Neighborhood social media

There has been much discussion about the benefits and costs of social media. On the one hand, it enables people to form communities and relationships with like-minded people without proximity being a factor. This has been a boon for people in low-density population areas or who have interests shared by just a small fraction of the population. But one downside is that immediate physical communities may suffer as people withdraw into their virtual worlds.
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The missing Malaysian airliner

The news media and the internet in general is abuzz about the mysterious disappearance of the Malaysian airliner on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and we are at the stage where theories as to what happened are getting increasingly exotic. I have not been following the story closely because it seems likely that despite the fervent hopes of people who had loved ones on it that the plane might have landed somewhere, the sad truth is that it did crash into the ocean and that everyone perished and that eventually the wreckage will be discovered and the cause determined.
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Losing your parents to Fox News

The average age of people who watch Fox News is 68. That means that many people’s parents and grandparents get their news almost exclusively from a cable news channel that deliberately sets about feeding a demonstrably false narrative aimed at pursuing an agenda that is a mix of enriching the wealthy, despising the poor and working class, ginning up viewership with fake controversies, making the audience feel that they are constant siege by hostile forces, and advancing the interests of the Republican party and its Tea Party base.
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The zombie lies of Vietnam

The truth of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus’s famous line that “In war, truth is the first casualty” keeps getting demonstrated over and over again. The latest example is the effort by the US government to revise the history of the Vietnam war. During that war, the US government kept insisting that things were going fine even as the reporters on the ground could see for themselves that things were going horribly wrong. The evening press briefings provided by the military became known as the ‘Five O’clock Follies” and the source of much dark humor.
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Seriously flawed artists: The case of Woody Allen

Nobody’s perfect. The fact that actors and writers and other artists may be personally flawed does not usually cause a problem with appreciating their work because we have learned to (mostly) separate the work of the artist from the person of the artist, so that praise for the artistic work does not mean we like or approve of the artist or the lives they lead. [Read more…]