Category Archives: Life

How One Insurrectionist Got There

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#CapitolSiegeReligion is a Twitter hashtag that refers to the intersection between the attack on the Capitol and religious beliefs. Peter Manseau is a curator of religious history at the Smithsonian and has been writing about it. Yesterday, he shared the story behind one of the insurrectionist’s actions. Facebook had a major role:

One month later, there’s still a part of #CapitolSiegeReligion I think needs more attention. Some religious media & evangelical leaders no doubt share a measure of the blame. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that the attack was the result of thousands of individual choices… To understand those choices I’ve been reading FBI charges, looking for mention of religious motives. That’s how I found Mike Sparks [of Elizabethtown, Kentucky], accused of being the first to enter the Capitol through a broken window. After the attack he declared Trump would remain president “in Jesus name”.

The day charges against him were announced, I had a look at Sparks’ Facebook page, which has now gone dark. What I saw there was fascinating: a record of one man’s transformation into an unlikely insurgent. A single chronicle of radicalization that may shed light on others.

Sparks was of course taken in by all the election lies. But what we need to understand is that his transformation started long before that. Last summer he posted a long video testimonial wrestling with a new anger he feared was rising in him & clearly naming its source: Facebook.

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“I consider myself a devout Christian,” he said, but he knew he hadn’t been sharing “godly things” on Facebook. “I’ve even said I’d shoot that person in the head, I’d shoot this person in the head… I’m not showing the love of Christ.” Friends began to worry; many unfriended him.

As he saw it, the problem for him began with Black Lives Matter. Images of protests across the country had pushed him over the edge. Framed by conservative media on Facebook, those images convinced him the time for spiritual war was at hand. “It’s good versus evil now,” he said.

It wasn’t just the images, it was that they felt inescapable. The same platform his family used to share photos was now driving him mad. “Facebook is where they’re feeding this anger and hatred,” he said. “They’ll find out what you are for or against & they’re gonna feed anger.”

Social media in Sparks’ description is a tormentor: an active, personified force that may do some good, but mostly means you harm. Facebook became for him the site of a clash with himself, relentlessly giving him dire warnings of threats posed to his family and his country.

“I’ve noticed that my phone has been in my hand more than my Bible,” Sparks confessed. “I’ve been locked in on my Facebook watching all this stuff play out and I get angrier and angrier.” He apologized & promised to do better, wondering if he should quit social media altogether.

“I’m not going to let my anger overtake me anymore,” he said. “I’m going to get in the word of God like I should be doing anyway, and get back to the me that smiles more. Because I got wrapped up. I got wrapped up in Facebook.”

In the end, he did not quit Facebook. His posts about BLM soon gave way to posts about the election and his refusal to accept the results. When Trump himself posted “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!”, Sparks shared it to his page, adding “I’ll be there.”

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According to the FBI, not only was Sparks there, he took part in one of the day’s most notorious incidents: when rioters chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman.

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At Sparks’ arrest, he wore a t-shirt citing Ephesians 6:11: “Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” It’s worth asking how much being “wrapped up in Facebook” led him see the Capitol attack in those terms.

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Elizabethtown man charged in connection with Capitol riot arrested. Michael Sparks is in federal custody at the Oldham County Detention.

Understanding January 6 on an individual level is not easy. Yet it’s an important part of making sense of the problem we face: Trump is gone, but how many angry men are still staring at their phones, wondering when the battle raging inside them will break out into the world?

It’s Time To Fix English Again

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The House impeachment managers have submitted an 80-page “trial memorandum” explaining why the former president should be convicted in the Senate and disqualified from ever occupying a federal office again. It describes the ex-president’s lies regarding who won the election and his encouragement of the mob that attacked the Capitol. It also explains why it makes perfect sense from a legal, historical and practical perspective for the Senate to convict impeached officials even though they have left office.

In response, the creep’s lawyers have submitted a 14-page response that’s too stupid to discuss (although it will give most Republican senators an excuse to vote against conviction). 

