Events this weekend in Milwaukee have us asking difficult questions again:
Like:
“If Social Media is used to incite people to violence and riot in a certain place, are they not guilty of “inciting?”
If so, can they be held liable by insurance companies and property owners when there is destruction of property?
Thus Fox News report Sunday said, in part,
“At least three people were arrested in an uprising that Barrett said was driven by social media messages instructing people to congregate in the area…”
There is, of course, the right to “Free Speech” in America. But it is also well-established that the free speech right does not project to things such as calling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or inciting to riot for example.
At some point, the Courts will have to come to terms with what constitutes inciting to violence. And while it is one thing to discussion politics, racial injustice, and so forth, it is quite another to call for gathering to disrupt and violently confront.
The Courts are slow…and in the meantime, the owners of Social Media that permit things like calling out rioters (and even the more common flash-mob theft from stores) would be held liable for the damage their media has caused.
Social media simply puts too many idiots in the “crowded theater” and the results are very much akin to mob violence that has marred America’s past.
Worse: Social Media is giving the U.S. Department of Justice even more excuses to federalize local police – an agenda that has been clear since the issue of body armor and MRAPS to previously quite good local police..
We don’t need lynch mobs or Lynch mobs running things.
But then again, it’s clear from the slanted media and social filtering of the presidential campaign that the oligarchs of Social are in on the CorpGov conspiracy to totally control local elective government and location options on how to be live our lives.
Which is why Social feeds into government social mapping and the growing federal database. It has been an easy way to “sucker” people into mountains of self-incrimination.
Social users, as a block, are probably even dumber than the rest of us with their clamoring for “friends” and “likes” – which when comes down to actual human connections are mostly meaningless.
Ah, but it is a business model. Ask yourself how much money or what quid pro qoo there is for the Social oligarch for them selling you out.
And then there’s the Broader Question
Which comes down to “Is “news” doing anyone any good?”
It’s really no different than the period we went through in recent historical times – say 100 years ago – the period which historians call the “age of Yellow Journalism”/ Wiki it:
Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.[1] Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.[1] By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.[2]
Thus we see, based on this definition, that most of today’s news is generated not by the recitation of facts, but rather by the plug-n-play modules that allow websites to become “news sources” even though there is no original work being done.
In fact, there are even news rewriting machines that you can plug into online (www.wordai.com) that will allow you to take the original work from one site and turn it into “new” content for your own.
It’s rather amazing, when you come right down to it.
The reason for us discussion this in such depth this morning is simple: We have an interesting nonlinearity in the Big Business Model of Life quickly approaching. We fail to see it.
The problem is that Social Media is monetized through advertising.
Whether it’s a YouTube Channel, or some FB pages, there are both people and corporations that actually made money on last night’s events in Milwaukee.
Worse, the news media is complicit in the sense that without such events they would be out of business. They have drifted so far from the field of pure fact reports, that their make stock-in-trade today is personalities and conflicts, the facts be damned. Which is why the FBI can find lots wrong with Hillary Clinton, for example, yet fail to bring charges – in a horrific display of “special justice” for America’s power elites.
A News-Free Life?
I was extremely impressed by a conversation I had while on on travel up in the Seattle area. One of Elaine’s sons and his wife are raising their daughter (age four, or thereabouts) in a “news-free” home.
She (grand daughter Charli Jane) is not allowed to watch “The News.”
At first I was shocked – and initially abhorred by this, but upon reflection, turns out to be a pretty neat idea. Do we really need to be “conditioning” young people before age 6-8 or so with the ugly freaking mess we call “news?” New all that social marketing tripping and gender marketing laid on a 4-year old?
Hell no. Great call by the kids.
For them, the idea is not to shelter her from everything forever – that will come along in time. Hell – with Common Core it is waiting in school.
But right now in the deeply formative years, does she need to find out about guns, killings, and political mayhem? Want to explain the relevance of Monica Lewinsky and BHil Clinton to a four-year old and how tigers and stripes work? No? Me either. Shit’s gonna get real enough for the kids too soon as it is.
Sure: She plays Pokémon Go, but with an adult. And no social media. Does math problems and learning geography of the world.
