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GREEN BAY, Wis. -- The Detroit Lions have a quarterback who hasnt won any division titles or playoff games or anything at all in 11 years. The Green Bay Packers have a quarterback who has won six division titles, 10 playoff games, one conference championship and one Super Bowl in 12 years -- and even threw in one Super Bowl MVP and two league MVPs along the way.

Guess which team just spent a first-round pick on a quarterback this year.

To the dismay of some Lions fans, Detroit chose cornerback Jeff Okudah over Tua Tagovailoa with the third overall pick in this years draft. Now Okudah is expected to make his NFL debut on Sunday against Aaron Rodgers, who remains Green Bays starting quarterback despite the first-round selection of Jordan Love in the spring.

And anyone watching in Week 1 could clearly see why.

Rodgers killed Minnesota with one of the best opening-week performances by a quarterback in the last decade. The numbers: 32 of 44 passing for 364 yards, four touchdowns and no picks. And Green Bay rolled to a league-high 43 points.

Now that guy is going to face a Lions secondary that is down two starting cornerbacks, and will almost certainly start one rookie who is attending his first NFL game.

Theres a lot going on here, and weve brought in Packers beat writer Ryan Wood of the Green Bay Press-Gazette to help us break it down in this weeks installment of the Beat Writer Breakdown. This is a weekly series where we put five questions to a reporter who covers Detroits opponent.

You can find Ryan Wood on Twitter here, and more of his work at the Green Bay Press-Gazette here. And with that, lets go.

MLive: How has Aaron Rodgers responded to the addition of Jordan Love? By the looks of it in Week 1, seems like he still knows how to do the whole quarterback thing.

Ryan Wood: The big storyline in Green Bay this preseason basically amounted to Aaron Rodgers being a willing smiler. Which probably says as much about the reality of remote coverage than anything. But, yes, teammates were pleased to report the quarterback is happy, and indeed he has seemed loose on the field. Rodgers hasnt always given off the best body language in the past, but thats been different since the team returned in August.

"Itd be fascinating to see what goes on behind closed doors, because Rodgers cant possibly be happy with how his future likely changed this spring. For all the comparisons to what the Packers did with Rodgers and Brett Favre back in the 2005 draft, there are clear differences. Rodgers, unlike Favre, has said over and over he intends to play into his 40s. He has never given any indication of impending retirement.

But its important to remember Rodgers has seen this before, from the other perspective, so it cant really be a surprise. He entered the league learning how the business works, even for a legend, and has always been aware his career might not end with the Packers -- because if it can happen to Favre, it can happen to anyone. So I do wonder if Rodgers has loosened his grip on things he cant control, something he has indicated in these Zoom calls. As for that right arm, yes, theres still plenty of juice.

MLive: Its easy to look at what Rodgers and the offense did on Sunday, and what the Lions are dealing with defensively, including probably starting rookie Jeff Okudah in his NFL debut, and see this as a lopsided matchup. Agreed? If you were try to beat this Packers offense, how would you go about it?

Wood: The Packers feasted on a young Vikings cornerback group last week -- Holton Hill on Davante Adams should be illegal -- and get another opportunity this week. I imagine Okudah might give Adams a tougher matchup, if that indeed is the matchup, because it would be hard not to. Still, the Packers will rightly view Adams against anyone in the Lions secondary as favorable. They were surely glad to see Darius Slay leave the division this spring.

As for the right approach, I wonder if the Lions will turn the tide on how to face this offense after the Vikings basically dared the Packers to throw last week. Aaron Jones is a stud, led the NFL in rushing touchdowns last season, and the Vikings were certainly aware. They loaded the box constantly against Jones, holding him to 66 rushing yards on 16 carries. But that allowed Adams to tie Don Hutsons single-game record with 14 receptions, a mark that had stood alone since 1942. Rodgers passed for four touchdowns and had a 127.5 rating.

In this league, you get beat quicker with the pass than the run. My guess is Jones might face fewer loaded boxes Sunday.

MLive: Not sure if you heard, but Adrian Peterson is in Detroit now, and actually looked pretty good in the opener. How is the Packers' run defense this year, and how will the loss of Kenny Clark affect that?

Wood: Different year, same reality for the Packers. Once again, they must stop Adrian Peterson. Theyve faced that challenge almost every year since 2007, and its never easy. The run game is certainly the big question for the Packers defense this season. You might have heard they gave up about 12,000 rushing yards in the NFC championship game at San Francisco. (The real number was 285. It felt like more.)

