Category Archives: Social media

Of COURSE we trust the NSA more than Facebook

Someone over at Slate seemed to be marveling over this “contradiction:”

One big reason why Americans aren’t that outraged by the revelations that the U.S. government runs a massive online and cellphone spying operation: People already assume they’re being tracked all over the Internet by companies like Google and Facebook.

Yesterday’s Washington Post/Pew poll showed that 56 percent of Americans view the NSA’s snooping as “acceptable,” while 45 percent think it should be allowed to go even further. Contrast that with a 2012 AP-CNBC poll that found only 13 percent of Americans trust Facebook to keep their data private, while another 28 percent trust the company “somewhat.” The majority had little to no faith in the company to protect their privacy.

The numbers aren’t perfectly parallel. But they suggest that the average American is more comfortable with the government’s spying than with Facebook’s control over their personal information…

Well, duh. Of course we trust the NSA more than we do Facebook. The NSA, the hysteria of recent days notwithstanding, works for us, and is constrained by the laws of this country and the elected and appointed representatives who have oversight over it, and who ultimately answer to us. Yes, that’s the way it actually is, contrary to all the “Big Brother” hyperventilating from the likes of Rand Paul.

Whereas Facebook works for Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t elect Mark Zuckerberg. Nor did I elect anyone who appointed Mark Zuckerberg, or in any way keeps an eye on him and holds him to account in my behalf.

And in fact, after pulling us in with the headline, “People Trust the NSA More Than Facebook. That’s a Shame,” the Slate writer acknowledges some of the reasons why that would be so:

From a selfish perspective, that makes some sense: Most Americans assume they’ll never be the target of a terror investigation—and that the government has little use for their information otherwise. Facebook, in contrast, relies on the personal information of all of its users. It doesn’t intend to prosecute them for crimes, of course—just show them personalized advertisements. But for many people, the fear of having an illicit relationship, a racy photo, or personal communications unintentionally revealed to their friends and colleagues is more visceral—and more realistic—than the fear of being wrongly prosecuted for a crime. And whereas most people can appreciate the NSA’s interest in monitoring their communications, they have a harder time seeing the upside to Facebook’s data collection. It’s not like Mark Zuckerberg is going to use their old status updates to prevent the next terror attack.

And that doesn’t just make sense “from a selfish perspective.” It makes sense, period. As this piece notes, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t going to prevent the next terror attack, nor is he expected to. His job is making money for Facebook. Leave him to it. That’s his business, not ours (unless we’re one of the saps who jumped at his IPO).

If we trusted Facebook more than we did the NSA, now that would be a shame. It would mean that our whole system of representative democracy was failing. Which it isn’t.

Have you heard the one about McCain and the Syrian rebels?

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I wasn’t watching the news all that closely yesterday, so, as sometimes happens with Twitter, I saw the jokes about John McCain sneaking into Syria to talk to the rebels before I knew he had gone. Here’s the first I saw:

pourmecoffeeVerified account‏@pourmecoffee

Syrian rebels with McCain, probably: “I want to trust your judgment, but go over again why you thought she was qualified to be president.”

Later, someone brought my attention to this one from McCain pal Lindsey Graham:

Lindsey GrahamVerified account‏@GrahamBlog

Best wishes to @SenJohnMcCain in Syria today. If he doesn’t make it back calling dibs on his office.

Anyway, no doubt to Graham’s chagrin, McCain apparently made it back out of Syria OK (at least, that’s how I read this reference to Yemen). The White House has said today that yeah, they knew he was going, and no, they don’t have anything else to say about it, but look forward to hearing from the senator about his trip.

Tapiture (a.k.a., ‘Pinterest for Dudes’) breaks no new ground

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Recently, I happened to mention to a young woman of my acquaintance something that I’d seen on Pinterest, and she stopped me to say, in a mocking sort of way, “You’re on Pinterest?”

We were interrupted at that point, so I didn’t get around to asking her, “Why do you ask it that way?” But I didn’t need to. You see, guys aren’t supposed to be on Pinterest. It’s supposed to be a woman thing. If we had continued on the subject, I would of course have explained, in a deep voice, that I don’t really like Pinterest, that I had only checked it out because I needed to know about it for work (I had been asked to write a post about it for the ADCO blog, which I did, and then wrote a somewhat different one for this blog), and that for me to like it, it would have to have fewer recipes and “cute shoes,” and a lot more stuff about cars and war and Steve McQueen and the “Evil Dead” movies. (Insert Tim Allen’s caveman noises here.)