Speaking of which, even my son and his fiancé/flame have taken down their Facebook pages: They are working on building trust and are serious about mutual exclusivity. FB, a Tinder account…well, you know the lay of that landscape.
Instead, they are both working on careers, moving into a house they’ve rented and that’s kinda of cool. They are doing as well, or even better than expected. One reason, I suspect, is that they are not following the latest and hottest trending crap in social. Instead, they are working their own agenda because they have the time and resources to do so.
Along the way, they are screwing the social media oligarchs out of a whole bunch of connect time. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.
T’other other day, I looked at my LinkedIn account and discovered (OMG) it had swollen to more than 500 contacts. But of these, only a handful are people I’d ever pick up the phone and call. And if I have their number, why do I want to socially map myself, or any of them- for knowing a nutter like me?
News-Free and Social-free…seems like a decent way to operate. At least through age 6.
And a lot older if you’re in Milwaukee.
About Our “Breaking News Page.”
OK, having said all of that, I decided that I would try a really cool experiment by putting up a page which is nothing but headlines about what’s going on in the world along with a “how long ago” stamp.
I deleted display of source (network name) and all the date crap. Wasted reading time. The “ago” stamp is all I need – or you too – because we know what day it is…
The reason for doing it so in simple? I detest going to news sites which essentially do the same thing and having them pull three things on me I don’t approve of.
First is auto page refreshing every 15-seconds or so. There is no reason to auto-refresh pages EXCEPT to rotate ads, which makes page refreshing a simple tool to drive page counts to unreal levels and, in turn, bump up ad revenue. Not honest – but it shows you the levels of desperation, I think.
Second thing is video auto-loading. I don’t like that at all. Takes too damn much time to happen.
Third is the pictures. I don’t need them either. Come to think of it, I don’t even need to know the source of the stories, so I turned that off on my news headline page (over here, bookmark it) too.
When I want to go through the news, I don’t give a rip about things going on that don’t impact my trading and my life out here in the woods.
Kim Kardashian doesn’t get any processor clicks in George’s headspace, nor do the Olympics…because it does me f**k-all good to know that someone can swim the 8-million meter faster than I can. I sort of suspected it already, know what I mean?
And spots…another huge bread and circus deal. It’s where a bunch of rich pricks use public bonding authority to build stadiums (and here comes another hospitality tax) so they can have the ego satisfaction of wind-up warriors and charge a bazillion dollars for the 50-years line or home plate seats.
Naw…don’t want spots. There are no sports feeds.,
When I do, I can ride my bike, fly my airplane, had my fill of sailing for a while, and I made it through the 940-turbo stage alive.
To me the things that matter are the personal researches into odd things I’m curious about: UFO;s, interdimensional electronics experiments, what Near Death Experiences are telling us about “What’s Next?” and so on.
Hence, the Sunday layout changes to our Breaking News Page. Just the headlines and hold fresh the stories are.
Makes my life a lot easier. Makes it way faster/better for Big Data Tool (Nostracodeus) to look at data we want and kiss off all the noise.
Let me know what you think or leave a comment…
Meantime, it is Monday, so time to get a move on…
Write when you get rich,
Breaking News fill a void for me. Moved the link to my home page. Alexa had a similar page called ‘What’s Hot’ (until they retired it this year) that was my go to site for a quick fix. I also like lack of attribution; It’s fun to guess the source based on headline bias.
Charli Jane’s innocence may stay intact but the information machine will not be denied and when she is exposed, whether it be in the public school system or by Sony, it may be traumatic. She will likely be exceptional but her social integration rate may fall below government standards.
Keeping up the boycott.
George,
I feel the same way about social networks and news sites.
I don’t belong to any social sites, but I can look at twitter from many news sites and I look at them for info that doesn’t include all the pet peeves you have mentioned in the news. This weekend our local weather twitter had a “promoted tweet” advertising satan worship complete with video to click on.???? Well, I guess if they are so hard up for money that they sell out to satan, I’ll get my weather info elsewhere.
Well, starting with the ‘last’ first, regarding your ‘breaking news’, which I think is an interesting idea though since ‘all things are equal’, it does take a bit of sorting to get what is ‘important’. (You could ignore all entertainment news and I wouldn’t mind.)
