Are Our Prohibited Conversations Multiplying?

Does it seem that our list of things we are not supposed to talk about is growing ever longer?

I raise this for a few reasons I will explain in a moment. . . not because this is the season, that with the holiday dinners starting with Thanksgiving we get the inevitable advice columns about what to do when, as extended family members are brought together, our viewpoints clash.  (These articles posit that some of your uncles might just be a little `crazy’ when it comes to things you don’t really need to talk about.)

Here’s one reason I’ve been thinking about what we are not supposed to talk about.  The other day I went into Manhattan to participate in a demonstration.  Arriving early, it wasn’t immediately apparent where things were going to be, so I started walking around looking.  A veteran of quite a few demonstrations, my eagle eye caught a large bag– with the sides of collected foam boards peaking up out of it.  It just had to be full of placards.

“Is that for a demonstration?” I asked the fellow standing beside it.

“Yes.” he said, “BUT, it’s a demonstration for . . . .”  Mentioning the demonstration.

“That’s the demonstration I’m looking for,” I said, “do you know where it’s going to be?”

“I’m not sure.  They might be assembling over there,” he said indicating the block across the street.                

“When you told me what the demonstration was for, why did you say ‘BUT’?” I asked.

“Because you are wearing that. .  button,” was his response.  He actually said what kind of button I was wearing that he referred to, but because I want to discuss the principle here, I want to keep this abstract.  He said that I must therefore be some kind of . . . The things he mentioned, I actually am not.  I’m not even truly conversant with the details of what he might have been envisioning or why it would be viewed as incompatible by him.

“Actually,” I started to tell him why the button I was wearing might actually mean, not surprisingly, that showing up for the same demonstration, we might both of us be, at least mostly, or very much, on the same page about the important reasons why we both showing up. . .

. . . I didn’t get very far. . .

“Don’t talk to me!” he said.

“If you’re here to win people over,” I said, “you should want to reach out to people.”

“Stop talking to me!”  He said.

“You’re putting yourself in a bubble, if you’re not willing to have conversations with people,” I said.

He covered his ears.  “If you keep talking to me, I’m going to scream,” he said.

I couldn’t believe it.  Everything I was saying I was saying in a quiet, calm and polite voice.  “This is not the way to reach out to people and win them over,” I said.

It didn’t work.  His ears still covered with both hands, the fellow started screaming, “Stop talking to me!  Stop talking to me!” He screamed over and over again and he started walking around in circles.  It was not a normal scream, but an exceptionally loud and full scream that I figured could probably be heard for at least the length of the block or more.

There was nothing more to do.  I slowly ambled away, shaking my head as I headed in the “probable” direction that the demonstration might form.  As I did, I wondered what the woman who had been standing with this gentleman thought.  Leaning against a building, she had remained impassive throughout our exchange.

Our numbers quickly grew to a pretty good sized and easy to find demonstration.  Presumably lost somewhere in the crowd, I never noticed the fellow again.

It’s worthwhile to note that we were there for a cause that, far from being universally popular in this bleeding and forsaken world, sorely needs more converts to be effective in its aims.

So I ask this: Have we lost the ability to talk with one another?  Are certain topics, an increasing number of them, off limits to more and more people?  I wonder.  It’s not just topics that are off limits; it’s also who we are not supposed to talk to, or who we are not allowed to talk to.  We’ve got a superfluity of categorizations of individuals related to setting up these limitations.

It’s worse than that: Now sometimes the people we are not supposed to are people we shouldn’t talk to, because those people have, in turn, already talked to somebody that they weren’t supposed to talk to.  We seem to be training ourselves to watch out for disqualifying “associations.” “Guilt by association,” is becoming a quick and ready time saving substitute for disqualifying who we can talk to as opposed to bothering to verify that their “beliefs” are actually dangerously at odds with our own.–   And more and more, for other’s people’s beliefs not to be dangerous to own, the people we are willing to talk to have to believe almost everything we believe, rather than just some or most of the things we ourselves believe.    

If you are surprised at my harangue, here’s more about this that has fixated me in this wondering.  At roughly the same time I went to that demonstration, I went to a “Town Hall” discussion about “Free Speech and Censorship,” instigated by journalist Matt Taibbi who is researching and writing about the subject.  In a provocative mood, he was looking for advocates of censorship to discuss the topic with.  He got some of the action he sought.  The Town Hall was in Park Slope’s beautiful old Montauk Club.

Taibbi has been directing his attention to copious documentation showing the United States government’s coordination with social media companies to achieve the censorship (in various ways) of information and viewpoints that the government doesn’t like.  This includes censoring information and facts that are true but that the government doesn’t like because of the potential influence such true information and facts might have on people.

Some of what has been subject to this kind of coordinated censorship involves quashing what should be considered political speech.  Again, in order to stick with a focus on principle, I don’t want to get very specific about the appreciable list of topics this coordination was censoring, but suffice it first to say that, as can be readily guessed, the documentation shows that among things, the government doesn’t like is speech that is critical of the wars and military actions that the United States is engaged in or backing.

Oh, and once again without being specific, that struggling cause we demonstrated for where the fellow covered his ears and screamed “Stop talking to me”? . . . .  Promotion of that very same cause is one of the things our government and the social media companies are censoring strenuously.

For purposes of all these coordinations, there are theoretically good points of view and bad beliefs, good guys, and bad guys.        

Taibbi began his Town Hall by referring back to 1989, when, in August, Milt Ahlerich of the FBI sent a letter to a small independent record label, Los Angeles's Priority Records setting forth a warning criticism of its distribution of the “Straight Outta Compton” album’s hip hop song, “Fuck tha Police.”  The letter unacceptable to the FBI the lyrics protesting police brutality and racial profiling.  Taibbi noted that, in 1989, this effort at government suppression of speech sparked outrage and that it was widely covered in the liberal media at the time.  Then he noted that the government’s coordination to silence points of view it opposes are currently magnitudes greater, the same thing occurring regularly on an ongoing basis, thousands of times over.  (Protest of police brutality and racial profiling is more acceptable since 1989, although maybe not to the FBI.  It is still targeted for social media censorship.)
            