Last week, a site seeking the success of Pinterest, except among men, came to my attention. It’s called Tapiture. When I searched for information about it, I saw this piece on Slate headlined, “Pinterest for Dudes,” which posed the question, “Is it sexist to create a visual sharing site for men?” (To which my reply is “No. Yes. How could anyone possibly care?”)

I wasn’t all that impressed.

First, it seems to lack the one thing I really liked on Pinterest — which was sort of a limited thing to like, because it was a one-time experience. When I first signed up on Pinterest, as I wrote previously, it kept throwing new images at me based on images I told it I liked. That was interesting, as I played around with it — If I like this, what will it throw at me next? Whether on Netflix or Pandora or Pinterest, I’m intrigued by watching an algorithm try to get to know me. Tapiture gives you a similar opportunity to “like” a wide assortment of images, but if the images coming at you change in keeping with what you’ve liked so far, I couldn’t tell. I think I was just getting a generic feed.

After that, Pinterest and Tapiture are equally disappointing. I would really dig Pinterest if, each time I called it up, it gave me new pins based on the stuff I’d liked so far. It doesn’t. What it gives me is stuff I have pinned (which is limited, since I lost interest in pinning fairly quickly), and recent pins from people I have “followed.” And that gets pretty static. Each time I call it up, I’m looking at pretty much the same stuff. There’s none of the dynamism of new things — more to the point, of ideas — that following people on Twitter gives you. Bottom line, Pinterest gives me no reason to keep going back.

Tapiture does pretty much the same. Not that it’s necessarily boring. I was a bit startled by it at one point. The second time I called it up, having gone through the signup ritual the first time, all of a sudden the pictures of cars and cool architecture and food-that-features-bacon had given way to page after page of pictures that looked like they were from an early-’60s edition of Playboy. Very much softcore, but fairly racy as old-school cheesecake goes. Yikes, I thought, what if my wife uses my laptop and sees this? I didn’t sign up for this.

Actually, I had, without knowing it. In my first foray, I had run across a user who called himself “BillS Preston,” and digging the “Bill & Ted” reference, I “followed” him. All of the skin pictures were coming from him. Which sort of stands to reason, I guess, with a guy who names himself for a quintessential adolescent. (In his defense, he does post other stuff, such as this, but not as often, apparently.) So I unfollowed him, to keep myself out of trouble, and went back to the beer and hunting dogs. And bacon. And the occasional girly picture, but not so it looked like I was obsessed.

Speaking of which… Tapiture says “We do not allow nude photographic images that contain exposed nipples, genitalia, and/or fully exposed buttocks.” Yeah, OK. But you don’t have to be on the site long to see lots of stuff that stretches that envelope. Some users are always going to see just how far they can go, and Tapiture’s users are no exception.

But you know what? That’s not just a Tapiture thing. In fact, I’ve images of female nudity on Pinterest, which doesn’t allow “Sexually explicit content or photographs containing exposed breasts, genitalia and/or buttocks.” Yeah, what do you call this (sure, that’s pretty mild, but it does cross the technical line — and I’m intentionally avoiding anything racier, this being a family blog)?

More to the point, I can also find plenty of cars and dogs and military history — and, yes, bacon — on Pinterest as well. I haven’t seen anything yet on Tapiture that I couldn’t find on the larger site that is theoretically just for chicks.

So guys, if you’re really into staring at lots of pictures of stuff you like (which I find tiring), you really don’t have to remember a new password. It’s all there on Pinterest. Assuming you don’t have anything better to do with your time…

Sanford’s continuing with the Nancy Pelosi shtick

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You would think that, after standing on a public street pretending to “debate” a life-sized photograph of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Sanford would realize that he had embarrassed himself in three ways:

By making Rep. Pelosi his target, he’s doing exactly the same thing that he’s accusing Elizabeth Colbert Busch of doing — failing to confront his actual opponent. This “run against the national boogeyman (or woman)” shtick is the last resort of the desperate. It cries out that he has nothing relevant to say to the 1st District. It’s like the political equivalent of how the Tsarnaevs learned to be terrorists — they just got it from the Internet. It’s garden-variety, off-the-shelf, inside-the-Beltway partisan nonsense.
By choosing MUSC as his background, he unnecessarily calls attention to the fact that he has always been hostile to the very idea of public research universities in South Carolina. If Mark Sanford had his way, institutions such as MUSC would not exist. It’s just not a good idea, for him, to remind voters of that.
By standing specifically in front of a building named for Dr. James Colbert — the father of his opponent — he not only demonstrates a shocking cluelessness of landmarks in the main city in his district, but underlines the contributions that his opponent’s family have made to the community in which they are so strongly rooted.

