The Bots Have Taken Over!

I am going to do something that I normally would not.  I am going to recommend that you go to Donald Trump's facebook page.  Or go to his Twitter feed.  Pick a post, any post.  Then I want you to look at the comments down beneath that post.
I read a lot of articles about politics and lately a lot of articles about the presidential candidates.  There is something that is common to both their sites and more specifically the comments underneath.  Take a look and see if you notice it.
I will go ahead and tell you. The bots have taken over.  Most of them are pro-Trump and if you look at the names and locations there are some very interesting trends.
First, there is the "Only Hillary..." bot.  This is a person who has cut an pasted some speech that someone somewhere wrote outlining a bunch of things that "only Hillary" has done.  So long is this litany of things that few spend the time to research all or any of the things that only Hillary has done.  There is then a mix of people who try in response or who agree with it.  It is just long enough to convey some idea of intelligent research and just short enough to be a sound bite.
Second there is the person who states their agency and attempts to establish that they belong to a group that is known to be anti-Trump and that they have come to their senses and now support Trump for some reason.  I am gay and I support Trump because... I am black and I support Trump because...I am a veteran and I support Trump because...
Third there is just the hater.  The hater just uses a bunch of words...bad and stuff. insults...bad.  The hater has a plethora of Hillary rhymes (Killery, Hitlery, etc.)
Fourth, there is my favorite the hater, denier.  This is a person who is relatively new and bases their replies on the current polls.  If Hillary is up in the polls, then the polls are fake and the game is rigged.  If she is down in the polls it is just a show of how the polls are rigged but the massive number of Trump supporters are overwhelming!
The most interesting thing that we see now is that they are alone.  Really.  When you look and I mean really look, it has become a lot like those old AOL chat rooms where all the real people eventually leave and you just have bots talking to bots. 
The common thread, especially when it comes to CNN is something like the hater comments.  The first thing they say is that no one reads this particular page, article, etc. not recognizing the irony of posting on an article or site that thousands of people are reading.
This leads to a lot of other questions.  The biggest being, what impact is this having?  How many people in middle America are on Twitter and Facebook?  How many believe what they see versus what they read, or what they see, or what they are told?
As of this writing, Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls and by all accounts rising, but I am surprised at the number of people saying that she is not. What do you believe?

We can be found on Twitter at @writlargepodcst

This ad is why Black People Support Hillary and here is a hint, it is not the ad itself...

This ad is powerful and not for what it says, but for the fallout and the comments.  The most powerful result of this ad is what people are saying about it. See a lot of the reaction is from white people and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
When I first saw this ad on Facebook, I thought it was very compelling and it made me think.  Then, I looked at the comments underneath.   The range is spectacular.  The vast majority of them were what blacks see on a regular basis. 
First, there are those who change the subject to attempt to mitigate its power. There are comments about her emails, Benghazi, the usual.
Second, there are those who inform blacks that Hillary is only using them.
Third, there are those who try to light things up by saying things like "these people need to go back where they came from..."  and they stop just shy of saying anything related to color.
The first two camps have a singular goal, no matter how benign it seems on the surface.  The goal of one and two are to remove agency from the black population.  It boils down to people saying to black people that they do not know what it means to be black.  It is a rhetoric that tells blacks their experience is invalid and "Don't let Hillary Clinton tell you that you can think for yourself, let us tell you that she is trying to control you so that you will vote for Trump."
The third camp is a group that ties themselves in knots trying to say this is all about race while not using terms like African American and black or "nigger".  This is the same group that uses terms like monkey to describe our current president and have spent the past 8 years saying that he was a Muslim born in Kenya.
The interesting thing is the fourth group.  I read through all of those comments and I found a voice that was missing was ...wait for it... the voice of many black people.  This ad is going to circulate.  It is going to gain ground but it is not going to circulate in the places frequented by people in those first three groups. 
It is like when Trump went to those huge rallies and spoke to predominantly white crowds to talk about what he had to offer black people.  Or the way he brings out Omarosa et al to talk to us about how sensitive he is to the plight of the black man!
So, people can attack the ad and swamp the comments section, but the problem is and always will be that you are not talking to the people you think you are talking to. You are preaching to the choir.  I read the comments because I have an interest in this, but for the most part, it is a bunch of people talking to themselves.

