I’ve always been careful to play by the rules on Facebook. I’ve avoided posting the kind of content which has led some of my friends to have posts taken down or spend time in “FB jail”. However, over the last couple of months (yes, during the election season), I had several of my FB posts deleted for violating “guidelines“, for “trying to get likes“. The common element in all of these was that I posted a link to a piece in a mainstream media channel, with a short introduction on the subject and why I thought it mattered. (I never post bare links.) Well, we now know that this was a deliberate policy change by Meta to “depoliticize” FB. Of course, channels like X didn’t do anything of the kind (quite the reverse), and so the effect was to shift the overall sharing of content rightwards.

I’m also posting this on FB, and to avoid that FB policy I’ll use a comment to share the link to the Emptywheel piece that includes hard numbers to back up this claim. I’ll also link to this blog piece from Bluesky.

As Marcy points out, “If I’m right about that dynamic — that politics worked but propaganda worked far better — then it means much of the post-election soul-searching is misplaced (and, indeed, a dangerous misallocation of focus). That’s because Harris lost, in part, because of media disfunction, because electoral choice became dissociated from political persuasion more than any recent US election, largely due to an assault on the press and rational thought.”

It occurs to me that the political consequences of the failure of the Washington Post and LA Times to endorse Harris have been much more significant, and immediately positive, than their endorsements would have been. This is almost certainly unintentional, but let’s run with it.

If the papers had published their endorsements, it would have had almost no impact. It would have been predictable, unremarkable, and instantly forgettable. Instead, we have a dramatic and effective demonstration of the reality of the central message of the Harris campaign: that Trump is a fascist whose disrespect for the rule of law causes even oligarchs to bend the knee, and this event is reverberating widely. Actions speak louder than words: Bezos signaling that he is scared of Trump is much more potent than yet another politician using the “F” word.

From NYmag:

When Donald Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten that Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price. “If I become president — oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems,” he warned. Trump’s grievance with Amazon was centered on Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, a connection the president did nothing to disguise. […]

In 2019, Trump found his lever. Amazon was due to receive a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon. The Pentagon suddenly shifted course and denied Amazon the contract. A former speechwriter for Defense Secretary James Mattis reported that Trump had directed Mattis to “screw Amazon.”

This is the context in which the Post’s decision to spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris should be considered.

Facebook’s current outage is a great impetus to do more with my blog….

There’s a great little piece in today’s Sift that is worth highlighting:

Via Michael Cohen, here’s the part of Article 88 of the Uniform Code which deals with insubordination:

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

Americans are fond of quoting John Adams’ description of their country as “a nation of laws, not of men.” So when do the courts-martial start?
UPDATE: I was just reminded of Truman’s wonderful assessment of MacArthur:

I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

Larison considers the world reaction to Israel’s incompetent attack on the flotilla, and nails the big lesson for Israel:

Regardless, Gelb should regard the outrage as a good sign. It means that most governments around the world have not resigned themselves to thinking of Israel as nothing more than a dangerous pariah. It will be a far worse day for Israel when the reaction to the next blunder is the sigh of resignation, “Well, really, what can you expect?”

The protestors keep saying that they want their country back. Sorry, my fellow small-governmenters, but this country is a democracy, and you didn’t lose your country, you just lost an election. You had your chance for eight years. You blew it, and you lost. What Obama is doing is what he was elected to do. The principled response is not a massive, extremist-riddled hissy fit a few months in, but a constructive set of proposals to build on universal care for a more market-friendly and cost-conscious system in the future. You have to win some political credibility for that; and then you have to beat the man you lost so badly to last year. That’s the civil and civilized way forward for the right. It also seems, alas, to be the one they are currently refusing to take.

Andrew Sullivan.

Russell Blackford takes on Terry Eagleton’s bullshit, and in doing so gives us a particularly good definition of liberal tolerance:

A liberal is not someone who takes the contorted view that her own viewpoint is no better than others on offer (that would be a vulgar and implausible sort of relativism). She is someone who takes the principled political stance that, although she considers her comprehensive worldview (perhaps a rationalist one, but perhaps even a religious one of some sort) to be superior, she will not attempt to impose it by means of fire and sword, as long as others do not attempt to use fire and sword to impose their views on her.

Generally speaking, liberals are even prepared to tolerate (at least up to a point) those who do not reciprocate. That’s a practical necessity in modern societies because it may well be that the majority of religious and similar groups are not totally prepared to reciprocate. They do so only with reservations.

There are, of course, difficult issues about how far liberals should tolerate the intolerant, such as Catholic cardinals with theocratic tendencies. However, the general assumption is that individuals and groups which advocate intolerant laws and social arrangements will themselves be given a broad measure of tolerance. That doesn’t mean that they should receive credence or be immune from criticism or beyond satire.

More from Andrew Sullivan on the torture memos:

If you want to know how democracies die, read these memos. Read how gifted professionals in the CIA were able to convince experienced doctors that what they were doing was ethical and legal. Read how American psychologists were able to find justifications for the imposition of psychological torture, and were able to analyze its effects without ever stopping and asking: what on earth are we doing?

Read how no one is even close to debating “ticking time bomb” scenarios as they strap people to boards and drown them until they break. Then read how they adjusted the waterboarding, for fear it was too much, for fear that they were actually in danger of suffocating their captives, and then read how they found self-described loopholes in the law to tell themselves that what the US had once prosecuted as torture could not possibly be torture because we’re doing it, and we’re different from the Viet Cong. We’re doing torture right and for the right reasons and with the right motive. Many of the people who did this are mild, kind, courteous, family men and women, who somehow were able to defend slamming human beings against walls in the daytime while watching the Charlie Rose show over a glass of wine at night. We’ve seen this syndrome before, in other places and at other times. Yes: it can happen here.

I’ve just been reading the torture memos which the Obama administration has released. Read them yourself – please. I’m not sure that I trust myself to describe my reactions, but Andrew certainly speaks for me:

Bybee is not representing justice in this memo. He is representing the president. And the president is seeking to commit war crimes. And he succeeded. This much we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. It is a very dark day for this country, but less dark than every day since Cheney decided to turn the US into a torturing country until now.

Setting aside questions of a “truth commission”, and also whether individual interrogators should be prosecuted, two things stand out very starkly.

• Yoo and Bybee should be disbarred from legal practice – including the teaching of law – for life.
• All of the doctors who supervised the torture sessions have violated their Hippocratic oaths. They should be struck off and never allowed to practice medicine again.