Taibbi noted that a vast number of people who consider themselves “liberals,” no longer seem to care, and have abandoned the notion that protecting free speech is still important.  One might want to point out that the cause of free speech has been adopted by many on “the right,” except that, in an unprincipled way, when it is speech they don’t like, many on the right are insufficiently antiauthoritarian, and similarly promote censorship.

Clearly, with some self selection, there were many in the Town Hall audience that night who sympathetically following along with the points Taibbi was making, but, there were also contrary views expressed.  It was suggested that the public may need protection from hearing some kinds of information.  There was the notion that when the government has determined that it’s needful for the public to think certain things or get behind certain actions it can be good to suppress true information if that true information may possibly interfere with manipulations to get the public in line.  There was also the idea that the government and social media companies need to be on guard to protect sensitive segments of the population, probably mostly minority segments, about whom hateful, critical or perhaps even politically incorrect things might be said.

Again, since I want to stick with thinking of these things in terms of principles, I want to steer clear of the specific suppressions and reason for them that were advocated to be condoned. . .

 . . . However, we can note that with changes of fashion, and updates that have been urged for societal mores, some in attendance at the Montauk Club that evening hoped for regulating the social media companies into versions of political correctness that could ban lots of communications that used to be (so thoughtlessly?) commonplace in our very recent past.

Midway through the evening, there was a fellow expressing a number of these views about how and why speech should be regulated.  Maybe he was not for real?  Maybe he was a theatrical student trying out a performance on us?  After he expressed a number of these views, he said he was going to produce “a wail” for all the poor creatures who would be hurt and injured and maybe die, if they were not protected by a regulated internet.  Then he began to produce the wail.  Loud, it lasted for maybe the better part of a minute. He had good breath control. I thought of the fellow at the demonstration covering his ears.  Then our wailer abruptly picked up and left the meeting, leaving behind a scribbled manifesto of his beliefs.   

The strongest thing said in favor censorship during the evening was the idea that the internet has changed everything, that we are no longer the same people we were before the internet, that, now, with the internet, everything is out of control in a way that makes free speech threatening in a way that it has never been threatening before.  To me, rather than a brand new argument, this sounds like an age old argument, the age old argument that “free speech” is generally good, EXCEPT. . .  EXCEPT, EXCEPT– Except for this war, except for that emergency, except for fighting communism, etc.

And I am reminded who brought us the internet.  It came out of the DARPA and the military.  It may be that those who brought us the internet have always been ahead of the rest of us in many respects regarding its uses.  Surveillance is certainly one of them.

The internet has been the great disruptor.  And as is the case with a great many rapid disruptions, much as the example disaster capitalism often furnishes, the seeming chaos of abrupt change reliably gets seized upon and taken advantage of by the power elite who are always alert as to how to amplify their interests.

Is it possible that internet, or no internet, the real answers to what is right, wrong, or best for free speech are really still, basically the same as they’ve always been?. . That we are basically the same human beings we have always been . . .

. .  Or do we really suddenly have a world with which we can no longer cope?

Have I given you enough explanation for why I am wondering about how verboten topics seem to have multiplied?

I’ll give you another reason I am thinking about this. . .

. .  Someone senior up in the leadership of the church congregation to which I have long belonged disclosed to me recently that the leadership of the congregation has concluded that the congregation membership is `not very good at handling conflict.’  Therefore potentially conflict-inducing subjects, difficult topics, need to be avoided.  I won’t say who in the leadership told me this.  I won’t specify which congregation.  The latter is probably easy to look up anyway.  Does it matter?  I’ll wager this kind of assessment may be commonplace in  congregations these days. – Some of the thinking seems to be that this helps the congregation “grow” – in numbers.

I’ve never thought that coddling was religion’s role.  I’m extremely wary of religion dictating the answers . .    Still, I’ve always thought the work of religion is tackling tough questions to which we seek answers. “Seeking”— Did I use to think my own congregation had a good quotient of “seekers”?  Our church’s history is resplendent with notables who didn’t hew to conventionality and valued exploration and curiosity.

What does this conflict avoidance mean?  Does it mean that congregation members talking to each other about the wrong topics has to be avoided?  Indeed, maybe so– At least don’t facilitate such discussions.

Even a topic such as the social injustice of censorship and the suppression of free speech may need to be avoided. . . because of where it might lead?  So many social justice issues may have to be avoided, because they might be difficult; so let’s only discuss the few justice issues that everyone can safely agree about, which means perhaps those “issues” don’t really need to be thought about, or discussed much at all. . . . unless you are taking time out to pat yourself on the back.

It generally means don’t rock the boat for powerful interests.

And if discussion of issues that might induce conflict ought to be avoided by the congregants . . . if those exchanges of information and viewpoint amongst congregants can, in fact, be avoided. .

. .  Sermons can be delivered into the resulting void that more adroitly and expertly sidestep the awkward.

There can be soothing sermons that purport to discuss the meaning of life, morality, and/or good and evil, while skirting big issues profoundly affecting most all of us.  Sermons that can skip over our connections to many serious things going on in the world even as those things are life and death issues for the less fortunate.

The hole in what doesn’t get sermonized about might lead to a certain blandness.  Am I a crank to suggest it exalts moral flabbiness?  If we aren’t wrestling with the difficult, is it easier to not stumble in concluding that we are “Okay” moral beings?  MSNBC, to name just one network, similarly never upsets the apple cart for powerful interests– and it is also good at avoiding many significant topics while sending its audience away convinced that they are endowed with a certain righteousness.

