03.23.18. Facebook, De-Friended

This week on Middle Theory, we examine the ongoing controversial use of Facebook by Cambridge Analytica, and the repercussions that the social media giant is facing because of it.

Before trying to figure out who fact checks the fact checkers though, we discuss a number of topics, some opinion-based, and some news analysis. We begin with a short discussion on drinking culture and bad cocktails masquerading as diet-friendly beverages in order to dupe consumers into drinking the equivalent of a can of coke when there’s a perfectly good vodka soda option available. It’s a topic the hosts feel passionately about.

Moving on from snorting tequila up one’s nose and drinking McCocktails, we spend time going over CNN’s decline from news to opining, and listen into Chris Cuomo’s interview with Ted Cruz about gun control and what’s in a name. We also have a flashback to an old Alex Jones interview with Geraldo Rivera on FOX News, in the aftermath of the Beltway Sniper.

Going into more current news, we talk about the HR 1865 “FOSTA” development which recently passed in the House, which will hold personal advertising websites liable for the criminal activity of their users. The goal of this is to reduce and hopefully eliminate an easy sex trafficking platform. In response, Craigslist has removed its Personals section, followed by Reddit doing the same. Looking at the other side of the argument in the corner of legitimate employees within the sex industry, we examine how the removal of the safety of the internet can jeopardize the safety and well-being of sex workers across America.

Turning to the big news at hand, the MID focuses on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Now disgraced Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix believes that his research firm positively influenced the election for the Trump campaign, while others believe that this is an, ahem, trumped up claim.

Cambridge Analytica isn’t the real story though – the real story is parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), a London-based propaganda firm that contracts out to governments around the world, and holding close ties with the Conservative Party and British Royal Family. Multiple members of SCL’s board hold direct lines to the Queen herself, which begs the question: Did another country besides Russia have a vested interest in the American election?

The show is wrapped up with a look at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s claim about conservative feminist and accused fascist Christina Hoff Sommers, which prompted Portland University students to rally against her speaking appearance arranged by the Federalist Society, a conservative, not fascist, think tank. When will it end?

Special thanks to those who supported Middle Theory this week:

  • Jenny Vongvith 
  • Ali Buchan
  • John Jolly 
  • Stacy Bearden
  • RUNE 
  • Jennifer Malatesta

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7 Replies to “03.23.18. Facebook, De-Friended”

  1. that was such an interesting point about putting people away if only people enforced law, and lets not even examine if the laws are even remotely enforceable with more than lip service in the first place… Who’s going to do all this stuff politicians run there mouth about them? I mean am I wrong in saying if border patrol, immigration, cia, fbi, Facebook, Chris Nolan’s Batman, and police can’t enforce laws already in place, one politician who isn’t going out in the streets isn’t going to make one!!!!!!!!#@%$^%

    University being involved in criminal activities hmmm? if a mere wall street is too big to fail then surely the “UNIVERSITY” must be pretention with infallible supposition… “The Corporate Affiliates Of Saint Pablo Augoustosio University in Cambrage Collins Forth Well” verses “Bob”.

    Do you think aliens wonder why we call nothing a thingamadoodlebobber while giving our selves reduced titles like D.J., Tom, Dan, Bill…Mcnonymous now that’s a good strong American name something you’d see spray painted over a garbage can…(that is just a joke and I only left it cause I laughed so hard cause I really was trying to go the other way with that…and I actually love graffiti)

  2. I love how the objective universe happens exactly like prophecy… With billions of dollars, professors from the best astute brain toilets, and millions of ignorant hands, building it up together claiming it’s fate doing it…

    People need to be told who they are this is what life is for. Our culture doesn’t understand this at all. Yet the culture’rs clearly do.

    They know the reason “you” can’t see “yourself” is there is no “you”, “you” is a transition, an ever becoming in the moment, as “you” go along. You can not see “yourself” but can learn about yourself through other people and objects through experiences. Our c-ulture V-ultures, do as predators do and keep the flock running wild until they flicker out in some exploitable implosion…It’s really funny how people call them wolves and yet don’t expect them to attack like one…Wolves don’t just rush in and kill healthy things like lions they run them down with fear…and once their mind burnt, snapped, out of cognizant fuel…bam…

    The culture Industry understands you need confirmation of “you” and that, that “is” what “life” is about and they take out the middle man, “subjective experience”, and put in a straw man image ego visage in words on a flat piece of media as a mask called the American Identity(Iden “tity”)an identity that no thing true and real bears on any breast, and so that is “you” Objective Reality…imitation of false reality

  3. And anyone who argues against subjective experience, argues against everything great about humanity…when someone says I’m going to go rob, or kill, or spread hate, these are all options provided by the objective universe theory and immersing in culture…when someone invents electricity that is a product of subjectivity and seclusion from the objective mind theory and all it’s arms, branches, and enforcers…