So far, the Packers are off to a good start. They kept Dalvin Cook in check last week, holding him to 50 yards on 12 carries. When they met Cook early last season, he had 154 yards on 20 carries. Maybe most important, the Packers didnt give Cook the big run. Cook had a 75-yard touchdown last season at Lambeau Field, meaning the rest of his 19 carries were somewhat ordinary. But it obviously did not matter because of the one. Cooks longest carry Sunday was 12 yards. Youll take that every time.

Now the Packers see a running back who broke into the league a few months before Aaron Jones was a teenager. Adrian Petersons name alone makes it impossible to overlook him, not that the Packers run defense can overlook anybody. His film from those 93 yards on 14 carries last week surely hammered home the point. It wont be easy without Kenny Clark -- the Packers defensive line is paper thin without him -- but my guess is coordinator Mike Pettine will try to load the box and let Jaire Alexander and Kevin King defend Matthew Stafford with minimal help on the outside.

MLive: Lambeau Field is always a daunting challenge. Lambeau Field for a home opener, especially so. Yet this time there will be no fans. What do you expect from that dynamic?

Wood: I think its going to be much like we saw across the league in Week 1. Which is to say, weird. Very weird. Look, we all knew football games without fans would be strangely different, but Im not sure any of us could have been prepared for just how strangely different it truly was.

Unlike basketball and baseball, football players never, ever play games without fans. From childhood, theyre conditioned to performing. Their ear is trained to recognize the sound of the crowd, how closely the noises in the stands are correlated to the play on the field. Without that, players said it was difficult to know how to respond, or even if plays were good or bad because the crowd wasnt there to tell them.

The biggest impact will be on the Lions defense contending against Aaron Rodgers' cadence. Rodgers used the hard count twice to draw the Vikings into neutral zone infractions last week on third down, picking up a pair of free conversions. He also got a free play because of an offsides in the second half, which ended with a 39-yard completion to Marquez Valdes-Scantling. Rodgers has long been arguably the NFLs best at dictating the game with his cadence. The absence of fans, with minimal ambient noise piped in over the speakers, only amplifies his ability to control the line of scrimmage.

MLive: Green Bay swept the series last year despite never actually leading in a game. It keeps rolling against Detroit on Sunday if ...

Wood: ... they show up and play clean football. Their best against the Lions' best is just better.

Ryan Woods prediction: I predicted comfortable wins for the Packers last season too, and they were certainly anything but comfortable. But considering the Lions will not be at their best because of the injury situation, its hard to see how the Packers lose this. Packers 34, Lions 17

Continued here:
Beat Writer Breakdown: A look inside the Aaron Rodgers-Jordan Love drama in Green Bay - MLive.com

Cultural Marxism is a term favoured by those on the right who argue the humanities are hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Australia.

The criticism is that radical voices have captured the humanities, stifling free speech on campuses.

The term has been used widely over the past decade. Most infamously, in former senator Fraser Annings 2018 final solution speech to parliament he denounced cultural Marxism as not a throwaway line, but a literal truth.

But is cultural Marxism actually taking over our universities and academic thinking? Using a leading academic database, I crunched some numbers to find out.

The term cultural Marxism moved into the media mainstream around 2016, when psychologist Jordan Peterson was protesting a Canadian bill prohibiting discrimination based on gender. Peterson blamed cultural Marxism for phenomena like the movement to respect gender-neutral pronouns which, in his view, undermines freedom of speech.

Read more: Is Jordan Peterson the philosopher of the fake news era?

But the term is much older. It seems first to have been used by writer Michael Minnicino in his 1992 essay The New Dark Age, published by the Schiller Institute, a group associated with the fringe right wing figure Lyndon LaRouche.

Around the turn of the century, the phrase was adopted by influential American conservatives. Commentator and three time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan targeted cultural Marxism for many perceived ills facing America, from womens rights and gay activism to the decline of traditional education.

The term has since gone global, sadly making its way into Norwegian terrorist Anders Breviks justificatory screed. Andrew Bolt used it as early as 2002. In 2013, Cory Bernardi was warning against cultural Marxism as one of the most corrosive influences on society.

By 2016, the year the Peterson affair unfolded, Nick Cater and Chris Uhlmann were blaming it for undermining free speech in The Australian. The idea has since been adopted by Mark Latham and Malcolm Roberts.

Insofar as it goes beyond a fairly broad term of enmity, the accusers of cultural Marxism point to two main protagonists behind this ideology.

