Stupid Is As Stupid Does

The great 20th-century philosopher,
Forrest Gump

Curmie comes by his sobriquet honestly, and there are times he just needs to vent against the raging stupidity of humanity in general. So here are a few items prompting Curmie to scream into the void. In no particular order… 

#1. This ad for Bounty. The premise is that the couple has just won the lottery, but in the excitement hubby knocks over his drink (soda? juice?), and it threatens to soil (de-legitimize?) the winning ticket. So it’s important that they have a really good paper towel, you see? 

Erm… no. It doesn’t matter how good your paper towel is if the spill will have done its damage before you can grab a sheet from the roll under the sink (or wherever). You want to protect that lottery ticket? Pick the damned thing up before the liquid can get there! Then you can mop up the spill. Anyone who does otherwise is apparently stupid enough to use the product in question. 

#2. Facebook. Gentle Reader, if you know Curmie personally, you know that he’s the president of a national organization.  In that capacity (and as an admin of the Facebook page), he announced that the deadline for applications for a rather hefty scholarship had been extended for a couple of weeks, and he posted a link to the page on the organization’s website from which the application can be downloaded. 

The next morning, Facebook’s algorithm proved itself even stupider than humans (well, not stupider than the particular humans who programmed it) by proclaiming the post “spam” and threatening dire consequences should Curmie similarly misbehave in the future. Of course, virtually everyone Curmie knows has been thrown into FB jail for alleged but usually imaginary offenses against their Divinely Inspired (i.e., Total Bullshit) “community standards.” 

Like a lot of other folks, Curmie has a history with Facebook, as you can see here and here, for example. My favorite Facebook story, though, had nothing to do with me: it’s the saga of the sexy onions from a year and half ago. Sigh. 

#3. FEMA Follies. FEMA has been an enduring punchline if not always a national embarrassment since Heckuva Job Brownie didn’t do a heckuva job. But most of their failures have been simple incompetence. This one is different: it’s fraud (not theirs, necessarily), and it damned well better be treated as such. After a September storm caused extensive damage in western Alaska, FEMA stepped in to help out. So far, so good, right? 

Alas, no, Gentle Reader. When residents sought out documents in such native languages as Yup’ik or Inupiaq, they encountered some… ahem… “translations” that were, shall we say, less than useful. When Monty Python riffs on horrible translations, it’s at least moderately funny (even if it isn’t one of Curmie’s favorite bits). When it happens in real life, it’s less amusing, and unless you think there’s a legitimate reason to say “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny” in an official government document, we’ve got a problem here. 

Whoever put together the faux translations seems to have used languages that aren’t indigenous to the area, trotted out a decades-old Russian text, and otherwise just fucked around, obviously thinking this whole business was a colossal joke. Those weren’t the exact words of Gary Holton, a University of Hawaii at Manoa linguistics professor and a former director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. What he did say was “They clearly just grabbed the words from the document and then just put them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup’ik but made no sense”; he called the final product a “word salad.” 

FEMA fired Accent on Languages, the company that “translated” the documents. Of course, anything less than a lawsuit and a prosecution for fraud is insufficient. Meanwhile, of course, Jeremy Zidek, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, claims that the mistranslations did not create delays or problems. It is unclear whether Zidek can see Russia from his house. What is undeniable is that if he were Pinocchio, he couldn’t see the end of his nose without a telescope. 

#4. Well, it’s Missouri. What do you expect? Apologies to anyone offended by Curmie’s allowing his inner Kansan to sneak out for a second, there. But seriously, are there no actual problems in the Show-Me State that merit the attention of the legislature? Apparently not, because the male GOP majority has decided that policing their female colleagues’ accoutrement is of paramount importance. (Note: to be fair, this absurdity was introduced by a Republican woman). 

It’s those arms, you see. They’re almost as distracting to the pseud-prude crowd as (gasp!) high school girls’ shoulders. Exactly what problem is allegedly being solved here is not entirely clear. What is, is that state reps Raychel Proudie and Ashley Aune err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole in declaring this measure “ridiculous.” 

#5. California Capers, Exhibit A. Curmie hasn’t voted for a politician in years; it’s always been lesser-of-two-evils time (or, perhaps more accurately, the evil of two lessers). In other words, the Loony Left is as scary as the Jewish Space Lasers crowd on the right. There are two discrete issues here: what is a sensible, ethical, and pragmatic choice on the one hand, and what is politically efficacious on the other. Needless to say, if an action is so problematic in terms of the former criterion that it offends the sensibilities of any rational person, then there is a price to be paid in terms of the latter. 

