What Happened Today: November 01, 2022
DHS accelerates policing of online platforms; judge halts publishing megamerger; Edward Said’s Jews
The Big Story
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has accelerated its constitutionally dubious attempts to police social media platforms after shutting down its controversial Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) earlier this year, according to a new report by The Intercept. The DGB’s mandate to combat online disinformation immediately drew critiques across the political spectrum, with comparisons to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, when it was announced in April. Those criticisms grew when the media surfaced previous statements made by the board’s director, Nina Jankowicz, who was billed as a “disinformation expert” and had advocated for legislation that would criminalize “awful but lawful content.” After her high-profile resignation and the DGB’s dissolution this summer, Jankowicz said the true intent of the DGB was misrepresented in the media, telling NPR that “we weren’t going to be doing anything related to policing speech.” In fact, it would appear now that the DHS was doing just that.
Expanding far beyond elections and immigration, which had been the initial purview of the DGB, the strategic priorities of the DHS evolved to regulate “inaccurate information” spanning “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine,” according to a draft version of a DHS report on the department’s long-term goals. “The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate,” The Intercept noted.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was a willing partner in DHS’s efforts to remove online information and speech it deemed a threat, and provided government officials with a portal that served as a direct line for reporting to the platform any content it considered troubling. Other tech companies—including Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and Verizon—had already established monthly meetings with DHS officials in the lead-up to the 2020 election, relationships that have continued as DHS has expanded its definition of what constitutes false information.
Following then president Trump’s sign-off on a new DHS department called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018, the DHS “evolved [its] mission” away from the counterterrorism it was formed to combat after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, intensifying its focus on domestic surveillance while “routing disinformation concerns” to tech platforms, some of which resisted open collaboration, and perhaps illegal intervention, with a government regulating the free political speech of their users.
“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t,” a former DHS official, Matt Masterson, wrote in a text message to DHS Director Jen Easterly after Masterson left the agency to work at Microsoft. “It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”
Read More: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/
For additional coverage on the new public-private partnerships in the growing business of truth policing: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers
In the Back Pages: Edward Said’s Jews
The Rest
→ A federal judge halted the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, a $2.2 billion deal that would have created a publishing company with control of 49% of all book sales in the United States. According to the judge, the new publishing behemoth’s grip on the industry would “substantially … lessen competition” and make it easier for the conglomerate to offer lower bids on authors’ new book rights. “You might as well say you’re going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house,” Stephen King testified during the trial. Though the merger likely would have had a small impact on household names like King, it could have significantly reduced the quality of offers and marketing services provided to new authors or writers with smaller audiences, prosecutors for the U.S. attorney general argued.
→ Image of the Day:
Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving landed in hot water after he tweeted out a link for a documentary rife with antisemitic tropes. Though Irving deleted the post, he did not apologize, saying he was being “dehumanized” by the controversy because “The ‘Anti-Semitic’ label that is being pushed on me is not justified and does not reflect the reality or truth I live in everyday.” While Nets owner Joe Tsai said he was disappointed in Irving, the lack of consequences prompted a group of a half dozen or so fans to pick up court-level seats at the recent Nets game against the Indiana Pacers and wear “Fight Anti-Semitism” T-shirts, seen above. The image captured might have been the best thing that’s happened so far this season on the Nets court: the team’s dismal 2-5 record out of the gate prompted the dismissal Tuesday of its coach, Steve Nash.
→ A longtime congressional staff member, Barbara Hamlett, was fired from her post in the office of Rep. Don Beyer (D) after the House Sergeant at Arms investigated her for allegedly working on the hill on behalf of the Chinese embassy. Employed as a scheduler in Rep. Beyer’s office, Hamlett had made several attempts to arrange meetings between employees at the Chinese embassy and the offices of other members of Congress, sometimes making repeated requests to discuss pending legislation dealing with China, at Charlie Palmer Steak, a well-known D.C. restaurant. Upon learning of the investigation, Beyer, a longtime China hawk and outspoken critic of China’s human rights abuses, dismissed Hamlett, telling one reporter that he was “deeply upset,” as he had been entirely unaware of Hamlett’s side hustle.
→ Researchers attempting to use crucial biomedical data for studies of cognitive diseases have routinely been denied access by the National Institutes of Health, the federal agency that funds biomedical research, because investigations into connections between genetics, education, and health could lead to “stigmatization” of certain populations if the results were made public. That’s according to Stuart Ritchie, a King’s College London psychologist, who explains in a Substack post how NIH continues to veto researchers’ requests to access its genetic database. “A lot of people wonder why anyone would be interested in the genetics of intelligence if you aren’t some kind of evil eugenicist freak,” writes Ritchie, but access to these databases would allow scientists key information to study conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Ritchie notes the agency could allow for the research to proceed while cautioning scientists about “some ways we’ve found [to] help communicate this type of study to the general public,” but the agency tells scientists “you’re not allowed to do this research, period.”