The first is Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Writing under imprisonment by the fascists in the 1920s, Gramsci argued the left needed to capture the bureaucracy, universities and media-cultural institutions if it wished to hold power.

The second alleged culprits are neo-Marxist theorists associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research. These critical theorists drew on psychoanalysis, social theory, aesthetics, and political economy to understand modern societies. They became especially concerned with how fascism could win the allegiance of ordinary people, despite its appeals to aversive prejudice, hatred and militarism.

When Hitler came to power, the Frankfurt School was quickly shut down, and its key members forced into exile. Then, as Uhlmann has narrated:

Frankfurt School academics [] transmitted the intellectual virus to the US and set about systematically destroying the culture of the society that gave them sanctuary.

While Soviet communism faltered, the story continues, the cultural Marxist campaign to commandeer our culture was marching triumphantly through the humanities departments of Western universities and outwards into wider society.

Today, critics argue it shapes the political correctness that promotes minority causes and polices public debate on issues like the environment, gender and immigration - posing a grave threat to liberal values.

Read more: How a fake 'free speech crisis' could imperil academic freedom

If the conservative anxieties about cultural Marxism reflected reality, we would expect to see academic publications on Marx, Gramsci and critical theorists crowding out libertarian, liberal and conservative voices.

To test this, I conducted quantitative research on the academic database JStor, tracking the frequency of names and key ideas in all academic article and chapter titles published globally between 1980 and 2019.

In 1987, Karl Marx himself ceded the laurel as the most written about thinker in academic humanities, replaced by Friedrich Nietzsche revered by many fascists including Benito Mussolini and Martin Heidegger, another figure whose far-right politics were hardly progressive.

Over the past 40 years, the alleged mastermind of cultural Marxism, Gramsci, attracted 480 articles. This compares with the 407 publications on Friedrich Hayek, arguably the leading influence on the neoliberal free market reforms of the last decades.

The Frankfurt School featured in less than 200 titles, and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (identified by Uhlmann as a key transmitter of the cultural Marxist virus in the US) was the subject of just over 220.

Over the last decade, the most written about thinker was the neo-Nietzschean theorist, Giles Deleuze, featuring in 770 titles over 2010-19.

But the notoriously esoteric ideas of Deleuze - and his language of machinic assemblages, strata, flows and intensities - are hardly Marxist. His ideas have been a significant influence on the right-wing Neoreactionary or dark enlightenment movement.

The last four decades have seen a relative decline of Marxist thought in academia. Its influence has been superseded by post-structuralist (or postmodernist) thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Deleuze.

Post-structuralism is primarily indebted to thinkers of the European conservative revolution led by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Where Marxism is built on hopes for reason, revolution and social progress, post-structuralist thinkers roundly reject such optimistic grand narratives.

Post-structuralists are as preoccupied with culture as our conservative news columnists. But their analyses of identity and difference challenge the primacy Marxism affords to economics as much as they oppose liberal or conservative ideas.

Quantitative research bears out the idea that cultural Marxism is indeed a post-factual dog whistle and an intellectual confusion masquerading as higher insight.

A spectre of Marxism has survived the cold war. It now haunts the culture wars.

Read more:
Is 'cultural Marxism' really taking over universities? I crunched some numbers to find out - The Conversation AU

I am meeting Russell Howard just days after he made headlines for walking off midway through a gig. He had not been billed in advance and had come to try out some new material in front of a pandemic-appropriate, small live audience. It didnt last long. When the comedian spotted a woman filming him, he at first stopped to chastise her Thats literally the worst thing you can do and then left the stage saying that she had ruined it.

It amazed me that it became a story, Howard says. I mean, its not like theres anything going on in the world, but oh my God a wonky-eyed comedian asked a lady at a live gig to be in the moment I was tired is the truth.

On telly, Howard looks incapable of being tired. Apparently ageless, hugely physical with his performances and relentlessly funny, he has been a mainstay of the schedules for more than a decade. In person, thankfully, he is less of a caricature; calm, thoughtful, wearing prescription glasses. The last time we met was in January, under very different circumstances. It was in front of a huge live audience, and in a bizarre reversal of roles, he was interviewing me for his Sky One show, the Russell Howard Hour, which returns n week.