There are, in short, a lot of people like Curmie—not in political philosophy, perhaps, but in voting for the candidates of Political Party X simply because they’re not quite as nauseating as those of Political Party Y. Nothing makes the right happier, therefore, than someone on the left not merely doing something the average person would regard as transcendently stupid (because it is), but bragging about it. And if the idiots in question are from California, the right-wing ideologues are in something very much akin to ecstasy. 

Naturally, the Bay Area Woke Folk are happy to oblige. A San Francisco panel has recommended the following for each of its black residents who meet any two of eight criteria in light of “decades of harm they have experienced”: a one-time payment of $5 million (yes, apiece!), plus wiping out all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households. Yes, really. The cost would be equal to approximately the city’s total budget for three and a half years… oh, did I mention they’re already running in the red? 

If you’re looking for how actual racists can get elected, look no further, because this proposal, presented with straight faces, apparently, makes anyone even remotely associated with the left look like an utter idiot. Frankly, Curmie resents it. 

Have at least some black SF residents experienced prejudice during their lifetimes? No doubt. To the tune of $5,000,000 apiece? It is remotely possible that a few have, but Curmie would need to see some proof. In fact, because of affirmative action set-asides and similar programs, one could make a case that the average black San Franciscan has already been compensated more than they deserve. 

It’s also telling that other groups who have certainly been the victims of prejudice—there are no doubt some life-long American citizens now living in the city who were interned during WWII simply because of their Japanese descent, for example—go unrecompensed in this proposal. 

There are no words that can adequately express the level of disdain Curmie holds for anyone supporting this ludicrous and almost certainly unconstitutional recommendation. 

#6: California Capers, Exhibit B. If there is one more step past “California” to really float the boat of the right, it’s adding in… “university.” After all, that’s where all those commie pinko weirdos are indoctrinating our precious babies with such seditious ideas as “other people have different experiences and therefore different perspectives.” 

Right on cue, the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California has decided not merely to fulfill the right wing’s stereotype of academics, particularly of those in the social sciences, but to surpass in idiocy even that tortured misrepresentation. Wanna guess what word they’ve decided to drop from their active vocabulary? Go on, guess… If you said “field,” Gentle Reader, you’ve either already ready about this story, or you’re wasting your time reading this blog: you should be crafting B-movie plots with diabolical villains named Professor Psychoto and Dr. Deviance. 

Yes, because, you see, “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” The acceptable word is now “practicum,” by the way, a reasonable enough synonym for the meaning of “field” most appropriate to the study of social work… but having little in common with the definition associated with the work undertaken by slaves. 

Look, if you want to argue that people ought to be circumspect about how to employ words with multiple meanings, one of which is offensive, Curmie gets it.  But it takes a contortion of mythic proportions to get to anything actually problematic about “field.” 

Ultimately, Curmie feels compelled to warn you, Gentle Reader, to watch where you step when you walk through that practicum, as there is an incredible amount of bullshit out there.

Sexy Onions and Freedom of Expression

Is this story even worthy of mention?  Not in isolation, probably, although Curmie did post it to the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page.  But taken in context… maybe.

Veteran readers of this blog, and especially of the Facebook page, will know that links to this blog were blocked on Facebook for nearly a year, sometimes with the message that the page violated their rules about spamming (needless to say, Curmie doesn’t engage in spamming), sometimes with just a blithe and unhelpful message about violation of their precious “community standards.”

Curmie wrote about his frustration with the situation in a post last July.  What’s really troubling is that there is no way to appeal an idiotic edict generated by whatever ill-conceived algorithm has taken the place of sense in the world of BigTech.  And now, just as mysteriously, Curmie can post links to this blog again.  Don’t ask why.  Curmie doesn’t know, and if Facebook does, they won’t say.

All of this, of course, both feeds into and complicates the narrative.  That Facebook and Twitter are, to repeat the title of Curmie’s previous rant, censorious asshats, is tautological.  But are they the partisan authoritarians some of Curmie’s right-leaning friends suggest, or are they just fucking stupid?  They’re certainly the latter, as demonstrated below. 

The former?  Well, links to this blog were shut down, and whereas Curmie may not be a traditional liberal, it would be difficult to describe him as a right-winger.  And over a dozen of Curmie’s friends have been put in Facebook jail for posting leftie content.  Did they deserve it?  A couple of them, perhaps.  But Curmie can’t imagine some of them posting anything that would be deemed problematic by anyone with an operative brain.

