Social Media Policies

I had a couple of discussions on Facebook over the last month or so, and was debating writing out some of my reasons for handling it the way I have.

It's too long to do in Facebook itself, mostly drawing on various experiences over the years, so... I dunno. I think I'll just start typing and see what comes out. I'll probably cover things I've talked about in other posts again, but it's sort of necessary to bring it all together.

Let's see...

Recent articles made me think I ought to go back farther on this one, to something I did as an undergraduate. This was back before 9/11, back when we were doing 'Military Operations Other Than War'. When we'd had the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia, and were sending troops to Bosnia, and had some stuff going on with Haiti.

I wanted to write a paper, I forget what the thesis was... I don't think I actually got a good grade on it, tbh... but reading about Bosnia really shaped some of my thinking.

At the time, everyone seemed to think it was "ancient hatreds flaring up", but that didn't really make sense. They'd been living peaceably together for a while. Intermarried. Hosted the Olympics.

People don't just wake up one day and decide to start killing their neighbors over something that happened 500 years ago. One of my references gave a rather disturbing timeline. Iirc, it talked about how certain radio stations started it. Spread messages arguing that their particular ethnic group (or religious group, I could go look it up but I don't think the details actually matter. It's like my earlier post with the allegory of the long spoons. It's easy to destroy trust, doesn't matter which group identity you're talking about) was being discriminated against. Targeted.

The author said it was as though every radio station and TV station had been taken over by the KKK. And then there was an uptick in people arming themselves... and when the government got nervous and tried to crack down on it, it was easy for those stirring up trouble to say "See! See! They're coming for you!"

Four or five years (and 100,000 deaths) later, and what had been a rather mixed region was now divided.

I brought it up because apparently, in some quarters, arrogant fools seem to think the Bosnian genocide is a 'success'. They got their 'pure' state....

A weak one. But I guess they think it's better to be the big fish in a small pond, then a small fish in the ocean? (Seriously... Every. Single. Powerful. State. has had to deal with multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity. Romans. Habsburgs. Romanovs. Han. If you're going to be a large and powerful nation/state, you're going to have a diverse group of citizens. So if you prefer being small and weak, go ahead and try making your ethnically - or religious, or political, or whatever identity you want to use - pure enclaves. Preferably without murdering a bunch of people in the process. That's not what they really want though, is it?)

So anyways. As we've grown more polarized, we've also sort of been self-segregating. I've seen it... when you start to someone, only to discover that their views are so wildly different from yours that you don't even know where to begin. And we don't want to get into a 'flamewar', or quarrel, so we generally roll our eyes and walk away.

Maybe even vent to our friends about how stupid the other side is. Like 'how can they possibly think X? And we build our own little echo chambers, where we only hang out and hear from people we agree with, and only read news articles from the sources we trust.

And, for the most part, I understood all that. I don't really want to ruin Thanksgiving, or stop talking to my various aunts and uncles, or get into a verbal fight with someone I don't even know because they've got a bumper sticker or t-shirt or hat I don't agree with.

Which is where the next part comes in...

I deployed to Iraq.

Actually, it's about more than that. 9/11 happened, I deployed to Iraq, and I wanted to understand.

I mean, I'm naturally curious and a voracious reader, so I prob would have done that anyway. But I also kind of agree with Sun-Tzu -

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

I will never agree with terrorism, or terrorist tactics. But in order to defeat them, I wanted to understand them. Why did they think this was a good strategy? What were they trying to do?

Some of it puzzled me initially. Our frames of reference were too different, I think. Like - did they really think 9/11 would start a race war in the US? (Damn, it's hard to find the references from something so long ago. Iirc, they thought their victory in Afghanistan led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thought it'd be even easier to defeat the 'weaker' US, and somewhere in there was the idea of provoking a race war.)

I also recall that bin Laden grew mad at Saudi Arabia for not using oil as a weapon against the West, which I later learned was a concept that had been around for a while.

There were other things, not directly related to terrorism. There are some things you can only really learn about your country by leaving it. Like the overwhelming number of conspiracy theories that credible people seemed to believe (like that the CIA actually wanted the Sunni, or ISIS, or whoever to win. Things I knew weren't true, but that people who otherwise seemed rational believed.)

