The Dangers Of Online Conmunity
By Ben Sixsmith

The internet benefits a lot of people who have sought like-minded acquaintances, friends, and even lovers — yet it is a dangerous place. All across social media are what I call “conmunities”: not quite cults, lacking their organization and militancy, yet still drawing fragile, desperate people into exploitative relationships based on false hope, narcissism, and greed. Features often include:

1. Charismatic leaders who act as mentors on the basis of selective information, rather than the more rounded perspective one might gain from acquaintance in real life.
2. Clear hierarchies of status and influence, based more on popularity than expertise, experience, or achievements.
3. Underacknowledged financial interests.
4. Claims to exclusive truth.
5. Severe resistance to criticism.
6. “Us against the world” dynamics.
7. Reinforcement of destructive behavior.
8. Relationships based more on shared beliefs and preferences than shared experiences.

These features make conmunities vulnerable to herdlike conformity, financial or narcissistic exploitation, and latent social ties based on shared opinions, taste, and language that are hard to transform into trust, cooperation, and emotional fulfillment.

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Kentucky governor blames violent video games, movies, not guns for school shootings
By Scott Wartman

Why is he convinced that it’s video games and not guns? Because when he went to school in New England, students would bring guns in for show-and-tell.

“Sometimes they’d be in kids’ lockers,” Bevin said. “Nobody even thought about shooting other people with them. So it’s not a gun problem.”

Bevin claimed there were more guns per capita 50 to 100 years ago than now. A report commissioned by Congress in 2012 disputed that. The number of firearms per capita in the United States doubled since 1968, going from one firearm for every two people to one firearm for every person, according to the report performed by the Congressional Research Service.

Experts: The Myth of Video Games Making Killers Is ‘Nuts’
By Tanya Basu

Video games have long been blamed for violent tendencies. The theory is that viewing and pretending to do violent things somehow rewires a person’s emotions and neurology and makes them more likely to think it’s okay to do something horrific, like use a rifle to massacre students and unarmed teachers at a school or a mass shooting.

That’s blatantly untrue, though, and been proven to be so for years now.

Chris Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University. He has extensively studied how video games affect violence.

“Trump’s claim is nuts,” he told The Daily Beast. “It’s long been discredited. This is not a thing.”

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Apple’s New Spaceship Campus Has One Flaw – and It Hurts
By Mark Bergen

The centerpiece of Apple Inc.’s new headquarters is a massive, ring-shaped office overflowing with panes of glass, a testament to the company’s famed design-obsessed aesthetic.

There’s been one hiccup since it opened last year: Apple employees keep smacking into the glass.

Surrounding the building, located in Cupertino, California, are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed “pods,” also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That’s resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents.

Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building’s design, the people said.

…

The building is designed to house some 13,000 employees. Wired magazine, first to pay a visit at its opening last year, described the structure as a “statement of openness, of free movement,” in contrast to Apple’s typically insular culture. “While it is a technical marvel to make glass at this scale, that’s not the achievement,” Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief, told the magazine in May. “The achievement is to make a building where so many people can connect and collaborate and walk and talk.”

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Walter Lippmann on liberty and the news: A century-old mirror for our troubled times
By Roy Peter Clark

At the time of his death in 1974, Lippmann had achieved a special status among newspaper columnists. He won two Pulitzer Prizes. His opinion was sought out by presidents and thought leaders across the globe. He was a founding editor of The New Republic. Most important, he took journalism seriously, not as a trade or even a profession, but as an instrument of democracy. He coined the phrases Cold War, and the manufacture of consent, and the use of the metaphor “stereotype” to describe thoughtless generalizations.

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[On power and importance of objective fact]:

“The cardinal fact always is the loss of contact with objective information. Public as well as private reason depends upon it. Not what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is so beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity.”

“For, in the last analysis, the demagogue, whether of the Right or the Left, is, consciously or unconsciously an undetected liar.”

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”

“It may be bad to suppress a particular opinion, but the really deadly thing is to suppress the news. In time of great insecurity, certain opinions acting on unstable minds may cause infinite disaster.”

“The desire to know, the dislike of being deceived and made game of, is a really powerful motive, and it is that motive that can best be enlisted in the cause of freedom.”

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After five years of ‘Unlearning Liberty,’ book’s prescriptions command urgent attention
By Alex Morey

“It may seem like a paradox,” Greg wrote, “but an environment that squelches debate and punishes the expression of opinions, in the very institution that is supposed to make us better thinkers, can lead quickly to the formation of polarized groups in which people harbor a comfortable, uncritical certainty that they are right.”

Indeed, “we live in certain times.”

Censorship on campus is, of course, nothing new. For most of FIRE’s history, campus censorship seemed to come primarily from the top down. Students complained about administrators selectively enforcing speech codes and ushering them into tiny, misleadingly-named “free speech zones.”

But in “Unlearning Liberty,” Greg noticed a shift: Many of the calls for censorship on campus were suddenly coming from students themselves.

But why?

Greg had a theory. It was starting in college, and spreading.

“I believe that an unsung culprit in this expansion of unwarranted certainty and group polarization,” he wrote, “is thirty years of college censorship.”

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