I am getting too contentious and I digress too far.  The point is that I worry that as a general populace we are losing our ability to exchange ideas, to grow and learn by listening to each other.  That leaves the lane wide open for our heads to be filled by the noise of the self-serving, harmful nonsense the corporately owned media continually pumps out.  And the powers that be drive home the same messages of how we should shape out ideas via many other channels as well.

If the populace is infantilized into incapacity, then those in power have no problem paternalistically stepping in to tell us what to think.

Maybe part of the growth, potential adulthood involved in learning from one another, involves evolution where we might change our minds or develop thinking that’s more nuanced and complex?

`Changing one’s mind’?: I am not sure whether that is necessarily regarded as either a good or a bad thing these days. . I mean in terms of the off-limits lists.

. . . Recently, I had a long conversation at a wedding with a fellow guest who told that me that a certain prominent individual in the news these days was “crazy” and–  worst part– notoriously never changes his mind, no matter that facts.  When I walked into the Montauk Club’s room for Taibbi’s Town Hall, I found myself almost instantly involved with an individual, somebody there on the side of free speech, who told me that this exact same well known individual was “crazy” and not to be taken seriously, because we was “always changing his mind” so you could never know what that individual thinks.

Personal confession: While I may hope that my principles aren't wavering hypocritically, there are important issues where my thinking has changed in some major ways.

I am obviously not leaving you guessing: I am the side of conversing with people.  Yes, whether or not they agree with me.  The buttons I choose to wear announce my availability for such conversations. As you might have been able to easily tell from what I’ve written here, they lead me into a lot of great and very interesting conversations.

Are you impatient with views that disagree with your own?  Is it distressing when you get angry because others are disagreeing with you, or because others are angry with you because you disagree with them?  I have friends who are tired of the headwinds they encounter respecting what they think are clearly mass delusions.  They find themselves deciding to give up on talking to those who think differently.

It’s oversimplifying and far from the entire answer, but patience is a virtue.  And you don’t have to get angry even when someone is angry with you for disagreeing with them. . .  Ask people why they hold the opinions they hold!  They might surprise you with some interestingly valid answers.  Or they might surprise themselves realizing that they don’t really know exactly why they have decided to think what they told you they think.

Among others, I wear “Don’t Sell Our Libraries” buttons, which I’ve been regularly wearing for a long time.  The beauty of those buttons is that almost everybody agrees with those buttons—   It’s just that they often don’t know about the sale of New York City’s libraries.- Because that’s one more thing the corporate press avoids covering.

I’ve been wearing a “Your Government is Lying to You” button.  It can startle people, maybe generate a chuckle, maybe a nervous one reflecting some unease about its implications.  They might be unsettled about how to direct some possible anger.  Nevertheless, most people find they can’t disagree with that button.    

The buttons I choose are for getting into the conversations we are being trained not to have.

It seems to me that one of the best indicators of exactly what’s most important to talk about is what gets designating as off limits topics and what gets subjected to the most vigorous censorship.  There is, of course, censorship that's straight out and vanilla in nature.  There is also a greater range of what gets done to silence voices.  What gets done includes silencing journalists: We can algorithmically suppress them; we can fire people, deplatform them; we cut them off from collecting funds; we can even imprison them, in some cases murder them; we can target them for execution, sometimes the executions can involve significant numbers of journalists; and, most awful, their family members may be targeted too. . .

These are signals which should tell us to pay attention. . . and where to direct out attention.

I am not going to get specific about the buttons that I’ve been wearing that are most likely to provoke disagreement.  That’s again, for the purpose of keeping this abstract for a focus on principle, but those buttons present subjects that have been made controversial largely because the establishment can be so desperately energetic when trying to keep certain viewpoints down to a minority.

I will, nonetheless, specifically mention that I’ve been wearing “Peace” buttons.  (“Brooklyn For Peace” is a good source of them.)   One might hope “peace” wouldn’t be controversial, but recently, I’ve found it important to include more “Peace” buttons amongst those I’ve been wearing.  It’s odd, but “Peace” buttons are escalating into the most controversial of the conversation starting buttons one can wear.

People, no doubt, are often ready to think that “peace,” abstractly speaking, is a good thing.  At the same time they can fret that “peace” can be a problem when if you might be opposed this or that particular new war.  Why?  Because inevitably, our government promotes our current wars as necessary and good.  And, inevitably, it can take time for a lot of us to catch on our government’s latest lies.

We may sing about “peace,” during the holiday season, but please let us shun the idea of talking about particular wars that need to be ended to bring peace about.

I’ll end by reiterating the question I started with: Does it seem that our list of things we are not supposed to talk about is growing ever longer?

Hmm, if so, are we, through self-censorship, handing over the formulation and structuring of our narratives to others?

How To Listen To “Democracy Now”- A Mind Boggling List of Possibilities For A Program That Was Incubated By Terrestrial Radio In NYC: Plus, Part II, A Few Cautions About Internet “Generosity”

How to listen to Democracy Now? The options that are multiplying make it complicated, but we are about to tell you.

Democracy Now is a very good place to get a lot of news.  You’ll get a get dense, comprehensive, very intelligently compiled overview of most world and national events every week day.  It's an hour broadcast every day.  The fast paced headline coverage that starts the program generally runs from about 12 to 19 minutes, depending on what's happened.  (Appropriately, there's usually more to catch up with on the Monday mornings that follow the weekend .)