Of course, a lot has happened since then. His world tour had to be postponed because of the pandemic and he went to lockdown with his parents in Bath so that his wife, a doctor, could stay in their London home with her colleagues. Its very weird at the beginning because you just feel such unbelievable pride but such fear as well, he says. You see the nurses and the doctors in the full PPE gear. And its sort of bewildering to think that thats your wife as well.

His fee for Sky Ones Russell Howards Home Time, which aired during lockdown, went to several charities including one for the NHS. Made in difficult circumstances, it was nonetheless a respectable effort to put an uplifting show together via Zoom calls from Howards childhood bedroom. The day of my 40th birthday, I was meant to be doing a sold-out arena in Amsterdam, he recalls, and I slept in my childhood bed.

Spinning jokes out of dark places is what comedians do best and the hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle has offered plenty of opportunities from grappling with Brexit to dealing with the pandemic. There was that really interesting stat at the beginning, in terms of Priti Patels immigration policy, that you couldnt go into this country unless youre at a job over 26 grand, he says. The majority of jobs that it turns out were vital were below 26 grand. And there was this assumption that if youre earning less than that, its not really a proper job. And yet it was what kept society going.

While he cares deeply, he is careful not to be too worthy when using examples such as this in his standup. What I like doing is talking about those things at gigs and trying to actually make it funny rather than make you applaud something you already know, he explains. A real issue with that kind of comedy at the minute is theres so much clapter, where you just say a thing and in a certain way, like: I think everybody should be treated fairly in the world people ... He gestures people clapping with self-satisfaction.

When people are laughing, you dont have time to do anything else because youre lost in the giggle ... theres such a truth to it because if you laugh, it is true, its tangible. Weve all been in situations where, miraculously, the sunshine of laughter has appeared and made the horror sit less heavily.

He recalls one such moment, at his grandfathers funeral in 2017. For whatever reason, my cousin Stuart had worn a leather jacket to the funeral and my brother Dan, as were carrying Granddads coffin went: Nice jacket, Stu, and our shoulders all went a bit. And then Dan goes: You come as Lovejoy? And Im, like: Seriously, everyone shut the fuck up, but it was somehow a connection. My brother had the audacity to break the tension of heartbreak with stupid silliness. And then my nan died six months later. Stuart arrives late wearing the same jacket and all of us are instantly having to lift our shirts because were laughing so much. It provided a bit of daftness amongst the horror.

Moments such as this are delicate and he is keen to emphasise that it is hard to create the sort of comedy that really touches people. Only Fools and Horses probably added years to their life the joy it gave them, he says, still thinking of his grandparents. John Sullivan when he was writing it in his shed, he probably had no idea that he was making peoples Christmases.

You want it to be that important to people, but you cant approach it like that ... So I see that in Richard Pryor and I see that in Michelle Wolf or Bill Burr or Dave Chappelle or Daniel Kitson.

In recent times, comedians, including Chappelle, have been heavily criticised for jokes deemed to have gone beyond the pale of acceptable topics for humour. In Chappelles recent Netflix specials, the American comedian joked about the transgender community and the #MeToo movement, to much opprobrium from sections of the audience. He was kind of one of the few people that could do it ... just sort of say: Im going to play for comedians. Its kind of fascinating, Howard says. I think he got like 0% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics and then 99% from the people. And then won a Mark Twain prize [for American humour]. Its bizarre.

As social media increases the level of scrutiny that comedians face, those who remain unfazed by it are held in high regard by contemporaries and fans. The wonderful thing about someone like Bill Burr is that you can disagree with some things he says, and thats fine, Howard explains, but that is challenging in every aspect of the world now. Comedians are being reviewed like theyre presidents and presidents are getting away with behaving like comedians.

Howard is fascinated by the nuts and bolts of how comedy works and he lights up when talking about the process of writing jokes, something that has provided him with solace in difficult times. I certainly realised during lockdown that life is so much easier if you have a purpose, he says. Even if it is an artificial purpose, thats not the worst thing in the world ... The way I got through lockdown is I went through every note that Id written in my phone since 2006 that Id never finished and just tried to, day by day, write stuff on it. I really enjoyed it.

That theme of purpose makes me think of Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian academic and author, who featured in the Modern Masculinity series I produced. It was that series that led to me being interviewed on the Russell Howard Hour. I ask what he makes of Peterson and the controversy around him. We now live in a strange world, where if you say: You know its interesting, that Jordan Peterson says life is about finding a purpose and and trying to be the best at that, its like: Oh, my God, so you mean to say that you and then they can pull up things that he said elsewhere [as if you were endorsing them, too]. Some of [what he says] is ridiculous and some of its interesting and thats how most people are.

