Author Archives: Brick Wahl

The end of privacy

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(2014)

I’m amazed at how the media is plunging into all the hacked Sony stuff without ever mentioning the right to privacy. What a quaint thing that was. I keep reading and hearing these Sony emails in the press as if they were public property and thinking when are we next? Apparently anything ever written on a computer keyboard is now considered fair game. And that means you and me, not just big corporations or government employees. It’s a stunning shift in attitudes toward privacy. People apparently have the right to peer into and publicize whatever we write in a digital format. You send an email, it’s public property. Where does this stop? Are phone conversations next? This is completely creeping me out. The vicious thugs who run North Korea get pissed at a movie that makes fun of them and splatter the studio responsible’s information all over the web, right down to individual employee’s  social security numbers. Reporters, bloggers and the public go nuts publicizing it, without compunction. Somehow hacking is no longer a crime, and our very thoughts are now public property, WikiLeaks expanded ad infinitum. There’s no limit. And this isn’t 1984, it wasn’t the government that did this, or big corporations, or any mega anything. It was the people. Just people. The North Koreans realized this, and used our own creepiness to spread the information. They understood that deep down we’re basically people peeking into other people’s windows. All they had to do was dump all the info they stole onto public sites and watch the rats race to feed on it.  We’re the ones who are so ravenous for all these intimate details. We’re the ones who crave other people’s secret thoughts. We’re the ones who love the dirt. We flushed our own right to privacy down the toilet. We created this nightmare. Though almost none of you see it as a nightmare. But this is just beginning, people. Any of you could find yourself gone viral, and have no control over it, even as it destroys your life. This will happen more and more and more. Now that we’ve given away our right to privacy, we don’t even have the right to complain. This is a brand new world and I, for one, don’t like it at all.

You might laugh now, think this is just paranoia, but when it’s your photo-shopped fake sex offender mugshot registering a couple million hits a day, you’ll remember the old days.

Blaming the good for the bad

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(2014)

About the cold blooded murder of those two New York cops, I keep seeing people somehow blaming their deaths on the recent protests. As if all those who protested the deaths of unarmed black males at the hands of the police are responsible, even indirectly, for these murders. As if a whole movement is an accessory to the fact. It’s not true. Every protest movement generates the occasional craziness, but that does not reflect on or invalidate the protests one bit. There are loonies and sociopaths who get caught up in excitement and kill, but they would kill anyway. This is just an excuse. Charlie Manson blamed the Beatles, the Symbionese Libeation Army cited Martin Luther King. There were murders and mayhem carried out by rogue thugs in the American Revolution and they claimed the were killing in cold blood for our independence. But they were killing because they loved killing. Independence was just an excuse. This is the same situation. There’s a connection between the deaths of those two officers and the death of Eric Garner only because the killer texted it as his reason. But the protests are not to blame. You can’t blame the good for the bad. You’d have to blame the entire human race to perdition if that were the case. Every single person who ever lived could somehow be connected indirectly with some murder or genocide. I suppose that makes for great comments on Facebook, but it’s nonsense. Eric Garner did not cause the deaths of those two officers. Nor did those of you in the streets. This tit for tat blame game is just keyboard warriors strutting their stuff, thinking they’re badass.

Burn Baby Burn

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(2014)

There’s a lot of white people yelling burn baby burn on Facebook and Twitter tonight, nice white people living in nice white neighborhoods a thousand miles away. It’s always easy to demand violent action when it’s not in your own neighborhood. And it’s always easy to demand neighborhoods burn when you think that property isn’t worth that much anyway. As long as it’s those people. Those people. Someone even plays the stereo too loud in your neighborhood and you call the police. But this isn’t about you, is it? It’s about those people. Sure there’s a riot goin’ on–I’ve seen that a few times tonight on Facebook, quoting Sly–but it’s not in your neighborhood. It’s so exciting, isn’t it, being a keyboard revolutionary.

