The movie violates privacy, smears reputations, makes shit up — just what the internet is accused of doing, right? Oh, it's entertaining, in a dark way, as much as watching the pillorying of witches used to be, I suppose. For The Social Network, geeks and entrepreneurs are as mysterious and frightening as witches. Its writer, Aaron Sorkin, admits as much in New York Magazine. "He says unapologetically that he knows almost nothing about the 2010 iteration of Facebook, adding that his interest in computer-aided communication goes only as far as emailing his friends." Sorkin himself says, "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling." Making shit up. …
Ah, but its fans will say, it's really just a drama about a man. But that's where it fails most. It can't begin to explain this man because it doesn't grok what he made — what he's still making.
Jarvis is the turd in the punchbowl on this one; Rotten Tomatoes, a critic aggregator, gives the film a 100% rating. John Hudson rounds up some reviews.
(Image of Mark Zuckerberg mask for Halloween via Ryan Tate)
This line appears in a New York Times Magazineprofile of Glenn Beck:
When I mentioned Beck’s name to several Fox reporters, personalities and staff members, it reliably elicited either a sigh or an eye roll. Several Fox News journalists have complained that Beck’s antics are embarrassing Fox, that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet.
Where to start? Beck is either a loon, it seems to me, or a charlatan, or a genuine enthusiast completely baffled by the world and entranced, like some unstable adolescent, by half-baked ideas that he seems to genuinely believe. I don't know the guy and can barely manage to watch more than a few minutes without being embarrassed for him and the universe, but I do find it bizarre that other Fox reporters regard him as the prime embarrassment for the propaganda network. (In this assessment, as always, I wish to make an exception for the terrific journalist, Shep Smith, and, on a good Sunday, Chris Wallace.)
Compared with Sean Hannity, for example, Beck seems to me to be a relative innocent. Hannity is a cynical liar and cool propagandist. You can trust nothing he says and although I find it hard to diagnose the motives behind Beck's enthusiasms (money? fame? emotional instability? misplaced patriotism?), he is, compared with Hannity, a model of genuineness. He did, for example, criticize Republican spending and debt under Bush. I remember, because he invited me on his show when it was on CNN before the 2006 mid-terms and we agreed on a lot. Hannity never criticized the GOP for its spending and borrowing, while immediately turning on a dime as soon as Obama was elected. Shameless does not even begin to describe the man's public character.
Then last night, in a lapse of hathos, I watched Bill O'Reilly. His Talking Points Memo was so full of meaningless cliches about "big government" and "progressives", so divorced from any coherent engagement with the reality of Obama's record and stated views, that it beggared belief. Here it is:
Just a few obvious points. O'Reilly lumps Obama into the "progressive values" camp and claims he is moving still further to the "left". What is his evidence for this?
He says first that in foreign policy, progressives believe that America is a "bully" and "too aggressive." Obama, however, has retained most of Bush's executive powers against al Qaeda (except, critically, torture), has poured more troops into Afghanistan than was ever the case under Bush, has ramped up the drone campaign in Pakistan, retained Bush's defense secretary, stuck to Bush's withdrawal timetable in Iraq, and embraced targeted killings of al Qaeda operatives, even US citizens. On Iran, Obama has managed to get a far more comprehensive and global set of economic sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards, and has refused to take military force off the table. Obama, moreover, went to Oslo to defend the necessity of war while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. For this record, O'Reilly says Obama represents the pursuit of "peace at pretty much any price." There is no other description of this than a travesty of the truth.
O'Reilly says that Obama, as a progressive, also wants open immigration, when, in fact, illegal immigration has gone down on his watch and many more law enforcement agents are now on the border. Obama, moreover, favors roughly the same immigration reform once backed by Karl Rove, George W. Bush and John McCain. Is Karl Rove an avatar of "progressive values"?
O'Reilly then says that Obama believes that a society "based on individual freedom has led to an unjust society." To buttress this, he shows a clip of Obama celebrating how through American history, African Americans, women, and workers fought to bring social change through their own efforts – and succeeded through organizing in a free society. His campaign and candidacy was based on a theme that America's freedom allows individuals to come together to make a better world. His argument is therefore the precise opposite of what O'Reilly claimed.