I’m not the person to ask about ‘social media’ – I don’t use facebook, or twitter – I’ve thought of that as gossip, not worth very much, though it can be damaging.
The media has had a long existence over hundreds of years – it was recognized very early on that ‘slanting the spin’ of the reporting of events could influence how the populace would react to the events. That is why being able to actually see and hear a politician speak means that what they say is ‘direct from the horse’s mouth’. No more weaseling out of statements . . .
Or weaseling into things that were never said.
I like the odd combination of “interdimensional” and “near death.” I was watching a program on the “many universes” concept this weekend, RE: Max Tegmark’s book, “Our Mathematical Universe.” I think it was George who once queried, “what if we never die, but simply plow forward in our own universe. Every time we encounter a situation in which we might have died, the universe splits, we do die in universes which go on without us. Yet we keep moving forward in ours. Similarly, precognition or deja vu may be echoes from our parallel selves. The seeming proof in the pudding is the validated quirky nature of quantum particles, which pop in and out of our universe and display seemingly illogical properties (e.g. being informationally connected over very large distances – Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”). The quantum particles could in fact be shifting between parallel universes, coexisting between/among them. Since we are ultimately composed of such particles, we could be ‘universe hopping’ through what we think is reality. We are in fact in our infancy, just waking up to the complexity of what we call reality. It is much, much stranger than we ever believed. The remote viewers at Farsight Institute, many trained by the CIA and/or military, are now admitting they might be viewing parallel universe activities in their sessions.
“All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.” ? Douglas Adams
If so, can they be held liable by insurance companies and property owners when there is destruction of property?
Sure. Only after a court case – at least one civil. Then the criminal case would need the local DA to actually charge.
If you are poor – why would the insurance company bother suing? Milwaukee is in the top 10 in poverty (for size), 70,000 homes have lead pipe water mains, 20-50K homes have Cream City brick basements (the mortar is in better shape than the brick) so what are the insurance firms gonna get?
It is the inciters – not the followers and sheep – that need to get the message.
My spidey-sense is the inciters have more income than their followers. It is, after all, a busi8ness model.
The inciters can be these “social justice warriors” and the one’s I’ve seen don’t have deep pockets. If you have an inciter who’s got a following they may have access to “deep pockets” – but why should a well off person fund directly VS toss ’em a few thousand so they can keep their subsistence living. The followers have nothing – so its a low bar to have more than the followers. The social graph of who got arrested should keep a number of people employed for months and spawn validation studies for “minority report” datamining software makers.
With rare exception “Social justice warrior” means someone who won’t get up off their ass and work hard like the rest of us. First for a free lunch: Ures and mine.
George
You are correct about the web page fill of videos, flashing ad’s, and refresh phenomenon that eats up computer time…DAMN annoying !! Now we need a blocker to block the blocker blocker !!
Ure Sure Media sounds great the crap they push makes me sick. I turn off the radio off at top of the hour. Meally mouth twisted illness
Shit dude, what are your REAL feelings?
Feel the same, don’t listen to the propaganda prestttttitooted pressure cooker invokers AKA main stream filthy “medsia”. Don’t need nor subscribe to any social media and can easily find, absorb, assimilate and act on useful alternative info leaving lots of time for important activities of daily living.
Putting up your own news site is either just cruising for more clicks, or else just a way to stick your head into your own selective sand.
May I suggest just going through the headlines on Rense.com or whatreallyhappened.com, sites of which both owners, Rense and Rivero have had attempts on their lives. Very few people have what it takes to read just the headlines on either of these sites.
Either you will put up crap news, or you will get on the list for after the elections.
And BTW, social media is not going away anytime soon, it’s like a shovel, you can use it to spade your garden and chop weeds, or you can use it to decapitate and bury the body. But if you are not connected to it, you don’t have a clue about what is going on in your country. Just think of Paul Revere and Thomas Paine as the social media of 1776. The citizens that ignored them didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the country either.