Kim What's-her-name is a hero!

Kim Kardashian is a hero.  We all know that she was robbed and that Kanye West had to abruptly leave a concert to rush to her side.  It was amazing and much like the rest of their lives, like something out of a b movie.
When I say she is a hero, I mean that she is a hero to the world for going through that ordeal and showing us who we are.  See, the majority of the fallout came in the form ridicule and derision from the internet because 9 or 10 million dollars worth of stuff was stolen.

The new face of social justice

I watched as people piled on with comment after comment with little care for a human being who had a gun pointed at her.  Everyone who knows me knows that I read articles for the facts and the comments below for a feel about how the nation or the world deals with things and this time the interwebs did not let me down.
The Kardashians overall put us in a strange place in our zeitgeist.  Women should be free to show off their bodies, except the Kardashians.  Women can sleep with whomever they want, except the Kardashians. They are the American royalty that we love to hate.
I subscribe to elite sites like Huffington Post, CNN, and NPR.  Imagine my surprise when I saw oh so much Kardashian related news showing up in my feed.  Truth be told I know very little about  either them Kanye except what could be gleaned from cultural osmosis.  I could not pick any one of them out of a police line up but if I saw one walking down the street, I would know them by the throngs of people following them to take pictures, talk to them, and then say they hate them.
She is a hero, not for surviving the incident.  She is a hero for bringing to the surface, once again, what is wrong with the world.  We do so often lose our humanity in small ways, but this one is different.
The Kardashians exist, in all ways, in their own little world.  We love them because it is ok to hate them and that is fascinating.
Trolls are going to come out.  It is inevitable. When Patton Oswald lost his wife earlier this year, so many people offered condolences and the vast majority of people in the cyber world were horrified and saddened.  Still there was a contingent who just had to be heard and they did not care how they were heard, just that they were heard. Whatever the discussion, there was always one or two people who would take the opportunity to say the most horrible, disgusting, and insensitive things to Patton Oswald.
This is not that.   What we have here is a group feed.  People seemed to take one of three positions.  First and most abundant, there were the people who were just so angry that this was even in their feed.  They hated that major news organizations were even reporting on it.  The Kardashians had fallen so far down their well of care that they were irritated by their push into their world.
Then there were the people who were sensitive to the whole thing and were defending and praying or Kim and her family.  Many took it a step further and went on to admonish those who were picking on her .
By far, the majority read this story and said, "Fuck her. She's rich.  She shouldn't have been showing off"  They all came out of the woodwork and were made bolder by the fact that huge crowds were piling on and the frenzy ensued.  Nearly an entire nation indifferent or angry at the threatening of a woman's life. 
Rosa Parks...MLK... JFK... Kim Kardashian? 
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How Mika Brzezinski Helped Me Understand Racism.

I like politics and though I am not a huge fan of Morning Joe, I like listening to their daily podcast and their banter.  Some days it is pretty entertaining.  Some days, they teach you a little something.  A few days ago, Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe filled in some of the blanks about Keith Scott, the man shot and killed by police in Charlotte two weeks ago sparking riots there that went on for days.
Mika reported that according to court papers filed a year ago by his wife, Mrs. Scott applied for a restraining order against him alleging that he had a gun and that he was threatening to kill his family with it.  Scott's lawyer stated that whether or not Keith Scott had a gun should have no bearing on whether or not the shooting was justified.
Mika said that she doesn't think you can discount that...
One of her co-hosts stepped up and said that it had nothing to do with the police shooting though.
This is where it gets a little strange, to me at least.  Mika goes on to bring up the fact that his wife was saying, on the video she was shooting, "Keith don't do it."  Which is true.  But she is also telling the police not to shoot and that [in her assertion] "He's unarmed!"  Mika leaves this part out.
The co host says, "that is a big jump from..."
and he is interrupted by Mika and Joe Scarborough almost instantaneously, each essentially saying that Scott's background is relevant to the shooting.
Joe ups the ante by asking "What if the black cop's wife had written that about him?"   Scarborough claims that if the cop had a history of violence that would have come out then he would have been skewered and the Left or Liberals would have rejoiced.
Mika says that it would have "sealed the deal for them [the cops]."

