belief of technologists that you "can't" charge for social media, whether chat systems or blogs or picture sharing, because people won't pay it and you'll never make enough to sustain the platform anyway. Everyone knows that subscriptions don't support media -- investors and ads do. More and more, you find the awareness that if you are not paying for social media, you are the product -- and the customers are really the ad buyers, or even more, the VCs.

Ads Without Subscriptions, Content without Conscience

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden Artist Thomas Cole 1828 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston -Wikimedia

This partial borrowing by Silicon Valley of the news media's profit formulas -- investors (venture capitalists) and ads -- (partial because generally there are no subscriptions at all) is really at the root of its evil, though few conceive of it that way. Subscribers have kept mainstream media honest -- when they lose them, they know they are doing something wrong. This conscience was lobotomized with new media.

The Internet became more than an exchange device for scientists or a bulletin board for counterculturists when it liberated paid newspapers -- and later music files -- as the loss leader to get engagement and to disguise the costs of coders and engineers, not to mention servers and their infrastructure. But also when it sneered a subscriptions - which is public accountability, like it or not.

The scorn for privacy and one's private data is rooted in the scorn for private property involved in copyright, which more than the "26 words" is what gave us the Internet.  Craigslist could undermine the classifieds that formed a pillar of media support by ads for amateur sex and prostitutes - its founder was simply less scrupulous than newspapers of record that see themselves as pillars of society, not playing on the customers' basest culture. And the stakes grew higher for social media, requiring more and more extreme content to keep interest.

Having ceded privacy along with artists' private property and allowing non-transparent ads to undermine democracy, it's hard to turn back. Voluntary moves like "making ads more transparent" don't take into consideration that even the CEO of a major Internet sales company like Overstock can fall for Russian blandishments and a sizable chunk of people will keep claiming Butina isn't really a spy, but merely a pro-state interest group.

Diagnoses Without Solutions

I've noticed lately that certain articles that seem to promise solutions only make more sophisticated diagnoses -- like Prof. Paul Musgrave's How Not to Fix Silicon Valley - "the problem isn't whether tech entrepreneurs read the humanities, it's how they think. Or Ramesh Srinivasan's "Yes, Google is Disrupting Our Democracy But Not in the Way Trump Thinks". Musgrave is right that having tech leaders read Plato -- or I would say something like Martin Buber's "I and Thou" -- isn't going to fix their essentially nihilist thinking. He doesn't use that word -- I do -- because I think it captures that self-interested, cut-throat, bullying take on the world that has no humility before anything greater than himself -- God or beauty or country. They got that way for all sorts of reasons involving the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and decline of parenting and education but most of all, I think, they got that way because they trained themselves to become more like machines in order to communicate with them and make computers work.

This is about literalness but also about an ardent, religious belief (in non-religious people) that the Internet has no value or evil or good -- the way a hammer or a nail do not. They are just tools, "able to be used for good or bad". I'm hardly the only one who has come to see this as riotously false -- an atomic bomb that was supposed to be used "surgically" and killed hundreds of thousands of people and altered the course of history and politics and civilization forever isn't just a "tool".  If social media's propensity for falsity even undermines elections, the tool is way out in front of the wielder. Yes, people are the ones who wield such tools, but the unanticipated outcomes in part engineered heedlessly into the tools due to technologists' hubris are increasingly revealing the agency of non-agency evil. No one thought sharing pictures of your cat would create a tool which could be used to bring a lout and liar like Trump to power.

Let me get right to my solutions then.

1. Silicon Valley should charge subscription fees for social media.

These fees could be $2.99 or $29.99 and based on number of uploads or posts or special features but they need to be in place. They will still have free accounts on the freemium model, that free gives you X features but for Y more, you incrementally add them. Let's say with a free account on Facebook, you can upload photos, but not videos. Or the follower cap on Twitter (currently 2,000 until others follow you, an insidious system) can be broken not by illegally buying batches of followers, but simply paying a subscription fee that mechanically lets you follow more people.  Even likes could be capped with fees, as they have inflated beyond all bounds! There is a deep-set belief that you "can't" charge subscriptions and that it is "fatal" for media.