America’s aversion to violence by those trying to be politically correct is destroying the country, and gets Americans, who pay for the largest military budget in the world, labeled as stupid, arrogant hypocrites. I suggest all you boomers reread the Declaration of Independence, which says that in the face of oppression, violence is not only a right, IT IS AN OBLIGATION for those wishing to remain free. Go down and wave that around at the courthouse and you will find out how “free” your country really is.
The first amendment gives a person the right to advocate all the violence they want, and in a free country you have the right to either not participate in it or to defend yourself from it using any means necessary.
Concealed carry is very simple. The statement “I am armed, and if I feel physically threatened, I am going to shoot you. Do you understand?” goes a long way in keeping a society civil. If you are in public and even 5% of the people around you are armed, you will never experience physical violence. Think about it.
No. Your sources don’t use RSS and this is a fully automated snapshot of global kabuki
I love the naysayers!!! Do it George!! How many people told you you shouldn’t do the sites you now are doing? I say go for it!!! I will check it out and so will the majority of your readers. Expats…not sure they should have a say since they aren’t in the trenches with us. People who ranaway have not real pony in the USA race. Just sayin!!! their comments are like bellybuttons!!!!
social media is not going away anytime soon
70-75% of Americans have a facebook account and 20-25% are ‘on twitter’. And you can reach them for almost $0 out of pocket.
The trillions and trillions that have been spent on persuasion via advertising is known to work. Social media means if you use time instead of money you have a shot at reaching your consumers. And sometimes you hope to come up with the squatty potty or dollar shave club to let people know you exist. Or you are a young kid with autotune and your covers of others leads to a job – like a Beiber.
How about we, the people – citizens of this country, judged to be responsible BY LAW – are a nation OF LAWS, wherein we decide by use OF THOSE LAWS who is permitted to carry a deadly weapon, and use that weapon to maintain civil peace and order, and to enable civil authority to judge when BY LAW that peace and order has been abused. (With the growing number of humans on this planet, the days of ‘the wild west’ are over!)
Got news for you, Sunshine! The ‘Wild West’ was a creation of Hollywood! So, I guess they ‘punk’d’ you and you didn’t even know it!
Robert, baby – not talking about the ‘cowboy, wild west’ – but rather that a person uses to do almost anything and get away with it! Granted there are still ‘elites’ out there, but slowly, slowly society is changing – mostly for the better. Christ my grand-dad used to talk about fighting the KKK in Oregon (my family was Catholic) – you need to know your rights and stick to them.
Besides which you need to ‘read up’ on how the internal combustion engine changed life in ‘the West’ – better ability to travel equals more ‘open’ way of life . . .
Hi George,
You’ll never find me on LinkedIn, but if you ever think I’d be helpful as a resource in any way, you have my contact info. I’m happy to share with friends. I’ve never found value exceeding the personal cost for joining any “social” media.
Son was 3 1/2 yrs. old while Nixon impeachment news was on every evening. He would be on the floor playing with his trucks and I thought not paying attention to the TV. WRONG!
When the announcement came on that President Ford was going to speak, son came up to me with worried look on his face, his hands on his hips and demanded to know what happened to President Nixon. I reassured him and said that President Nixon did some bad things so he couldn’t be our country’s president but our new president Ford would try to do good things. That simple statement seem to reassure him so back to the toys.
Ham Radio. The truly original social media.
I first learned of the Milwaukee flare up this morning when I turned on radio news. Not knowing until then had a beneficial impact on me; I didn’t get worked up about nothing that affects me. I continued with ignoring news today and living my life. It is so blissful.
Hi George,
I raised my twin sons with no television and they’re better adjusted and informed than most of their peers. Solid young lads, with good values.
They did ask occasionally but not after I thought to ask them the following: “will you, as a parent, allow strangers to come into your house and talk to your children about any topic of their choosing, with no supervision?” The answer was obvious.
We’re biologically wired at the limbic level to respond to “news” insomuch as it could affect our tribal/individual survival prospects. Rolf Dobelli has written a compelling argument for weaning ourselves completely off the modern equivalent of “news”: (PDF link)
http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Part1_TEXT.pdf
I would remind you that NJ’s Hal Turner spent three years in jail for writing an editorial that led to no violence whatsoever.The government tried him three times to get a conviction.