I probably ought to emphasize this more - when official news sources aren't considered reliable, people start looking elsewhere, and it's far too easy for rumors and outright fabrications to spread. I try to keep an open mind, and I don't necessarily trust official news sources, but I use a few rules of thumb when considering a conspiracy theory. One is that if it requires too large of a group to keep their mouths shut, it's probably not true... Another is Hanlon's razor - "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." A third is this - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you want to claim that 9/11 was an inside job, or that FDR knew about and allowed the Japanese to strike at Pearl Harbor, you need a bit more than just 'it sounds plausible.'

I know I grew disillusioned with our own media - the reporting on Iraq was awful, no matter if it was a 'liberal' or 'conservative' source. Fox News, CNN, most of them seemed to be trying to fight the domestic political battles of Vietnam all over again, and didn't really look at Iraq as it's own thing.

But I did think, for the most part, that journalistic obligations to get multiple sources and corroborating information meant you could sift through the opinions and spin and still get something worthwhile.

I remember reading about an incident in a neighborhood, I think in Baghdad? This was around 2006, I think, when extra-judicial killing (aka Sunni and Shia murdering each other and bodies turning up overnight) were a thing. Anyways, the article was talking about a neighborhood where one witness claimed a number of people were killed and their bodies hung from the streetlights. Another witness claimed nothing at all had happened.

And I found myself thinking - there's no way of reconciling these two. You can't say this was the type of distortion you can expect from the different perspectives people can have on the same incident. It either happened, or it didn't, and one of these sources was lying. (By way of contrast - all of our various media sources reported that the police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson. The spin came in the different perspectives on why he was shot, and who you found most credible when the stories differed, but everyone knew that Michael Brown had been shot, and that he had been shot by the police.)

I found myself thinking that letting conspiracy theories spread unchecked was a problem...

And to bring this back to personal policies... it was no longer enough to just roll my eyes and walk away. The people who believe this sort of stuff will spread it to others, and the more biased or credulous will believe it....

And I don't want to live in a world where 'the truth' seems to be whatever the majority seems to think happened. I don't want us to start arguing about whether Michael Brown had really been shot in the first place, or have some fool start claiming it wasn't really the police that shot him. We've got more than enough to argue about even when you accept the basic facts, let's not go spreading outright lies in the process.

(And, seriously, while some conspiracies seem to spread because of human nature, some of them are definitely tied to politics. Like Holocaust deniers... I don't know if they think they need to believe lies in order to undermine Israel, or they just don't want to believe people can be that awful, or what... but it's wrong, and I can't believe anything good will come of people spreading those sorts of lies.)

So anyways. Here I am, in 2020, and suddenly everyone is talking about 'fake news' and 'information operations', and I've got someone spreading crap on Facebook who doesn't seem to do any sort of fact-checking or bias checking. It's kind of scary.

I'm not judging others for cutting out people they don't agree with. I, personally, have deliberately chosen not to block or cut off anyone. Part of that is about preventing me from creating my own personal echo chamber, but part of it is also because rolling your eyes and walking away isn't enough.

I'm not saying get into fights over every little thing, though. That's generally counterproductive, especially if it gets heated and you start calling people stupid. (Even though I'm sometimes sorely tempted to. I have to remind myself that the stereotypes of the other side are generally not accurate. Really.)

I've come up with my own personal rules about it, though, and I accept that sometimes I just don't have the energy to get into it...

But even though I don't expect to ever change anyone's mind, I think its important to engage. For a couple of reasons:

First, as more and more people isolate themselves... so that they only hear from people who already agree with them... it's important to show that 'real' people do have different takes on things. I don't mean the stereotype we each create of the 'other', politically speaking. The 'snowflake liberal' or 'racist and uneducated conservative'.

It's also extremely important to speak out about things that can and should be fact checked. The big one I've gotten into has been about Islamophobia. Terrorists are awful, but most Muslims are NOT terrorists... and trying to lump them all together makes it harder to fight the bad guys.

I know things have gotten so bad that there's almost no news sources we can all agree on (conservatives claim fact checkers like Snopes are 'liberal', and won't believe them... there's now entire information eco-systems to support whatever you want to believe. Which makes it even more essential to keep some sort of grounding in fact, imho.)

There's more to it than that, but I've typed long enough for now. I'm sort of feeling my way into it, really. I try to ask for sources, but stay away from being insulting or sounding judgmental, and I'm most definitely open to giving sources if/when I'm asked for them.

