Go Read Important Stuff From Smart People.
Darlings, yesterday’s Missive wasn’t exactly giggles and rainbows. And today’s isn’t either! So to all of the new readers gained yesterday, Hi! Welcome! Hope you enjoy bad puns, pictures of dogs, the latest in tech industry snafus, but also existential rants about fascists. It’s fun sometimes, I promise!
There are so many greater thinkers than I putting this week into context. And you should read / watch them all.
In the past week, many technology firms had to reckon with with the moral - and business - limits of remaining agnostic platforms for all speech. As David Ingram at Reuters reports, this means that companies who’d previous refrained from removing hateful content from their platforms are now wrestling with the ethics of content policing. And in a particularly pointed example of this, the Cloudflare CEO who had initially refused to kick a neo-Nazi publication off of their servers admitted that he changed his mind, and that “I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet.”
Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel are our late night societal consciences. And I am totally happy with that.
Despite what she is enduring as a Mom who just lost her child, the mother of the woman who was murdered in Charlottesville said, "They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well, guess what? You just magnified her.”
Quartz reminds us of the “Paradox of Tolerance” to help us understand why it’s ok to be intolerant of white supremacists while still fighting for an tolerant society. From Quartz:
"A tolerant society should be tolerant by default,
With one exception: it should not tolerate intolerance itself."
People of color are watching POTUS side with white supremacists. And as Erica Lee writes, they are “not fucking ok.” (h/t Stefana)
In the States during this past week, we’ve seen more public displays of Nazi symbols in public than most Germans see in a decade. Sarah Wildman at Vox dives in on the differences between Germany and the US, when it comes to symbols of hate.
And finally, let’s all revisit Kurt Eichenwald’s 2016 piece, shall we? Right-Wing Extremists Are A Bigger Threat To America Than Isis.
I leave you with the 1968 wise words of Stan Lee, responding to bigots:
Toodles, my loves.