Let's take a moment, shall we?
I think the first thing that has to be said is that there is respect for cops by and large, though it may not seem like it.  The reason it does not seem like it is that people are angry right now.  I am often annoyed by the police, but I have no ill will towards the vast majority of them. (This is the disclaimer that every person who says something negative about any police officer anywhere must give lest they be labeled a cop hater.)

Now that that's out of the way, let's look at the thing that pissed me off about the exchange.  There are some things that we have to get straight right off the bat.  The first being the over arching assertion that cops and criminals are on equal footing.  They are not.  A criminal is  criminal and not necessarily held to any code of ethics whereas the officer is a duly appointed law enforcement officer to whom we as a community issue a badge, gun, taser, etc.

The co-host (Willie Geist? [I am unsure because I listen to the podcast, I do not watch the show and it is hard to tell voices]) was absolutely right.  Keith Scott's background is irrelevant for one major reason, the cops were not there to get him.  They were there to serve a warrant on someone else apparently.  One officer claims to have seen Scott in his car with a gun and a joint and then he and his partner went to get their vests and arrest him.  There are things that do not match up from there but at this point it would be conjecture on my part.

The point is that they have no way of knowing anything about his past.  His wife obviously had forgiven him or whatever occurred because she was right there begging, pleading, and at times ordering the police not to shoot him and saying that he has a TBI (traumatic brain injury).  His past is not the issue.  The debate is about whether in that moment, for that instance, was he a danger to himself and to others.  If someone says yes, I will beg to differ, but what Mika and Joe and many others are not getting about this situation and many others is what is at the core of why there are riots etc.

Blacks obviously do not have the privilege that whites do in this instance and instances like this.  Yes, he was shot by a black cop and yes it can still be construed as racism because more often than not white people do not face the same scrutiny that blacks do by any race of cop.  The issue is not who is doing the perceiving, the issue is that the perception exists and the narrative becomes "hey, there is a black guy who has not done anything, let's pull him over. stop him, run his license, frisk him, whatever."  Let's get him or her in custody, and we'll figure out what they did after the fact.  In fact, a number of the encounters, the encounters themselves bring charges to the individual.  It is odd to think of the number of men and women who are tackled to the ground screaming and thinking, "what did I do?"

During the exchange on Morning Joe, they said that there were things that they just did not know yet and that the investigation was ongoing and that it was good to have as much information as possible.  The problem is that she did not even know the things that we already know.  There was no cursory study of the incident or keeping up with the story as it unfolded.  She DID know that Scott's wife had once filed charges against him.  She knew all the parts of the video where the wife was saying "Don't do it." but did not know the rest.

This whole thing has put things in perspective.  Blacks have done something.  We just have to figure out what it is.

We are going to be writing a lot more about a lot of issues.  We are going to get a lot deeper and try to clarify some issues and get more voices out there.  Slowly but surely...
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The Ghosts of Black Men Passed...

We should start from a space of relative honesty about what is going on. It is less than 48 hours after the death of Philando Castile and less than 72 hours after the death of Alton Sterling. We have heard from a lot of people on the issue of shooting young black men.  Have we noticed that the one group that we have not heard from about this issue?  Young black men.

 When this type  of thing was rare (or at least not as often caught on tape, but I will get into that in a moment) the wavelengths were a lot wider.  It would take a solid three or four days to come up with video of the incident.  A week to argue and debate, then several months for the trials of the police and blah blah blah.  It took us years to get through Rodney King.  The issue is not new, the cameras are.

Let's take a look at what happened with Alton Sterling.  Yes it was caught on tape by a bystander.  Oddly, both officers' body cameras fell off during the altercation.  Strange that.  Worse was that it was caught on film by the store's security cameras and we had to wait to see what that produced.  We needed more angles, of course.  Do we remember a time when something like that would not even be shown?
Less than 24 hours later, Phliando Castile's shooting was broadcast to thousands of people in near real time on Facebook.  If you happened to be a friend of his and on Facebook at that time, you could have seen the death of a human being...yay technology.

I am writing today because I wanted to talk about the voice of the black man and how that plays into the media today.  I am not a big believer in the vast media conspiracy on the left or the right.  I think that it is all a big popularity contest.