After so thoroughly striking out with this shtick yesterday, you’d think Sanford would abandon it. But above you see a picture of him Tweeted by Stacy Jacobson with the ABC affiliate in Charleston. Her explanation of the picture:

Sanford holds up $1,000. Says Pelosi spent $600k to campaign against him

Sheesh. Never mind that, as an image, it evokes the photo that so embarrassed Mitt Romney.

That’s our former governor. When he finds a way to make himself look silly, he shticks with it…

Bang, bang! Your hashtag shot me dead…

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At first, I was going to launch into a rant about the stupidity of the people, here in the celebrity-addled West, when I took an additional few seconds to ponder this:

What do you see when you read this Twitter hashtag?

#nowthatcherisdead

It’s supposed to be about Monday’s death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and looks to have been popularized by the website “IsThatcherDeadYet,” which was not upset to hear about the Iron Lady’s passing. “It’s fair to say that we are not fans,” site co-creator Jared Earle told The Guardian.

When Thatcher died, the website asked readers “how are you celebrating?” and suggested they use the #nowthatcherisdead hashtag.

Monday at 7:58 a.m. ET, just after the news broke of Thatcher’s death, the hashtag popped up on Twitter. The first tweet from someone who seemed to have read it wrong came four minutes later:

“So sad to hear that Cher is dead. #nowthatcherisdead.”

That then led to some confusion and amusement. Comedian Ricky Gervais as among those who tried to straighten things out:

“Some people are in a frenzy over the hashtag #nowthatchersdead. It’s ‘Now Thatcher’s dead’. Not, ‘Now that Cher’s dead’ JustSayin’ ”

Idiots! I thought, and then I looked at the hashtag as though I were seeing it without the setup, and realized the natural way to make it out was to read “now,” then “that,” then whatever else one could make of the letters that remained.

So the stupidity, I now think, was on the part of the Thatcher-haters who devised the hashtag. The Cher interpretation makes for a better-written statement. The mind sort of wants a “that” after “now.” I mean, really, the thing would have made more sense, been easier to make out, had it read, “#nowthatthatcherisdead.”

Anyway, so much for the “Cher is dead” rumor. Which turned out not to be nearly as much fun as the “Paul is dead” one. That one had all those clues to look for…

A very bad photo Cher posted on Twitter after rumors spread of her death. Come to think of it, she does have a sort of Elvira, Queen of the Dead thing going there. I don’t know who the kid is.

House of Cards: A political fantasy in which a South Carolina congressional district is represented by a white Democrat

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That — what I said in my headline — is what struck me first about the American version of “House of Cards.” Kevin Spacey’s character is a powerful congressman who represents South Carolina’s 5th District. At least, he’s from Gaffney, and that’s in the 5th District. (The Peachoid features prominently in episode 3.)

Indeed, that district was represented by a senior white Democrat, John Spratt, just a couple of years back. But that was before the Tea Party, before the Republican Party cemented its hold on the entire delegation — except for Jim Clyburn, whose district is secure because the GOP doesn’t want those black voters in their six districts.

Have you seen the series? It’s the first original series on Netflix, and in keeping with the new national watching habit that that service helped foster, they’ve given us the entire first series all at once. I appreciate that. That is, I would appreciate it if the series had proven to be as addictive as “Breaking Bad,” or “Homeland,” or “The Walking Dead.”

But it didn’t. Netflix had hoped it would, that the series would give it the kind of cred as a content producer (because it is such a hassle negotiating with others to use their content) that “The Sopranos” gave HBO. But this is no “Sopranos.” Nor is it a “Mad Men.”

