BernardoVerda 🤔

@bernardoverda.bsky.social

2202 Followers 2666 Following

Retired. Into science, environment, climate, literature, Proportional Representation, Esperanto, science fiction & fantasy... More interested in "policy" than "politics" -- but nonetheless prefers "woke" over "zombie". "Live & learn, or die an idiot."

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives any more. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding? Andrew R. Moxon (contemp.) American writer, critic [a.k.a. Julius Goat] Essay (2017-01-16),
In any event, modern measurements show that there is not nearly enough CO2 in the atmosphere to block most of the infrared radiation in the bands of the spectrum where the gas absorbs. That’s even the case for water vapor in places where the air is very dry. (When night falls in a desert, the temperature can quickly drop from warm to freezing. Radiation from the surface escapes directly into space unless there are clouds to block it.)
In a post on his blog, the security guru Bruce Schneier points out that if the ruling stands and is adopted elsewhere, it could have important implications not just for things like Google’s AI Overviews and chatbots, but also for the increasingly popular AI agents: < More generally, liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable. Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do. > Schneier says that he is “OK with this outcome”: < There’s nothing in the law that requires us to accommodate AI systems if they are fundamentally untrustworthy, just as we don’t need to accommodate untrustworthy human systems. Any company that won’t stand by the statements its agents make—whether human or AI—doesn’t deserve users’ time or money. >
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Isaac Asimov
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced his administration’s latest attempt to prop up the US coal industry during an incoherent press event that randomly oscillated between energy issues and Trump’s fixation with building and renovating monuments in DC. The energy portion of the events was also frequently disconnected from reality. “Today we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” said Trump, apparently unaware that coal is one of the most expensive means of generating electricity in the US. With wind and solar power getting cheaper, coal has become the second-most expensive way of producing electricity, trailing only the cost of building a new nuclear plant. As a result, no new coal plants have been completed in over a decade, and coal has gone from powering over half the electrical grid to producing only about 15 percent of the nation’s electricity. That’s before the indirect costs of coal use are considered. It produces the most greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy, releases dangerous particulates and chemicals into the atmosphere, and leaves behind ash that has high levels of toxic metals. That’s reality, but the White House is clearly not inhabiting it. “If you look at some of the real great failures, countries, they’re usually wind,” he proclaimed. “It keeps blowing, blowing, blowing and puts you right out of business. Very expensive. The most expensive energy there is.” He also suggested that China, which produces roughly half the wind energy in the world, isn’t actually using it: “About the only time they build [wind turbines] is to sell them to stupid people in the United States.” Despite the economic issues with coal, Trump claimed that his new effort to stall its decline will save $50 billion in electricity costs. The source of that figure wasn’t specified.
Image from the movie * Shrek * "Some of you may die. But that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?” ~ A.R. Moxon
These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
The bar chart showing just how few kids claim that TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram make them feel worse about themselves is quite telling: [Image of bar chart] Just look at those numbers. That tiny green bar? That’s the percentage that says these services make them feel worse about themselves. On TikTok — the platform most frequently cast as an unusually dangerous self-esteem killer for teen girls — 15% of teen users say it makes them feel better about themselves, and just 3% say it makes them feel worse. That’s a 5-to-1 ratio in the wrong direction for the moral panic narrative. The numbers on the other platforms follow the same script. On Snapchat, 13% say it makes them feel better, just 2% worse. On Instagram — the platform Haidt has singled out for particular damnation, building much of his case on leaked Meta internal research he insists proves it’s poisonous — 10% say it makes them feel better, just 3% say it makes them feel worse. Three percent. That’s not a signal of a generation-defining mental health catastrophe. That’s barely distinguishable from a rounding error. And even these small numbers overstate the harm, because the vast majority of kids—around 60% on each platform—say these apps make no difference at all to how they feel about themselves. Add the quarter who report “about equally better and worse,” and you’re left with a tiny minority on either side of the ledger, tilted toward the positive. Overall experience tracks the same way: All told, teens tend to have a mostly positive experience on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. About seven-in-ten teens on each platform say this. Very few – just 3% on each – say it’s mostly negative. Seven-in-ten teens report a mostly positive experience. Three percent report a mostly negative one. These numbers are not ambiguous. If social media was so inherently harmful to kids, the numbers would not — could not — look that way.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person’s GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are.
