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.

Honest Weight's Best and Brightest Just Keep on Giving...

There is so much to marvel about when it comes to the governing Board at Honest Weight. First, there is the fact of the Board's purging of staff members from its ranks by proclaiming the need for it because of supposed conflicts of interest. They did this despite the fact that there is no evidence that this has ever been a problem with staff serving on the Board of the Corpop over its forty year history. There is nothing like replacing empirical reality with a fabricated one.

Second, there is the fact that Boards for years have ignored and continue to ignore real conflicts of interest. For example, Honest Weight Boards have ignored Board members wives serving as managers of departments at the Corpop. Honest Weight Boards have ignored the fact that a child of one of the members of the LT, the Corpops leadership team, was given a job in one of the departments at the Corpop. Honest Weight Boards have ignored the fact that there has long been a situation at the Corpop where members of the Board and the members of management at the Corpop developed and continue to develop close relationship with one another undermining the objectivity of at least some Board members in the process. Let's call this the theory of Board aristocracy. These real conflicts of interest are such a problem that any objective observer would recommend getting rid of the membership programme entirely given that real conflicts of interest are woven into the very fabric of the Corpop.

Third, while the Board was fixated on imaginary or hallucinated staff enemies within, they apparently forgot to appoint or call an election when Simon Moon offered his resignation from the Board in what seems like a year ago. If the current Board had simply done this there might be no problem with governance at the Corpop today. If the current Board had done this they might have the five member quorum they need as mandated by the corporations by-laws.

Frankly, all of these examples raise valid questions about the competence of the Board...It also raises questions about opiates...

Under the Big Top: Life at Honest Weight

In the last few days I have been reminded how happy I am not to be a member of the Honest Weight Food "Coop", aka, the Honest Weight Food Corporation. Recently, two members of the Board resigned. The two who resigned, Kate Doyle and Rebekah Rice, wrote letters to the letters to the editor section of one of the Coop 'newspapers", the Coop Voice, stating their reasons why the resigned. Long story short: Finances. A day or so later these letters disappeared rather like commissars in the USSR and Board members in the HWFC to be replaced by a statement about the need to avoid conflict at the "Coop". Now, however, the letters are back again, by popular demand the Voice says, showing, I suppose, that repressed history inevitably reemerges at some point.

Genre and Academia: The Case of Deborah Jermyn's Prime Suspect

Genre, a repetitive style, is at the heart of popular literature, popular film, and popular television. It turns out it is also very much at the heart of modern academic life. This was made very clear to me recently as I was reading Deborah Jermyn’s BFI TV classic monograph on the ITV detective show Prime Suspect (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

All the usual genre suspects from film and television studies are present in Jermyn’s monograph  including a discussion of realism in Prime Suspect, a discussion of the representation of gender in Prime Suspect, and an exploration of the detective and crime genre as it relates to Prime Suspect. Given that such repetition can prove tedious and tiresome to some of us after awhile it was a welcome relief when Jermyn turned to her attention to matters that are often far too peripheral in contemporary academic film and television studies including the role creator Lynda LaPlante played in creating Prime Suspect, the difficulties LaPlante met while working on and writing the show, the role real life DCI Jackie Malton played in bringing greater realism to Prime Suspect, and the increasingly important role actor Helen Mirren, who played DCI Jane Tennison, the central character in Prime Suspect, played in the production of the show as it went on.

Jermyn’s Prime Suspect is a good if repetitive paint by the theories of the moment in academia book. Prime Suspect itself, which I have been re-watching on Blu ray is, in its first, third, fourth series first episode, and fifth series, extraordinary. Ironically, it breaks certain aspects of the genre mould it has been poured into.

Stupid is as Stupid Does: The Triumph of Moronicity in American Life

The most remarkable thing, perhaps, about contemporary social media is the displays of utter stupidity one finds on it on a daily basis. Take this gem from Facebook today.