But look at the New York Times, and how it has literally added subscriptions by creating more and more diverse and niched content. Washington Post and New Yorker as well. Miraculously, it can be done. TechCrunch grudgingly admits that the old media dinosaurs are making money now -- much more than TC itself, which won't move to a subscription model although their core reader base -- programmers and other tech -- have some of the highest salaries in the country and could pay for their news. I should note that it is not merely compelling content that achieved this. The first thing that the Times, Post, New Yorker and others did was make it impossible to put a link into Google search, and pull up a story past a paywall by doing this. The Google trick was broken about two years ago, I think. I've never seen any reporting on this, but it was vital. I don't know whether the Snowden helpers that the Times brought in to do tech, or whether some treaty with Google achieved this, but it is now impossible to read past a paywall by using the Google cache trick. It simply doesn't work anymore. And that forced people to pay. Mechanical blocks like to force payment are as vital as fresh and compelling content, and this was achieved, despite legions of techs always saying it "can't" be done because of the Internet's copyable nature. Sure it can, when you set your mind to it.

The book by Jill Abramson Merchants of Truth also explains this phenomenon of new media like Vice or Buzzfeed failing and having to lay off journalists who formerly swaggered over the demise of old print media. To be sure, this reality still hasn't encroached on the deep-set belief against subscriptions, not only for new media but social media But it must. And it will. Something has to be done to wean these companies away from ads which they sell next to your free content by exploiting your privacy and your emotions. And undermining civil society in the process.

When you're a paying customer, the attitude changes. Newspapers change their tenor when they reflect on what subscribers' responses might be. Even razor companies trying to rely on "viral social media" can only indulge in their ideological follies for so long before the bottom line corrects them.

After all, Apple, HBO, Netflix and so on charge subscriptions for streaming content. Spotify has the free and the premium version. Why shouldn't social media, that serves us up the most content of all, daily, hourly, even by the minute?! Think of how much people look at their phones -- and what percentage of that content is free! CHARGE for some of it!

Wallets and Customer Commerce

Such a subscription system should also have "wallets" so that people can go around and award pennies or dollars to friends for posts they list or journalists for articles they like. Technologists could feasibly put in such a system, but defiantly don't, as they know it will undermine their own control and power over the ability to milk the Internet for revenue.

Once you could sell your photos on Instagram, Instagram can't make money from them in any way. If a payments system is installed by a third party like PayPal or Venmo, whereby the platform provider is bypassed and there are peer-to-peer transactions easily using the interface of the platform, money isn't flowing into the hands of those who provide the service -- UNLESS they decide to work it that way.

In fairness, platforms that enable your commerce through social media should get reasonable compensation, and they could charge a fee -- but not only due to reluctance to enable customer commerce and take on the headaches of payments systems (which include fraud and hacking and security) they don't even start such a plan. They should. BTW, the online virtual world Second Life, which is mocked by techs, is a good example of how this works. Facebook, with its 3 billion users, only enables a tiny handful of engineers who create apps related to it to make money from it directly, and of course takes payment from individuals, groups, or companies for ads. This segment of its income is likely its largest, and why it would not move to a subscription plan only reluctantly.

But Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, itself makes a profit of $75 million, and enables $60 million or more a year to be made by its users who sell various virtual goods or server space or service to a relatively tiny population. I think can't be more than 500,000 or 600,000 these days, without about 30,000-50,000 concurrency (these figures used to be released, but when SL began doing poorly after its initial boom in 2007-2008, it stopped publishing them). The point is, if you give people a service they pay for as a subscription ($11.99 a month, less than some massive online games), while allowing free accounts as well, and allow people to use the platform to make money, get tokens for their creations or services, and then cash out those tokens in a carefully-managed exchange system, you have sustained yourself and the customer. That's what we need to be thinking about as jobs become automated -- how to enable people to make money online with creation as well as service.

I think likely the content companies rather than the platform will be the one to institute wallets, so they can control the rake of fees from them. Imagine if the NYT made a way for you to pay pennies to clip one article or tip one journalist -- they benefit, we benefit. They won't want to cut into their revenue stream from full-fledged subscriptions -- but I suspect they will hit a wall eventually and will have to buckle as the only way to grow.