I didn’t hear Michael Brown’s parents yelling burn baby burn. But then this isn’t about them. It’s about nice white people living vicariously through someone else’s broken windows and busted heads.

A public storage facility consumed in flames in Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014.

A public storage facility consumed in flames in Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014.       (Eric Thayer/Washington Post)

Maybe libertarianism is just socialism for stoners

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Gary Johnson just had another stoner moment when he couldn’t name a single living leader of another country. Not one. Shimon Peres? His running mate and designated driver William Weld had to remind him that Peres was no longer among living world leaders. Oh yeah, Gary said. Silence. We waited. Gary shrugged. I’m having another Aleppo moment, he said. I had no idea it was possible to smoke that much marijuana. Yet Johnson is still at 6% nationally and up to 30% among voters 18-35. The very unstoned Jill Stein, however, is down to 1% nationally and slipping below 15% among those same 18-35 year olds. But she is a doctor, not a pothead, and you know what buzzkills doctors are, even the hippie ones. So apparently every time Gary Johnson has a Cheech and Chong moment on national television, Jill Stein loses more stoner votes. Refill Johnson’s bong and the Green Party might disappear altogether. Though if anyone has an alternative explanation I’d love to hear it.

Jill Stein

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Man, did the Green party blow it this year. They selected a ticket so incompetent that it not only failed to pick up most of Bernie Sanders’ supporters, but has since lost two thirds of the ones they did get. Jill Stein is now showing up with 2% (and dropping) in most of the four way polls, down from 6% before she began campaigning in earnest. Such a debacle the Greens are having that when Gary Johnson asked “Where’s Aleppo?”, the Greens lost more voters than the Libertarians. Apparently Gary the Stoner’s short term memory issues were more attractive to die some hard Bernie Bros than was a woman (you know those Bernie Bros and women) who was running on nearly all of Bernie Sanders’ platform. A very large percentage of Jill Stein’s socialist followers are apparently converting to libertarianism because Gary Johnson is a dude you can smoke a doob with. And unless she can cool it with the silly sixties crap and actually run a campaign that isn’t embarrassing–the raised fists and calls for the brothers and sisters to join the revolution ain’t cutting it–there might soon be more Bernie supporters voting for Trump than for Jill Stein. It is hard to imagine how her campaign could have done worse in what should have been their banner year. Bernie Sanders laid the groundwork for what could have been the greatest showing by a left wing candidacy in a century. Instead she has made an Ayn Rand quoting Libertarian look relevant. Those voters will not be coming back to the socialist fold anytime soon.

Note to Green Party–ixnay on the ippiehays in 2020.

bernie-sanders-supporters-jill-stein-670x388

Issues? What issues?

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One of the most infuriating things about press coverage of the presidential campaign this year is how the press avoids pressing the candidates on the issues. This is Trump driven, I think. His campaign has been virtually issueless for the most part–it is up to nine policy positions now (including “paying for the wall”), while Hillary has detailed positions on thirty nine. Romney had twenty five by this point. But as Trump does not discuss issues–he said the voters aren’t especially interested–the media doesn’t bother to bring them up. Why would they? Why risk his displeasure? Trump has them cowed. Instead, he gets live network coverage of a hotel opening, or a visit to his new golf course in Scotland. Those the press talks about. Sure they bitch about it, but do they ask him hard, policy questions? Uh uh. What is the point for a reporter to even try? You get out of line and he turns the crowd on you. Or banishes you from his rallies. Leaves them stuck on the tarmac. Maybe has an insolent reporter arrested. Worse yet, he’ll say mean things on Twitter. So instead you ask Hillary if she’s still having seizures.

The campaign press corps will be a little light on Pulitzers this year. But maybe TMZ is hiring.