A Facebook poster, who frighteningly teaches in the Palmer Independent School District, stated today that George Stephanopoulos, currently the moderator of ABC television's This Morning on Sunday and co-host of ABC's Good Morning America, is a communist. What is remarkable about this statement is its total idiocy. Such a moronic assertion reveals that this poster has no idea what Marxism is and that, most likely, his source for this statement is some cynical or moronic demagogue who manipulates Americans for political and economic gain for a living or who is an idiot him or her self.

As anyone who has taken an introductory sociology or introductory social or cultural anthropology course knows, if they remember anything about their college days other than the partying, is that Marxism is a symbol system in which economics is the key symbol around which all other Marxist symbols revolve. Marxism maintains that economics is central to human life and that economics is the motor of human history. Ironically, I suspect that if one left out the fact that this is a Marxist argument most American neoliberals would agree with this statement.

The notion that a media figure like Stephanopoulos is a communist too is utterly moronic. If Stephanopoulos was a communist it is, first off, unlikely that ABC would hire him. Stephanopoulos may know a bit about Marxism. After all he attended Columbia University in Manhattan and took a degree in political science. I seriously doubt, however, that he would describe himself as a devoted Marxist or that he, like 99% of the American population, spends much time thinking about social theory.

The poster goes on to make another immensely moronic statement, specifically that Dale Hansen, sports anchor at Dallas TV station WFAA, is a communist because he supports NFL players in their ongoing protest and recognised those protests for what they are, a protest against racial inequality and the police killings of unarmed Blacks in contemporary America. That far too many believe such tripe proves once again the truth of Giles's statement that the earth is doomed...

The Attack of the Five Minute Monster From the Deep

Apparently Prager "U"s (brought to us by radio talk show host Dennis Praeger and his fellow travellers) mantra is give me five minutes and we will give you the intellectual history of the universe. Such a notion is, of course, absurd as anyone who has dealt with reality knows. In fact, demagogues like Jonah Golderg, one of Praeger "U's" many talking heads who have recently been appearing on my Facebook page thanks, no doubt, to weird human algorithms or algorithms become missionaries to heathens like myself, might be seen as latter-day Pauly Shore's starring in their own American sitcom passion plays if they didn't actually appear to believe the demagoguery that comes out of their mouths.

What folks like Goldberg do is what demagogues, apologists, and polemicists have always done and will always do. They create caricatured and stereotyped and, of course, unnuanced straw men to then batter into dust in the liberal/commie/nazi/socialist/anarchist wind with their conservative hammers and sickles. They, for instance, don't interrogate and excavate the history of terms they talk about such as social justice and they really don't engage those who have written about justice from other points of view like Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre. Instead they confine their "analysis" to a caricature and stereotype of whatever they are "analysing" and which they have already demonised. They don't reflect on their sacred statements such as that which asserts that all states, be they monarchical, fascist, corporate, "democratic", or oligarchic, are the same, tyrannical. They confine their "analysis" to a caricature and stereotype of "government" or "states" that they have already demonised in their holy writ, oral and written. They don't see academia as it is. Engineers and physicists are hardly revolutionaries bent on destroying conservative fairy tales. They don't see reality as it is. Like it or not the US, as documents show, aided and abetted the overthrow of Chile's president.

In the end Prager U is yet another fundamentalist theocratic religion. We can actually count the ways that it is in its five-minute presentations and in the comments on the various five minute pontifications on the Prager U Facebook page. There’s the belief amongst many of the faithful that once the priestly authorities have spoken there is no need for further exploration of a topic. There’s the belief amongst many of the faithful in the inerrancy of the sacred texts of the religion. All hail the power of Hayek’s name. There are those five-minute Prager U catechisms that socialise or try to socialise the faithful, new, converts, or old, into how and what true believers should think. There are those ahistorical and anti-historical attitudes of many of the faithful. There’s the belief among many of the faithful that true believers need to mission to the many heretics outside the Prager church. There’s even a willingness among many of the red faced emotional true believing faithful that, should evangelism fail, heretics should symbolically and even perhaps actually be burned at the inquisitorial stake. Prager U is a religion. Prager U is a theocratic religion just like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam before it. Everyone, by now, should expect this inquisition.