Wile E. Coyote, walking well beyond the edge of the cliff, and starting to realize that his situation -- standing on nothing, and gravity is still a thing.
There’s a concept in economics known as Goodhart’s Law, often summarized as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The idea, originally about monetary policy, has proven remarkably durable across domains. When you attach high enough stakes to a single metric, people stop trying to accurately reflect reality and start trying to game the metric. Schools teach to the test. Banks shuffle risk off their balance sheets to hit capital ratios. Hospitals reclassify patients to improve their reported outcomes. Prediction markets were supposed to be immune to this. The whole pitch — the reason people like me found them conceptually interesting for years — was that because participants are putting real money on the line, they’d have powerful incentives to seek out and act on true information. Financial stakes, the theory went, would filter out noise and bullshit and produce a hopefully decently accurate signal about the probability of real-world events. The wisdom of crowds, sharpened by the discipline of the wallet. What most people didn’t think through was the obvious corollary: what happens when you attach $14 million in stakes to a 150-word blog post by a war correspondent, and the gamblers decide it’s cheaper to threaten the journalist than to accept they made a bad bet?
"I can't believe that!" said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. authoritarian right is buying up all of our new and old media companies because they’re trying to mimic what Viktor Orban created in Hungary. Namely, a media where all the major outlets are owned by rich autocratic allies, who spew propaganda 24/7 while the government strangles real, independent journalism just out of frame. Of course, you’re supposed to try and have some subtlety in this so the public isn’t fully aware of the con. But the Trump administration doesn’t do subtlety...
But that kind of progress demands that we take responsibility for these problems. We must acknowledge that our governments, societies, communities, and even ourselves may have normalized and contributed to these harmful conditions. We may discover there’s no rhyme or reason to why teenagers commit suicide. But we may uncover that teen suicide isn’t random at all. It may stem from something we’ve unwittingly ignored, or perhaps built into the world. That possibility is far more unsettling than the idea of dangerous technology. It’s the idea that the danger might be us.
These and other socioeconomic reforms are not easy solutions. They aren’t just a matter of adjusting algorithms or restricting platform features. They demand uncomfortable conversations about how we structure work, education, and community life. They require sustained political commitment and resource allocation. Yet if we can achieve these results, we will create a better world than one derived from mere technological fixes. In short, technology doesn’t cause suicide. It doesn’t cause a host of human problems for which it is often accused. Sadly, they have always been with us. But technology, used wisely, could help us mitigate these problems. For example, through processing massive amounts of data, AI can detect patterns that elude us humans. This alone could help reveal early warning signs or surface new protective factors. AI chatbots, for example, could help us identify teens who are at risk and create opportunities to intervene.
The path forward requires resisting the impulse to treat fundamentally human problems as technological ones. When new technologies appear alongside harm, the harder and more necessary questions are not simply how to regulate the tool, but what human choices produced the conditions in which harm emerged, which institutions failed or fell short, and what values should guide our response. These questions are more difficult—and often more uncomfortable—because they turn our attention inward, toward ourselves, rather than external and more convenient actors. Instead of focusing our energies on systematically regulating platforms, we should direct our efforts toward these human problems. For suicide, public health experts point to a wide range of evidence-based strategies for preventing and mitigating risk factors. These include strengthening economic supports such as household financial stability and housing security; creating safer environments by reducing at-risk individuals’ access to lethal means; fostering healthy organizational policies and cultures; and improving access to healthcare by expanding insurance coverage for mental health services and increasing provider availability and remote access in underserved areas. Experts also emphasize the importance of promoting social connection and teaching problem-solving skills that can help individuals navigate periods of acute distress.
The appeal of reducing complex social issues to matters of redesigning or banning technology is understandable. Technology problems can feel tractable. They suggest clear targets and concrete fixes. What this logic ignores, however, is that the pre-technology status quo for many public health crises has long been dismal. The better question, then, isn’t whether technology causes harm, but whether it deepens an already broken baseline—or simply reflects it.