There could be a war over this. But wallets/micropayment systems will go in eventually and they will be a way for both platforms and content providers to make money other than ads. I don't pretend this will be easy -- Facebook or Instagram would rather let game devs make money from fees collected for addictive farm games or letting influencers with high followers take brand endorsements than let the user decide with micro-currency payments what he or she "likes".

And the game devs and top influencers themselves would constitute a block against the democratization of making and receiving payments as they would see their income undermined. As more and more people get on social media, the opportunities for making money with it seem to increase, according to the gurus who make a living teaching you how to do this. But it's only possible to make a living for a few, and it has become harder as companies like ebay and Amazon (through which you sell real goods ) are taking more and more percentages and instituting more rules; YouTube only lets those with a defined number of higher followers sell ads, and Instagram has thresholds as well.

Real Identity Curbs Abuse

There are advantages to taking this controversial and even arduous path, however. If you have a subscription system, you have to have a form of payment, which generally means a real identity, a credit card or a bank card. Real identities tend to lesson -- although not entirely remove -- bad behaviour online, people are conscious of their reputations (and sadly a part of this is job loss over social media indiscretion, which I think is wrong). But the bottom line is, if you put your real name on a Twitter account you paid even $5.00 a month for, the chemistry changes. When something is free you don't respect it, nor do you respect the anonymous. It's always possible to make a pseudonymous account on top of an account in which a real name is provided. The screaming that usually accompanies the debate about "nicks" is that we "can't" have it because all kinds of vulnerable groups from battered women to Iranian freedom fighters will not be protected, given how hacks of personal data take place all the time. Yet that's something not just dissidents under oppressive systems but ordinary bank customers in Western democracies have to worry about, and that has to be fixed on a larger scale.

Social media companies will still have to sell ads. But they will sell ads to buyers who must reach people who not only gave real names and locations but to whom they now have an obligation as paying customers. They aren't just sheeple to be fleeced with addictive "freeness". The era of free is not sustainable and will change. So better to do this in a planned and staged manner than close down in bankruptcy.

On one of the Silicon Valley episodes, there is the regurgitation of the received wisdom you can't charge money for a service -- and then the telling comment from a tech titan that the value of a company isn't in its product but in the company's stock. Literally, in the shareholders' shares, not the actual thing that gives them revenue -- which seems remarkably shortsighted and even crazy. That's why the paydays of these ephemeral companies, whether unicorns or badgers mainly come from VCs trading them around to each other. You "take money off the table" not because the public is buying a product or service -- only another VC is. Facebook users were not offered shares of stock like employees -- although they should have been, since they made Facebook successful. When there are subscriptions and real customers, there is more focus on what the product is and how to sell it, and less on dark exploitation.

I don't pretend it's a total solution, but the job here is to tame evil as it cannot be eradicated. Still, there is more to be done:

2. Government regulation. Ironically, one of the very things that may have to be forced on social media is the demand that they charge money for subscriptions. That seems hilarious and counter-intuitive, but think about it. Since when can the government force a company in a free economy to charge money? They can't. Although if you think about it, there are laws regulating contests, sweepstakes, and lotteries -- giving away things for free -- why not accounts? But by taxation and tariffs, they bring this about, as the companies need to have a reliable revenue stream. 

If ads are regulated more heavily -- first and foremost by insisting on the same transparency that radio and TV elections ads must have -- subscriptions may look more attractive. 

I think Section 230 has to be revised to make platforms responsible for specific crimes, like the incitement of imminent violence -- not protected under the First Amendment.  Companies already have Terms of Service and sometimes also additional Community Rules that are not at the level of the First Amendment but which they only passively or irregularly enforce. Only legislative demand that redacts or even removes "the 26 words" will get them to enforce their own TOS. This cannot be decided by the companies and their lawyers only, although media is tending to give only them the voice, and castigate critics as Trumpians, which is foolish.

