“THIS IS A SNUFF FILM:” School Shootings Spread Like a Virus. The Media Can Help Stop Them.
Archive for 2018
March 5, 2018
BLUE WAVE? GOP Panic Spreads to Pennsylvania.
Josh Kraushaar:
Republicans are learning an uncomfortable reality about the political environment for 2018: Tax cuts, conservative culture-war staples, and even Nancy Pelosi herself probably won’t be enough to overcome the deep hole that President Trump has put them in. With the White House awash in scandal and struggling to articulate its agenda, the political mood has turned so grim that Republicans are in danger of losing an upcoming special election in the heart of Trump country.
That’s the lesson to draw from the surprisingly competitive campaign Democrat Conor Lamb is running in a Pittsburgh-area district Trump easily carried by 20 points, surviving millions of dollars in outside GOP attack ads portraying Lamb as a liberal in disguise. Even a close loss in such a reliably conservative area would raise red flags that Democrats are on the verge of a major landslide in the November midterms.
It doesn’t look good right now, but Democrat-Media Complex overreach on gun control (see last night’s Oscars — or better yet: Don’t) might change things in a hurry. Provided, of course, that the media onslaught doesn’t cow Republicans out of running on the issue.
A booming economy would help mightily, too, but last week’s steel and aluminum tariffs added unnecessary uncertainty to the mix.
BLUE ON BLUE: How a Texas House primary erupted into a full-blown Democratic war. “Now, with two days left before the Texas primary on Tuesday, the infighting has opened wounds within the Democratic Party that never quite healed after the 2016 election, when Sanders supporters accused the Democratic National Committee of tipping the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton. And the fighting could go on past Tuesday: If none of the four leading candidates top 50%, the top two finishers will advance to a runoff six weeks later.”
A TYRANT IN FAVOR OF GUN CONTROL? BUT THAT’S UNPOSSIBLE! Iran’s Supreme Leader Weighs in on American Gun Control Debate.
JOURNALISM: NYT Gets Around To Reporting On Sweden’s Immigrant Crime Problem, Leaves Out A Few Key Details. “The NYT took great pains not to mention where the violence was coming from.”
Plus: “Sexual violence has been a particular problem, according to Swedish government statistics released earlier this year. The percentage of women who reported being victims of sex crimes rose from 1.4 percent in 2012 to 4.1 percent in 2016. And a 2014 study on the geography of outdoor rape in Stockholm found two-thirds of the suspects were non-Swedish citizens, according to Sunday Times correspondent Bojan Pancevski, who has reported extensively from Sweden’s immigrant communities.”
Also: “Ironically, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, who criticized Trump’s comments last year, is now entertaining extraordinary measures to address the immigrant gang violence described in the NYT’s latest dispatch.”
JOEL KOTKIN: How Silicon Valley Went From “Don’t Be Evil” To Doing Evil.
Once seen as the saviors of America’s economy, Silicon Valley is turning into something more of an emerging axis of evil. “Brain-hacking” tech companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as one prominent tech investor puts it, have become so intrusive as to alarm critics on both right and left.
Firms like Google, which once advertised themselves as committed to being not “evil,” are now increasingly seen as epitomizing Hades’ legions. The tech giants now constitute the world’s five largest companies in market capitalization. Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.
At the same time these firms are fostering what British academic David Lyon has called a “surveillance society” both here and abroad. Companies like Facebook and Google thrive by mining personal data, and their only way to grow, as Wired recently suggested, was, creepily, to “know you better.”
The techie vision of the future is one in which the middle class all but disappears, with those not sufficiently merged with machine intelligence relegated to rent-paying serfs living on “income maintenance.” Theirs is a world in where long-standing local affinities are supplanted by Facebook’s concept of digitally-created “meaningful communities.”
Back during the Obama years, the tech oligarchy was widely admired throughout the progressive circles. Companies like Google gained massive access to the administration’s inner circles, with many top aides eventually entering a “revolving door” for jobs with firms like Google, Facebook, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb.
Although the vast majority of all political contributions from these firms, not surprisingly, go to the Democrats, many progressives — at least not those on their payroll — are expressing alarm about the oligarchs’ move to gain control of whole industries, such as education, finance, groceries, space, print media and entertainment. Left-leaning luminaries like Franklin Foer, former editor of the New Republic, rant against technology firms as a threat to basic liberties and coarsening culture. . . .
Whether one sits on the progressive left or the political right, this growing hegemony presents a clear and present danger. It is increasingly clear that the oligarchs have forgotten that Americans are more than a collection of data-bases to be exploited. People, whatever their ideology, generally want to maintain a modicum of privacy, and choose their way of life.
Someone’s going to make a lot of political hay out of breaking these companies up.