    Yet people are sold on objectivity? It’s like when we see a dog we do not see the same thing; go to any court trial that requires witness testimony, people do not see the same thing. Why can we not just go ok that’s reality, and with purpose…That’s why they round them all up to get every detail seen from different perspectives…So police and our own law and court systems have enough faith in subjective experience to prosecute people yet we are taught by supposed scientific views that subjective experience is a mental disability…the only thing objectivity is for sure is hopeless…

    And just so people know any argument of objectivity is completely debatable and mostly a result of laziness. For instance how come when I looked at the last supper I saw the female holding up a green man that no one else has ever mentioned and seems blind too? Objective universe didn’t tell them it was there…go see for yourself…the trident raises the green…subjective reality is a function of the so called objective reality. Objectivity can not exist without subjectivity, yet subjectivity requires no objectivity at all…so how any logical person will deduce a thing is what it is, because they are not looking at a thing but a fixed frozen concept of a thing in transition…limited generalized words to describe…Intelligent people can wrap their mind around to describe is to demean, while ignorant people, think it means you understand, create, control…the world is full fools believing words are a personal expression…while the writers understand well words are just a game…the expression is in how you pattern the game around certain limitations and rules…I don’t know if readers understand this at all…I can cut up the new York times and rearrange it into a pattern and that will be perceived as my expression, when in fact I borrowed every word letter, and line…nothing more than an editor/rearrange of other peoples/cultures words and expressions we borrowed…

  4. I avoided 2 accidents today because I’m never rushed…I’m never in a hurry…I’m not a slave to the man…so you never see me leave my house 3 times in a row like I see my neighbors all do “forgetful” …You know when you stop the TV, social media, cell phones, junk food, news, people, politics, work, and family especially…all the clouds go away, I can see like a hawk…I can see America is stretched so thin they can’t think straight, this is the reason for everything and it isn’t changing or slowing down…it is an increasingly too complicated world…

    Bob Rafelson really brought this point to my attention when I was in film school, he explained what we see today on the news on CNN…50 things at once, a jingle, a song, a voice, a scrolling line, CNN popping up in the corner, time, stock market, I think all these people were on coke when they devised this…it’s like sci fi horror when they zap your brain with flickering split second images…like in Event Horizon…I’m sure Alex has proven to us all it effects mood… just by reporting on it it’s like sticking your face in Satan’s portal porto poty and taking a glance into the bottom of hell…you come back ten tears older in body and five years dumber in mind…who wants to do that? we are rubbers with too much friction and not enough room adding more lube and desensitizer is all we ever do..

  5. We have this Great and big radio personality here in my town who does the most popular, and respected, average joe thinking man’s political radio show, and I think he, as most political talk show hosts should, should have a logo with themselves digging through the corporate news garbage can…

    News corporations should have to start putting locks on their trash bins like porn shops and put up signs that show talk show hosts going into the garbage with a line through it…

    I want to end on this note should our countries Eagle be replaced with a Parrot?

  6. True last thought…can our culture ever mature enough to say like for instance because I love the movie Happy Go Lucky…

    If you didn’t absolutely fall in love with Sally Hawkins then you are a good and true individual, but me I fell right into the hands of the propaganda and instantly like a gullible fool fell in love with her character, and thought regardless of all suspension of disbelief, that in the context of a film the idolitized, contrived, idealism was palatable; as in being materials nessacery to paint that particular picture, and all my political views and racist pre judgmental western contrived views of reality and gullible begotten opinions equaling expectations on hold, I can absorb fully into impossibility, and then reemerge back into reality and understand that is exactly what took place, and not look down on anyone else who didn’t want to see it through, but yet understand their view is a refusal to go along, and that is ok…as long as they see their own limitation is refusal…

    I think never…If you don’t like what I like because the objective universe says so then we got a problem and your something wrong with the world that needs taken to task, that is the western way…it will probably always be our motto…Just like facebook, Dr. No like all pervs of the objective universe think everyone wants what they want…everyone sees the same thing, they want to be loved, touched, felt up, basically we all desire what society has served up that’s the message

  7. Dr. Drew preaches this message on his society mold shows about sexuality… He and John Edwards have the same exact modem of operandi “I see a bald drunk uncle.”, “I have no uncles”….

    “I see a girl who talks high pitch cause of sex abuse”, “I was never abused”…

    “You never knew this uncle that is why his ghost has come to tell you about him”…

    “Of coarse those who are abused won’t admit it”…

    So Dr know it all can opt out of proving his theories by presupposed predjudices based on nonsensical theories with insufficient data stamps, just by “saying” most of people generally are happy pandering to the society mold, which isn’t true…that’s like saying the kids who have no money are happy just watching through the fence at the water park because they are following the rules set by society… Or that gay men are better off playing straight for pay with Jesus cause it’s less stressful than to fight the society standard that says gay isn’t normal…who cares what a fake status quo says is natural and normal and what quackery is psychology that it bases mental health on playing along with this BS…I call BS…

    …go watch the movie SOCIETY Brian Yuzna best analogy ever of our upper class at the end…Other than Salo…

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