I LIKE Facebook

 

I guess I’m well old enough to know better, but there it is. Let me start by saying that I’m pretty much a homebody by choice. My wife and I live by ourselves; we don’t have a huge social circle when it comes to face-to-face contact, either individually or together, .and the pandemic hasn’t helped.

Having had a carbon footprint on the planet for more than a few years, however, I have accumulated a larger circle of contacts from living and working in various places, and without Facebook, I would not be able to keep up with them. Some are very good friends of different generations. I have friends on the “other side of the aisle” politically, with whom I am still friends because I knew them before there was what I would call an aisle between us. I have lost one or two friends on FB through my own selfish behavior, which gives me pain, but I have learned from it. These can’t all be bad things, can they?

 But remember how Facebook started. If I have the history right, it was launched at the college level to provide a platform for rating the attractiveness of young women. Now, Facebook’s Instagram product is being slammed for the self-body-shaming of teenage girls. Sounds a little bit like full circle to me.

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen has blown open the window on the company’s practices, charging that it favors profit over public safety, knowingly prioritizing eyeball engagement through algorithms that make us depressed, envious, or angry.

Thanks to Ms. Haugen, those days may be numbered. Legislators in Washington may now be moved to modify Section 230, which has allowed the Wild West growth of such companies today. She’s not calling for Section 230’s repeal, but for some degree of regulation, especially over the algorithms Facebook uses.

Regulation always lags behind technology, as it did with radio, TV, and movies. and it’s too bad that it’s required at all.  But Facebook’s practices are only part of the problem. It’s needed because we humans are not all that great at regulating ourselves -- or, at parenting, for that matter.

Regulating Facebook will be like trying to change the course of the Mississippi River or drain an ocean -- almost impossible. But Frances Haugen is telling us that we have to start somewhere, and I hope the end product is a company that focuses on the good things that keep me connected to it.

 

 

 

Was It Worth It?

  

If we’re talking about Afghanistan, I think the answer is, we had to “buy” it, so to speak, but we way overpaid.

The sheer magnitude of the 9/11 attacks on this country simply left us no choice but to respond, and quickly. Turning the other cheek, or waiting patiently for the best opportunity to strike back, were not options. We had to answer, and we did. This is America, so that usually means bombing something, which we did in spades within months in Afghanistan, and we came soooo close to taking out Osama bin Laden. Had we succeeded, there might not have been a 20-year war. But we didn’t, and there was. It was often said, we had to fight terrorism over there so we wouldn’t have to here. That rolled a little too easily off the tongue for my taste. But our blood was up. And we did hold off the Taliban for two decades. That’s not nothing.

In 2021, it was way past time for us to leave; there was virtually no argument about that. While the last-minute airlift of Americans and Afghans was truly heroic, it’s pretty clear that the process leading up to it was botched, and the world knows it.

That said, I wish the pundits would stop saying we were defeated or that we lost the war. We chose to leave. The Afghan government lost it by not bothering to fight it. As for our messy departure, some are saying that our exit from Vietnam was much worse, but for comparison, that’s a pretty low bar.

Was our time and money wasted in Afghanistan? Not entirely. True, we shouldn’t have tried nation-building, but if history serves, we were actually pretty good at it in Japan after World War II, though that was rebuilding. The problem with Afghanistan, as one writer has said, is that it is more of a place than an actual nation. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work there. Still, we did give many of its citizens, especially women, a good long taste of freedom, and hopefully, there will be enough Afghans ready to fight to get it back someday.

As for where we go from here, there has been much said in recent days about how great it was that this nation was truly united after the 9/11 attacks, and wouldn’t it be great if we could feel that way again. The trouble with that kind of unity is that it’s a reflex. The price we paid for it in 2001 was way too high. I hope someday we can get there by commitment instead.

Life, Abortion, and Balance

Some of you may not like hearing this from me, but I have a problem with abortion.  I just can’t be convinced that a fetus with a heartbeat isn’t alive, so abortion seems like killing something. I didn’t say “murdering,” that is a legal term; I said “killing.” All that said, I remain in favor of reasonable freedom of choice for women when it comes to abortion. It’s a question of balance.

“Thou shall not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments, and most of us would find ourselves in trouble if we violated it. That seems simple enough. But when it comes to the law, nothing is simple. There are exceptions. You CAN kill someone else if they pose a direct and immediate threat to your own life.