Some days I really do wonder why I bother, though. And while I get why people are drawn to the articles that support their own biases, I have some serious questions for the ones knowingly and deliberately spreading lies.

Perils of Authoritarian Govt

This tweet touches on something I'd had a passing thought on -

https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1231226188288471040?s=19

I remember reading The Sword and the Shield (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10756.The_Sword_and_the_Shield), about the KGB...

And here's the thing. Our covert ops seemed awful, in comparison. Our networks penetrated, our spies found out. And yet we 'won'.

I put that in quotes because of our current situation, but when the Soviet Union fell that's what most thought. 

And, it seemed to me, most of that was because of the flaws inherent in authoritarian systems. People afraid to stand out or draw attention, pressure to be 'yes-men' - or 'yes-people'. Reluctance to speak out when higher ups clearly don't want to hear it.

I used to think this was why, ultimately, democracy was better. There was a better chance of critical information being acted on in a timely fashion, better decision-making, better responsiveness.

I say 'used to', again, because of current events. We have some really foolish people (with more money than sense, and a really screwed up sense of what God wants) who seem bound and determined to destroy all that.

I struggle with feeling like it's worth saying anything more on that matter, though. I don't feel like preaching to the choir, and the rest seem too out of touch (and impervious to the thoughts of people like me) to bother with.

Sums Up Well

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/andrew-sullivan-trumps-presidency-as-absurd-tragedy.html

On Selecting Subordinates

In my previous post, I indicating that sele for loyalty was actually a bad move. I figured I ought to lay out how/who I'd select instead.

Competence, ofc. And I'd want one with that whole 'servant leadership' mentality. Not loyal to me, but loyal to the Constitution and the laws of our nation.

And then I'd have my spiel. The 'you don't have to agree with me on everything, but before you decide to go outside with something, do me the courtesy of talking to me first. I'll give you a fair hearing'

(that could be a huge time commitment, but I don't think most people take you up on it unless it really matters to them, so it's generally worth listening when they do. Oh, and you also have to demonstrate that you really, really mean it. The first test case will either seal the deal, or convince everyone that it was just words, and not to bother). 

And maybe I prioritized things differently, or was aware of something they didn't. Generally people want to feel heard, and understand that they can't always get what they want.

If they still strongly disagree, then I'd encourage them to find another position. No hard feelings. 

Like, you can argue (preferably behind closed doors) right up until the decision is made, but once it's made that should be it.

Which is why I could see firing someone - not for lack of loyalty. Nothing I described was about being loyal to me - but for not taking me up on the offer to hear them out, and/or not being willing to accept a decision but refusing to leave (and instead trying to force the desired outcome).

I'm trying to think how this is different from wanting loyalty, and in some ways it prob looks and acts the same. I think the key difference is simply that 'loyalty' often ends up meaning 'be a yes-man/woman/person', so they hire people who do a good job of telling you what you want to hear. And generally value those people over others, who may be more opinionated and/or outspoken.

Idk, it's hard to say for sure without being on the inside of those decisions. 

Oh, and btw... If someone decides to 'leak', I don't think I'd see it as a problem. Just means I'd have to explain that reasoning in a more public venue.

And really, I can't help feeling why politicians are so afraid of that is because their reasoning wouldn't hold up in the face of public scrutiny. Goes back to 'they really don't believe in government of the people, by the people, and for the people' do they?

Lest someone think I'm hopelessly naive, I'll just add one last thing. The wikileaks of our diplomatic cables didn't get much public dissent. Most of what I heard was 'it seems reasonable to keep that private, I can see why.' The public is probably not going to be too upset unless your private decisions really are a problem, and I'd ask you to reconsider why you think it's necessary to do something they wouldn't be okay with. 

Worried

I had an interaction on social media the other day, and there was a rather minor bit that's actually troubling me the more I think about it.

I've written a lot about group think, team building, the importance of eliciting feedback and opinions and so on and so forth... 

But there has definitely been a trend in politics, on both sides of the political aisle, where they value loyalty more than anything else. 

More than competence. 

And it generally veers into valuing 'yes-men' (and women) who never trouble you with things you don't want to hear. After all, it's all too easy to paint that as a lack of loyalty.