First, it’s not original. It’s based on the 22-year-old British series of the same name, starring Ian Richardson, whom I will always think of as Bill Haydon in the original BBC production of le Carre’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” The first season co-stars the lovely Susannah Harker, who five years later played Miss Jane Bennet in the definitive production of “Pride and Prejudice” (the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. (Hey, did y’all recognize her in “Zero Dark Thirty”? Jennifer Ehle, I mean. I knew I knew her, but I didn’t realize who she was, with her hair down and all, until the credits. And can you tell my caffeine is starting to kick in? I’m writing this at Barnes and Noble, with a cuppa the black stuff from the Starbucks across the parking lot — I prefer it to the “proudly served” version served here — and since I don’t drink it much since my ear thing started, I’m feeling it. Sorry about the digressions…)

Let’s focus in on Ms. Harker’s character, because I think it will help define why I don’t like the new American series as much. Oh, the production values are better; you can tell more money was probably spent making it look good, and the technology’s just better now than it was in 1990. But it’s not as engaging. My wife and I watched two episodes a night for two nights, then stopped. Last night, I proposed going back to it, and my wife OK, but as I called it up, said with disappointment, “Oh, you mean the American one…?” So we watched the last of the first season of the original.

But back to Ms. Harker’s character. She’s much, much more engaging than the extremely irritating little girl (which I mean both literally, in the sense of stature, and in the sense that our governor uses the phrase) played by Kate Mara in the Netflix version. She’s also more believable. It is far more credible that this is a person who would be able to keep a job. OK, so she eventually gets fired, but she kept the job for awhile.

Yeah, I get it. Mara’s supposed to be the brash “new wave” of electronic journalism, sweeping aside the conventions established by the old-timey ink-stained wretches. And maybe that offends me because I’m pretty sure I’m as adept at blogging and social media as her character is, and even if I’m not a grownup, I know how to act like one. Obnoxious is obnoxious. Then there’s the fact that we’re asked to believe that Spacey’s character — who has Robin Wright waiting at home, and no end of young lovelies walking the halls of Congress — would be attracted to her. She was cute in “Shooter” several years ago, in a waiflike sort of way, but both physically and in terms of personality, is about as cuddly as a hedgehog in this.

By contrast, Susanna Harker’s character in the original series, which debuted when she was 25, draws you in. Even though, or perhaps because, her tragic fascination with Richardson’s character makes me think of the refrain of Elvis Costello’s “You Little Fool,” you can’t help caring about her. You see why, for instance, her editor loves her hopelessly. Oh, and for any young people who think, “Well that was made in the olden days before women were set free and allowed to have sharp edges,” I’ll point out that it was 20 years after the leading edge of the movement that produced today’s allegedly liberated generation. (Sorry, but y’all didn’t invent independence and assertiveness.) Harker made her soft and vulnerable, but she also made her real. I found myself wishing she were a little more cynical and tough-minded, to keep her out of trouble, but at least she doesn’t come across as cheesy and contrived.

Why is this difference important? Well, because the main problem with the new American series is the utter lack of a sympathetic character. Everyone is horrible. It doesn’t have to be a soft, vulnerable young woman — any sympathetic character would do. This sort of thing doesn’t bother everyone. And indeed, a really excellent series can get overcome that flaw, as I think “Breaking Bad” does — I keep watching in horrified fascination. But normally, the lack of a likable character will ruin any work of fiction for me. As much as I enjoy Tom Wolfe’s old New Journalism — especially Acid Test and The Right Stuff (his only book in which one could detect a hint of admiration of his subjects) — I hated Bonfire of the Vanities. Brilliant writing, interesting Tory social commentary, but everyone in it was so contemptible, like loathsome little bugs being fried under Wolfe’s magnifying glass.

Eventually, I’ll watch the rest of the new version, if only to see if it ever does anything interesting with the supposed South Carolina connection. But so far, I’ll have to say that it doesn’t live up to the ambitions that Netflix had for it.

Pope Benedict the Quitter?

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As the world received the surprising news that Pope Benedict will be the first pope in just under 600 years to retire rather than die in office, the commentariat struggled to produce instant analysis. A typical facile effort (particularly typical for Slate), was this Tweet linking to a piece by the late Christopher Hitchens asserting that this pope’s “whole career has the stench of evil.” Not that they wanted to be critical or hostile or dismissive or anything. (Of course, as always, the Hitchens piece is powerfully written. If atheists had a Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Hitchens would have been the perfect guy to head it up. Whatever he had to say, I almost always admired how well he said it.)