Democracy Now covers news and issues that corporate media typically shuns such as the climate chaos catastrophe (including how mankind and the fossil fuel industry are causing it), corporate malfeasance in general (its coverage of the Boing 737 max crashes was better than anywhere else), misadventures of the U.S. military, and U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries.  Democracy Now will not shy away from telling you about the plight of disadvantaged members of our society whose rights are being ignored and abused.  It will tell you what the powerful are tying to get away with.  Their coverage of issues such as the recent Supreme Court nominees under consideration (Kavanaugh and Gorsuch) sets standards that, by contrast, made clear how embarrassingly inadequate coverage by NPR and the New York Times is. It almost seemed that the NPR and the Times, with a modicum of objection, were smoothing the way for eventual acceptance of bad outcomes.

I generally recommend Democracy Now as a good starting place where you can get about 85% of the important national news, versus the maybe the 20% and inevitably misleading stuff you may get if, for instance, you watch NBC's nightly half hour of advertising-interspersed national news.  Democracy Now's hour is free of commercial interruptions.  It runs on listener support.

I say you can get about "85%" of the news from Democracy Now, because, valiant and comprehensive as it is, there is some news that Democracy Now seems to treat as off limits.  (For instance, there was one significant story involving the Kennedy, King and Macolm X families joining with a number of respected notables that was- perhaps oddly?- covered in January, very thoroughly and respectfully by the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post, but Democracy Now never mentioned or reported it at all.  Of course Democracy Now wasn't alone, NPR didn't report on it and it went unreported just about everywhere else as well. . .  And Washington Post Coverage didn't provoke the New York Times or anyone else to follow in its footsteps.  .  .

 . . . To be fair, perhaps once upon a time (and just once), Democracy Now, way back in 1997, did previously report one aspect of that particular story-- There's a link extant for some June 18, 1997 coverage!-- Ah!  The internet giveth!  Isn't the internet amazing with respect to what it can do?-  It can take you all the way back to 1997!   However, if you click on the Democracy Now video link to hear and see the video link reporting of that story, the link is broken.  Yikes! The Democracy Now reporting is not there to be found (frown).  The internet taketh away!

How do you get news from Democracy Now?  There are lots of ways and this article will fill you in.  Following that instruction we have a few cautions to offer about the future.  Those cautions concern the internet.

Democracy Now began with WBAI radio.  WBAI is the New York City Pacifica Network radio station that once was a home to Amy Goodman, Democracy Now's principal host, and it is the home out of which Democracy Now was incubated and able to emerge.  WBAI is still a way to listen to Democracy Now.  Here, starting with WBAI, are the ways you can plan to be informed by getting the comprehensive news Democracy Now furnishes.

Tune in and listen on WBAI FM radio, where it all began, where the show was incubated.

1.    Listen to a terrestrial broadcast of WBAI radio in New York weekdays at 8:00 AM as Democracy Now is first being broadcast.  WBAI radio has a strong signal so you can listen up in Westchester and New Jersey, all the environs immediately surrounding the greater NYC metropolitan area.

2.    Listen to WBAI’s live internet stream station broadcast.  Like most radio stations these days, WBAI also streams its broadcasts on the internet.  The internet giveth!

The internet live stream straight from Democracy Now's website is an interesting alternative, and there is video to provide a visual, but you may find the live stream cuts out (the faltering is very trying during election night coverage).

3.    Listen, or even watch, directly at 8:00 AM ET on the internet by going to the Democracy Now website, where you can get both an audio and a video stream of the show.  Plus you can get special Democracy Now broadcasts like election night coverage.  It’s almost like TV, you know the kind when you cut the cable?  The internet giveth!  The vexing problem with the live video stream however is that the video often cuts out.  In our household, the cutting out of the video stream was especially pronounced one night when we were trying to watch the 2016 election night coverage.  Otherwise, Democracy Now would have been almost as convenient as watching any of the major corporate network coverage that night.  I am told that, since, in Brooklyn Heights, we sit atop a Spectrum (formerly TimeWarner) trunk line, internet bandwidth should not have been a problem and should not have been causing the halting of the stream.   The internet taketh away!

There are others now following in the footsteps of Democracy Now to launch, using the internet, what are essentially their own television broadcasts.  Mid-July (July 12, 2019) the alternative website Consortium News launched CN Live to start such video broadcasting.   It's an appealing idea, being able broadcast video over the internet that could be as satisfying in quality to the viewer as anything the major networks put out over cable or the airwaves.  The internet giveth!  Just as it launched its CN Live broadcasts, Consortium News tweeted (July 15, 2019) "Our website is completely down. Our media host said we have been attacked by malware. . .  Every article published since 2011 now gets a 404 Not Found. They are working on it. Problem started slowly on Friday first day of CN Live!"  . . . Oh my!: The internet taketh away!

Pacifica Radio app

4.    Listen to WBAI at 8:00 AM using the Pacifica Radio app that plays an internet live stream of all five Pacifica Network Stations (WBAI from NYC, KPFA from Berkley, California, KPFK from Los Angeles, KPFT from Houston, WPFW from Washington D.C.) plus one Pacifica affiliate station, WQRT from Madison, Wisconsin.  Since KPFT, the Houston station, broadcasts a second signal using its HD capacity (high definition radio), the Pacifica app actually affords a choice of seven streams to listen to Pacifica Network content.  The app can play on your phone or can play of your iPad tablet. The internet giveth!

Democracy Now phone app- It used to work on an iPad too, but doesn't now.

5.    Listen to or watch a Democracy Now live internet stream on your phone via the Democracy Now phone app.  Listening live, the same cautions apply about how the show may cut out as you listen because there isn’t enough bandwidth.  The Democracy Now app also once worked on the similar Apple iPad Operating systems– That was until Apple introduced a new operating system.  Now the app still works on iPhones, but not on the iPads any longer.  The internet taketh away!