After the deaths of these two men, we began to say that the violence is not new, the cameras are.  When Rodney King got the shit beaten out of him on camera, many made the comment that it was really just another night for black man in LA it just so happened that someone had the forethought and an empty tape to start recording.

Right now I have a digital camera, two phones, each with cameras, and there is a camera on my laptop pointing at me as I write.  I think I am ready to go if anything happens.  Is this a good thing?  I like that we can document these things, but the only thing is that it gives more to argue about.

Remember the "wavelength" I talked about earlier?  Less than 72 hours away from witnessing the police murder a man on the street, we are in the dark part of that wave as it begins to tail off.  We have done what we can to tear down Alton Sterling...he was a convicted sex offender (the cops did not and COULD NOT have known that when they shot him NOR SHOULD IT HAVE BEEN AN ISSUE!).  Philando Castile worked at a school. He had a gun, but was licensed to have one and by all accounts told the officer that.  As well, he was shot for "reaching" even though the officer asked him for his license.

How do I know that we are at the tail end of the wavelength?  Because we are now talking about who is talking about what happened.  People are posting their regrets and we are talking about what they are wearing and where they are when they offer their thoughts and condolences.  The reverence with which we treat the passing of people has been whittled down to hashtags and frowny faces on fb posts.
Hillary Clinton's email hearings were yesterday and there were those who were, really, saying that she had something to do with these killings so that those hearings would be lost in the news cycle.
The major frustration for me are the voices who will be lost in the shuffle.  Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are going to say something.  Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are going to say something.  People are going to say that they should keep their mouths shut never once acknowledging that maybe we should not shoot these young men.

The point is a sad one, no one cared about these men aside from their families three days ago.  We do not talk about Trayvon Martin anymore and Zimmerman is a kind of hero, celebrated in some circles.  Eric Garner still can't breathe but his dying words are all over t-shirts.  We only care about these men in death.  They only have a voice for a short time and goodness knows that it is not while they are alive.
When I lived in SC, we were at the tail end of three day snow storm.  The power was out at my house and it was warming up during the day, so I went to the local Starbucks to charge my phone and laptop and check my email.  As the sun went down, I headed home. I was walking and stopped by three squad cars less than 100 feet from my house.  The cops blocked traffic, turned on their lights, and held me there in the middle of the street.  They told me that I was asking people for money.  I was not afraid of being shot that night.  I was unarmed. They seemed surprised that I had no warrants.  They also seemed surprised that I lived in a good neighborhood.  The next day, I went to city hall to complain.  They would not even listen to me.  I went to the police station to complain.  Even though they had enough officers to block traffic on a snowy, icy night, they apparently did not have the staff to talk to anyone about what those officers were doing.  Too bad I did not have a camera that night.

See, all the things that led to each of those men being shot are still going on right now.  Somewhere, there is a young man who has not done anything shaking in his shoes because a cop has him up against a wall and he doesn't know what to do. The problem is that no one will listen to him unless the cop shoots and someone has the wherewithal to record it and THAT person has enough friends on Facebook and Twitter to make it go viral, then and only then will that man/ boy have a voice and even then, only until they find out what he has done wrong.

WTF did I just see? #altonsterling

Yeah, I watched it.  Yeah, I was appalled.  The question is, what does it mean?
We have gone through the standard arc, but are we seeing the problem now?
See, every time this happens, we get faster and faster.
When Trayvon Martin was shot and killed, it took days to find out that he had been on his way to get high.
When Michael Brown was shot and killed, it took maybe a day to find out that he had just come back from taking some cigars from a bodega around the corner
When Eric Garner was choked to death, they said he was resisting and that he was illegally selling cigarettes.
John Crawford III, he was pointing a gun (bb gun) at people...kids!
Tamir Rice?  Same.
They were all asking for it.
Maybe...Just maybe we could look at these cases for what they are.  They are murders.  Alton Sterling was not a law abiding citizen (years ago).  From all reports, he was a sex offender who had a few other convictions under his belt.  The thing that we  like to gloss over is that was not what he was doing when the police came upon him.
He was selling CD's.  Someone told the police that he had pulled a gun on them.  We do not know who that person is.  The owner of the store he was in front of, said that he saw no fight and no gun.  Prior to the cops arriving, he was laughing and joking with the owner a mere moments before.
They pulled up and within moments, was dead, shot at point blank range ...in the back.
The whole thing was recorded.  Police have earned such a reputation that as soon as they show up, someone starts filming with one of the many cameras at their disposal.
Someone, somewhere is watching.
As good as it is that it is all being filmed, there is also the notion that it hit the web immediately.  We went straight past the "authorities" and wen straight to youtube.
Within moments, it was viral.
Within moments people started digging.
Within hours everyone knew everything they would ever know about Alton Sterling.
Within hours everyone knew everything they would ever want to know.
Is this justice?  Who knows.  It is 2016.  In this case and many like it, the case is simple.

