On Sunday a student-led democratic movement ousted Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, a key ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, from power. Today Serbian TV started its news program by apologizing to viewers. “For years, we failed to fulfill our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask necessary questions. We owe our viewers an apology.”
Also on Sunday, right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro lost to leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Despite what appears to have been the restriction by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, of social media accounts that promoted Lula and its promotion of pro-Bolsonaro accounts, Lula pulled out a victory.
Tiago Rogero and Tom Phillips of the Guardian reported that Lula’s victory came, in large part, from street protesters who helped different factions come together against Bolsonaro and from Lula’s supporters’ use of social media to override Meta’s restrictions and make pro-Lula content perform well on social media. Lula ally André Janones created a WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army” that organized more than 10 million followers to push back against Bolsonaro content and boost Lula.
Three weeks ago, many observers thought Bolsonaro would win the election. Bolsonaro and his supporters had cultivated the idea they were allied with Trump in fighting off a perceived communist threat. A victory for Bolsonaro would help to spread the idea of Trump’s control over the Western Hemisphere as he helped to install right-wing leaders across Latin America. But in the end, the vote was not close. Lula supporters organized voters, explained what social media was suppressing, helped folks get to the polls, and Lula won by more than 4 million votes.
Initially, Bolsonaro said that he would not accept defeat and would ask for the result of the election to be annulled. In that refusal to accept the results of an election, Bolsonaro echoed his father, right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who in 2023 launched a coup to remain in power after voters elected Lula. The elder Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year sentence for his role in that coup attempt.
As Megan Messerly, Daniel Desrochers, Ari Hawkins, and Phelim Kine of Politico reported, the younger Bolsonaro had the support of MAGA insiders in the U.S., who claimed the Brazilian election had been stolen. On Sunday, Trump himself told reporters that Brazil’s election “looked so, so corrupt, so terrible.”
But on Monday, Trump suggested to reporters he would not intervene in the election, and as Michael Birnbaum, Marina Dias, and Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post reported, minutes later, Bolsonaro effectively conceded. A Bolsonaro advisor told the reporters: “Flávio has given up. He’s terrified. He is worried his father will die in jail, that he himself will be jailed this week and that he may have a long prison term ahead.”
Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro, who is under investigation for corruption, money laundering, and currency evasion, to surrender his passport and stay in the country. Bolsonaro posted a video saying he would comply and that he had never thought of leaving Brazil. But today he went missing. Brazil’s Federal Police canceled his passports and began to look for him.
Bolsonaro and his family turned up this afternoon in the United States, where a senior State Department official told reporters the State Department would offer the family visas to enter the country. Bolsonaro’s allies cheered that he would lead Brazil’s right-wing opposition to Lula from the United States.
Meanwhile, concerns are circulating about a manipulation of information in the U.S. before the midterm election, similar to what happened in Brazil. As Kevin Frey of MS NOW reported today, Democratic representatives Robert Garcia of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are demanding that Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg explain why the main Instagram account of No Kings was suspended earlier this month during the October 17 No Kings rallies around the country that were encouraging Americans to vote. The representatives wrote that the “apparent” act of “corporate censorship of political speech raise[s] serious concerns about Meta’s dedication to ensuring free and fair elections.”
The representatives dismissed Meta’s explanation that the outage was caused by an automated action triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies.” Garcia and Raskin wrote that such an explanation strained “public credulity,” and noted that Meta appeared to have interfered in Brazil’s election.
“Technical glitches occur,” the congressmen wrote, “but at Meta they are happening frequently and, curiously, seem to disproportionately impact the political opponents of President Trump and his authoritarian political alliances.” Garcia and Raskin noted that the interests of Zuckerberg and Meta in government contracts mean they have a financial incentive to cooperate with Trump.
In addition to the suppression of information, disinformation is also a concern. As George Chidi of the Guardian reported today, disinformation, driven by AI, is running rampant on social media in the U.S. in the runup to the midterm election. Social media companies reduced their efforts to stop the flood of disinformation in the wake of Trump’s reelection, Chidi writes, and now official government sources like the Department of Homeland Security sometimes amplify the lies.
Trump and his allies have always relied on a false narrative to gain and then to keep power. They adopted a strategy developed by Russian political theorists to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Political strategists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.” They perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Trump ally Steve Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to distinguish what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.
Trump’s allegiance to Putin continues to be on display. Today journalists reported the administration is considering lifting sanctions on Russia’s multibillion-dollar government investment fund. Anton Troianovski of the New York Times explained that the Biden administration placed sanctions on the fund immediately after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, cutting it off from the West’s financial system. Lifting those sanctions would be an economic boon to Russia in the midst of its war on Ukraine.
