Dana Blankenhorn

How Google Must Take Responsibility

If I could blame any single company for the mess America finds itself in today it would be Google.

Don’t be evil? All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. When you gain great power, you also gain grave responsibility. You can be evil by doing nothing, just as the people who watched Kitty Genovese be murdered in 1964 became evil by doing nothing. Just as the good Germans who watched Hitler’s rise and did nothing became evil by doing nothing, or the southerners who stood by while generations were lynched became evil by doing nothing. It’s a stain that does not wash out.

In this case, evil is at the heart of Google’s business model, and that of Internet advertising generally, which has become divorced from the content it sits beside.

This is something I’ve covered before, but briefly Google eliminated the advantage publishers previously got from aggregating audiences.

Why Tech Moves Us Left

Technology creates value and productivity.

It does this at an extraordinary, even accelerating rate.

The problem is neither economics nor our politics is equipped to handle abundance.

When the basics are easily afforded, most of us go on to luxuries. This should be true for societies as well as individuals. But it’s not.

The problem is that the business models for societal luxuries can’t be created without government. Government is the only force that represents shared endeavor. And ideology has declared government involvement in the economy anathema.

Sport and the New Political Divide

The political divide today is less the traditional left-right than nationalist-internationalist.

This was brewing before Trump. But it has become the new normal. It’s a fault line people are still willing to cross, because it’s new. We love our nation, but can we love another without betraying it?

My point today is that this fault line has appeared in every area of our lives. Not just in politics, but in economics. It has appeared in music and art. And it has appeared in sport.

I have described how it works in sports here in Atlanta, where the Atlanta United “football” team has taken intown’s love from the Atlanta Braves. They moved to Trumpistan, specifically suburban Cobb County, with its long history of racism aimed at the central city. The bridge on I-75 over the Chattahoochee to Cobb County is still named for Lester Maddox, for gosh sakes.

Stupid Starts to Bite in Qatar

When people in business figure out the guy across the table from them is an idiot, they don’t take pity on him. They take him for all he’s worth.

America is led by a very stupid man, and the world has recognized this.

A good example was on the Idiot’s trip to Saudi Arabia, where he apparently agreed to isolate Qatar.

To the Saud royal family, which let’s not forget is the closest thing the world today has, to the 18^th century Bourbons, Qatar is like Voltaire, a pain in the ass. Qatar is the leading edge of the Muslim World’s efforts to engage the Western World.

Think of Qatar as 15^th century Florence, and the Qataris as the Medici. 

The 28th Amendment

Of the 17 amendments to the U.S. Constitution approved since the Bill of Rights, almost half have had to do with voting rights.

It’s time for another one.

The present political situation is based on a concerted Republican campaign, since 2009, to deny people the right to vote, and to make sure that the voices of its political opponents is never heard. The result is a government that believes it can act with impunity, that it can ignore the will of the majority, that it has succeeded in making democracy a dead letter.

Some of the weapons in this war have been around since the nation’s founding. Others were developed over time, in the South, for racist purposes, and have now been moved north for political ones.