Anyway, here’s a specific issue I want to discuss. It’s a grammatical problem with the U.S. Constitution. This is the troublesome passage:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. . . . Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States . . . 

Since you can’t remove somebody from office after they’ve left office, there seems to be a problem here. The former president’s lawyers (who are unlikely to ever receive a dime from their client) put it this way:

Since the 45th President is no longer “President,” the clause ‘shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for…’ is impossible for the Senate to accomplish, and thus the current proceeding before the Senate is void ab initio [“from the beginning”] as a legal nullity that runs patently contrary to the plain language of the Constitution.

So, although other officials have been convicted by the Senate after they’ve left office, and barring someone from holding office again used to be the main reason for impeaching somebody, as opposed to removing them from office, and almost all experts on the Constitution say it’s totally fine to convict somebody after they’ve left office, and presidents could commit all kinds of High Crimes and Misdemeanors near the end of their term if you couldn’t convict them after they left the White House, the “plain language” of the Constitution does include that three-letter word “and”.

If only James Madison, George Washington and their colleagues had used the phrase “and/or” instead of “and”! Judgment against an official would extend to removal “and/or” disqualification. There wouldn’t be any room for confusion. The Constitution’s meaning would have been perfectly clear.

Unfortunately, nobody at the Constitutional Convention was familiar with the phrase. The first known use of “and/or” occurred in 1853, sixty-four years after the Constitution was written. 

Alternatively, the framers could have used “or” instead of “and”, giving us “removal or disqualification”. But then some lawyer would have claimed that an official can’t be removed from office and disqualified at the same time. They’d argue that the Senate would have to choose between the two options, either one or the other (understanding “or” in this case as the “exclusive or”, meaning one or the other, not both). 

In the near future, we’ll learn how all this plays out in the Senate. Nobody seems to think 17 Republican senators will agree to convict the demagogue, and without 50 Democrats and 17 Republicans voting “Yes”, he will escape judgment again.

Going forward, however, I have a suggestion. We English speakers need to adopt a single term for what’s called the “inclusive or”, i.e. the meaning of “or” that implies “this or that or both this and that”. It’s rather amazing that it took hundreds of years for somebody to invent “and/or” to do the job. But since it’s not a word — unlike hyphens, a slash isn’t ordinarily used to combine other words — we need a new word to take on this function. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I suggest “andor” without a slash. “Andor” sounds the same as “and/or” and after a while it wouldn’t look weird.

This isn’t the first time I’ve argued for a change like this. Four and a half years ago, I pointed out that we should change the way we use quotation marks. I won’t go into the details again (you can review my argument at length here), but instead of writing sentences like these:

He said “Go away.”

I can spell “cat.” 

We should write them like this:

He said “Go away”.

“I can spell “cat”.

The quotation mark should go in front of the period, not after!

So far, my quotation mark suggestion hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm. Maybe I was simply ahead of my time. At any rate, please do consider adopting my suggestion from today andor my suggestion from 2016. (See how incredibly easy that is?)

A Few Pertinent Items

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From: The Economy Does Much Better Under Democrats. Why? – The New York Times

“A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”

“It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as ‘startlingly large’.”

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” . . . if the causes are not fully clear, the pattern is. The American economy has performed much better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, over both the last few decades and the last century.” 

From: AOC isn’t going to forget about the insurrection and move on – The Washington Post

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she was told that trauma victims should ‘tell their stories’ as a part of their healing. And that is what she did Monday night . . . The New York congresswoman initiated a live stream on Instagram and . . . recounted what had happened to her during the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.’

“She talked about flattening herself behind her bathroom door as someone entered her office, screaming, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ It turned out to be a police officer, but until she learned that, ‘I thought I was going to die’.”

“She talked about eventually escaping to the office of Rep. Katie Porter (Calif.), where the two Democratic congresswomen rifled through staffers’ gym bags, searching for sneakers they could change into in case they needed to jump out a window or run. . . .” 

