Category: Politics

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Bye-Bye Facebook

There’s a saying: “If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.”

It’s been reported that Mark Zuckerberg recently had dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. For me, this was the last straw. For a while now, I had been wanting to leave Facebook. But that’s it for me. I’m quitting Facebook.

I’ve made my last posting on Facebook, telling my Facebook friends how to find me on Mastodon and Bluesky. But in a few weeks, I’ll cut the cord completely.

It’s now been about 16 years since I signed up with Facebook. Facebook suggested a number of people I should connect with, and I was impressed with how accurate the suggestions were. But then I realized how they did it, and I was less than impressed. Even before I had signed up, they had developed a profile of me and my on-line contacts.

But for a while at least, Facebook seemed like a cool place to be, with a lot of my friends, relatives, and acquaintances. At one point, I had more than 200 Facebook friends. And I found a couple of useful groups, in the realms of music and genealogy. I even was able to reconnect with some old classmates from high school.

At first, Facebook had options to let me prioritize what I wanted to view. But after a while, these options disappeared. It was now Facebook that made the decisions about what I should see. I wasn’t happy about that, but I grudgingly stayed. However, I was still never happy with the fact that we, the users, are not the primary concern of Facebook. Their customers are the advertisers, and we are their product.

When Google Plus came along, I readily joined it. It seemed like a good mix of Facebook and Twitter features. I saw a lot of potential with G+, but Google lost interest, and it faded away. I did try out Twitter, but I didn’t see much point in it, and generally ignored it. When Elon Musk bought it, I deleted my Twitter account immediately.

Which now brings us up to the present time. I signed up with Mastodon, and I’ve been pretty satisfied with it. And now we have Bluesky, and everyone seems to be jumping on board, primarily after leaving X (AKA Twitter). The two seem very similar is design and concept. Mastodon has the advantage of being totally distributed, which means it can never be under the control of a faceless corporation or selfish billionaire. On the other hand, Bluesky has the momentum. It’s now the attractive place for the disaffected masses.

For the next little while, it will be difficult finding alternatives to Facebook. There are still a couple of groups that I will miss. But it is important to take a stand and send a message. Zuckerberg has made his choice, and has sided with the Trumpists. We must now make a choice too, to side with Zuckerberg and his ilk, or stand with what’s right.

During the Nazi era, my grand-father spent time in prison for his political beliefs. We must not forget the lessons of history as we face a couple of difficult years.


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COVID-19, SARS, and Model Train Shows

Back in 2003, model railroaders in southern Ontario were eagerly awaiting the upcoming National Model Railroader Association convention in Toronto. This was significant since this was to be the first time the NMRA held their annual convention outside the United States. But as luck would have it, Toronto was hit with the SARS virus. Enough people canceled their reservations that the NMRA had to cancel the convention. A train show was still held in Toronto that Summer, but it paled in comparison to what should have happened.

(For some reason, the NMRA website still lists Toronto as the site of the 2003 convention.)

SARS was a big deal. However, for most of us in Toronto, life went on with little disruption. The outbreaks were mainly limited to a couple of hospitals, and all area hospitals took severe measures to mitigate the spread. By the time the danger had passed, the SARS virus took the lives of 24 people in Ontario. However, the panic resulted in the cancellation of many more events in the Toronto area, not just the NMRA convention.

Compare that to today. As a result of COVID-19, another corona virus, few places are free from infection. Currently, the United States is experiencing one death every 53 seconds from COVID. And that’s just the official count. The actual number of deaths is almost certainly much higher.

And yet, look at the attitude of many people in the US. I wonder this: Of the people who canceled their trips to Toronto back in 2003, how many are now actively taking steps to prevent the spread of the virus? How many are wearing masks? How many are practicing social distancing? And how many are attending events where people don’t take the virus seriously enough?

The latest news from the US is disheartening. The United States Supreme Court ruled that, in the state of New York, social distancing rules do not apply to churches.  This is insane! The virus doesn’t differentiate between secular and sacred spaces. Once vaccines are available and people get vaccinated, there will still be people who will refuse the vaccine. Infection rates will drop of course, but with people refusing to get vaccinated and with people still congregating in places where mitigation measures are willfully ignored, it will still take some time before the virus outbreak is fully under control.

Currently, churches are already a major source of COVID infection, and now will continue to confound public health efforts to contain the virus. How will this affect religion long-term? Even before COVID, church attendance has been dropping. But now that we’re in a pandemic, interest in church has been falling even further. Although there are still people who don’t take COVID seriously enough, there are a lot of people who do, and many of them see how dangerously out of touch many conservative preachers are. This can only drive even more people into the “nones” category. If there’s a positive to COVID, I suppose this is it: As the churches become even more of a factor in the spread of COVID, the ineffectiveness and dangers of religious practices will become even more obvious.

 

 

 

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On Poe’s Law

Recently on Facebook, someone posted a quote which, on first glance, seemed totally absurd. It took a bit of googling to realize that the quote was intended as satire. And indeed, a brilliant piece of satire it was. After thinking some more about it, I realized something I’d known for some time: The best satire is that which is virtually indistinguishable from what’s being satirized.

Googling some more, I was reminded of “Poe’s Law“, which states that without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.

RationalWiki has a good list of examples of Poe’s Law. One of the oldest and still best examples of such extreme parody on-line is the website for the Landover Baptist Church.

Which brings me to the point of this tome, the current president of the United States, whose name I can barely utter without reaching for the barf bag. As many of my friends and acquaintances know, I’m no fan of the “orange asshat” (Also sometimes called the “talking comb-over” or “Decomposing pumpkin pie inhabited by vicious albino squirrels“.)

But here’s one reason why I personally detest the man so much: He has spoiled late-night TV for me. Ever since the “Hairpiece come to life” was elected, I can’t watch such great shows as The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. And especially not The President Show.

After all, how can you satirize someone who himself is such a parody? Who in their right mind can take such a man seriously as a politician? How can you read about him hiring a Disney star to his staff or his lunatic tweets without wondering if it isn’t all some big joke. True satire just can’t compete with the reality of the “Hair plug swollen with rancid egg whites“.

We can only hope that this nightmare of a presidency will soon come to an end. At least we all know that now, fewer and fewer people in politics are taking him seriously, while more and more people are ganging up against him. He is the true epitome of a lame-duck president, holed up in his bedroom in the Executive Residence, simply counting the days before he’s hauled away in chains.

Cheers! Hans