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Welcome to the very first edition of what I hope will become a regular weekday post rounding up various bits of news and entertainment I’ve found during my online travels, and various thoughts, anecdotes, trivia, and analysis pertaining thereto. What ground I’ll cover is up for grabs; there’s sure to be some socio-political content every day because that’s where I live, and likely to be plenty of stuff about music, films, etc.
While “news” will play a role, it’s not my intent to be just another copy-paste gimmick that does crappy rewrites of articles from bigger sites and passes it off as original material. Expect anything that catches my attention and inspires 250-500 words of thought, with maybe four to eight stories per day.
With that said, let’s get right in to it!
In today’s issue: Greta Thunberg reminds us that she ran out of f**ks to give about five minutes after she was born and good for her; Neil Young sings about other people; YouTube bans antivaxx misinformation. Read more using the navigation links (pro tip: the header is a drop-down menu), and don’t forget to add me on social media so you don’t miss anything!
Another entry in the “Big Brother?” argument: NPR reports (https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041493544/youtube-vaccine-misinformation-ban) that YouTube has now announced a generalized ban on vaccine disinformation. This extends the existing ban on fake or misleading info about COVID and related vaccines and other management measures. You can read the details of YouTube’s position on the matter in the linked article.
This naturally brings to the surface questions about censorship and information control, and it’s quite reasonable to be concerned when any private company has the ability to exercise that level of content control over public discourse. Sorting out the imperatives of free expression and public safety in a moment like this was never going to be easy, and the flag-waving and sloganeering around the issue from all directions don’t help.
The real, core solution to all of this is of course education, but that takes time we don’t really have. The problems with our failure to sufficiently educate are manifest and must be dealt with on a basis of exigent need, even as we work diligently to construct robust, effective, and meaningful core solutions. How that will play out, I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling free expression is going to take a hit in the end.
Meanwhile, those of us who would like to help educate others (or ourselves) should find this video from UNESCO quite handy.
Thanks for reading, please remember to like, share, comment, and subscribe, and we’ll be back Friday…you know The Drill 😉