Epilepsy is such a dirty word in a presidential election

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When the Alt-Right and Trump’s media surrogates began alleging that Hillary was having seizures, I knew she was in trouble. Americans perhaps alone among western countries are notoriously hung up about epilepsy, often terrified of it, always uncomfortable around it, and almost universally uninformed. And when you actually go and utter the terrible word and apply it to a presidential candidate, even if it is a complete lie, it sows severe doubts in a lot of people in this country. Hillary, of course, is NOT epileptic (though Chief Justice John Roberts is), but no matter, this is a TMZ world, people believe the stupidest stuff, and now several million Americans think that Hillary is, or might be, epileptic. And you know what that means. Well, no, almost nobody does know what that means. Except that Donald Trump suddenly looked a lot more presidential to a lot of people whose neurological knowledge isn’t that far removed from the Middle Ages. Hell, even Tom Brokaw flipped out. And when an anchor man says that Hillary better see a neurologist right now, then there must be something to it.

Four score and seven tweets ago…

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Donald Trump has utterly transformed the way the media covers the presidential election. Now, running on issues is considered a weakness by both Trump and the media. Try as you might, you will see almost zero coverage on any actual issues this week. Trump and the Alt-Right dominate the media’s thinking. When Tom Brokaw screams that Hillary needs to see a neurologist immediately, you can see just how fundamentally news coverage has been altered.

And unless you spend hours daily on Twitter, you will be completely mystified as to how this is happening. But it’s happening because Trump turned Twitter into the dominant medium this campaign, even more so than television itself, and on Twitter the news cycle runs in seconds, with everyone trying to be the first person to tweet the latest story. When Gary Johnson made his What is Aleppo goof on Morning Joe (on MSNBC), he was barely a minute away from the set when panelist Mark Halperin–one of the country’s leading political reporters–got him on his iPhone. Within two minutes that conversation was broadcast on the air, with Johnson still inside the building, but even more remarkably, Halperin tweeted about that phone conversation while still talking to Johnson. That news cycle was literally less than sixty seconds, and What is Aleppo was trending within two minutes (I watched it happen.)

I think the reason that news coverage of the campaign is so distorted is that political reporters and pundits are addicted to Twitter. 140 characters or less. Even telegraphy was not so terse. Ironically, though, vastly more of us voters get our news on social media from Facebook instead of Twitter, and the disconnect between media and voters has never been so stark. We each live in our own social media universes. You and me here, on Facebook, and reporters and pundits on Twitter, and neither platform can access the other. That happens second hand, via television news. Twitterized reporting is stretched out into news stories and pundits shouting at each other, which filters into Facebook and down to us. “I was just asking a few farmers about grain prices & all they wanted to talk about was how the Clinton campaign handled the media Sunday” Mark Halperin tweeted today. It’s like policy issues don’t even exist.

Trump will lose the election–he gets slaughtered on Facebook–but his campaign stays even in the media because he tweets incessantly, and the media follows every tweeted utterance like it is a message from on high. No one, not even Hillary now, can compete for the media’s attention when the media has become conceptually twitterized. It certainly beats doing any real issues reporting. You can’t discuss, say, the ramifications of the new Filipino president pivoting his nation away from the U.S. and towards China in 140 characters or less. Anything politically newsworthy today can be no more than a catch phrase. Even sound bites are too long for Twitter. And certainly sound thinking is.

The Gettysburg Address, a mere 272 words long, has 1,369 too many characters and spaces for Twitter. 87 yrs ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty & dedicated to the prop that ppl are created equal. That’s about all that fits. Then on to the real news that Lincoln picked up a case of smallpox in Gettysburg.

What is Aleppo?

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An upbeat and self-confident Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, is on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. He’s asked what he would do about Aleppo. He looks confused. What is Aleppo? Asked if he was kidding he repeated what is Aleppo? When told it was in Syria he says oh that and it you could see the scale of his mistake dawn upon him. He is pounded about Syria, and was he not seeing the articles and stories and footage of the disaster in Aleppo? Yes, he said, though was unable to say anything particularly coherent. He left after a couple minutes, completely deflated. What is Aleppo was trending on Twitter before he was even off the set.