Thats whats frustrating about so many things, he continues. Everyones multilayered and everyones nuanced. Youre super-liberal on some things and super-conservative on other. This idea that you can only be in that gang or this gang is ludicrous, and it isnt the truth. The real world isnt social media.

[But] it doesnt it matter what you say. If somebody wants to skin you, they can skin you.

Series four of The Russell Howard Hour premieres on 10 September at 10pm on Sky One and NOWTV, whilst Russells return to the UK with his rescheduled world stand-up tour, Respite, begins on the 25 February 2021. More info at russell-howard.co.uk

Read this article:
Russell Howard: 'The real world isnt social media' - The Guardian

Adrian Peterson is arguably the most well-known running back of the last decade and a half. From his days starring as an Oklahoma Sooner in the Big 12, to his time carrying the Minnesota Vikings to the playoffs on the back of his incredible 2,000 yard season. He is one of the more physically gifted players in recent memory and his place in the top five all-time rushers in NFL history is a well-deserved one.

It seems his historic career may be nearing its conclusion. At the ripe-old age of 35, Adrian Peterson has been released by the Washington Football team mere days before the start of the 2020 NFL season. For a team that has relied on Adrian Peterson the last two seasons to the tune of nearly 2,000 yards, this is not shocking but a little surprising.

The question for many organizations at this point is whether bringing Adrian Peterson in for a workout could improve their team. This is certainly a conversation that every general manager is having, whether theres much intensity behind it or not. So the question remains, does he make sense for the Kansas City Chiefs?

The answer is emphatically no. Whether or not Adrian Peterson has much left in the tank doesnt really factor in here. The Chiefs offense going forward will showcase running backs who are extremely versatile, likely to burn you as much or even more in the passing game than they will in the running game.

Even in Adrian Petersons heyday, he was barely a threat in the passing game. His highest production in the passing game happened 11 seasons ago in 2009 and he really hasnt come close to it since. For his entire career, the percentage of production hes had in the passing game has amounted to only 14 percent of his total production.

Then theres the fact that Peterson wouldnt have any time to learn Andy Reids complex playbook. Even if the team did bring him in, youd likely not see him on the field for at least a few games if not half the season. At that point, would he really even impact the teams chances at repeating as Super Bowl champions? The answer is probably no.

Understandably, there will be some in Chiefs Kingdom who think bringing in a big name like Adrian Peterson will be a nice little boost to start the season. No disrespect to Peterson, as he has had himself a spectacular career, but the Chiefs shouldnt think twice about passing on him.

See the rest here:
Should the Kansas City Chiefs consider signing Adrian Peterson? - Arrowhead Addict

Over the past few years, I have all but stopped using Facebook. There were several reasons for doing so, but a big one was that I kept getting gross right-wing content stuffed into my news feed, no matter what pages I followed or who my friends were. Life is too short to wade through idiotic Jordan Peterson videos so I can feel depressed about how many people I know from high school are now openly racist.

But the truly noxious nature of Facebook has become even more clear in recent months. The platform has become a gigantic factory of extremist conspiracy theories and genocidal hatred part of a general trend in which right-wing publications and political campaigns have come to dominate the site all while bleeding traditional journalism to death.

Facebook, in short, is destroying America.

Last week, Russell Brandom at The Verge reported that several people had notified Facebook that a right-wing militia group called Kenosha Guards had been making violent threats on the platform in advance of the alleged murders committed by a Trump-supporting teenager. Content moderators did nothing about it. On Monday, President Trump repeated a ludicrous fake story that antifa had loaded a whole plane to go and disrupt the Republican National Convention which turns out to have come from a months-old viral Facebook post, just one of many similar freakouts over wholly imaginary "antifa supersoldiers." Conspiracy lunacy about coronavirus and QAnon have also spread like wildfire on the platform in recent months.

This kind of thing doesn't only happen in the United States, either. A United Nations report found that the company played a "determining role" in the attempted genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar, as extremists used the platform to coordinate and spread virulent hatred. A study of Germany found that where Facebook use was just one standard deviation above the average, racist attacks on refugees jumped by about half.

Now, it is not the case that Facebook is incapable of policing certain kinds of content. It stamps out pornography almost instantaneously, using tens of thousands of content moderators, because porn is a threat to Facebook's family-friendly brand and hence profits. (Incidentally, these moderators are horribly exploited, and experience serious trauma from all the nightmarish things they are forced to witness day after day. Facebook recently agreed to a $52 million settlement in compensation for moderators developing PTSD on the job.)