Moreover, a lot of the problem seems to stem from unreasonable demands placed on social media corporations: they seem to be held liable for anything they allow to remain on their sites, but also get into trouble for restricting access.  This dilemma doesn’t make them blameless, of course.  For one thing, they can’t seem to maintain a consistent set of rules.  When Curmie wrote the post linked above, politicians running for office could lie in Facebook posts all they wanted, but the rest of us got dinged if some idiot fact-checker decided that a literally true statement didn’t provide enough context.

Then they got rid of that idea and started limiting all political content.  Then they brought it back.  Now, lest their site be used to disseminate falsehoods (e.g., about COVID) they’ve taken to asking users “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?”  This neat little merger of Orwell, Kafka, and the Stasi is intended, they tell us, to prevent the spread of extremism.  On this Independence Day, do we really need a reminder that John Hancock was an extremist?  Or that he was only one of the multitude of great figures in world history to whom that term could be applied?

It’s also reasonable to flag a particular post with a warning that there is factually incorrect information there.  But such designations should not lead to taking the post down unless it is libelous or incites violence.  Calling the President names doesn’t qualify.  Saying the last election was “stolen” doesn’t, either, despite the dearth of evidence to support such a claim.  Nor do wildly exaggerated claims that no rational person would believe… or jokes that aren’t supposed to be taken seriously.

Are the BigTech companies imposing political homogeneity?  Maybe.  Are their motives pure, even if their actions are flawed?  Maybe.  Are the people running the process card-carrying morons?  Yes.  Of course, being dumber than the proverbial sack of hair does not necessarily preclude also being partisan.  As one of Curmie’s students is fond of saying, ¿Por qué no los dos?

But on to the actual subject of this post, a subject about which Curmie believes we can all agree.  It isn’t a new story, but it only recently appeared on Curmie’s horizon, and it encapsulates what is wrong with all the multitudinous attempts to squelch freedom of expression by the very people who purport to be cultivating it.

Last fall, the Gaze Seed Company in St. John’s, Newfoundland sought to buy an ad on Facebook, promoting their Walla Walla onions.  Curiously enough, the company included a photograph of what the grown onions would look like.  The photo was deemed “overtly sexualized” by, presumably, a remarkably prudish algorithm.  You can see the evidence here.

Gentle Reader, if you find anything remotely suggestive in what you see here, Curmie would suggest the only career path available to you is high school administration, where you can get over-stimulated by the sight of teenaged girls’ shoulders or collarbones.

The situation was ultimately resolved, and the ad ran.  But that’s because Facebook represents the quintessence of capitalist amorality.  If you or I, Gentle Reader, post a meme the maladroit algorithm doesn’t like, it’s gone, and your account is imperiled.  But if you’re paying them for an ad, well, yeah, of course they’ll have a real human take a look.  They’re still morons.

The desire to control false or otherwise disruptive content is understandable up to a point, but we’re well past the point of idiocy.  BigTech’s censorious asshattery would be problematic enough if the decisions were made by someone smarter than moose scat.  Curmie doesn’t see that happening in the foreseeable future.

Facebook and Other Censorious Asshats

Curmie is indebted to Ken White at Popehat for the term “censorious asshat” that serves as part of the title of this piece.

Here’s the deal. When Curmie awoke this morning he checked in with Facebook, as usual. One of Curmie’s posts on the Facebook page had been deemed “false” by “an independent fact-checker,” specifically by that paradigm of journalistic mediocrity, USA Today. The offending meme, riffing on the anti-maskers, shows a soldier carrying a donkey across a field. The cutline reads:

This picture is from World War II, a soldier carrying a donkey. It is not that the soldier loves donkeys or has some sort of perversion. What’s happening is that the field is mined and that if the donkey was allowed to wonder [sic.] as it pleased, it would likely detonate a charge and kill everyone. The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don’t understand the danger and do as they please.

Ah, but the geniuses who have no understanding of humor decided to point out that the photo wasn’t really from World War II. [I know, the horror!] OK, first off, Curmie doubts that anyone looking at that meme, especially anyone seeing it on Curmie’s page (I attract a pretty intelligent clientele, if I do say so myself), unquestioningly believed that the details provided in the meme were literal fact. They existed not to be regarded as truth, but to set up a joke. No one cares that it was really the French in Algeria, or even that the field wasn’t actually mined. Seriously, if we were talking about a gag that starts “A priest walks into a bar,” these morons would feel compelled to point out that there’s no solid evidence of such an event, that all we know is that the man was dressed as a priest, that it’s true that he entered but we don’t know if he walked, and really, it was more of a pub than a bar. Curmie also awaits Facebook’s revelation that Abraham Lincoln didn’t really say not to believe everything you see on the Internet.