Peter Andringa, Chris Campbell, and Eenee Purevdorj of the Financial Times reported today that Donald Trump Jr. took a hunting trip in Mongolia this August with Umar Kremlev, the man who helped to finance Don Jr.’s wedding party in May. Kremlev is a boxing promoter with a criminal record of extortion and battery, and is close to Putin. The journalists called the relationship between Trump and Kremlev “remarkable.”
On the trip, Jr. shot and killed an endangered sheep prized for its large horns. According to the Financial Times, this was at least the third Altai argali he has killed.
Tonight Angie Nixon, the Democratic state representative who is running for the U.S. Senate from Florida wrote in a social media post addressed to Meta that her campaign’s Instagram page “was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from” a “get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community.”
“This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community,” she wrote. “With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.”
She continued: “The stakes are too high to take down pages encouraging people to vote in seven days, Meta & Instagram.”
Teaching Our Kids to be Violent
Teaching Our Kids to Be Violent
I’m in a very busy outside restaurant on the plaza in La Manzanilla, Mexico. To the front and side of me are two long tables filled with 13 adults, children and teens who seem to be members of the same family. When I first entered, the littlest girl in the family was sitting on the lap of her auntie or her mom, mugging for “sorta selfies” taken by her mom/auntie who was using some app to horribly distort the photos. All were laughing uproarously at the monstrous images.
Then the child moved to the end of the table, where someone had removed the long cellophane-plumed toothpicks that had held their sandwiches together. Grabbing two of the toothpicks, she proceeded to jab the pointed end of one of them into the arm of one of the young women at the table.
Waiting for chastisement, I was sorely disappointed, as what I imagine to be an auntie giggled and then grabbed the other toothpick and jabbed her back. Back and forth they went, all of the adults at the table smiling and laughing as though it was the most adorable little performance in the world. In time, the child went down the table, jabbing with more enthusiasm each time, moving to the other table where eventually she jabbed so violently that the adult slapped her. She slapped the adult back and a slapping match ensued. Everyone watched, smiling, giggling. Such an adorable child!
She moved away from the slapping match and sneaked up on a more elderly member of the party, approaching her from behind to take a hard jab with the point of the toothpick into the flesh of the woman’s upper arm. The woman jerked away in surprise, slapping at the arm as though she believed it to be a wasp or bee sting. This brought great peals of laughter from the other table and the child returned to it to take her bows.
At no point in this crazy string of behavior did any adult ever censure the child or display any emotion other than enjoyment and approbation. I, on the other hand, was totally horrified. What they were teaching the child was fairly obvious. They were well-dressed and sophisticated-looking, modernly dressed—like city folk come to the beach who didn’t actually want to get sand between their toes. The voices of the seeming other half of their party at the nearby table were louder than theirs—very loud, in fact, to the point that even some Mexican customers accustomed to the general noise of Mexico were glancing over in surprise. But the table where the child sat seemed more refined–in the level of their voices if not in their surprising acceptance of the increasing violence of the formerly angelic-looking little girl.
Was she the heir to a vast cartel empire? Was this part of her education in ruthlessness? Was their glee at her monstrous appearance on the smart phone just a hint of the monster child they would raise to carry on the family business? As most scenarios begun in restaurants and other public places, this is a story whose ending I will never know. I leave it to your imagination to come up with an ending for yourself.
But I could not help seeing it as a small metaphor for the violence in films and games and sports entertainment that our kids are submerged in every day. It seems as though movies and TV are resorting to ever more violent and extreme cruelties to keep our interest. War and murder are not enough. Sadistic twists and torture are called upon to keep the audiences and thereby swell the coffers of production companies and advertisers.
Years ago when violence first reared its ugly head on TV, we were told that it was a fantasy that would have no effect on children, but if we look at the world around us, I think this is an assertion that has been proven to be false. As some in our society grow ever more affluent, we grow increasing more dependent on entertainment to distract us from the reality around us, and part of that reality seems, sadly, to be that we are teaching our kids to be more violent.
No Energy
No Energy
When he made his overture on electronic media,
it read as though he’d copied it from an encyclopedia.
Each sentence was incongruous with the one before,
his transitions nonexistent and his details all a bore.
He was indubitably boring, so she gave the guy a miss.
Judging by his message, imagining his kiss.
The prompts today are overture, electric, incongruous and indubitable.
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/rdp-friday-overture/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/12/14/fowc-with-fandango-electric/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/incongruous/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/your-daily-word-prompt-indubitable-December-14-2018/
Quote of the Day, Day 3: “Serenity Prayer for Parents”
No Longer in the Present
jdbphotoNo Longer in the Present
Seated around the table in our favorite cafe,
attention to each other has come to be passé
We are not present here and now. We’re all in other places
as we stare at tiny screens, intent on other faces.
The friends we have around us will simply have to wait
for our interest in the world-at-large to finally abate.
The news that’s happening elsewhere is simply more amusing
than what might be happening in this space our body’s using.