O'Reilly then says that Obama believes that a "big government" should impose the dream of a good education, a decent job and a house to live in, and thereby bankrupt the US. The only things that are truly bankrupting the US are entitlement programs that have been in place for decades, a new Medicare entitlement pushed through by George W Bush, and a soaring defense budget that O'Reilly supports. The debt Obama has added was the minimum necessary to prevent a second Great Depression, which would have added more to the debt than any short-term stimulus.
Beck is in many ways a clown. But my own sense of him is that he is, at times, a genuine clown, not entirely fake. (I know many disagree, and I cannot judge the man's soul from a distance, but that's my hunch.) O'Reilly, meanwhile, is a propagandist – not as bad as Hannity – but dishonest and wrong. And his claim to balance, by having on the hapless, clueless, intellectually vapid Dee-Dee Myers as a rebuttal, is absurd. Mr O'Reilly, I know Fox has long had a blanket ban on having me on as a guest, but here's a challenge: allow me to debate this Talking Points Memo with you, and reveal what a completely half-baked piece of nonsense it was.
I'm not Dee Dee Myers. I am not a progressive. And I think your version of this president is a caricature so unfair it deserves a real thrashing out on air, in public.
What on earth can one say about this story? An assistant attorney general in Michigan is viciously attacking an openly gay student college president at the University of Michigan. An assistant attorney general.
Check this out:
Part Two of this amazing story after the jump. Why is this assistant attorney general still employed? It couldn't be because the attorney general is a Christianist Republican, could it?
[T]here’s a huge worldwide investment in oil production, distribution and refining. As the electric cars storm onto the market and both short and long term demand for oil look set to decline, panic will seize the world’s oil companies. Ruthless cost cutting and price slashing will begin. OPEC may collapse. Gas could end up being cheaper than Koolaid (at the moment it’s cheaper than Diet Coke), and the big beneficiaries of the introduction of the electric car might well turn out to be the owners (and makers) of gas guzzling SUVs. In any case, the transformation of the world oil market from a seller’s market to a buyer’s paradise is going to reduce America’s security problems connected with the oil supply whether we get in the electric car game first or not.
You may remember one of the Dish's favorite Internet stars, the double-rainbow dude, here and here. Well, the Internet evolves. Enjoy the Republican version:
Eddie Long would do himself and his own race a massive favor if he, shall we say, had a conversion here. “Got the call,” to put it in language familiar in his realm. He should openly admit what he did, disavow his antigay positions, and serve as a beacon to a black community that needs to get beyond an unthinking prejudice especially unseemly in a group positioning itself as a standard-bearer of America’s moral advancement.
Not to speak of the pressing need to tackle homophobia's role in spreading HIV in the African-American community.
The New York Times has an interactive feature that shows what models look like before and after visiting the makeup room. Play with it first. Then read Phoebe Maltz.
Jonah Lehrer uses Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties," to rebut Gladwell:
Granovetter … [argues] that weak ties play a seminal role in building trust among a large group of loosely affiliated members, which is essential for rallying behind a cause. … While Gladwell argues that the flat hierarchies of online networks are a detriment to effective activism – he cites the leaderless P.L.O. as an example – Granovetter points out that leaders of social movements often depend on weak ties to maintain loyalty. He notes that organizations dominated by strong ties tend to produce fragmentation and cliquishness, which quickly leads to the breakdown of trust. This suggests that part of the reason Martin Luther King was able to inspire such discipline among a relatively large group of followers was that he cultivated a large number of weak ties.
Awhile back Chait argued that they are. Brendan Nyhan looks at the research:
Democrats have been less enthusiastic relative to the other party in the first midterm under both Clinton and Obama than Republicans were under Bush, but it's important to keep in mind that the 2002 election is an outlier due to 9/11.
By comparison, 1994 and 2010 were extremely unfavorable electoral environments. In more favorable conditions (principally, a booming economy), we see that Democrats were relatively more enthusiastic for Clinton in the 1996-2000 elections than Republicans were for Bush in 2004-2008. It's unlikely that Democrats will close the enthusiasm gap with Republicans in this election — the conditions are just too unfavorable — but the historical record doesn't indicate that they are incapable of enthusiastically supporting a Democratic president.
Micah Sifry argues that progressives are still ahead when it comes to raising money online. Patrick Ruffini disagrees:
As someone who deals directly in Republican political activism and often watches confirmation emails flood my inbox as online money for candidate clients pours in, I don't there's any arguing that the right has at least reached parity with the left and outmatched it in important ways. And as someone who was doing this long before 2010, I can say this very definitely wasn't the case a few years ago.
The Dish 