Curmie would be pleased to send them all a box of laxative and get on with his day, except that having the post labelled as “false” means that Curmie’s posts, already seldom seen by more than 10% of the people who like his page, will show up on the feeds of even fewer folks who don’t actively seek out his posts. Oh, by the way, the photo you see here: taken from someone else’s Facebook page; there’s no disclaimer on that page. Ah, equity…

This is, by the way, the third time Curmie’s posts have been questioned. In one of the other cases, Curmie did post something from a clearly partisan source that seemed at the time to be a little devoid of context. It was not intentionally misleading (on my part, at least), and indeed the “ruling” from the Grand Poobahs of fact-checking was only “partly false.” Still, it was a moment of intellectual laziness, and Curmie was rightly dinged for it.

The other time, Curmie posted something that looked interesting but a little suspicious: and he said so, specifically requesting his readers who knew more about the subject would help separate fact from fiction. Ah, but he posted something that turned out to be incompletely contextualized (fact-checkers care about context when it suits them to do so; otherwise, they’re the quintessence of literality). The fact that Curmie labelled it as questionable is irrelevant to the bot that enforces the “rulings” of PolitiFact (or whoever). [Note: Curmie has had his issues with PolitiFact in particular for some time. See here, here, and here, for example.]

Of course, there’s one category of posters who aren’t subject to Facebook’s faux interest in the truth: politicians and their minions. It’s right there on FB’s self-righteous ”Business Help Center” page:

Posts and ads from politicians are generally not subjected to fact-checking. In evaluating when this applies we ask our fact-checking partners to look at politicians at every level. This means candidates running for office, current office holders - and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees - along with political parties and their leaders.

Why, you ask? Well, free speech, of course! A candidate for office is even allowed to post outright lies: “If a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third party fact checking program — even if the substance of that claim has been debunked elsewhere.” Riiiiiiiiiiight. Trump or Biden or their respective parties can repeat nonsense that was proven to be false months ago—and a). it’s actual mendacity rather than a misinterpretation or an unintentional omission of context, and b). the falseness of the statement is actually relevant—but the likes of Curmie will be censured because a joke meme misidentifies a soldier in a way that doesn’t change a thing.

Still, not to worry. Surely only three such instances (even if two of them shouldn’t count at all) over a period of several months shouldn’t make much difference, right? Well, this is Facebook, so who knows.

But the day’s saga doesn’t end there, Gentle Reader. It’s Thursday, and Curmie has taken to posting reminders on Wednesday or Thursday to remind Curmiphiles to vote for the Political Asshole of the Week. So I went to the Facebook page to re-post last Saturday’s link. Gone. Indeed, Sunday’s post had disappeared, as well. In fact, I can’t post anything from this blog, either to the Curmudgeon Central page or on my own personal page. Of course, I received literally no notification that (or when) the posts had been removed. When I went to post directly from the blog to either of my Facebook personae’s pages, I got a pop-up that said it was a violation of Facebook’s community standards. That’s it. Nothing more specific than that, and not just the inability to post a particular article, but to post literally anything from manjushri924.blogspot.com. I honestly have no idea what’s going on. Curmie has never advocated violence or criminality, and whereas there’s some adult language now and then, the blog itself is behind a warning that “This post may contain sensitive content.” You’ve got to say you’re OK with that to see the posts themselves.

Were I of a cynical disposition, of course (perish the thought!), I’d suspect that some pol who got nominated as Political Asshole of the Week decided to throw his weight around. Oh, by the way, the fun folks at Opinion Stage shut down the poll because it’s been seen too many times? Yeah, right. The days when Blogspot had their own polling apparatus are missed. Or perhaps it’s time to migrate to another platform? We shall see…

Anyway, readership here will likely go down, as Facebook has been the principal means by which most readers find their way here. But Curmie writes mostly for himself, anyway, to keep his writing skills sharp and to clarify his own thinking on matters of the day. And who knows? Maybe someday Curmie will be told what exactly is so offensive about this blog, so he can either fix it or tell Zuckerberg to perform an action best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites. In the meantime, Curmie will try to revive his dormant Twitter account to announce his blog posts, to continue to post to his Facebook page but list this page as manjushri924 dot blogspot dot com in doing so, and to urge you to follow this page directly. Oh, and to try to figure out how to do the Political Asshole of the Week poll without having to pay for it.

Facebook Follies

As I write this, I am partially banned from Facebook. Sort of. I tried to access the site this afternoon, and got a message that I needed to log in again. Then, I couldn’t. I got a message that my computer is infected with malware. OK, so if it really is, I’ve got no problem with a little security. Buuuuuuut… (You knew this was coming, didn’t you, Gentle Reader?)

