I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
Tim Pool for President (sorry Ford Fischer, Jack Andraka, or Cameron Kasky): the need for youth in office (and not just on social media)
OK, Tim Pool is, I think, six weeks too young to be inaugurated
president of the United States on January 20, 2021. Biden is slipping and looks
tired.Maybe Bernie could come back, but
he had a heart attack. If you can’t accept a “President Cameron Kasky” (Twitter
doesn’t, at age 19), well, maybe Andrew Cuomo will get the nod. He acts like a president already. (And he quoted my books once.)
Or, Stanford Graduate Student Jack Andraka (of NatGeo's film “Science
Fair” with his pancreatic cancer test invented at age 15) may be “only” 23, but
had he been president as 2020 started, the COVID threat would not have been
missed. Jack would have jumped right on the intelligence from China. He’s right in the middle of all
the research right now.
We do need much younger people in politics. We need brains. Maybe we need an M.D. in the White House some
day, to fix health care financing once and for all and provide universal care.
Seriously, let’s look at while Pool thinks his
position in social media is so precarious now.Adam Crigler is there, as is Emily (from Subverse) remotely.
I think Ezra Klein’s book “Why We’re Polarized” (which
I reviewed on Wordpress recently) speaks to this dilemma. Yes, Ezra Klein is a reasonable candidate for president.
At one point he talks about “epistocracy” where
individual speakers (like Pool, or Ford Fischer, or David Rubin, or Sargon of
Akkad, or me, for that matter (even though my style is quite different from the
others).My idea, especially before
perhaps 2010 especially, was simply to be found passively by search engines,
without much interaction from readers, except occasionally and sporadically.
That was unusually effective with an issue like gays in the military and the
don’t ask don’t tell policy (repealed in 2011 under Obama).It is somewhat effective with some of the
Internet speech issues (like understanding Section 230-like problems).It is much less effective with issues perceived
as remediable by class or group solutions – intersectionality.
The antonym, of course, is goading everyone into
joining groups and pimping and raising money for them (my notorious “Dangerous
Thought Experiment”).Klein talks about
this late in the book, where he compares corporate donation to political (and
issue) campaigns and large non-profits, to individual donations.The latter, when they are funneled to
specific PAC campaigns, tend to correlate to narrow, sometimes extreme and not
well-thought-out ideas.So the idea of
being expected to “join up” does not work very well either.
You need some kind of systemic reform, he thinks,
which sounds undoable.
You will have a different, more solitary Easter, alone together online. Picture: Pitman, NJ, original site of the Minds Conference Aug 31, 2019, moved to Philadelphia. Those were the good old days now.
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