But the company is much more reluctant to police extremist political content for two reasons. First, tech platforms have long wanted to pretend as though they were above politics or regulation. They are, in fact, private dictatorships where company executives can and do regulate speech however they want, but this is an uncomfortable thing to admit when it comes to political content. Conservatives have taken advantage of this reluctance to get Facebook to bend over backwards to appease the right by constantly screaming tendentious lies about how it is biased against them, in much the same way as they bullied mainstream press outlets to do the same years ago.

Second, the company brass is increasingly openly reactionary. Former Bush administration staffer Joel Kaplan is Facebook's vice president of global public policy, and he pushes the same argument that it would be unfair to conservatives to shut down conspiracy garbage (implicitly conceding that most of that kind of junk is on the right, but never mind). The company's head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, was previously a militant anti-teacher union activist who happily endorsed Betsy DeVos' campaign to gut and privatize public education. After the 2016 election, Facebook rewrote its internal rules to allow Trump to lie on its platform. Peter Thiel, the pro-Trump billionaire who secretly used his money to destroy a publication he didn't like, and is openly against democracy, is also on the Facebook board, where he argues against fact-checking political ads.

As a result, Facebook is now ludicrously dominated by right-wing content farms. As Kevin Roose reports at the New York Times, over one week in August, right-wing personality Ben Shapiro got more interactions than "the main pages of ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR combined." Breitbart gets more likes than every Democratic member of the Senate put together. According to a Twitter account that documents the best-performing Facebook posts every day, other conservative figures like Dan Bongino and Franklin Graham are regularly at or near the top.

All these right-wing ghouls are very good at gaming the Facebook algorithm, but it simply cannot be the case that their operations generally skeleton crews surrounding a celebrity or two, that do almost no originally reporting are actually out-competing huge news organizations with dozens of expert social media employees. On the one hand, as John Whitehouse outlines in detail for Media Matters, Facebook shovels free attention to right-wing sources by selecting right-wing garbage as fact-checkers or "trusted sources," and directly boosting conservative content. On the other, Facebook exempts right-wing publishers from its own content standards, thus allowing them to win by cheating. As Judd Legum reports, Shapiro openly games the platform's algorithm through the use of multiple front pages that all coordinate to promote his content (and he probably isn't the only one doing this). This is a violation of Facebook's terms of service, but the company lets him get away with it, just as it forgave other right-wing accounts like Diamond and Silk, PragerU, Breitbart, and Charlie Kirk for flagrantly violating its misinformation policy. (Incidentally, Diamond and Silk had the top-performing post in the country on Tuesday.) On the contrary, Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac report at Buzzfeed News that when a Facebook engineer compiled evidence that the company was giving preferential treatment to right-wing content, he was fired.

Finally, Facebook is destroying journalism in this country. The online advertising oligopoly consisting of Facebook, Google, and Amazon have snapped up 70 percent of the digital advertising market, and as a result, all but the biggest media companies are being strangled a fifth of all newspapers have closed over the last 15 years, and most of those that remain have slashed their staff. Today, half of all American counties have only one (usually eviscerated) paper, and 200 have no paper at all.

At the recent House hearing involving all the Big Tech barons, Facebook stood out for the relative pointlessness of its core product. Amazon and Google may be ruthless and increasingly dysfunctional monopolists, but you actually can buy just about any product imaginable on the former and find just about any piece of information on the latter. Apple may exploit laborers in poorer countries and abuse its walled garden app store, but its phones are reliably some of the best you can buy. But Facebook is at best a sort of online White Pages that would be extremely easy to replace. If it were to vanish tomorrow, dozens of similar products would spring up the following day providing the exact same service the ability to talk to your friends and family. We had online forums 20 years ago, and they were straight-up better than Facebook at least they didn't seem to give you clinical depression.

That's what the government of Australia should keep in mind as it considers a law that would force Facebook to share revenue with publishers for being able to profit off their content. That threat to its monopoly profits naturally led the company to make a thuggish threat that it would forbid Australians from posting news articles about their country if it passed.

The government's response should be "bring it on." The company's refusal would open up space for an Australian Facebook replacement that wouldn't be so poisonous to local journalism, and could even compete worldwide by not being a propaganda arm of global fascism. I would join up immediately.

Continued here:
Facebook is setting fire to America - The Week