The Post Disappears: Musings on Facebook Censorship

I have recently noticed something very interesting going on on my Facebook news feed. Specifically, I have noticed that the right wing dogmatic site, Praeger University, a misnomer if there ever was one, and the left wing Monthly Review, which I "friended", have been disappearing from my news feed like Stalinist era commissars disappeared from photos during that era in the USSR. I see both briefly and then both disappear into the aether that is Facebook.

I can only assume that this is happening because Facebook and its algorithms think that if you subtract the "extreme" right and the "extreme" left you end up with Arthur Schlesinger's vital centre and that is where, or so they believe, empirical truth lies. The problem with this assumption is that it is pure rubbish.

It is true that much of what comes out of the mouths of right wing babes is poppycock. The Prager University case is exemplary. Like so many on the right Prager U offers dogmatic truths without excavating and debating those truths as happens in academia when academia is at its best. In academia, for example, if I want to argue that Mormons were primarily the product of cultural factors rather than economic, political, geographic, or demographic, I first have to explore and then critique these other approaches to Mormonism. At Prager U, on the other hand, one only finds ahistorical statements that are akin to statements of faith. There is no exploration of other valid points of view there. There is just dogma, subpar dogma at that.

The moderate centre that Facebook seems to cherish is no more empirically accurate than the right. Like the right the vital centre tends to fetishise and, in turn, use these fetishisations to rationalise and make moral might makes right things like the Americna business takeover of Hawaii, the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American support for South Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, and US support for the overthrow of Salvador Allende.

Where truth generally can be found is in the analyses of the left. Truth can be found in Marxist theory, in Conflict theory, and in social constructionist theory. This is something those "moderate" "centrists" at Facebook simply don't understand. But then they, like those on the right, have drank the ideological kool aid, the opiate of the we are so right because I believe classes.

The Funny Farm Where Life is Beautiful All of the Time: Sillyness, Faux Democracy, and Absurdity at the Honest Weight Food "Coop"

It really is hard to put into words just what it is really like at the Honest Weight Food Corporation. Since I am a social scientist, however, I am going to try to capture the essence of this bureaucracy in imperfect words.

First word, silly. As the tale of the incredibly incredible shrinking Honest Weight Board, the tale of the incredible shrinking governing body of the Honest Weight Corporation, shows the world of Honest Weight Food Corporation is silly. The Honest Weight Corporation Board, for those of you who don’t know, consists of nine people all ostensibly elected by working members of the Corporation. Over the last year, however, five of the nine members of the Board resigned. One Board member resigned right after the last Board election a year or so ago, another was purged for his supposed troublemaking, three more resigned more recently. Did the Board fill the two positions that have been open for months as they can and have done in the past via appointment? No. Why not? Who knows. Welcome to the kingdom of silly.

The fact that the Board has appointed rather than elected members of the Board brings us to our second word, undemocratic. Since 2014 three individuals have been appointed by the Board to serve on the Board. One of the appointees, one Leif Hartmark, was within a point of being elected to the Board. Fair cop. Two others, however, including current Board member Saul Rigberg, didn’t have the number of votes equal to another who ran for the Board on these two occasions. This other Board contender ended up being shunned by the Board during the appointment process for reasons that can be readily deduced. Undemocratic. Recent events at the Corporation have pointed up once again just how undemocratic Honest Weight’s political culture is. The current Board, despite not having the mandated five people to constitute a quorum mandated by the Corporation’s by-laws, recently appointed several new members to the Board. They did so in order to bring the Board into line with five-person quorum the Corporation’s by-laws mandate. This, by the way, for those paying attention and who don’t have ideologically clouded minds, shows that even this Board recognises the need to follow the by-laws even if they are doing it in an undemocratic way. That these recent appointees to the Board are going along with this charade is simply another nail in the Corporation is democratic coffin.

The illegal appointment of several new members to the Corporation Board brings us to our third word, absurd. Devotees of the current Board defend, in their apologetics and polemics, the democratic nature of Board actions by trying to explain away what they can’t explain away, namely, the violation of the Corporation’s by-laws. In one of these apologetics in the service of power the Board’s devotees claim that the Corporation’s by-laws are trumped by corporate law. Corporate law, they claim, doesn’t mandate a five-person quorum, and so, as a result, the actions of the Board are perfectly legal and perfectly democratic. In a topsy turvy world of the absurd perhaps. In another apologetic the Board’s devotees claim that the Board needed to do what it did in order to avoid problems with the Corporation’s moneylenders. These devotees apparently do not realise that this argument, since it implicitly calls for extra legal action to save the corpop, undermines the previous apologetic. Bring out your absurd.

It is not hard for the dispassionate observer to be amused and bemused by the silly, undemocratic, and absurd world of the Honest Weight Food Corporation. It is not hard for the dispassionate observer to appreciate the hypocrisies galore at the Honest Weight Food Corporation. It is not hard for the dispassionate observer to recognise the absurdity of all of this in relationship to what is happening in the broader world. After all, to paraphrase that most paraphrasable of films Casablanca, the troubles of a silly and absurd little bureaucracy masquerading as a cooperative doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans in a world that is as silly, absurd, and undemocratic as the world we all are forced to live in.