The comparison cases are going to come out.  People will dig up cases from years ago where something similar had happened to a white person.
The zeitgeist will say that something should be done and that cops are corrupt.
The zeitgeist will say that people need to let the cops do their work.

What is going to happen next?
What more is there to know?

It is going to happen again and we are going to get better at it.  A black man is going to get gunned down and someone is going to get it on film and we will immediately begin to pick it apart and so on and so on and so on.

We will just keep adding to the list.
Yeah I watched it, but WTF did I just see?

We are living n interesting times.  If you do not think that we are, then you are not paying attention.

This is what is wrong with the world....

Why do we have so many problems in the world?    This morning, I engaged in a Facebook battle with
someone over the meme at the right.  The main reason being that I think that the picture and your reaction to it, says a lot about who you are as a person.
The problem with the world is that we often have an inability to empathize.  We can't think about what it is like to be in another persons shoes.  Now, though, it seems that we don't even want to.  The person with whom I was debating on Facebook was adamant that this meme was funny.  I contend it is not.

A child was pulled into the water by an alligator near a Disney resort a couple days ago.  What is funny about that?

When I first saw the meme, several things became clear on the screen and in my head.  I am going to go ahead and say that if you laughed at that meme, you are a horrible person.  I try to not be judgemental, but I think that I am on pretty safe ground when I say that laughing at the death of a toddler is a bad thing. No matter how much one wishes to justify it, it is purely bad.

The conversation did not go on long on Facebook, but long enough and enough platitudes were proffered to make me wonder about what is wrong with the world.  I do not think that we, as a society have any kind of baseline for behavior, for ethics, for right and wrong.  In a world where there is no right and wrong, there are no solutions.  Without right and wrong or even an establishing a baseline for reality, there are no solutions to anything.

Look at any major discussion that we have been forced as a nation to reckon with in the past few days.

 In the case of gun control, we cannot even decide whether or not there should BE gun control because the Constitution, if you conveniently remove the first clause in the sentence, says we can all have guns.

Should transgender people be able to use whatever restroom they like?  There is no gender!

Should a nation founded on religious tolerance close its borders to Muslims for fear we have a repeat of what happened in Orlando a few days ago?

Trump is the greatest. Trump is the worst.

It goes on and on and on and the range of those issues is based on years of argument and in many cases scholarly debate by great thinkers.  When we look at the Hegelian Dialectic, we are to suppose that a thesis is confronted by its antithesis and the two, through debate and logic, reach a synthesis.  This, I was promised by my college professor would lead onward toward a homogeneous perfection.  That is not happening though.  We are more divided than ever.

We are more divided than ever and that is in large part because we cannot empathize and there is no line.  Someone read the article, watched on the news, or wherever and saw that this tragedy had occurred.  This was likely one of the happiest days of this child's short life and it ended.  The last thing this child likely saw as he was dragged under the water were his parents and loved ones frantically rushing into the water, chasing him.  Volunteers, helicopters, rescue workers went to work trying to find him with every hope that he would found alive.  Meanwhile, someone else was setting to work to make a meme.

We should be able to say that there is nothing funny about this.  We can make jokes about whatever, but we should be able to, without a doubt, say that there is NOTHING funny about this.  We should be allowed to have a dark sense of humor about all sorts of things, even hypothetical dead babies. This is not some story about the color of a dress or the solution to some math problem.  There are rarely absolute rights and absolute wrongs. This should be our line in the sand.  If you laughed at the meme above, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Rest in Peace, Lane Graves