As concerning as recent outbreaks of measles have been, they herald a larger systemic problem. How a country controls measles can be viewed as a proxy for how well it would control many other diseases. That’s because the steps for stopping the spread are the same: deploying vaccines to prevent infections, detecting and isolating cases when they occur, identifying exposed contacts of infected people and making sure they stay home if they’re likely to be contagious, and treating sick people safely. But besides measles, we’ve already seen infections that were once controlled, like whooping-cough, that rose sharply in 2024 and remained high in 2025 compared with before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lately I’ve seen this quote from George Orwell’s “1984” making the rounds: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” When Orwell and others tried to imagine the worst iteration of government power, they pictured an all-powerful state that controlled an official narrative of events. In Orwell’s “1984”, Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheitt 451″ and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” the government uses violence (or drugs in the case of “Brave New World”) to control our perception of reality. The fear was a paucity of possible narratives. Today, the opposite is true: The number of narrative possibilities is infinite, so we can choose the one that “feels true,” regardless of its connection to reality. These stories don’t need to be fact-checked or verified. They just need to be shared by people you trust. The events in them matter less than the beliefs holding them together. And as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
“It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: “America’s right to know.” It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ”America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?” None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” -Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, January 21, 1980, p. 19.
But as bad as the measles is, and it is really bad, it would be nothing to the visible horror show that any real return of polio in America would be. It was only weeks ago that the chair of ACIP, the CDC’s committee for recommendations on vaccine policies, wondered aloud if we should be vaccinating for polio any longer. Perhaps in part because of those comments, healthcare professionals throughout the country are ringing the alarm bells, warning that the country is in no way prepared for a return of polio.
Wyden has been right about this from the start. He was right when Republicans attacked Section 230 because they wanted to force platforms to carry their content. He was right when Democrats attacked it because they wanted to force platforms to remove content they didn’t like. And he’s right now, when tearing it down would hand the most speech-hostile administration in modern memory the tools to reshape online expression however it sees fit.
This is the part that the “repeal 230” crowd never seems to grapple with. Without Section 230, the platforms hosting that content become legally vulnerable for the content their users post. And the people with the deepest pockets and the most to hide—government agencies, corporations, the powerful—are exactly the ones who would use that vulnerability to silence critics through litigation. We’ve talked about this for years. It wouldn’t be Big Tech that suffers from a 230 repeal. Big Tech can afford armies of lawyers. The people who get crushed are the small platforms, the community forums, the individual users who share and reshare information that the powerful would prefer stayed hidden.
Democrats like Durbin, Klobuchar, and Blumenthal spent years convinced that weakening Section 230 would force Big Tech to clean up its act. The counterargument—made by Wyden, by us, by basically everyone who actually read the law—was always the same: any power you create to shape online speech rules will eventually be used by people whose priorities look nothing like yours. That day has arrived. Those same Democrats are somehow still pushing the same bills. So what would actually happen if they got their way? Nothing good. Wyden points to how Americans have been using platforms to document what’s actually happening with immigration enforcement: Americans have used WhatsApp, Signal, Bluesky and TikTok to document violent, lawless activities by Immigration Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection across the country. While corporate news organizations like CBS News have buried stories about Trump administration immigration abuses and are increasingly pushing disingenuous “both sides” reporting, regular Americans have helped to change public opinion with their first-hand videos of government-sanctioned violence that have spread across the internet. That was possible because of Section 230. Take it away and you would see ICE agents bring bad faith lawsuits against those platforms, perhaps claiming that Meta helped incite anti-ICE protests or defamed them by carrying posts alleging excessive force. To understand what would be possible, just look at how police departments and Big Oil have used civil suits to try and silence their biggest critics.
We’ve been writing about Section 230 for a very long time. We’ve written about why it matters, why the people attacking it are wrong, and why most of the proposed “reforms” would make the internet dramatically worse for everyone except the already powerful. And for just about as long as we’ve been doing that, Senator Ron Wyden—who co-authored Section 230 three decades ago—has been doing the same thing, often as a lonely voice in a Senate full of colleagues who either don’t understand the law or are actively trying to destroy it.