I get why it's happened. I get how frustrating it must be, for staff members who disagree with a decision to go leaking to the press. To feeling like they're airing your dirty laundry, and/or trying to do a run around to get a decision changed.

But it def contributes to a culture where nobody can is in a position to 'speak truth to power', as the much desired cliche says.

And it contributes to the poor decision making we've seen, over and over again, among those who supposedly ought to know better. 

But I didn't start this to write about the importance of having a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people."

I think far too many of those powers that be don't really believe that, or don't realize what it takes to make that happen. (Side note - we were seriously lucky, as a nation, to have George Washington as our first president, who se the unofficial policy of only serving two terms. It set a great precedent on how to transfer power. Something that, as just one example, the Russian Provisional Government utterly failed to do after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated.)

Anyways. I generally call myself an independent, and have criticized pretty much every president when they were in power. Not much point in doing so when they're not, after all. I tend to focus most of that on the current party (I think. Not like I've done an analysis of my posts to confirm that), so Democrats when there's a Democratic president and Republicans when it's Republican.

But during this interaction, it seemed clear someone seemed to think even criticizing the current president was bad. 

I'm sure there were people who felt that way before (for example, that nobody should criticize President Bush. I'd say the same for President Obama, except that this is another case where the hypocrisy tends to show - people who feel this way tend to be conservative, and generally aren't upset about it when the President is a Democrat. And with Obama, some even go so far as to buy into that birther crap so they can even argue that he's somehow not legitimate, and criticizing him is okay), so maybe it's just that I've expanded my network.

Still, that tendency to see any criticism as somehow unpatriotic, or un-American, or whatever their claim, is deeply disturbing. After all, grouching about our political leadership is a time-honored American tradition, and it's my right to speak out as much as I want to.

Its yet another disturbing example of how some 'patriots' are throwing out everything that makes us great, are undermining our freedoms... And don't even seem to care, so long as it empowers someone they agree with. 

Team Building

Over and over, we see articles like this -https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it

And yet too many still act as though leaders who destroy everything listed here are 'tough' and even desirable. 

Untitled.

I've been a bit busy these days, but I had some time today and realized I never got around to writing a post that I'd been mulling over.

I mentioned that I had been reading a biography on Stalin. What I hadn't mentioned is that I was also reading a book on Muhammad.

As usual, the contrast between two different topics provoked a bit of thought. The biography of Stalin, after all, was fairly typical of powerful political people. (More or less. It's a thick tome and I haven't finished reading it, but for the most part it's in keeping with what I'd consider 'normal'.)

Mohammad, unsurprisingly, was not. I could go probably talk a lot about that. About how hard it is to expect such a proud culture to change, to bend the knee to a higher power (Muslim, after all, aim to live a life of complete submission to God).

About what a strange story it was, this movement that had to work within the 'real' world, and deal with conflict and power issues, while at the same time calling for a complete change in how people acted.

But the part I wanted to focus in on was the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. I unfortunately don't have the book in front of me right now (I'm currently traveling), and it's been hard to find anything online focusing on the details in the book that I wanted to focus on. I'll just write what I recall, and hope any readers will forgive me if I misremember.

The pilgrimage to Mecca was important to Arab culture, even before Islam began, and Mohammed was living in exile in Medina. Relations were tense, occasionally violent, when he had a premonition that he participated in the pilgrimage, and decided to go.

Pilgrimage is not supposed to be violent, so Mohammed essentially put his opponents in a tough position - allow their enemy entrance as a pilgrim, or prevent it. Through force, if need be.

Mohammed's followers seemed to expect some sort of great victory, or a miracle, or something, but nothing of the sort really happened. Or rather, nothing obvious...

Mohammed met with his opponents, and they negotiated a treaty. Mohammed actually gave in on Every. Single. Point.

Submitted. Was defeated.

And yet, through that action, was able to return a year later and complete the pilgrimage... and eventually, ultimately, was the victor.

Sound familiar?

Isn't that the 'deep magic' I talked about in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Isn't that the underlying mystery of Jesus's death on the cross?

The wikipedia link I gave above was rather sparse on the details, but iirc Mohammed even told his people that this was what was required of them. That they should accept conditions that were considered blatantly wrong, or unfair.

And he did, in the long run, win by doing so.