OK, there are two problems here. Problem #1: My computer is not infected with malware. Or so says my Norton Anti-Virus package, after a full-system scan totaling about 1.2 million individual items. What got turned up was a few dozen tracking cookies: another day online, in other words. Malware? Not a bit. Perhaps the problem is related in some way to my inability to post links to this blog on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, a problem I’ve been experiencing for a couple of days. Perhaps not. Anyway, given the choice between believing what Norton tells me (good or bad) and what Facebook tells me (good or bad) about whether I have a problem with my computer, guess how many times out a 100 I’m going to believe the latter. Hint: it’s an integer, and it’s less than 1.

Problem #2: After running the aforementioned scan, I tried to sign back into my Facebook account. Having dutifully checked the box swearing I had indeed checked and my computer was malware-free, I could then check into my account… with the proviso that I can’t post anything (status updates, comments, messages) for 24 hours. This means both as myself and as the admin of the Curmudgeon Central site (and of a couple of others about which most of you rightly couldn’t care less). Of course, I had to test this proposition… on line it says “for a few days.” So, we’ll see.

In any case, we’re back at two problems. Problem #1: if your super-whingy-dingy program doesn’t detect any malware now, then what is accomplished by keeping me from posting? (If it does show malware, then f*cking fix it!) Problem #2: if my computer has a problem, then shut off the IP address, not my account in general. Actually, it turns out that this is what really happened, an eventuality I discovered by taking the rather reasonable precaution of not believing anything Facebook tells me. Which brings us to Problem #2A: shouldn’t FB provide accurate information to its clientele?

All of this would pre-suppose, however, that Facebook actually cares about getting things right. They never did before, why should they now that Google+ has turned out to be so little competition? More to the point, getting it right would require a higher degree of technical sophistication than arrogance: a hierarchy of priorities with which they have little if any experience. Needless to say, Facebook provides no means of contacting whatever moron made the erroneous call or programmed the software or whatever. They’re invincible, you see. No one can survive without them, so they can do whatever they damned please. Just like MySpace. Or LiveJournal. Or VHS tapes.

So here’s the deal. Not being able to post from my laptop is not an enormous deal: I can use my phone or the desktop in the next room. And really, no one particularly cares whether I had a good Christmas, nor will they experience severe distress at missing out on some wry comment I might otherwise have made. My friends will even bear up under the strain of not seeing photographs of my cats being adorable. It’s a bigger pain in the ass that I still can’t seem to post links to this page on the CC FB page. Still haven’t figured out how or why that happened. But the annoyance, however mild, does serve to remind us all of how much Facebook has taken over many of our lives.

I get a good share of my news via Facebook posts: between my personal account and the CC page, I “like,” meaning in effect that I subscribe to newsfeeds from, literally dozens sites dealing with news and/or news analysis and commentary: The Guardian, a couple of Huffington Post pages, AlterNet, Media Matters for America, Talking Points Memo, Rachel Maddow, and a lot more. Plus, I also get news feeds from a host of other Facebook pages much like my own (although most have more subscribers than I do): Being Liberal, The Athena Tree, Proud to Be a Filthy Liberal Scum, Carlinist, Don’t Invite Anyone Who Thinks Ayn Rand Makes Sense to Your Next Party… you get the idea.

These sources provide me with not only the raw materials for most of my own blog-writing, but also with a sizeable percentage of the information that shapes my world view. Not all, of course: I still access the websites of MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc., with some regularity. Hell, I even look at the Fox News site on occasion, though more often than not I end up in disbelief that anyone would regard them as more credible than the National Enquirer. But I’m lazy. When news comes to me, it’s easier. Presumably most readers of this blog also “like” the CC Facebook page, meaning you’re even further down the food chain than I am: if you read the stuff I link to, it’s because you haven’t already seen it elsewhere.

So what we need to do—or at least be prepared to do—is to go to Plan B in a not-so-hypothetical scenario in which Facebook screws up. This might be an appropriate time to suggest that if you are a regular reader of this blog, you might glance to the right side of your screen and fill in your e-mail address where it says to do so. You won’t get an immediate notification when new material goes up, but you’ll at least get an e-mail once a day if there’s a new piece.

More importantly, we need to begin to prioritize differently. That’s been true for a long time, of course. But we need to go to news sites proactively, to talk to our friends live and in person when possible, to be a little more self-reliant and a little more truly social rather than to fritter away time on a “social network.” You and I will both readily survive my reduced Facebook presence for a day or two. Take the few minutes you might have been reading my stuff to track down an article on your own, to pet your dog, to kiss your sig-o, to play with your kids.

Thanks, Facebook. I’m most appreciative of you when you’re not working properly. As luck would have it, that’s not infrequently.