What Happened: July 2, 2021
Tablet’s afternoon news digest: Tucker claims govt. spying; Facebook censors; U.S. leaves Bagram
July 02, 2021
The Big Story
In the same week that Facebook defeated significant antitrust challenges in the courts and passed a trillion-dollar valuation for the first time, the social media company is asserting greater control over users’ access to information. On Thursday, Facebook users began reporting that they were seeing warnings from the social media platform that they “may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently.” Screenshots from Facebook users document other similar messages, such as one that reads, “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?” The message continues, “We care about preventing extremism on Facebook. Others in your situation have received confidential support.” To people receiving the message, Facebook sends links to where they can “get support,” which lead to the tech giant’s chosen nonprofit partners, such as an organization called Life After Hate that’s devoted to helping people leave “the violent far-right.” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told the New York Post that the messages were “part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk.”
Read it here: https://www.yahoo.com/now/facebook-trying-rout-extremism-asking-044215551.html
Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads
The Rest
On his popular cable news show this week, Fox’s Tucker Carlson asserted that the U.S. government was spying on his communications. Carlson provided few specifics to substantiate his claims but said that he had been informed of the surveillance by a source who provided him with information that could only have been gleaned from his private communications. If Carlson is right and the government is in fact spying on him, it is most likely occurring through the notorious section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This is the provision that provides U.S. surveillance agencies with a workaround to spy on U.S. citizens by “incidentally” collecting their private information in the course of targeting a foreign subject—spying that would ordinarily be banned by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution but is permitted so long as it’s incidental. National Review writer Michael Brendan provides a plausible account for how this might have happened, suggesting the government could have collected on Carlson’s communications while targeting WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
Anyway, if you were reconstructing the most obvious explanation for NSA having Tucker’s stuff it would be an investigation targeting Assange, which includes the “incidental” over collection of all contacts like Roger Stone, and all Stone’s contacts which would include Tucker.
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) June 30, 2021
The U.S. military has fully transferred Bagram Airfield to the Afghan National Security Forces, putting the base outside American control for the first time in 20 years. As the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, Bagram was home to 40,000 troops at its peak, with over 100,000 passing through the base yearly. The Biden administration has committed to pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September 11, but most are expected to be out by July 4.
The European Union launched its vaccine passport, known as a digital COVID-19 certificate, yesterday. The certificate allows holders who have received EU-approved vaccines—AstraZeneca, Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson—to travel between countries in the European Union without having to undergo additional testing or quarantines.
A city inspector in Surfside, Florida, who ruled in 2018 that the Champlain Towers South condo that collapsed last week was “in very good shape” has been placed on leave. The inspector, Ross Prieto, delivered his assessment after an engineering report the same year warned of structural damage to the building’s concrete and steel reinforcements. At least 18 people were killed in the condo’s collapse, while another 140 are still unaccounted for as search and rescue efforts continue.
Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/ross-prieto-surfside.html
A new plan to impose a minimum corporate tax rate on multinational companies was agreed to by 130 countries yesterday that included the world’s leading economies. The minimum 15% rate is intended to prevent corporations from using regulatory loopholes and other tactics to avoid paying taxes, a practice that amounts to between $100 billion and $240 billion in lost tax revenue annually, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a memorial for the victims of the Surfside collapse shares details about the lives of its Jewish victims, “a diverse nexus of the American Jewish community” that ranged from “a group of young Venezuelan immigrants to New Yorkers looking for a fresh start in a new state.”
Read it here: https://www.jta.org/2021/07/01/united-states/these-are-the-jewish-victims-of-the-surfside-building-collapse
A Chabad rabbi was stabbed eight times on Thursday outside a synagogue and Jewish day school in Boston by an assailant who was also carrying a gun. Rabbi Shlomo Noginski was approached by 24-year-old Khaled Awad, who told him to open his van. No official motive has been announced yet, but the Anti Defamation League’s New England regional director said Friday that there were “multiple indicators pointing toward antisemitism.” Noginski is recovering with non-life-threatening injuries.
Read it here: https://boston.cbslocal.com/2021/07/02/rabbi-shlomo-noginski-stabbing-brighton-adl-hate-crime-antisemitic/
The New York Rangers’ Adam Fox, a Jewish native of Long Island in his second year as a pro hockey player, was awarded the James Norris Memorial Trophy this week, crowning him the league’s top defenseman.
The Back Pages
- Like many people of my generation, the first Mel Brooks movie I ever saw was the Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs. It’s not Brooks’ finest work, but it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, and Brooks’ lesser films still stand up as better than 99% of comedies that get made. In honor of the great genius of American comedy turning 95 this week, here’s a classic Playboy interview from 1975.
Anarchic, the crickets call it. My mother says, “An archie?” She thinks I’m an architect. My comedy is big-city, Jewish, whatever I am. Energetic. Nervous. Crazy. Anyway, what do PLAYBOY readers care about comedy? They’re not reading this interview. They’re all sitting on the toilet with the centerfold open, doing God knows what.
- It is a fact that more and more our lives in America, as in much of the post-industrialized world, are ruled by a tiny group of corporate overlords hiding behind machines who control what we think and feel and say. This system of power and administration, in which Google and Facebook determine what information we can access, is opaque, unaccountable, and beyond appeal from ordinary people. It is profoundly undemocratic. Matthew Crawford has been one of the most perceptive critics of this state of affairs. The New Atlantis has published an essay adapted from testimony he gave to a hearing on smart home technology held by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights that surveys this landscape.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon have established portals that people feel they have to pass through to conduct the business of life, and to participate in the common life of the nation. Such bottlenecks are a natural consequence of “the network effect.” It was early innovations that allowed these firms to take up their positions. But it is not innovation that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect, it is these established positions, and the ongoing control of the data it allows them to gather, as in a classic infrastructure monopoly. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a grid of surveillance that continues to spread and deepen. It is this grid’s basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet accountability is the very essence of representative government.
- Good luck finding a wittier, more lacerating ode to America than this 1872 speech that Mark Twain delivered on the Fourth of July to a gathering of Americans in London. Happy Independence Day and God bless America.
But I must not stand here and brag all night. However, you won’t mind a body bragging a little about his country on the Fourth of July. It is a fair and legitimate time to fly the eagle. I will say only one more word of brag—and a hopeful one. It is this. We have a form of government which gives each man a fair chance and no favor. With us no individual is born with a right to look down upon his neighbor and hold him in contempt. Let such of us as are not dukes find our consolation in that. And we may find hope for the future in the fact that as unhappy as is the condition of our political morality to-day, England has risen up out of a far fouler since the days when Charles I ennobled courtesans and all political place was a matter of bargain and sale. There is hope for us yet.
Read it here: https://www.whatsoproudlywehail.org/curriculum/the-american-calendar/speech-on-the-fourth-of-july-1872
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Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.