Read More:
→ The daughter of a 75-year-old Iowa man named Donald Dean Studey says that her father was a prolific serial killer who’d murdered dozens of women before he passed away in 2013. Since Newsweek reported the story in October, law enforcement officials have begun following up on the statements of Lucy Studey, who said she and her siblings were forced by their father to move the bodies with wheelbarrows and toboggans after he lured fix or six women each year, most of whom were sex workers or transients, from the Omaha area to his farm in southwest Iowa. Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Astrope told local reporters that canines thus far discovered a single area with human remains on the farm, but more work was to be done after the single “cadaver dog hit.”
→ Hoping to avoid the fate of the 20,000 workers placed in mandatory quarantine after a COVID-19 outbreak in October at the Foxconn campus, where Apple’s iPhones are produced in central China, another 200,000 workers have escaped the remote campus facilities by climbing over fences and walking dozens of miles to find transportation home. Speaking to Bloomberg, factory workers describe being locked into quarantine dorms, littered with piles of trash, where access to food was intermittent, sometimes reduced to just rations of bread. The mass exodus underscores the economic toll and growing unrest for those enduring China’s draconian zero-Covid policies.
→ Graph of the Day:
Are the kids all right? Who’s to say for sure, though it seems they’re pretty stoned. Driven in part by the increased access to legal and medical cannabis nationwide, the rate of young Americans using cannabis and psychedelics is at an all-time high, with marijuana use up 34% compared to five years ago, peaking in 2021 at 43% for the entire 19- to 30-year-old population, according to a recent report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Researchers note that young people are smoking almost as much as they are drinking heavily, with 2021 marking the highest level ever recorded for participants who said they’d had 10 or more drinks in a row over a two-week period.
→ Piet Mondrian, the well-known abstract Dutch painter, may or may not have objected to the recent discovery that his iconic painting, “New York City I,” has been hung upside down for the better part of seven decades, including a stint on the walls of MoMa. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realized it was very obvious,” said Susanne Meyer-Büser, a curator who was researching Mondrian for a new retrospective of the artist at the North Rhine-Westphalia museum in Düsseldorf. The painting’s complex pattern of red, yellow, and black adhesive tapes could not, however, be shown right side up for the new exhibit because the piece’s tape might unravel. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story,” said Meyer-Büser.
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Edward Said’s Jews
The Palestinian intellectual had Jewish influences at every stage in his life, but the exposure yielded only incurious and unsubtle positions
By Mardean Issac
Places of Mind, Timothy Brennan’s recent biography of Edward Said, is fundamentally a celebration of the Palestinian intellectual’s life and mission. Brennan, a scholar who studied under Said at Columbia University, draws from a sensibility rooted in social and racial justice and an academic career inspired by his teacher. His examination of Said’s personal relations and conduct often seems protective of Said (against others) or his family (against others and Said). While not ruthlessly probing into the most uncomfortable and unpleasant aspects of Said’s personality, however, Brennan is willing to at least acknowledge them.
Brennan notes while describing the “special challenge” of his endeavor that none of the many books that have been written about Said “paints a full picture of his Arab and American selves as they come together, or accounts for the ways that Said’s writings on Palestine, music, public intellectuals, literature and the media intertwine.”
That Jews are missing from that fullness is significant, for the Jewish echoes in Said’s life were numerous and pronounced: He was rooted in the experience of exile, inspired by Jewish intellectualism, and driven by a central obsession with the Jewish state.
Jews were important at every stage of Edward Said’s life. He was delivered in Jerusalem by the midwife Madame Baer. Growing up in Cairo, one of his closest friends was psychoanalyst Andre Green; he took lessons and shared meals with the exacting Polish pianist Ignaz Tiegerman.
Most of Said’s close friends at Princeton were Jews; there he was inspired by the experimental approach of Milton Babbitt and would study under the composer Erich Itor Kahn, who had fled the Nazis. Monroe Engel and Harry Levin, his dissertation supervisors at Harvard, were essential in shaping his academic perspective. At Columbia, many of those who concerned themselves with his burgeoning Palestinian identity were Jews, including David Lehman, who dedicated a series of poems to him, and theologian Alan Mintz.
His work first appeared in publications led by Jewish writers. Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, offered him a refuge for his perspective. Jean Stein named a room in her apartment, filled with Oriental décor, after him.
But Said’s long engagement with Jews and Jewishness largely amounted to a set of crass positions: incuriosity, relativism, blankness, replacement. Brennan charts many of Said’s seemingly innumerable relationships with individual Jews. But he largely echoes Said’s perspective on the Middle East (the book is dedicated “for the Palestinian people”) and the infecund nature of Said’s encounter with Jewishness.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/edward-said-jews
What Happened Today: November 01, 2022
http://kavanna.blogspot.com/2007/03/falling-star-of-edward-said_05.html