And yet, somehow, everyone seems to forget how to do that. I mean... I've never heard of a single Muslim nation say that following Mohammed means making treaties like that. Did they forget? Decide it doesn't really apply? Argue that he couldn't possibly have meant that for anyone other than their fellow Arabs?

I don't know... I will freely admit I'm not an expert, am only passingly familiar with any of it, and that you would probably want to consult a real scholar on the topic.

I brought that up because the quest to help a proud nation learn how to submit... is something that all of us struggle with. It's not an Arab or Muslim thing.

It's a human thing.

Well, I wanted to make that point, as well as add emphasis for my earlier points about 'deep magic', and actions that go against 'normal' human behavior.

There's more to it than that, too. Would Mohammed's actions have been as effective if he'd given in right away? Or did it only have an impact after he proved that he and his supporters were willing to fight in the first place?

I also don't want to gloss over how challenging this is. In one of my previous posts I'd talked about how you transform a society, and the thing of it is that people who choose to follow that path can and do 'lose'. By conventional standards. As individuals.

The early Christian martyrs, though, ultimately won. They still died, ofc, but the courage of their convictions and the example they set inspired more converts... and more people who tried living like they did.

It's sort of like that clip from the movie Gandhi, too:

It can hurt, it will hurt. It's hard to take it and not strike back, or lash out. But if enough people engage like this. If enough people take a stand, while at the same time not outright attacking, it can change everything.

One last thing. In my earlier post I mentioned the allegory of the long spoons. It is fairly easy to get those cooperating in 'heaven' to start acting like those in 'hell'. Heck, it may not even require deliberate effort. Someone's hand shakes while trying to feed someone else, and the food slides off. Pure accident, but the other person thinks its deliberate. They're friends with someone else, and so the next time their friend is feeding the initial offender, they deliberately let the food slide off. A bystander sees it and blames the friend...

Next thing you know, trust is destroyed and everyone's trying to feed themselves with spoons that are too long to do so.

Going the other way, though? Getting the ones in 'hell' to start cooperating?

That brings up all the questions I'm fascinated by. Like - how do you build trust? How do you convince people it really is in their best interests to work together? More importantly, how do you get them to believe it can really happen?

All that stuff I talked about earlier in my post? It touches on one singular answer... one we all know, already, but find really hard to put into practice:

Be the change you want to see. Trust that it will lead to something better, even though you might 'lose'. Even though you might get hurt, or suffer.

Perhaps especially so.

Despite all that, persist.

Be kind. Be cooperative. Don't react with more hate, or violence.

Stand up for your beliefs, but do so in a way that doesn't threaten those who disagree.

Turn the other cheek.

Give in.

Be open. Be vulnerable.

It can and will most likely hurt.

But you can't control anyone else, you can't make anyone else do the right thing. The only thing you control is yourself, and the choices you make, the choices we all make, create the world we live in.

If enough people choose the same, we can live in 'heaven'. If nobody else does, we'll all be living in hell.

Choose.

What world do you want to live in?

Shortsightedness

With all the fuss over the Iowa caucuses, it reminded me of how important it is to see our elections as legitimate -

And how dangerous it is for one of the candidates to claim differently. 

Its the sort of shortsighted tactic one might use to win, once, but damages the one who uses it in the long term. 

After all, it opens the door for future claims, destroys trust in the process, and therefore destroys the legitimacy of whoever wins. 

Kinda like the NC Republican strategy - which anyone could have seen was the kind of thing that only works once. Once you've shown your hand, the other side is likely to take countermeasure (they were apparently dumb enough to think they could do a vote without the Dems again, and somehow surprised the Dems made sure to have someone monitoring who could bring everyone back for the vote).

Like - aside from fair play and morality arguments - what sort of fools think these will actually work in the long run? How has our stereotypical problem with "winning the battle but losing the war* infected so many of our politicians that nobody was able to stop this crap before it even started?

BOTH parties ought to hope and pray for a secure 2020 election, because anything else undermines the legitimacy of everyone. 

Not just for this election, but all future elections as well. 

And I suppose there have been too many fools already, and I can't neglect to add a comment on how important legitimacy is. Which, obviously, is very... But it's the kind of thing that is impossible to quantify, and a government can succeed with a low level of it. It's just that you never know when the lack of legitimacy will break a system, so it's better to play it safe.