So you’ve got FCC boss Brendan Carr, an authoritarian zealot who has been wiping his ass with the First Amendment. You’ve got Mathias Dopfner, the owner of Politico whose feckless “both sides” reporting and apparent admiration of Trump has helped normalize authoritarianism. You’ve got Matt Murray, the Washington Post Editor who is helping Jeff Bezos throw the paper’s reputation in the toilet in service to Trumpism and corporate power. You’ve also got Hamish McKenzie, the Substack co-founder who has openly coddled white supremacists and fascists for engagement cash. A few folks from Fox News, arguably the biggest and most successful right wing propaganda operation ever created. And then some representatives for Meet The Press, another stellar example of generally feckless establishment “both sides” or “view from nowhere” access journalism.
And then we get to the conclusion. It’s worth quoting at length because you really don’t see this kind of language from the bench: There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter). And then the kicker: Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that. These rulings represent something we’ve been watching develop for months now: federal judges completely abandoning the traditional deference typically afforded to government positions, because the government has made clear it doesn’t deserve it. The DOJ’s credibility has been in freefall...
Still, the unsanitary dairy has grown in popularity among devotees of the wellness industry, including those in the Make America Healthy Again movement. Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has personally endorsed drinking raw milk and, prior to taking up the position, claimed he would end the FDA’s “war on public health,” including its “aggressive suppression” of raw milk.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. John Rogers, Ephemera blog post , 2009
Republicans are selling their soul to win elections. Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. The government won't work without it. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
In 1945, Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies and in it, he articulated the idea of the paradox of tolerance. Simply put, an open society must retain the right to intolerant of intolerant ideas or run the risk of losing its tolerance – it’s openness – to being overrun with intolerant ideas. As he writes: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. Karl Popper – The Open Society and Its Enemies
We’ve already explored at length how Bari Weiss was hired by the billionaire Ellison family to make CBS even more friendly to billionaires and authoritarians after their embarrassing capitulation to (and bribery of) U.S. autocrats. This isn’t really a pivot real people were actually asking for, it’s simply extension of the right wing extraction class’s assault on informed consensus and real journalism. The goal is to consolidate what’s left of our sorry ass establishment corporate media, then create a simulacrum of actual journalism that blows smoke up the ass of wealth, power, and the U.S. right wing’s phony victimization complex. While hoping the public doesn’t notice the difference.
‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’ ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’ ‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected. ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’ Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. ‘They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’ ‘Would you tell me, please,’ said Alice ‘what that means?’ ‘Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. ‘I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.’ ‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone. ‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’ ‘Oh!’ said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark. ‘Ah, you should see ‘em come round me of a Saturday night,’ Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: ‘for to get their wages, you know.’ (Alice didn’t venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I can’t tell you.)
When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard introduced in 2017. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.” As we noted last year, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard. “At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.
Patent trolls have hated IPR from day one, and they’ve fought it relentlessly. They challenged the process all the way to the Supreme Court—and they lost. Then they tried again. And they lost again. Losing twice at SCOTUS would stop most campaigns, but the troll lobby just pivoted: for years they’ve been pressuring Congress to change the law and kill IPR outright.
Slow down. Read that again. One more time. Let it register fully. A sitting senator stated constitutional law. The executive branch opened an investigation into him for stating it. State propaganda praised this as making an example. This isn’t approaching fascism. This isn’t fascism-adjacent. This is fascism—the actual thing, not the metaphor, happening in real time on national television while we debate whether calling it fascism is too divisive. Let’s be precise about the mechanics. The Trump Administration isn’t investigating Kelly for corruption or lawbreaking. It’s investigating him for defending the principle that law constrains executive power. The investigation isn’t meant to find wrongdoing—it’s meant to intimidate through spectacle of state punishment. The message isn’t “we enforce laws” but “invoke constitutional constraints and we come for you.”