Other friends are funnier in their “selfie” poses—
pooching out their lips at us and scrunching up their noses.
It won’t do to look natural, we have to look unique
in the selfsame pose that all selfie-flashers seek.
So if your friends are boring, not half so chic as you,
you always have the option to make a Tweet or two.
Check out the latest fashions available from China.
They’ll only take three months to reach you here in Carolina.
Check out the weather in Tibet and give YouTube a glance.
Companions won’t distract you if you don’t give them a chance.
Living one life at a time no longer has to do
so long as you remember to have your phone with you!
So if you’ve dropped a French fry and spilled ketchup down your dress,
you needn’t be embarrassed. It couldn’t matter less.
Intent on Twitter, Instagram, Facetiming and Facebooking,
the friends with you won’t notice, for nobody is looking.
The prompt word is present.
Facing up to Facebook
Aha, it has arrived—my seventieth birthday. Pictured is part of the detritus of a party that will not happen. A few days ago, I called off the 70’s Fondue Extravaganza Slumber Party and Games Night that I had planned. At that time, I was so sick with some mysterious intestinal and stomach disorder and I didn’t have the energy to do the last minute preparations—plus I feared I’d still be ill and have to call it off at the last minute. In addition, Yolanda was with her husband in the hospital and I didn’t have her to fall back on as usual. At any rate, I’m feeling better today and so I’m meeting a few friends for an impromptu comida at a restaurant and chocolate fondue at Blue’s house later, so there will be some celebrating done. This morning brings the welcome messages from friends on Facebook and I really do appreciate them, but as usual, they, combined with the daily prompt, have brought me to reflection.
I hope no one is offended by the below poem. It is meant in no way to disparage the very welcome communication with old friends that such a day brings. On the other hand, I can’t help but reflect on how our world changes and changes and how the cyber networks have not only brought us closer together but made it easier to drift farther apart. I am as guilty if not guiltier of this than anyone else I know. This is not an indictment, but rather a pondering over where we’ve been, where we are and where we are going—the sort of pondering one does at the age of 70, and if one is a writer or artist, probably at a much earlier age as well:
Facing up to Facebook
Facebook quips and tweets with hashes
have replaced the dot dot dashes
of telegrams we used to send
to functions we could not attend:
birthdays and other days once meant
to celebrate with an event.
But now we sit in different places
pretending we’re exchanging faces
when in fact, for many years
our facial contact’s been in arrears.
They might have better renamed “Facebook”
“Those Who Have Vanished Without a Tracebook.”
It does not bring us face-to-face.
That is simply not the case.
Rather, it keeps us more alone
than even talking on the phone.
Old friend, it’s good to hear from you.
I know, there’s nothing more to do.
I’m just as guilty of it as you.
It’s what the whole world’s come to do.
We’ve simply moved too far apart
except in memory and heart.
It’s the new age’s way of seeing—
avoiding closer you and meing.
The prompt today was dash.
Music Man
For the most part, the men I have met over the seven years I’ve participated in social introduction sites have fizzled out–either through lack of interest, lack of memory or just plain lack of fuel to keep a long distance relationship going. There is just one who has lasted as our relationship has evolved from friendship to seduction to love affair to a best friend relationship where we are crazy about each other from a distance––willing to do anything for each other that can be done from 1500 miles away––including advising each other over other romantic relationships as we share heartbreaks, frustrations and all the problems of daily life.
In this strange cyber world we are all slipping into by varying degrees, he has become one of the most important people in my life, even though it has been two years since we’ve met in person. He is my blog administrator, copy editor and computer tech. He reminds me to pay my helpers, lock my doors at night and turn the lights out. When I lost my camera, he found it from 1500 miles away in Missouri by checking the message boards in my hometown in Mexico! Once, when I was at the beach, when a friend came by and handed me something as I lay on a hammock on my front porch, he Skyped me asking me what she had handed me—having seen it on the beach cam of my next door neighbor which just happened to pick up the corner of the porch I rent every year! (I know. Sounds creepy, but it wasn’t.)
Since he hardly ever leaves his house or his computer screen, unless he is asleep he is usually available within a few minutes via Skype. He checks my computers from afar, patrolling for viruses or needed updates. He is there when I receive good news and bad. Because I live up on a mountain above a small town in Mexico and because all of the houses around me are homes used as vacation homes and usually empty, he monitors my after-midnight swims in the pool or my journeys down to the studio, waiting online to check that I am safely back in bed within a reasonable amount of time–one hour or two, depending on how ensconced I become in my late night/early morning adventures. But with all of the roles he has assumed in my life over the years we’ve know each other, one of his most important roles right from the first is as my “Music Man”!
