Folks, we’ve got less than two months left until the election. How did that happen? Will the news cycle ever let up from now until we get Trump out of office? The answer, of course, is no. So let’s make sure we give him the boot and let’s take down a bunch of Senate Republicans while we’re there, yeah?
Until then, here’s what you might have missed this week.
Facebook announces new preelection rules for political ads and claims—but will it follow through?
By Hunter
Facebook, the gargantuan and nation-bending social media behemoth, today announced a collection of new actions intended to make it look Slightly Less Bad in the final weeks of the 2020 elections. Facebook has been harshly criticized as one of the top venues, in any medium, for fake news and propaganda dissemination from political campaigns, from professional hoaxers seeking quick advertising revenue, and from your own particularly gullible relatives.
The new policies announced are ... limited. The most substantive is a policy to block all new political and "social issue" advertising for one week prior to the November elections.
I just rolled my eyes so hard that I gave myself a headache.
In addition to the mere one-week duration, though, there's a caveat there. Only new advertisements will be refused; if political groups already have ads in the Facebook pipeline, they will be allowed to boost spending on and visibility of those ads during the final week. Facebook will be showing plenty of political ads in that final week; what the one-week ban provides is a small buffer zone in which Facebook doesn't have to scurry to deal with brand new false claims being disseminated by a campaign or allied groups.
So basically… this is useless, right? Am I missing something here? How is this supposed to help exactly?
Ted Cruz claims pregnancy is not life-threatening, and Twitter has an absolute field day
By Laura Clawson
Cruz has children, yet he is either ignorant of or willing to pretend to be ignorant of the physical dangers of pregnancy in pursuit of closing off healthcare options for women. He’s doing this at a time when COVID-19 is making pregnancy even more dangerous, especially for Black women.
Many, many people let Cruz know not just how wrong he is on the facts but to tell him about their own experiences with the fact that pregnancy is absolutely life-threatening.
Either Ted Crus is a total sexist idiot, or he’s just pretending to be an idiot. (He is definitely a sexist, no doubt about that.) Either way, the result is harmful and he deserves to get ratioed every time he says something this completely inane.
Donald Trump and William Barr to defund America's cities using authority they just made up
By Mark Sumner
Donald Trump’s reelection strategy has been clear for some weeks—destroy America’s great cities, including deliberately refusing to provide the systems needed to fight COVID-19—then point to the damage he’s done and blame “Democrat mayors.” It’s a strategy that plays directly to Trump’s rural—urban divide, and is inspirational … to people like Kyle Rittenhouse. To people who think that cities are places where they can go and commit murder with impunity, because the folks who live there are not “real” Americans.
For months, Trump has done everything he can to throw gasoline onto protests sparked by demands for an end to racist police violence. He has repeatedly sided with police, repeatedly demeaned protesters, and delivered into the middle of cities camo-wearing troops derived from either the bureau of prisons or the border patrol, whose apparent orders are to keep attacking until they get a response.
Even so, it appears that cities are just not being damaged enough to feed Trump’s campaign strategy. So on Wednesday he decided to turn up the screws again, by deciding to cut off funding to cities and states on the basis of “lawlessness”—a standard to be determined by Trump. This appears to include any city where people are protesting, any city where people are trying to address the problem of police violence, just … any city that Trump chooses. Starting, improbably enough, with New York City.
Threats, bullshit, lies. Unfortunately, what we have come to know as the status-quo.
Removing names of slavers and massacre makers from public buildings is one element of reparations
By Meteor Blades
Amanda Rosa at The New York Times writes today about the administration of Columbia University’s plans to change the name of Bard Hall, a dormitory named after Dr. Samuel Bard for his contributions to the university’s medical school. The dorm was named for Bard in 1931, the powers-that-be having decided to ignore the fact that Bard had owned eight slaves and had put up a reward when one of them, James, ran away and became a fugitive from so-called “justice.”
A few other universities are doing likewise with their own buildings named for owners of slaves and engaged in other violence against human rights. While Bard’s slave-owning past had spurred some faculty and students to call for renaming the dorm, it took the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police to spark Columbia’s decision:
Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia who led the research project into the university’s links to slavery, said the ties ran much deeper than the name of Bard Hall, though he said the decision to rename the building was a “wise move.”
“The money from slavery goes way back in Columbia’s history,” he said, adding that the university itself did not own slaves. [...]
“Samuel Bard was a pretty significant slave owner by New York standards,” Professor Foner said.
While many critics argue that the renaming of buildings either doesn’t matter or amounts to “politically correct” attempts to erase history, they matter a great deal and are the opposite of erasure. Dr. Raymond Givens, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia who petitioned the administration for the name-change, told Rosa:
“Names matter,” Dr. Givens said. That, he added, was why “when people protest these police killings, the chant is, ‘Say their names.’”
And that’s it for this week!
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