Already the anti-trafficking legislative effort was successful, and there will be more. Admission that it "didn't end the Internet" even if some liberals dislike it as law is the first step toward awareness that virtuality has to be regulated as much as reality because it is human and therefore flawed. The Internet as a substance is not perfectability always in motion, that "Better World". The current climate has helped bring this vital change about more than anything, ending the stale arguments' stalemate, as Lawfare explains:

At first, tech companies lined up in lockstep against the bill. But then the seemingly impossible happened: The platforms’ opposition receded. Perhaps because the climate on the Hill was increasingly inhospitable to the major social media companies given their role in L’Affaire Russe and perhaps because the writing was on the wall, the Internet Association (which represents Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies) endorsed the legislation after Senate staff changed the bill to head off some of its excesses.

If platforms are faced with the need to become responsible for removing content in violation, they have more incentive to have subscriptions -- because payment information must be supplied. I think we will see this in the future. A lot of things in Silicon Valley started out for free, then had to charge or go out of business. Social media could be the next big thing -- because it's rational for companies to charge for a service and irrational to keep relying on damaging their very customers to make money from them. To ensure your privacy, you have to have some privacy to ensure -- that means identity.

Impact Litigation and Good Corporate Governance

Traditionally, capitalism has solved the problems of companies harming their own customers through fraud or environmental pollution or health damage by litigation. So tobacco companies are forced to put labels from the Surgeon General, or Big Pharma may finally face the music for its contribution to the opiod crisis with the town and county lawsuits. Boards of companies are an even greater force for reforming abusive companies -- Overstock's Patrick Byrne had to go when he got too loony, and Elon Musk got his wings clipped.  Of course, the experts and legislators will take a look at anti-trust law and see if any of it fits with big tech, especially things like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. But I don't think the solution to Silicon Valley is to favor Elizabeth Warren's socialistic animosity to capitalism period in this popular form. It's to treat these companies like any companies and demand from them the board control, adherence to regulations and customer care that "meatworld" companies have to exercise whether they manufacturer car-seats or fast food. 

Here I'll mention the claims that Facebook and others unfairly favour liberals. Of course they do -- just as mainstream media is dominated by liberals. One obvious cure for this is never to look at the news feed Facebook provides you, and make your own news feed by going to sites directly or using Google news or other feeds you can set up and control yourself. Google famously hides behind users as the reason certain content surfaces instead of others. Yet this is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if users surface antisemitic content, others then lazily click on it simply because it's there. Nothing to be gained by denying this bias, even if the solution for it is not so easy.

Try to Chomsky test -- type in "Noam Chomsky" and you will not find anything critical about this leftwing extremist hugely critical of the US and capitalism on the first page. You'll find pages from Truthout, a leftwing watchdog, Chomsky's own page, and Wikipedia -- which is the chief way all searches skew left, because it really is dominated by a few lefty and libertarian techs.

So it's a thing. Yes, it isn't fixed by Google skewing its algorithms. But it has the big old blank landing page, which unlike Yahoo, has no curated news on it, either of "real" or "paid" type. Why can't it start a curated news feed on its big old blank page? The solution to the discontents of search is outside of search, in curated content which yes, this company could provide, and yes be a publisher/editor responsible for its content under revised Section 230. It can be done!

Its Soviet Knowledge Society-style object lessons of obscure scientists and techs (the Google doodle which doesn't always show up), with way more representation of women and people of colour than in the actual RL Google itself -- can't carry that load alone. Let Google hire journalists to select news and you know, make the world a better place. It could be only real news, unlike Yahoo, which has a lot of paid and sensational junk on it. Then, when there's a search box next to their modest news feed (they could still leave a lot of blank space on that big old blank page so we can admire the inspirational lesson for the day and the primary colours against that blizzard white) so providing a good news feed will help their search, as people are inspired to look up things in the stories.

Also, they need to have subscriptions, too. Search is so heavily used for the Internet's very functioning to have Google subscriptions just for search (even just to go from one page to another -- I wonder if other people don't use bookmarks but use search to bring up pages like "Yahoo" or "Facebook" if they aren't landing pages). But they could charge subscriptions for those of us who use Google Ads. Why not? The people placing the ads have to pay, obviously. Why shouldn't those who provide free content and put those ads on their blogs or corporate pages not have to pay a subscription, too? And if we could pay a subscription, we could finally demand customer service from this most outrageously abusive product of Google's. Everyone knows how arbitrarily they remove accounts and how hard it is to get them back (I've had to do that, after people used fake complaints about ads as a way to shut down my criticism they didn't like). There are other Google services like this with zero customer service. Twitter is terrible that way, too. Charge subscription fees. And do the customer service -- use some of your billions to pay for jobs for people you are automating into poverty.