6.    Now it’s 9:00 AM ET and Democracy Now has finished its one hour weekday morning broadcasts.  What if you missed it?  You can listen via the Pacifica App and hear it broadcast again on KPFA from Berkley. (It’s 6:00 AM California time!)  The Democracy Now show always begins with host and anchor Amy Goodman reading the headlines, which, will, as noted, in ten minutes or perhaps just under twenty, cover about three times as much news as the corporate networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.) cover in their half hour evening news broadcasts.  It means Amy is speaking very fast.  If you are not fully awake, there is no quick rewind.  It's best to be fully awake when you listen.  Maybe that's what some Californians thought--  Pacifica’s KPFK from Los Angeles just moved Democracy Now from a 6:00 AM California time slot to an 8:00 AM California time slot which means you can hear it again in New York at 11:00 AM ET.  All the Pacifica stations carry Democracy Now and the twin Houston stations carry it differing times.  So there are lots of options using the Pacifica app.   The internet giveth!

For a while, after the 9:00 AM hour, the only way to listen is WBAI's archive

7.    But what if its after 9:00 AM ET and, hungry to catch up on the news (particularly the headlines?), you’ve missed the beginning of Democracy Now?  Anytime after 9:00 AM you can go to the WBAI archive and listen to the previous broadcasts of Democracy Now.  In fact, for a while, after 9:00 AM that’s the only way you can listen to it.  The internet giveth!

8.    Still later in the day (it could be as late or later than 11:00 AM ET), Democracy Now will make its program available on demand on the internet.  At that time, it will be available for listening or watching from Democracy Now from its website or, alternatively through its Democracy Now app.  Plus, the broadcast Democracy Now show is an hour; but, on the internet, Democracy Now posts extra “web exclusives,” extensions of on-air interviews if you are interested in hearing more and going into greater depth on the subjects covered.  The internet giveth!

Two day's Democracy Now Show segments

9.    Still later in the day, Democracy Now will start dividing its broadcast up into different segments, so you can pick and choose portions of the show to listen to specifically.  And you will be able to share links to specific content that way too.  The internet giveth!

When the text transcript of show content like this goes up like this, it is more likely that Google will, for example, help you find out that an unusually long lasting sustained drought in Honduras is one of the things driving refugees away from their homes (that is if Google's algorithms are in the mood to let you know).

10.     Eventually, later in the day, there is another way to take in Democracy Now.  That’s when the text of the segments for the day get written up and posted.  That also makes the content searchable on Google.  The internet giveth!  But has Google been adjusting its algorithms to make Democracy Now content harder to find, the way that Google has been spiking the algorithms of many alternative news sites?  You will probably find that Democracy Now content does not Google as high as it should . . . The internet taketh away!  But if Democracy Now behaves . .?

Amazon’s Alexa

11.    At some point during the day it has become possible to ask Amazon’s Alexa to play that day’s Democracy Now program.  Command "Alexa: Play Democracy Now," and the show starts!  For now, without looking into it, we’ll assume things work much the same way with Siri alternatives that listen to your home commands: Google Assistant, Cortana, Mycroft, whatever.  The internet giveth!  (if you want these kinds of things in your home.)  Asking a willing Alexa to play Democracy Now was, we observed, possible for a number or weeks. . .  For a number of weeks, that is just up until recently: Now, if you ask Alexa to play Democracy Now it has found a substitute program to play.  Alexa now refuses to play Democracy Now.  The internet taketh away!

Democracy Now on cable TV via the CUNY station in New York

12.    Want to watch Democracy Now as good old fashioned cable television?  In New York City, wait until 6:00 PM and you will find it broadcast on the local city university CUNY station.  However, if you want to capture it reliably for time shifting on your Tivo, you will have to deal with the fact that CUNY TV and Tivo haven’t been coordinating on exchanging programming information the usual way so you will have to set up a specified word “wish list” program to capture the show rather than a Tivo "season pass." These electronics are all so reliably smart and dependable, until they are not.

13.    Don’t like old fashioned cable television?  Do you think that YouTube is the answer?  Democracy Now also goes up on YouTube, which allows you to subscribe to it there.  The internet giveth!  One thing we must note, however, about content that is put up and made available on YouTube: Sometimes it gets taken down by YouTube for reasons that seem totally inexplicable, or, if those reasons are explicable, then for reasons that are downright scary.  (Ditto Facebook.) 
The internet taketh away!
  

14.    You can also listen or watch Democracy Now in Spanish because it gets translated.

The iTunes audio Podcast

15.    Prefer everything via podcasts?  You can get podcasts of the audio through iTunes
Google Play, and Spotify.  And iTunes also has podcasts of the video too.

PART II: A Few Cautions About The Internet

With such a mind boggling multiplicity of options, it certainly seems like there is cornucopic wealth to the variety of ways in which you can access the news that Democracy Now will provide. The internet giveth!  However, the illusion fades when you realize that almost all of these options that seem to afford such liberating choice come through just one spigot: the internet.  There are hands ready to turn the handle on that spigot.  They could turn it off entirely, or just adjust the flow.

The Federal Communications Commission under Trump appointed chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer and telecommunications industry corporate lobbyist, is determinedly doing away with net neutrality.  Net neutrality is the principle that lets Democracy Now and others compete with the conglomerate telecommunication giants that consistently stream government friendly news-- even when those telecommunication giants don't want that competition.

The elimination of net neutrality isn't the result of democracy.  Quite the opposite- "poll after poll after poll shows that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or any other party: Overwhelming majorities of people in the United States support net neutrality rules."  So it is not as if democracy can be counted on to protect us from this change.  Instead, with 83%, perhaps more of the public, wanting net neutrality, the FCC's elimination of it is just one of the most extreme examples of how on issue and after issue democracy is being overridden to give corporate and moneyed interests and other powers in charge the things they want instead of the things that the vast majority of the public, supermajorities, want and should by all reason be allowed to have.  The internet taketh away!