“Ocasio-Cortez, her voice wavering, revealed during the live stream that she was a survivor of sexual assault, something she said many people did not know, because there were only so many times she’d wanted to tell that story. But she was mentioning it now, she said, because of its relevance to the attack at the Capitol.”

“Almost immediately after Jan. 6, she said, people began implying . . . that reconciliation depended on ‘moving on’. Those words, she said, were the tactics of ‘an abuser’.”

“She compared it to a sexual harasser telling his victim that the quickest path to normalcy would be her forgiving him. Or to parents telling the child they once abused that the mistreatment had happened in the past. . . .”

“There needs to be accountability, she said, because forgiveness does not happen when a perpetrator wants to move on. It happens when a victim is ready. . . .”

From: It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Party Now – The New York Times

“Some decent Republicans imagine they’re in a battle for their party’s soul. Representative Adam Kinzinger, who . . . voted to impeach Txxxx, recently started a PAC devoted to fighting the forces that led . . . the Capitol rampage. “The time has come to choose what kind of party we will be,” he said in an introductory video. The thing is, Republicans already have chosen.

Just look at the party’s state affiliates. On Jan. 4, the Arizona G.O.P. retweeted a “Stop the Steal” activist who’d pronounced himself willing to “give my life” to overturn the election. Said the party’s official account: “He is. Are you?” An Arizona lawmaker has since introduced a bill that would let the Legislature, controlled by Republicans, override the presidential vote of the state’s increasingly Democratic citizenry. The Oregon Republican Party approved a resolution suggesting that the Capitol siege was a “false flag” attack. The Texas Republican Party has adopted the QAnon slogan “We are the storm” as its motto, though it insists there’s no connection. . . . 

[QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene] is not the outlier in this party. Kinzinger is.

“American conservatism — particularly its evangelical strain — has fostered derangement in its ranks for decades, insisting that no source of information outside its own self-reinforcing ideological bubble is trustworthy.”

“If you’re steeped in creationism and believe that elites are lying to you about the origins of life on earth, it’s not a stretch to believe they’re lying to you about a life-threatening virus. If what you know of history is the revisionist version of the Christian right, in which God deeded America to the faithful, then pluralism will feel like the theft of your birthright. If you believe that the last Democratic president was illegitimate, as Trump and other birthers claimed, then it’s not hard to believe that dark forces would foist another unconstitutional leader on the country.”

“There was a moment, after the Capitol riot, when it seemed as if a critical mass of the Republican Party was recoiling at what it had created. But the moment passed, because it would have required the party’s putative leaders to defy too many of their followers.”

From: More than two-thirds of Americans side with Biden on COVID relief — and most support the rest of his agenda – Yahoo News/YouGov Poll

“When asked about the 20 policies that define President Biden’s agenda, more Americans support than oppose all 20 of them, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.”

“The margins are decisive. The majority of Biden’s proposals garner at least twice as much support as opposition. Nearly half are favored by more than 60 percent of Americans.”

Keep This in Mind When You Hear the Right Claim They’re Censored on Social Media

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It’s bullshit. From The Washington Post:

A new report calls conservative claims of social media censorship “a form of disinformation”.

[The] report concludes that social networks aren’t systematically biased against conservatives, directly contradicting Republican claims that social media companies are censoring them. 

Recent moves by Twitter and Facebook to suspend [the former president’s] accounts in the wake of the violence at the Capitol are inflaming conservatives’ attacks on Silicon Valley. But New York University researchers today released a report stating claims of anti-conservative bias are “a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.” 

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of [the ex-president’s] accounts were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service — and if anything, the companies took a hands-off approach for a long time given [his] position.

The report also noted several data sets underscore the prominent place conservative influencers enjoy on social media. For instance, CrowdTangle data shows that right-leaning pages dominate the list of sources providing the most engaged-with posts containing links on Facebook. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino, for instance, far out-performed most major news organizations in the run-up to the 2020 election. 