For the first four months I knew him, he played his guitar and sang me to sleep every night over Skype, the camera of my laptop trained on my face so he could see when I slept and say goodnight and go back into his own world where few strayed. Those serenades continued off and on for the next year, but since then, he has been my music man in other ways: sending favorite songs I request as well as songs I’ve never heard before that I open like Christmas packages.
On the CD’s he has made for me or the iTunes he’s sent are my own favorites: Emmylou, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits, Stacey Earle, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Dan Bern, Chris Smither, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Lila Downs, and Janice Joplin. Joining them are his favorites, some of whom I’d never heard of before: Brett Dennen, Joe Purdy, Steve Earle, and Nanci Griffith. He has created a new world for me comprised of Towns Van Zandt, Eva Cassidy, Jolie Holland, the Wailin’ Jennys and Iris DeMent along with songs discovered via movie soundtracks or the background music of favorite TV shows. The Avett Brothers we discovered together––I no longer remember which one of us first stumbled across them on a YouTube video of the Letterman show.
Music was our courtship: Since he is too much a rebel to participate in the regular celebrations of society, songs became my valentines, my birthday gifts and Christmas stockings. Where others gave flowers, he gave songs. “I and Love and You” was declared to me by the Avett Brothers. When Amy Lavere sang to me, “Lucky boy, lucky boy, ’cause I’m your lovely girl,” I got the message that I was the lovely girl and he the lucky boy, even though in the past he had advised me not to interpret all the songs as messages.
I now have over 471 songs on my computer—most of them sent by him. They are the songs I listen to every time I have guests, when I am in my car or in my studio. They keep me company at night in the pool or my studio. The first thing the man who comes to my house to give me a weekly massage does when he enters the room is to click on my iPod in its speaker/holder. He says this is his favorite place to come—partly because of the calm and the art, but more so because of the music.
My music man. I’ll see him in person in September and it will be wonderful to give him a hug and a kiss, to travel up to Minnesota together to see my sister and nieces and to Alabama to see other friends; but this man who has been by turns my serenader, my computer tech, my editor, my confidant, my lover and my best friend has, in addition to everything else, given me one invaluable gift. He has created the soundtrack to my life.
In typical fashion, Music Man has answered this post you have just read in musical form. To hear/see it, go HERE.
Lunch Date (Old-Fashioned Attention): JNW’s Prompt Generator
Lunch Date
One thing I’d like that I will mention
is a bit of old-fashioned attention.
The kind with no device in hand
is the kind that I can stand
better than the sort with texting
minds caught in “before” and “next”ing
and not a thought for whom you’re with
until I’m sure that it’s a myth
that I’m the one you want to see,
even though you have invited me.
For though our table is for two,
you bring so many more with you–
every relative and friend.
Your texts to them just never end.
Our tete a tete‘s become absurd.
I never get to speak a word!
So there’s one thing I’d like to state.
Please cancel our next luncheon date.
The next time you desire a munch,
just take your iPhone out to lunch!
My prompt was “Old-fashioned Attention.” To get a prompt or see more JNW Prompt-Generated posts, go HERE.
Needless to say, there will be no sequel to this lunch date, but to see posts about sequels to movies, go here: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/missing-seqeuls/
Social Stew: NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 17, WordPress “Powerful Suggestion”
Social Stew
I’ll admit that I read Facebook and post on it as well.
When I can’t “ping” on WordPress, it’s my idea of Hell.
I care what followers think of me and follow every friend,
though facts about their lives and loves never seem to end!
It’s great to know that Cousin Pam soon will be a granny,
but must I know a mere acquaintance lifted up her fanny?
Ann Garcia hates my riddle. See how she berates me?
On OK Cupid, no one writes and no one ever dates me.
I’m not brief enough for Twitter and Instragram escapes me.
I’d post myself on YouTube, but no one ever tapes me!
I don’t know what they are and so I am forever gagged
on Pinterest and Flickr as well as Vine and Tagged.
MeetUp and also VK are eschewed at my behest.
My link to Linked In’s broken and I’ve overlooked the rest.
One day I’ll be less social. Say, “I’ve been there and done that.”
I’ll close my blog and Facebook, unpin pictures of my cat.
My life will become private. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.
If you should choose to see me, I’ll be right here in my house.
My blog I won’t read constantly to see what viewers say.
I will not count my “likes” or compare viewers day-to-day.
I will not be obsessive. No more followers will I seek.
Still, now and then I might have cause to go online and peek.
For though I am compulsive and my posts have become endless,
the only thing that might be worse would be to end up friendless!
The WordPress Daily Prompt: What’s the one piece of advice someone gave you five years ago that you wish you’d followed? Well, perhaps it was not to get too caught up in social media. As you can see above, I’m undecided about whether I should have followed it or not. (Wink, wink.) The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a Social Media poem, so as you can see, again, the two fit right together. Somewhere, Carl Jung is smiling and nodding his head. https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/powerful-suggestion/