By contrast, I was impressed by the quick-draw thoughtfulness of this piece from The New Yorker. An excerpt:

One thing is clear: Benedict has made a conscious choice not to be John Paul II, who turned his own wrenching, illness-filled last days into something like a parable. It could be hard to watch John Paul wave at a crowd with a hand that trembled, and he knew it, and sought consciously to use that time to emphasize his community with anyone who hurt, and with his God. Say what one will about John Paul II, but one couldn’t honestly read his biography without being moved—he worked in a limestone quarry during the German occupation of Poland, studying at a secret seminary—and one can’t quite blame Benedict for not matching that, or for lacking John Paul’s Popemobile charisma or the manner that made his faith seem so manifest. But then it was John Paul II’s conservatism, particularly in the selection of cardinals, that assured Ratzinger’s succession. And which way is really better? Should pain—not only of the ill, but of the poor—simply be borne? One can argue that Benedict is far more honest—and by providing a valuable example of his own about knowing when one is done, perhaps he is doing the Church a six-century-overdue favor. But it is inescapable that Joseph Ratzinger has not lived, and will not die, as Karol Wojtyla did.

That’s an interesting thing to contemplate. There is an object lesson, and particularly a spiritual one, for the world in how a man perceived as so powerful deals with the powerlessness of age and sickness. Like John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin (Columbia’s homeboy) did what he could to be an exemplar of how to face a terminal illness, showing solidarity with the weak and suffering of the world. In other words, they imitated Christ.

On the other hand, does not the head of any major organization, including the church, have a stewardship responsibility to make sure there’s someone in the job who’s up to it?

I thought it an intriguing question to raise, particularly since I’m not entirely sure how to answer it. The Pope’s made his decision, though, and as is his habit, he didn’t check to see what I thought first…

Todd Kincannon seems to have found his own Heart of Darkness

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I’m not sure how else to put it.

I’ve known Todd, slightly, for several years now. Once, I would have said, “I know him to say hello to.” Now, I say, “I know him to exchange Tweets with,” which I have done frequently. I’ve only met him in person a handful of times, and when I have, he’s been a polite, friendly young man who seems to know how to behave himself in public.

But lately, his Tweets — and there are a LOT of them; I don’t personally know anyone who Tweets more constantly — have been trailing off into a strange, dark, extreme place. Following them is like traveling up the Congo (or, in Coppola’s version, the Mekong) in search of Kurtz, who had lost himself in savagery. Increasingly, they are of a sort that I can’t quote here without violating my own standards. Even showing you the ones that this post is about is a departure. But now that Todd has gone on national media to defend these truly indefensible Tweets, and not backed down an inch or admitted in any way that they are beyond the pale, and been identified to the world as a former executive director of the state GOP, well… I’m laying them out before you.

Here’s the one that the above video interview is about:

Here’s another related to it:

I don’t know what has led Todd on this path. I know that when he stepped it up (or rather, down) a few degrees a month or so ago, he found himself gaining a lot more attention, and I’ve seen that do bad things to people’s heads before.

Is it just immaturity? When Rusty DePass posted something on Facebook that deeply offended all who saw it, he immediately took it down (too late; it had been grabbed and preserved) and truly, sincerely apologized to everyone for it. (I think Kathryn, and others here who know Rusty, will back me up as to his sincerity.)

Todd operates in an environment where… well, the maturity level is pretty well established in the language used in this Wonkette piece criticizing him. A place where there are no rules of civility, or at least it seems that there aren’t — until Todd manages to find a way to violate them. (The problem with Wonkette’s reaction, of course, is that it helps Todd believe in his explanation that this is just a left-right thing, and he’s just doing what everybody does to people on the other side.) A place where obscenities that would only sound daring to a 7th-grader are the standard.

How hard is it to simply say that, for instance, Trayvon Martin was just this kid, you know? He was neither an angel nor a devil, he was just a kid who didn’t deserve to die because he had a run-in with this George Zimmerman guy, who wasn’t an angel or a devil either. MIsguided people on the left and right have glommed onto these people as some sorts of symbols, but they were just people. And his shooting was what the prosecutors in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities would have called a “piece a s__t case,” a case that’s just a horrible, tragic mess any way you look at it, with no heroes, no one to admire, no good coming out of it, no redeeming lesson to be drawn.

But one thing is clear: Now that the kid’s dead, he sure as hell doesn’t deserve to have his memory trashed in terms that shouldn’t be used in public under any circumstances, about anybody.

Todd’s performance in the above video is nothing short of appalling. I don’t know what to say but to define it in Conradian terms, and express how sorry I am to see it. He might not be sorry, but I am…