Facebook is purging liberal sites and harassing liberals and progressives who post on their own sites. I went a few rounds with them today when they kept removing my posts because they were “spam” or because they violated FB “standards.” I complained and got some things back but always without an explanation of exactly why it had been removed.
To me this is harassment, when I have to go through the process of appealing and explaining in order to get a picture or a short text reinstated. It seems designed to wear down people posting anything against the fascists and extremists who are destroying the nation. It is intimidation against Freedom of Expression and it is right out of the authoritarian playbook.
Below is a re-edit of an article in Eudaimonia by umair haque.I have pulled chunks of it from a larger text and hope to have given a good essence of haque’s points. Included is the url for the whole article to check if the essence gets it right. Any errors are mine.
I don’t usually try to post summaries of other articles but I wanted to put this on another site on FB that does accept summaries and got blocked. Here is what FB blocked.
eand.co/...
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Why did Lindsey Graham throw such a hysterical fit? Why do 30% of Americans fanatically cheer for Don the Con no matter what he says or does? Why do some whites hate women, blacks, browns, reds, immigrants, and lots of others? [editor]
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Myth: That America was the land of the free and the home of the brave — that it was the world’s noblest experiment — that it was unique amongst nations in being a haven for the wretched — that people ever lived together in some kind of new Athens on the Atlantic. None of these things were ever true.
American democracy was so easy to kill because America did not really practice democracy much, or well enough, at all.
Many Americans alive today grew up in a country where there was a strict hierarchy of humanity, of personhood. At the top were white men. Below them were white women. Below them were other kinds of men — Asian, Chinese, and so on. And then finally black men — and last of all, black women.
But such a society is not really a democracy, though it might call itself one — as Americans did — because in a democracy, these three goods, freedom, justice, and equality, are at a bare minimum, things which people enjoy in roughly equal proportions. When, though, was that ever the case in America?
Old America’s hierarchy of personhood never really went away.
Norms and values die much harder than laws, after all. And so from wherever immigrants, blacks, and minorities came — whites fled. Whenever it was asked that people invest in one another, whites especially refused. “Those dirty, lazy good-for-nothings won’t get my tax dollars!” The hierarchy of personhood is alive and well today — isn’t it just what we see the Trumpists and Kavanauaghs of the world not just hoping to resurrect — but, more grimly, relegitimizing and institutionalizing and formally structuring all over again?
A caste society — made of tribes. Tribes occupied different social strata, essentially, from which movement was nearly impossible. The elite white at the top, the working class white below him, a jumbled mass of immigrants and minorities in the middle, and finally, at the bottom, blacks — who’d always remained the equivalent, sadly, of untouchables.
A society can either be a place of tribes, sorted into castes — or it can be a democracy. But it cannot be both. America was never really the democracy it thought it was — and still believes itself to be.
New America has only existed for forty years — and in those forty years, it has faltered, stagnated, and collapsed. But old America — undemocratic America — existed for centuries.
Old America is not some dusty, ancient memory. It is very much a living one. And it seems to be a place that many Americans wish to return to.
He remembers a world of dominance and power and control — old America. It is a boyhood memory for him — a living thing, not a drawing of a long-gone age in a textbook. And it seems to me these days perhaps that he longs for it. He yearns for it. And least some hims do.
He is wishing for a return to the stability and comfort and easy pleasure of that world — a world still within living memory. A patriarchal, tribal, subjugated place, where he and those like him were on top. Simply by inheritance, birthright, and blood.
Hence, Americans of a certain kind are doing everything in their power to resurrect old America. Which “hes” might I be speaking of? Go ahead and take a look at the old, sneering men who hold power. The Trumps and Kavanaughs and Grahams.
You see, unlike the rest of the rich world, at least, in America, original sins are not things which occurred centuries ago. America’s original sins of the violation of the sanctity of personhood did not even happen a lifetime ago. They happened in the very boyhood of the men who now lead it just back to that very place.
The men who long for old America only need to think of their very own childhood — and there, my friends, perhaps they see better times. Times when women knew their place, when blacks knew theirs, when those dirty, filthy immigrants kept to themselves. When they were lords and masters.
Dominion over every body, every dollar, every muscle, every mind in the land was theirs. They look at their boyhoods, and they see total and absolute power. And that glittering temptation was not long ago enough to be far away enough to preserve democracy now.
But like all resurrections, something must die, for old America to live again. And that thing is new America. And that, my friends, means that democracy is the brief period American had in between two dark oceans of apartheid and authoritarianism.
Saturday, Oct 13, 2018 · 10:25:46 PM +00:00
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ebhunt
Facebook shut down 559 pages and 251 accounts on Thursday that violated the company’s rules by spamming users with partisan news, the social network’s largest purge to date.
The accounts, all based in the United States, circulated both far-left and far-right content. Each had hundreds of thousands of followers, and one, Right Wing News, which shared articles from a website of the same name, had more than 3.1 million followers. More recently, Right Wing News released a flood of content in support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and propagated conspiracy theories about Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, the New York Times reports.
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No mention in this article about the collateral damage from the overly broad sweep of offending web sites. At least some harmless web sites will never return as the price for FB’s inability to focus on its real targets.
Biggest Purge Ever