3. Moral Leadership. It's funny how this is a public demand of sorts -- many people think Silicon Valley titans don't give enough to charity, don't help communities enough, ship jobs abroad and avoid taxes by taking revenue abroad and it all has a corrosive effect. But yet despite several decades of Big IT, the evolution that took place with the Vanderbilts or the Rockfellers still hasn't occurred (and we should expect it to be speeded up like everything else in our time).

I don't really care for Bill Gates, but his corporation (which mainly sells hardware, so it is more rooted in the real world than Google or Facebook) provides jobs and he gives to charity causes from AIDs treatment to clean water. Sergey Brin is mainly known for giving to the research of the disease from which he is genetically predisposed. Does Jack of Twitter give to charity? I don't even know. Craig Newmark gives to trendy progressive causes he likes -- wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if he were forced to have some kind of subscription service for classified ads, which might widen his philanthropy beyond just his lefty favourites.

Robert Scoble

I think there also need to be tech leaders who present a more caring and concerned face to the public. When I think of the better face of tech, I think of Robert Scoble, who was once the "evangelist" (a top PR outreach guy) for Microsoft, and went on to represent a variety of companies including Seagate before morphing into an independent consultant who now specializes in "spatial computing," which basically means anything 3D -- virtual reality, augmented reality, panoramic photos and such.

He went through a trial in the wilderness, first admitting his alcoholism and going on the road to recovery, then apologizing for his abuse of some women in tech, and continuing to hone his devotion to his wife and children, working at home and doing childcare while his wife takes a demanding Silicon Valley job outside the home.

I've always admired Scoble's ability to explain tech and be excited about it and draw people in without scorn -- a rare talent in the tech world. Most of the people who follow him are techs themselves and I suppose he isn't super famous, but I always found him to provide an enormous amount of information and insight. He takes the time to answer ordinary people on Facebook (like me). He is upbeat and positive without being smarmy about the tech, and calls it out when it is less than great. To be sure, his endorsement of products is often paid (as it was for Google Glass, which ultimately was a failure and which cost him some ridicule - he famously showed himself taking a shower in the Google goggles).  But there is an organic quality to this endorsement which comes from enough commentary that is unpaid. And really "eating the dogfood" -- he has valiantly taken his family, which includes a son with special needs, on trips to Yellowstone in a driverless car. I will never get into one of those vehicles and I believe they are mainly about putting truck drivers out of work, but I do recognize that they likely are the wave of the future. If you have to have such a wave, you want it to be explained and guided by someone who has faced the worst of his own personal demons as well as those of technology. We need more people like this, and far less of the types satirized in Silicon Valley, the scourge of Twitter and politics, Anil Dash, who not only got a fellow tech who was politically incorrect fired from his job at Business Insider, he threatened him with blocking his funding in the world of start-ups forever (this denizen of the White House could do that). Despicable! 

The techs cannot be taught a moral code out of Plato or even C.S. Lewis but they can be humbled by losing customers and revenue, facing regulation and lawsuits and realizing that what is good for business and and should be what is good for Americans and the world.  There isn't anything like the ABA or AMA for technologists and should be, where their "Better Worlding" is not merely outwardly directed toward their own arrogant engineering of the world by their leftist/libertarian tastes, but where they pledge to do no harm themselves. This wouldn't just be them deciding what harm is, or their former execs now with "harm reduction" consulting gigs. It would have to be done by denouncing the DDoS and ceasing to characterize hacking as "cool"; where they cooperate with government and military in a liberal democracy instead of letting tiny factions of anarchists rule; where they draw the logical conclusion that protection of privacy and private property -- personal data and copyright -- should be their hallmarks instead of scorned in their "California business model." This can be done with a move to subscriptions, some regulation, and some selfless and real moral leadership.