When it comes to abortion, many states that restrict it also have exceptions, allowing it in cases of rape or incest. But here comes Texas, essentially banning abortion outright, with no exceptions.

Those who want to end abortion entirely claim to be motivated by the sacredness of life. But do you think maybe those states whose legislators are most opposed to abortion also happen to have higher proportions of their states’ population on death row in prison?  So why is life sacred at one end and not the other?

Ideological purity doesn’t work in the real world. The function of law is to strike a balance among competing interests. In the broadest sense, Roe v. Wade has offered this balance between a woman’s right to decide what happens to what’s growing within her and society’s need to regulate. It has worked for about 50 years, but those days may now be numbered.

The Supreme Court majority seems to have made its position pretty clear, by declining to keep the Texas law from taking effect. Expanding the court, however, isn’t the solution to resolving its ideological imbalance. Both parties could use the tactic whenever the numbers were not in their favor. There are really only two paths open to those who want to preserve a woman’s right to abortion. Neither is easy.

One is to codify the provisions of Roe into federal law, which would have to get through both houses of Congress. Good luck with that! The other is to use the 2022 election to replace the legislators who insist on a total abortion ban. If the right-to-choose side really reflects a majority in this country, as is often stated, the voters will have to demonstrate that next year at the ballot box.

 

It Takes Money

  

They’re off! What many call the Billionaire Boys’ race to space is on. Branson went by plane, Bezos by rocket. Musk will go into orbit in a couple of months.

Let’s face it: Exploration takes money. History is full of stories about entrepreneurs spending their own wealth on expeditions or getting it from investors or from government. And while we think about the spiritual aspects of exploration, like opening new vistas and life-changing experiences, in real terms, the goal is usually commercial. Columbus was looking for a new route to the Indies for trading opportunities. Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis wasn’t a free ride, he needed investors. But these events are all on a continuum. Lindbergh flew by himself; we can now sit in first class and have a flight attendant bring us a cocktail. But flight around the world helps make the word go ‘round.

Columbus and Lindbergh were heroes for a while, but history hasn’t been kind to them. I wonder whether it will be the reverse for our current billionaire explorers - a rehabilitation of their reputations. It may be offensive to many that Jeff Bezos gets to play with space toys while the workers at the company he founded have to think about the bathroom breaks they get during a shift. But he is also a visionary with a genuine concern for the planet, and as we see now, a major philanthropist too.

Let’s face another thing: Many of us just hate people who have more money. Why don’t they pay more taxes? I’m no tax lawyer, but I betcha Bezos’ trip into space is deductible. Schedule C for “capsule,” maybe?

Will the Billionaire Boys’ Race democratize, as they say, space travel for the rest of us? I’m actually glad to see something getting democratized right now.

 

 

Payback

 

The recent observance of the 100th anniversary of the massacre of African-Americans and destruction of property in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has brought renewed focus on the touchy question of reparations. There seems to be little question that they are deserved, but what form they should take and how they are distributed remains a fairness – and maybe even a legal – minefield.

We can start with the principle that apologies alone are simply not enough. But then there is the question of payments to victims or their descendants. In Tulsa, there are only a handful of survivors of the atrocity still living. Already, there are formulas being discussed about how members of their families should be compensated based on where they fall in the line of succession. Greenwood, though it appeared to be the most serious race riots of its time, was not alone, and the history of many such incidents has been suppressed or ignored.

The next principle is that payments, like those made to Japanese-Americans interned in US camps during World War II, would be symbolic only. Duke University professor William Darity, who has studied reparations, estimates that if African-Americans were fully compensated for slavery and its follow-on effects down through the years, the price tag would be $11 trillion. While an increasing number of Americans support the concept of reparations, there is just no way to pay that bill.

 If and when an amount is agreed to, there is then the problem of getting the payments out. If you go by our recent experience with COVID stimulus payments, that would be something of a rocky road. And what about other minority groups that have been mistreated?

To my mind, there is one serious drawback to cash reparations. Once the checks are cashed, so to speak, do white people get to say, we’re even now, you’ve been paid?

Clearly, the reparations process involves way more than money, or even legislation. If there are racial prejudices built into our systems of finance, housing, education, and government, certainly these structures must be changed accordingly. But we do have to recognize that prejudices are lodged very deeply in many of us. The good news is, they are habits of feeling, thought, and behavior, which we can recognize in ourselves and change, but that will take time. Meanwhile, we can raise future generations that, hopefully,  may not have to wrestle with these issues. There will be plenty of other things to occupy them.