The report also cites an October 2020 study in which Politico found “right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets, and other GOP supporters” dominated the online discussion of Black Lives Matter and election fraud, two of the biggest issues in 2020. Working with the nonpartisan think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue, researchers found users shared the most viral right-wing social media content about Black Lives Matter more than ten times as often as the most popular liberal posts on the topic. People also shared right-leaning claims on election fraud about twice as often as they shared liberals’ or traditional media outlets’ posts discussing the issue.

But even so, baseless claims of anti-conservative bias are driving Republicans’ approach to regulating tech. Republican lawmakers have concentrated their hearing exchanges with tech executives on the issue, and it’s been driving their legislative proposals. . . .

The New York University researchers called on Washington regulators to focus on what they called “the very real problems of social media.”

“Only by moving forward from these false claims can we begin to pursue that agenda in earnest,” Paul Barrett, the report’s primary author and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights said in a statement. 

The researchers want the Biden administration to work with Congress to overhaul the tech industry. 

Their recommendations focus particularly on changing Section 230, a decades-old law shielding tech companies from lawsuits for the photos, videos and posts people share on their websites. . . . 

The researchers warn against completely repealing the law. Instead, they argue companies should only receive Section 230 immunity if they agree to accept more responsibilities in policing content such as disinformation and hate speech. The companies could be obligated to ensure their recommendation engines don’t favor sensationalist content or unreliable material just to drive better user engagement. 

“Social media companies that reject these responsibilities would forfeit Section 230’s protection and open themselves to costly litigation.” the report proposed.

The researchers also called for the creation of a new Digital Regulatory Agency, which would serve as an independent body and be tasked with enforcing a revised Section 230. 
The report also suggested Biden could empower a “special commission” to work with the industry on improving content moderation, which would be able to move much more quickly than legal battles over antitrust issues. It also called for the president to expand the task force announced by Biden on online harassment to focus on a broad range of harmful content. 

They also called for greater transparency in Silicon Valley. 

The researchers said the platforms typically don’t provide much justification for sanctioning an account or post, and when people are in the dark they assume the worst. 

“The platforms should give an easily understood explanation every time they sanction a post or account, as well as a readily available means to appeal enforcement actions,” the report said. “Greater transparency—such as that which Twitter and Facebook offered when they took action against [a certain terrible person] in January— would help to defuse claims of political bias, while clarifying the boundaries of acceptable user conduct.”

So Where’s the Vaccine?

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Perhaps you’ve been wondering where the vaccine is and how much is on the way. We’d know more if the previous administration hadn’t displayed an extraordinary combination of malevolence and incompetence. The good news is that we’ll know more soon. From The Guardian: 

The Biden administration has spent its first week in office attempting to manually track down 20m vaccine doses in the pipeline between federal distribution and administration at clinic sites, when a dose finally reaches a patient’s arm.

The Trump administration’s strategy pushed the response to the coronavirus pandemic to individual states and omitted pipeline tracking information between distribution and when the shot is actually administered, Biden administration officials told Politico.

The lack of data has now forced federal health department officials to spend hours on the phone tracking down vaccine shipments, the news website reported.

“Nobody had a complete picture,” Dr Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice-president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told Politico. “The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”

As of Saturday, 49 million doses of vaccine have been distributed by the federal government, but only 27 million administered by states, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

About two million of those doses are believed to be accounted for by a 72-hour lag in reported administration, Politico reported. That still leaves millions in the pipeline between delivery and patient. At least 16 states have used less than half the vaccine doses distributed to them, USA Today reported this week.

“Much of our work over the next week is going to make sure that we can tighten up the timelines to understand where in the pipeline the vaccine actually is and when exactly it is administered,” Dr Rochelle Walensky, [the new] director of the CDC, told USA Today.

. . . The CDC’s first report on early vaccine rollout is expected in February.