There are all sorts of ways that the internet can take things away: Things can disappear, they can just get lost or buried, they can become unfindable, the enabling technology by which they are accessed might not keep up to date or it may fail, tech product interfaces foe accessing content can be withdrawn, you can be steered or warned away from things, or things can be censored.  From early on, the model of the internet has been to lure people in by offering up things seemingly for free.  The internet giveth! But that doesn't mean those things will stick around or are that they are actually free. 
The internet taketh away!

I was one of the many who was heavily solicited by Google to become a trend-setting first adopter of Google+ when Google launched Google+ as an alternative, perhaps preferable in certain ways, to Facebook.   Google shut down Google+ this past April deleting all its users' accounts and posts.  Google+ was a favorite means of sharing information and content of Yoko Ono.  I could show you what I mean by linking to her posts, but they have all been deleted.  In a sense, these deletions were also a re-erasure of John Lennon's presence in our lives, assassinated in 1980-- many of Yoko's posts were about John.  The internet taketh away!  Google announced its plans to end the Google+ (originally launched in June of 2011) in October.

Google's October announcement of the Google+ withdrawal was contemporaneous with Facebook's October shutdown of more than 800 mostly anti-war, anti-authoritarian pages, including things like popular Black Lives Matters and police watchdog sites.  The October Facebook shutdowns occurred during the run up to the mid-term elections and involved coordinated action with other social media giants like Twitter.

Scary?  Wondering why this is something that people know so little about?  Here is something scarier.  When this was breaking as news, in a brilliant bit of nonreporting and disinformation the New York Times ran a contemporaneous story about the Facebook deletions that made you complacently think you knew what was going on.  The Time story communicated `not to worry . . . everything is under control.'   The report of the Facebook take downs was hidden, Purloined Letter fashion, on the paper's front page.  The Times article made it seem like mainly that Facebook was taking down pernicious, maliciously motivated  right wing disinformation sites.   The article's headline?: Made in U.S.: Untruths Infest Social Websites- The Right and the Left Try Russia’s Methods, By Sheera Frenkel, October 11, 2018.

The Times October 12, 2018 front page from the internet (The internet giveth!): Prominently displayed, but escaping notice, an article about how Facebook took down more than 800 web page sites, mostly anti-authoritarian and anti-war.

The main example the Times article led with and gave considerable focus to was what it described as a sketchy conservative right wing blogger publishing “several false stories” about Christine Blasey Ford as she was accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.  Eliminating such “false stories” doesn’t seem like it would be upsetting to Times readers.  The sketchy blogger's "Right Wing News" site gets a total of 19 mentions of it by its full name in the Times article.
        
Or maybe the front page Times article successfully escaped much notice because readers were turned off and very bored, and didn't read the damned thing because it sounded so much like just another of the endless run of Times' articles harping on "Russiagate."  . . . The article simply characterized the rest of Facebook take downs being about another manifestation of the conspiracy theory that "state-backed Russian operatives" swung the 2016 election to Trump, albeit that in this case the Times pontificated that we were dealing with the "spreading of disinformation started by Americans, for Americans . .   emulating the Russian strategy of 2016."  "Americans, for Americans"?  The article said that "such influence campaigns are increasingly a domestic phenomenon fomented by Americans on the left and the right."

If you are trying to go back in time find the Times article about the Facebook take downs without knowing exactly what you are looking for, it is very hard to find because the online headline for the article makes the article sound even more like it is just another Russiagate story: Facebook Tackles Rising Threat: Americans Aping Russian Schemes to Deceive.  (The Times frequently uses different headlines for its web edition than it uses for its print edition- It's one of the vagaries of what we think the internet documents and preserves for posterity.)
        
The Times article quotes two seemingly impartial third parties for perspective.  One of them is presented as "Ryan Fox, a co-founder of New Knowledge, a firm that tracks disinformation" who assures that the Facebook take downs don't present a worrisome free speech issue with these words: “These networks are trying to manipulate people by manufacturing consensus — that’s crossing the line over free speech.”  You might catch in that statement something altogether too coy: "manufacturing consensus."  It's a virtually and obviously synonymous with "Manufacturing Consent" or "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."   That is the seminal and now key reference book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 that explains the propaganda model by which the government and those in power in our society manipulate and control public opinion in a "democracy."

The Times does not explain that Ryan Fox was at "New Knowledge" (does "New Knowledge" sound Orwellian?) having just come from the National Security Agency where he was  an “Intel Analyst,” nor does the Times indicate how that probably also tells you a lot about "New Knowledge."  On his LinkedIn profile Ryan says the New Knowledge mission is "to secure the integrity of public discourse."  For good measure, please know that Facebook is partnering with the Atlantic Council to determine which web pages it will censor.  The internet taketh away!  That is not mentioned by the Times article.

Ryan Fox's LinkedIn info and more information (The internet giveth!): "Ryan spent 15 years at the NSA championing next-generation SIGINT solutions, driven to support national security interests. Prior to his civilian roles as a Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative European SIGINT partners, he served under U.S. Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), as a CNO Analyst for the U.S. Army."

To be clear, the Atlantic Council has been described by Peter Phillips as the unofficial policy-making and consensus-building arm for the transnational corporate elite as they seek to protect their interconnected capital investments throughout the world.  Phillips is the author of the new reference book "Giants - The Global Power Elite," that, identifies, boiling down to a very few people, about 300, controlling most of the world's wealth.  He furnishes the bios of 199 directors of seventeen global financial Giants controlling $50 trillion of the world's wealth- $41 trillion in 2017.  He furnishes estimates that overall world wealth is about $255 trillion two-thirds of which is U.S. and European.

