ToxiCities: Dotting The Landscape like Pools of Venom
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| Unbiased reporting? Even Caen wasn't Able. |
While the
heads of Anti-social media companies whine as they twist under the microscope of public scrutiny they assure the Eloi that more locks will help secure the net from hate speech:
Suckerburg, one of many Toxicities built from the ground up, ground up their own citizens by deliberately exposing them to anyone with a coupla dollar bills to help fill the Suckerburg's Toxicity coffers. They named this perfidy "ad revenues". Now the Man makes empty promises to Congress, falsely stating that AI has the capacity to root out toxic content. Who would define exactly what was toxic was never discussed. Didn't have to be: just the magic words AI needed to be mentioned to lay the lawmakers' concerns to rest.
That should sound familiar to you. You should be alarmed that AI is actually nothing more than machine-based Quants. You should take these words and see the similarity between the unwarranted faith they espouse in AI and that same blind belief in "science" (it's not science once its accepted without question: its' dogma) was evinced by the risk-Free Market advocates, those pre-2008 Robber Barons and quants, using Black–Scholes model of options-pricing formulae punched numbers into their PDA's which then popped out the prices, despite none of them having any idea of how it worked.
Just as the entire MBS scam (Oh, I'm sorry, I meant scheme ... oh well, since in modern Cowboy Capitalism-based finance, they're in fact synonyms ... ) was based on a false premise, its collapse was built-in. And the false premise, that housing prices would keep rising, having been since structured into the CB regime of QE printing and stock-market backstopping, false premises reign once again. That something called "Newsfeed" actually contains news, although everyone using it knows they can put whatever they want in their own; that a platform is responsible for what is posted, even though everyone reading what's posted knows that anyone can post anything. Facebook (hello? it has never, by the longest stretch of the imagination, even remotely resembled a book) is not a journal, a newspaper/magazine, or even a blog. If you want the news, and you go to FB for it, you're bound to be misinformed (by your own design. You don't have to be, you've just decided that that's good enough for you). There's nothing any amount of censoring that FB can do that's going to change that; anymore than calling someone a "friend" simply because they "friend" you (or you friend them) will ever make them one.
But just as CDO's and MBS were called toxic instruments by those selling them, yet were ballyhooed as instruments of security and worry-free investments then, so today is data now labelled toxic or safe by ... well, that's just the question now, isn't it? By who? Just because FB calls it a "News Feed"? But that doesn't make it one.
Even newspapers, whose existence depends on actual news, can't decide on how to be impartial:
Today's NYT feature:
"The right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones confronted Florida senator Marco Rubio while he was speaking with reporters outside of a Senate committee hearing."
Jones' Info Wars is a competitor of the NYT, so he is described as a "right-wing conspiracy theorist", yet Rubio, a vocal proponent of the hoax that Climate Change is a Hoax, by virtue of that stance, is himself a right-wing conspiracy theorist, as a hoax is by definition a conspiracy: so he not only believes there is a conspiracy of the world's scientists and meteorologists to fool the entire world for their own, unstated, yet presumably nefarious reasons, he is also himself a party to the President's conspiracy to undermine the scientists of the world by pretending that their claims are specious and without merit, yet it is Jones who is singled out as the "right-wing conspiracy theorist"? Yet who reads or even heard of Jones until the self-appointed internet censors conspired to oust him from their platforms?
I'd certainly never heard of Alex Jones, except on a little-known site called Seemorerocks where every nutjob's "News" is reported with sometimes an acerbic comment/warning. Yet it takes no time at all, reading the likes of Hal Turner ("World War III to start on Sunday!!" How many times do you need to read such outlandish prognostications before you start to doubt their veracity? Hint: exactly once) to learn how much credence to put in his "reporting". It's like reading
theeconomiccollapseblog.com and expecting to get unbiased reporting of economic news: it ain't gonna happen. And the title tells you as much, much as it does for any site named "InfoWars". How much faith are you going to put in anything that whatever whackjob's running
that site says?
So it's actually the NYT, by pretending it only prints what is news, yet, as seen from their description of Alex Jones, right next to no such description of the equally right-wing, equally conspiracy-weaving Rubio, the NYT is most assuredly
not unbiased, they do more real propaganda specifically by advertising that pretense and having it swallowed by millions. They make Trump credible when he screeches his "Fake News" broadsides, in a way that no online Newsfeed could.
Yet in all the hubbub about "Fear" and the recent NYT op-ed by an anonymous source "somewhere within the administration", there has not been a whisper about the President being a self-proclaimed right-wing conspiracy theorist, despite real, credible individuals making such statements as:
Richard Branson
✔
@richardbranson
It is not known how much longer the ocean can continue to buffer us from climate change as its health declines. We need to take action: https://virg.in/3dc
(Oh? Like starting yet another airline?).
How about from Bloomberg?:
Years of doomsday talk at Silicon Valley dinner parties has turned to action.
In recent months, two 150-ton survival bunkers journeyed by land and sea from a Texas warehouse to the shores of New Zealand, where they’re buried 11 feet underground.
Seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have purchased bunkers from Rising S Co. and planted them in New Zealand in the past two years, said Gary Lynch, the manufacturer’s general manager. At the first sign of an apocalypse — nuclear war, a killer germ, a French Revolution-style uprising targeting the 1 percent — the Californians plan to hop on a private jet and hunker down, he said. (Shouldn't that be "bunker down"?).
You’ve Heard of Outsourced Jobs, but Outsourced Pollution? It’s Real, and Tough to Tally Up
By BRAD PLUMER
What Happens When Nations ‘Outsource’ Their Emissions? Headaches for Measuring Progress.