This is what a lot of new state laws are actually requiring, even when they use softer language like “age assurance.” Age verification doesn’t just confirm you’re over 18, it reveals your full identity. Your name, address, date of birth, photo—everything. Here’s the critical thing to understand: age verification is really identity verification. You’re not just proving you’re old enough—you’re proving exactly who you are. And that data has to be stored, transmitted, and protected by every website that collects it. We already know how that story ends. Data breaches are inevitable. And when a database containing your government ID tied to your adult content browsing history gets hacked—and it will—the consequences can be devastating.
I love America. You’re so fucked up. But I love you. You’re built upon a beautiful and preposterous idea: that ordinary people—you and I—can govern ourselves. Together. Not through superior intelligence. Not through noble birth. Not through accumulated wealth. But through the messy, difficult, glorious work of reasoning together when no one has final answers and everyone has standing to speak. Some of us have gotten really rich. Really powerful. And they’ve decided the real problem is that we dare to think we’re capable of this endeavor. This experiment in self-governance. They want to replace your Constitution and its laws with a Terms of Service Agreement. They say the “customer service” will be better. They’re the cognitive elite, you see. And the commons—us—is a tragedy. Unrestrained, we’ll vote for regulations and taxes that will slow the march of progress.
Rather than running a correction or retraction, they simply rewrote the article at the same URL, with the same timestamp, transforming a story about “SNAP beneficiaries threatening to ransack stores” into a story about “AI-generated videos going viral” even though the article doesn’t make any sense. The deception is in the architecture: casual readers following the original link would have no idea the entire premise had been fabricated.
Again, I feel the need to repeat this because it is so incredibly stupid. Literally in the same sentence where he says CBS had to pay him “a lotta money” because it edited a 60 Minutes interview, he tells them to edit the interview not to air that section. Then he claims “you can’t have fake news.” Even though what he’s claiming is literally fake news. They didn’t pay him because they changed the answer. They paid him to get their merger done. Everyone knows it.
It is so fucking stupid. As you’ll no doubt recall, last year, Trump sued CBS over the show. Right before last year’s election, 60 Minutes had interviewed Kamala Harris. As every such news show does, it had edited the interview down to make it fit into the TV time slot. MAGA culture warriors, desperate for anything to culture war about, started screaming that 60 Minutes had edited Harris to sound more coherent. This was nonsense. What had happened was that in one question, Harris had given a long answer. CBS broadcast part of the answer on 60 Minutes. But it had broadcast a different part of that answer during the CBS Sunday morning show, Face the Nation. This… happens all the time. The full answer was too long. They edited it down to a shorter bit. The two different broadcasts chose different parts. That’s basic, fundamental, editorial discretion.
60 Minutes is under new management and things are getting stupid faster than you might expect. Last night’s episode featured President Trump, which is currently being described as “nuts.” There are all sorts of crazy moments to call out, but let’s start with the recursively meta nonsense. 60 Minutes edited out a segment where Donald Trump tells them to edit out a segment in which he brags about getting CBS to pay him because of them editing out part of an answer by Kamala Harris, and he notes that CBS clearly did the wrong thing in editing Harris in the same fucking sentence he tells them to edit out what he’s saying.
"Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives any more. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?"
That’s worth highlighting, because we keep seeing it play out in nearly identical ways. Whether it’s a venture capital firm or a social media platform, the playbook is the same: invoke “neutrality” or “free speech” as a shield, refuse to take a clear stance on bigoted behavior, and then act shocked when the people being targeted decide they don’t want to stick around. This is the Nazi bar problem, and it keeps happening because people in positions of power either don’t understand it or don’t want to. If you’re not familiar with the Nazi bar analogy, it comes from a story about a bartender who learned the hard way that if you don’t kick out the first Nazi who walks in, you end up running a Nazi bar. Not because you’re a Nazi yourself, but because once word gets out that Nazis are welcome, they keep coming back and bringing friends. And everyone else? They stop showing up. Because who wants to drink at the Nazi bar? The key insight—the one that keeps getting missed—is that claiming “neutrality” in these situations isn’t actually neutral. It’s a choice. You’re choosing to prioritize the speech and presence of the people spewing bigotry over the speech and presence of the people being targeted by it. And that second part is what everyone claiming to be “neutral” conveniently ignores.