As noted, while the prevailing model of the internet is to lure you in for free, much of it is here today, and (The internet taketh away!) gone tomorrow.   My central storage hard drive device came with the option of using a free program that allowed me (my family too) to stream and listen anywhere to any of the music I had stored on my computer, a large music collection.  Did that console me for the fact that my once upon a time "lifetime" purchase of the Music Match music player meant the "lifetime" was only that of the corporation owning Music Match, not my own?   Eventually, my ability to stream and listen to my music collection anywhere via the program from my hard drive device maker simply ended as well without warning or fanfare.  Now, I think we are all supposed to be uploading our music collections to the Amazon cloud, or using streaming services like Spotify where the security of my being able to access that music in the future is dependent upon my ability to pay future rent.

Much of the fitful starting and stopping with which the lure of free internet convenience has proved undependable has to with the acquisition and consolidation of the internet companies into increasingly few giant tech monopolies.  Music Match was subsumed into Yahoo.  Yahoo faded, pushed aside by the dominance of other fast growing companies.  Eventually, Yahoo's remnants were picked up by Verizon to be administered alongside Verizon's previously acquired AOL so that the AOL and Yahoo email services became clones, both subject to new simultaneously implemented restrictions on promulgation of information through email distribution lists.

While the lure of the internet may often be things that seem to be free, the provision of those things is far from free at all: The other recognized key to the standard model of internet provided services is the prevalence of data scraping.  Would I have a right to expect that, with the internet music services I just mentioned, those services will not be tracking and collecting data about my music preferences, listening and buying habits?  When was the last time you read or bothered to understand the "terms of service" agreement according to which you got a computer or internet program?

Of course we all know how some of that generally expected data scraping results in our being micro-targeted with advertisements tailored very specifically to us after we looked into the availability of a product.  Or did I express interest in that product writing in an email or mention it on a Facebook post?  Even if I disregard or chose to like this volunteered assistance from the internet, including the way it reduces my need to think, in other contexts it can be creepier.  What if what this kind of surveillance notes that I seem to be paying a lot of attention to stories on Democracy Now about mistreatment of immigrants and asylum seekers at the boarder?  About ICE misconduct?  And what if the follow up to that is that someone micro-targets me with links to stories that convey a mistaken impression that immigration at the border involves a flood of immigrants at unprecedented levels and an insoluble crisis?  Or what if the follow up is simply to ramp up the distractions being offered with more Russiagate conspiracy theories?

You may put yourself at ease by saying to yourself that no one is likely to want to pay attention to your little needle in the big haystack out there, and you may virtuously feel that to the extent you get fed distracting or misleading stories you have the strength of mind and mental acuity to think for yourself no matter what.  If so, you'd be right be right in one respect: Most of the surveillance methods sweeping up data tend not to focus on the individual; they focus broadly on interconnections and relationships throughout cyberspace.

If your emerging individual political predilections were lonely and aberrant they'd hardly be a concern for those seeking to maintain power and control.  What is more to be worried about is something the internet and the data collection surveillance systems are designed to do very well: Keep track of where groups of people and their ideas are swarming.  So when you and your neighbors in your extended political community all start paying attention to, for example, certain Democracy Now stories and reports, you may find that you and your neighbors all get headed off and deflected in similar ways.  Algorithms may do a lot of the work and those algorithms again may smartly incorporate informed instincts of what is the best and most tailored way of deflecting you and like-minded neighbors to other modes of thought.

Would any of the big internet monopolies take actions that steer public discourse (the way that their sister corporate media giants do)?  Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has been doing very well recently despite the way that the corporate media has been working to shut out her anti-war themed campaign.  Right now Gabbard is suing Google for halting and refusing to accept her campaign advertisements.  Is she likely to win?

Nor is it necessarily good when we teeter on the brink as politicians finding fault with the biases of Facebook, et al. threaten to regulate the internet giants as common carriers (the giants assuredly control what has become the public square) without actually doing so. . .  Because then those ongoing unconsummated threats become a vehicle for coercing political favors and bias that could not be demanded of entities that were actually, in fact, regulated by the government.

The internet, created by the U.S. government, was privatized in the mid 1980's without fanfare and with virtually no discussion about that privatization as Yasha Levine notes in his book “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.”  Also as Levine notes, the original purpose of the internet when the government created it had a lot to do with surveillance and information control.  Lawrence Preston Gise, the mentor and maternal grandfather of Amazon's Jeff Bezos was involved was involved with DARPA (originally ARPA- which he helped set up and he worked)  in setting up the internet.
 
The privatizing of the internet is an interesting thing.  Legal distinctions of what is permissible mean that those who control the internet privately have not been subject to the same restrictions on surveillance to which the government itself was theoretically subject. But the convenience of that distinction does not prevent data collected by private firms from being sold to politically active individuals (where is the dividing line really?), nor, probably, at least as a practical matter, to private firms hired to work for the government.

As noted, almost every way to get the news from Democracy Now involves information that flows through the interruptible spigot of the internet.  The two exceptions are the evening CUNY cable television broadcast and listening to Democracy Now via terrestrial radio such as the broadcasting of the WBAI NYC radio station that helped incubate and give birth to the Democracy Now program.

It is nice to think about cable as affording one of the backstopping alternatives to the internet, but the cable services owned by private communication conglomerates like TimeWarner (Spectrum) and Verizon can’t be relied upon for secure access to information either.  Just as internet access to content and ideas can be choked off, so can access through cable.  The Supreme Court, in the very recently decided DeeDee Halleck (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) case written by new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ruled that cable TV companies, even in the case of channels regulated for the purpose of providing “public access,” are not subject to  First Amendment free speech constraints and requirements and that the cable companies as private entities can censor and deny transmission to whomever they want.  So for instance, as with Halleck, they can cut you off if you raise questions about broadcasting access or the economics affecting the content provided by the public access channels.

