Facebook & Twitter Notes, March 20, 2019

Has the internet changed the way we think? At the least, it convinced fans of Brain Pickings to confuse a grab bag of mildly cool factoids for real insight https://t.co/Td5d3oYKJf

— Arts & Letters Daily (@aldaily) March 20, 2019

A decade ago, lots of people worried that the internet was ruining their brains. In 2008, Nicholas Carr published an essay in the Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—a question that pretty much answered itself. Carr felt sure that his increasing inability to concentrate, to immerse himself in a book or even a long article, had to be the result of his cognitive functions having been rewired by the web, making him hopelessly distractible. The counterargument to Carr’s theory, voiced by the usual gang of get-with-it-Grampa tech-positive pundits, held that every new communications technology is greeted by some form of panic and that if the internet fosters a skittering, browsing form of reading, well, maybe that’s what’s required in the brave new world we have created. At the time, blogger John Batelle wrote that when he was “jumping from link to link, reading deeply in one moment, skimming hundreds of links the next” and “devouring new connections as quickly as Google and the Web can serve them up,” he was “performing bricolage in real time” and getting “a lot smarter.” Besides, the internet has made more information, and therefore more knowledge, accessible to more people. And how could that be wrong?

Mondoweiss has a great survey of Bernie's campaign. 
Lots of links.
Don't skip the rich, intelligent comments thread. 

Bernie Sanders is officially running against Israeli apartheid! Yesterday Sanders posted an ad on his Facebook page featuring excerpts from activist Shaun King’s introduction of the Vermont senator at his Brooklyn College campaign launch March 2. King embraced the label that Donald Trump has given Sanders, of being crazy.

Listen, he has always rejected the status quo. He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa when crazily that was an unpopular thing to do. And even today he speaks out against apartheid-like conditions in Palestine even though it’s not popular. Listen, I don’t care if 45 calls him Crazy Bernie because he is a little crazy.

The ad uses the apartheid reference with the graphics above and below, including the statement, “Bernie smashes the Israel status quo.”

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Notes on The Guardian's long read, Why Israel is quietly cozying up to Gulf monarchies...

The Trump presidency may be a blessing in disguise. I hate saying that out loud but in a global context he is simply an echo of a trend toward authoritarian government around the world. For countries historically run by dictators nothing much changes from one regime to the next. In some cases, dynastic control passes from one generation to another very much like corporate creations operate in the global economy where founders or executives with the most stock maintain control in their respective environments. China is the most prominent global example of collectivized state control, monarchies are the dynastic models and single dominant political parties run the rest. In all cases maintaining power is the number one objective. 

Evidence is mounting of increasingly close ties between Israel and five of the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – none of which have formal relations with the Jewish state. Trump highlighted this accelerating change on his first foreign trip as president – to the Saudi capital Riyadh – by flying on directly afterwards to Tel Aviv. Hopes for Saudi help with his much-hyped “deal of the century” to end the Israel-Palestine conflict have faded since then. Yet Netanyahu is seeking to normalise relations with Saudi Arabia. And there has even been speculation about a public meeting between him and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Saudi crown prince who was widely blamed for the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October. That would be a sensational – and highly controversial – moment, which is why Saudis are signalling frantically that it is not going to happen. Still, the meeting with Netanyahu in Warsaw went far beyond anything that has taken place before. The abnormal is becoming normal.

The subtitle of this piece echoes his main theme: After decades of hostility, a shared hatred of Iran – and a mutual fondness for Trump – is bringing Israel’s secret links with Gulf kingdoms out into the open. So as I read a steady drumbeat droned in the background. Backing away from this one issue, the chemistry of Israel and her neighbors and Donald Trump's catalytic effect, my mind wandered to many other ways this presidency is lancing old abscesses and ripping off scabs that have been part of the political landscape for years. I think of many examples but here is a partial punch list that comes to mind.

• Racism generally and white supremacy in particular
• Religious extremism -- Christian, Muslim, Hindu largely but others as well
• Overbearing nationalism
• Revisionist history
• Skepticism of science

Each of these subjects and more are ideal subjects enabling individuals or systems in control to strengthen their grip on whatever population is involved by the use of divide-and-conquer tactics. For example, in the same way that segregation in the American South or apartheid in South Africa was used to control black people, Israel uses the same model to maintain control over Arabs in Israel and Palestinians in the occupied territories by keeping alive arguments about conflict resolution -- to maintain control not shared in any meaningful way with Palestinians. 

A subset of the population always seems to be suspicious or even outright hostile to science. Opposition to vaccines, for instance, is nothing new. Almost immediately when the first vaccinations were used to prevent smallpox, there was widespread opposition and suspicion that it was the work of the Devil and preventing disease was contrary to the will of God. Diseases, many believed, are a Divine way of punishing mankind for their sins. The idea that some individuals are  innocent of wrongdoing is easily dismissed by citing examples of whole nations or populations destroyed because they collectively opposed God's will. After all, everyone spoke the same language until they tried to build a tower to reach Heaven but were forced to abandon the idea when God split them up. They woke up one day speaking different languages. See how that works?

I could go on, but the point is clear. Thanks to this new "leader of the free world" being in most ways the opposite of his predecessor, he is either following a trend that has been growing since the end of World War Two or emerging as the logical result. It turns out that free world is becoming an oxymoron, with the only truly free places being those protected by tough, virtually impenetrable geopolitical boundaries. Trump's name appears 14 times in this link, and that of Obama 8 times, nearly always illustrating either a diametric contrast between them, or how both move in the direction of autocracy. 

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That's all for today. Long reading tends to produce more hours of thought and reflection. And that's a good thing.