We Don’t Get Silicon Valley

That’s what Facebook MFWCI Mark Zuckerberg said in Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate.  On the other hand,

Senator Gary Peters (D, MI) asked whether Facebook is using the microphones of users’ phones to listen in to what they are doing and saying—a charge the company has denied repeatedly in recent months.

And given the level of integrity Facebook managers have shown over the years, of course we should believe their denials. Right.  Never mind that that’s an easily done exploit that hackers have done on and off (pardon the pun) for years.  Right along with playing untoward games with the video cameras on our laptops.

Here’s the kicker, though, from that Senate hearing:

Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley had one for Congress: Why don’t you get us?

The Senators’ questions often were ignorant, but that’s all they were: borne of an ignorance that’s easily corrected. Zuckerberg’s question, to the extent it’s accurately paraphrased and attributed, is a deeply cynical one that carefully misdirects the emphasis, borne as the question is from Silicon Valley’s deeply Leftist ideology—a slant Zuckerberg freely acknowledged a couple of times.

The more accurate question, the more serious question, is why doesn’t Silicon Valley get Americans?

A Gordian Knot Solution

Sometimes blunt instruments are the appropriate ones.

DoJ, while the ink was still drying on its promise of transparency and cooperation with Congress regarding the House’s Intelligence Committee investigations, welched on that promise.  Regarding the electronic communication—memo—that launched the counterintelligence investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,

Chairman Devin Nunes (R, CA) received an official response from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd.
…
Upon inspection, however, [the response] looks more like an effort to distract attention from Mr Boyd’s refusal even to mention Mr Nunes’ main request of FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

That main request was for a clean, unredacted copy of the document.  Instead, the key data in the doc, the data central to the Intel Committee’s investigation, were carefully redacted.  The excuse?  The data would give up the name of the nation whose intel service is cooperating with us.  Never mind that the New York Times already has published Australia as the source for the Papadopoulos claims and that ex-CIA Director John Brennan already has bragged about Great Britain’s relationship with the FBI.

Enough stonewalling.  President Donald Trump needs formally and explicitly to declassify the memo and order the FBI to release it.

Sure, he’ll take heat from the Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally. What else is new?

“White Privilege”

In an op-ed for Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, Zachary Wood, in the course of decrying “white privilege” as an excuse for not engaging in serious discussions to address racism, made this claim:

Does white privilege exist? Sure. If you’re white and you excel at academic or other cognitively demanding endeavors, for example, the light of your success is never dimmed by speculation about whether you benefited from affirmative action.

While his heart is in the right place, he misunderstands the particulars.  This isn’t white privilege (even assuming such a nonsensical thing could be taken seriously). The stigma attaching here is the result of the racism and sexism inherent in affirmative action programs.

Social Media Censorship

Facebook’s management is making some moves in the name of its version of transparency.

Facebook Inc will soon require that advertisers wanting to run ads on hot-button political issues go through an authorization process first, a move the social network hopes will prevent the spread of misinformation across its platform.

And

In October, Facebook unveiled a similar authorization requirement for election-related ads. The latest move will cover “issue ads”—those that don’t specifically mention a candidate but weigh in on a divisive issue, including during an election campaign.

These moves strike me as just move by Facebook management and IT types to facilitate their efforts at censoring the speech of which they personally disapprove.  These steps have nothing at all to do with separating fake from truth—which is the sole responsibility of the reader, anyway.

Identity Politics

This time it’s via rank sexism.  Lots of women, lots more than in past campaigns, are running for office, and they’re doing it on the basis of their gender as much as, or more than, their policies.

Erin Collier, a 34-year-old economist, made a late entry into the crowded race [primary, to determine the Progressive-Democrat candidate who will run against Congressman John Faso (R, NY)] in March with an announcement video that ended: “I’m not going to let those boys beat me.”

Not because her policies are better for the district than those of her competitors.

Nor is it limited to Progressive-Democrats.

Congresswoman Martha McSally, a Senate candidate in Arizona…former fighter pilot, denounces “BS” and tells national GOP leaders to “grow a pair of ovaries” in her introductory campaign video.

Kelly Dittmar, Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics:

Women are more willingly and successfully using gender as an electoral asset instead of seeing it as a hurdle they have to overcome.  It’s going to be important for these women not to present messages that could be perceived as marginalizing men.

Dittmar’s condescension is itself sexist.  We men aren’t the precious snowflakes she assumes; we don’t feel marginalized by the sexist identity politics of these candidates.  We’re just irritated by the dishonesty of this extension of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) identity politics.

And that’s the larger point.  Running on their gender—rather than running as an American candidate and doing so on the basis of policy—is sexist bigotry no matter the claimed motive or the cuteness of their framing of the matter.