If internet access to information and content is choked off more in the United States than it is now (and other countries like China provide examples of just how choked off it can be), would we be able to rely on Newspapers for more robust information flow as once was the case?  Newspapers once wielded the power of printing press production linked with their own channels of very effective distribution.  It was a huge, very powerful physical infrastructure for information delivery that, now supplanted by the internet, is getting dismantled.

The internet has given us ready access to information like we once got from newspapers, including information from the remaining newspapers that still survive (The internet giveth!), but, disruptively, the internet has largely demonetized the newspaper business. That demonetization includes the advent of services like Craigslist, which has diverted all of the classified advertising revenue that previously supported those papers.  The internet taketh away!

The demonetized newspapers can now be bought up for a pittance by wealthy individuals (like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post) interested in their propaganda value.  That's what will generally happen with the legacy papers whose great names still afford branding value for propaganda.  The lesser papers are simply going out of existence-- or maybe they become meaningless by just simply republishing corporate press releases.  The internet has worked brilliantly as a disruptive force to slice and dice things in a way that the production of content, going every which way, has become untethered from monetary streams.

Unless you have independent resources, monetization and access to monetization is obviously important.  Because there are also controls and levers with respect to monetization on the internet it is another way that content on the internet can be regulated and controlled.  YouTube, owned by Google under its Alphabet umbrella, demonetized The Jimmy Dore Show videos when The Jimmy Dore Show was putting out facts about how reports of chemical attacks attributed to Assad's government in Syria were probably false and designed to draw the Unites States into further conflict there. In retrospect, as opposed to the uniform and unquestioning incendiary reports of the corporate media, it appears clear that Dore, while suffering this kind of censorship, was correct. . . 

. . . This is why the model of donor-supported news production is becoming increasingly critical.  Among other things, speaking in old fashioned terms, it eliminates one of the "filters" that Herman and Chomsky identified in  "Manufacturing Consent" as a hurdle blocking the content reaching the public: Advertising and sponsorship.  The Jimmy Dore Show now supports itself through donor support from the show's fans coming in via Patreon.  Like Democracy Now, the radio show version of the Jimmy Dore Show plays on the Pacifica Network radio stations, including WBAI in New York.

With cable being unreliable, if the internet damps down to throttle a news broadcasting show like Democracy Now, the terra firma that remains to which Democracy Now could return will consist only of publicly owned independent terrestrial radio stations like Pacific Network stations, a fittingly poetic homecoming to its origins.

How firm is that terra firma?  Would Democracy Now continue in such a future and is it assured that WBAI would still be broadcasting in New York, able to provide Democracy Now with a future within its embrace?   As is obvious from the production values when you watch Democracy Now, it is a show with ample resources and very well funded.  In fact, its budget may now dwarf the entire budget of WBAI radio.

It should also be noted that a good number of all of the internet options for watching Democracy Now that were described at the beginning of this article involve mechanisms (accompanied by appeals) by which those watching and listening to Democracy Now can support the program by donating directly to it.  The internet giveth!  At the same time, all of the separate multiple ways the internet furnishes for donating directly to Democracy Now represents ways in which supporting Democracy Now and other shows on Pacfica radio stations like WBAI that also have alternate incarnations on the internet (The Jimmy Dore Show is another example) have become untethered from supporting the terra firma of terrestrial radio.  The internet taketh away!

Stations like WBAI and the other Pacifica network stations rely on listener donations just does.  Thus, in a sense, the stations are almost being asked to compete with shows like Democracy Now for donations.  Much like the untetherings that the internet caused to occur in the newspaper industry, that untethering of the stations from shows that are spread through the internet is weakening the guarantee of terrestrial radio as an alternative and backstop that may be turned to if the increasingly few hands controlling the internet spigot impede further information that threatens existing power structures.

If the information traveling through the internet that is critical of power is further damped down in the future, maybe Democracy Now will still be around because it will continue to broadcasts via terrestrial radio.  Or maybe Democracy Now will adapt and mange to stay around because it will simply broadcast less of the news than it currently does.  Nevertheless, Democracy Now, broadcasting over the internet, might even position itself as being still nominally critical of the government.

Does Democracy Now already pull any of its punches with respect to what it reports? 

Democracy Now covered the issue of Facebook censorship, albeit, somewhat gingerly, in September 2018, when the website ThinkProgress (which is somewhat middle-of-the-road politically despite its name) was peculiarly censored by Facebook for reporting about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's position with respect to overturning Roe v. Wade (yes evidence is Kavanaugh has such instincts).  That September 17, 2018 Democracy Now reporting was just weeks before Facebook’s massive censorship take down of more than 800 pages, but Democracy Now never followed up that ThinkProgess story to report on Facebook’s subsequent big take down.

Facebook censors a story about Brett Kanaugh's Roe v. Wade position-  Are there any other stories that relate to this?:  Only a 2012 story about the effect of media consolidation on journalism?

If you go to the Democracy Now page reporting the censorship of ThinkProgress's reporting of Kavanaugh's Roe v. Wade position, Democracy Now offers up as “related” a soon-to-be-vintage January 12, 2012 story: Ex-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on Media Consolidation, Broadband Expansion, Threats to Journalism. . . . . Not linked to on their site was a more confusing pre-Facebook-take-down August 1, 2018 Democracy Now story that was even somewhat sympathetic to Facebook. It was about how Facebook was then taking down just a few sites that Facebook said had “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to “undermine democracy.” 

If you'd absorbed that August 1st Democracy Now story beforehand, it probably would not have prepped you to be alarmed when reading the New York Times front page story published in October.

. . .  As we noted, Democracy Now is a good place to get about 85% of your news, not a full 100%. 

PS (8/11/2019): After this article was written and posted, there was this breaking (August 9, 2019) news- “leaked documents show the White House is planning an executive order that would put Ajit Pai in charge of policing free speech online and allow government censorship of the Internet.”