NOW he asks this question? The US has been doing that as a matter of policy since the Reagan administration, yet the country's use of oil has never reflected (ie, has never slowed its growth in the use of oil, despite the fact that its most energy-extensive industries have left the country) that its consumer products are manufactured on another continent and shipped thousands of miles across a vast ocean, despite the receiver country of those goods having perfect capacity to produce them. They are produced in One-Party-run
Communist China for one reason: Outsourced Pollution to a country where the denizens have no capacity to protest the poisoning of their soil, pollution of their air or befouling of their water by breakneck industrialization. And it was for the specific purpose of Outsourcing Industrial Pollution that those Outsourced Jobs were Outsourced (before Reaganomics, "outsourced" wasn't even a word):
Larry Summers while at the World Bank: "Shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons":
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
So if you haven't heard of outsourced pollution, industry, the political system, and NGO's certainly have, it's the bedrock on which Globalization was built.
Or perhaps, Pocahontas has the clue:
Elizabeth Warren’s much-trumpeted Accountable Capitalism Act (ACA).
That is as big a hoax as the climate-change-is-a-hoax hoax: there is no such thing as accountable Capitalism: it's well-named, though, as it would, in fact, be nothing more than an Act. If it were accountable it wouldn't be Capitalism, as capitalism has no capacity to pay for the damage it wreaks.
Capitalism, as we've seen from the lobbying and union-busting activities of industry, hasn't the capacity to pay. It can't even pay its own workers:
a living wage: Without SNAP and Medicaid programs, as well as federal government subsidized roads, energy (the military, the QE, the depletion allowance, are all costs that should be paid for by purchasers of the product thus provided: gasoline. Yet, as evidenced in California, even levying a tax to keep the roads in repair is most vehemently opposed by exactly those who most use those same roads) and law enforcement/emergency room costs that increase with every commuter pulling on to the cynically-monikered
freeway.
health insurance (unless it's subsidized by government as
untaxed compensation. The same people who are against ACA have no problem with the rest of us being literally forced to subsidize the healthcare of the Corporate workforce. Not employed by Corporate America? Well then,
your Health insurance must be paid for with
after-tax dollars. To pay a $500 premium, you have to first earn $750. Not one Democrat saw fit to point this out during Trump's attempt to completely scuttle Obamacare).
Pensions plans: A corporation that has far more wherewithal than any individual investor can't invest in such a way as to make it possible to promise their employees a nickel after 20 years of work. Yet somehow you, a single employee with no accountants, tax lawyers or investment analysts, are supposed to be able to somehow do that on your own.
And how, Ms. Warren, are you going to make capitalism accountable for others when it has publicly announced (via its very public machinations to avoid paying taxes, workers, or liabilities for accidents their own carelessness and criminal negligence have caused) it hasn't even got the capacity to be accountable to its own workforce? Capitalism exists to funnel the output of labor into the pockets of an ascendant, decided-by-who-you're-a-descendant-of, Keptocracy. There is no method by which you can make that "accountable". It functions on the principle it was rigged to function on: theft. Theft of the commons, theft of profits, theft of wages, funneling them right into the Keptocracy's bank accounts. Accountable theft? Corporations can't even afford to pay dividends anymore. The highest valued companies in the world pay their executives outlandish piles of cash but their investors, not a nickel. "You want your stock "earnings"?" Sell. It's the only way you'll get a nickel, so your timing better be good.
All of these items are a result of Climate change and it ramifications, yet not a word is uttered as to the President's outlandish stance on it as "a Hoax", a position he maintains to this day, but one that is never questioned, even though there is nothing that can be done: not a highway built, a bridge constructed, a power plant brought online, that should be undertaken without this reality in mind. It should be shouted in his face everyday until he not only admits it's a problem, but once admits it, what are his plans to mitigate against it?
But No such question will ever be put to him. And as long as it isn't, and on a continual and persistent basis, does anything else really matter? Certainly not "AI's capacity to root out "toxic content". Unless, of course, that toxic content were CO2, and what AI could root it out of were the oceans and the atmosphere. But no. Both AI and the internet will continue to instead
Contribute, at an escalating rate
, to that, much more real, and what is in fact,
actually toxic, atmosphere, by pouring the CO2 burnt to provide the prodigious energy needs of the internet with its onerous demands for cooling, and its unaccountable use for such energy-hog apps as bit-coin mining (do you see that Ms Warren? The theft of resources from the rest of us so that a few "miners" can gamble? It's
built in by design).
So Zuckerberg's big promises to Congress about the capacity of artificial intelligence to root out toxicities are, sadly, not just "wildly premature", they're dangerously deceptive, as much so as any Fox News coverage of The Donald, because both pretend they're, "Fair and Balanced", when neither has any intention, nor capacity, of being either. Anymore than the NYT does (If you squeeze the pejorative phrase,
right-wing conspiracy theorist, into a headline, where space is at a premium, for one person, yet don't use it to describe the much more dangerous (him being in Congress and all, and able to echo the unhinged proclamations of his Boss, The Donald)
right-wing conspiracy theorist, Marco Rubio
, that is toxic content). The NYT made a conscious decision to depict the one as a nut, and the other as a victim. That is neither fair nor balanced. Whatever follows is toxic content because the writer made a point of biasing your opinion before presenting it . And no AI is capable of "rooting it out". You can't separate reporting from bias anymore than you can separate capitalism from criminality, they are natural bedfellows, and in both cases, as in that of Planetary Warming, it is only by first targeting, and then stopping, the rampant and pervasive denial that even a modicum of a solution can ever hope to be attained.
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