Source: LIFE magazine 23 Apr 1945, which glosses over how Truman had been nominated July 1944 to replace Wallace as Roosevelt’s VP.
Here’s a sage warning from the controversial U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, as recorded by the Senate on April 17th, 1944: Source: Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the United States Congress. (1944). U.S. Government Printing Office.
Wallace wrote this for the New York Times, which had sent him a request to “write a piece answering the following questions”:
What is a Fascist?
How many Fascists have we?
How dangerous are they?
His definition basically is a Fascist combines of lust for money/power with an intensity “most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact”, such as when America First will “use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism”.
Many of his ideas sound relevant to today’s news, such as one about the Facebook executives falsely using privacy as a slogan just to conceal their selfish surveillance.
Years of twisting themselves into a pretzel to appease Trump only to have him throw Zuck into imaginary Gitmo…
The “New Deal” of Roosevelt was about building a democracy powerful enough to defeat a destructive value system of the Facebook-like monopolists and cartels who pumped up Fascism as a way to block competition.
It used to be that TV and radio broadcaster fear of the FCC was tied to its origin story under Roosevelt’s 1934 Communications Act. What better way to fight “America First” (the infamous Nazi military intelligence operation) than regulate against Nazism being promoted by monopolists like Hearst? It was no coincidence the General Counsel of the FCC in 1940 (Telford Taylor) later became Prosecution Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials.
…inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. […] It was Hitler’s claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.
The above NYT article was published by Wallace two years after his very famous May 8, 1942 presentation on how to counter Germany military intelligence influence campaigns (minute 4:04).
The common man will smoke the Hitler stooges out into the open in The United States… he will destroy their influence… [using] the four freedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt… freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of the fear from secret police… and freedom from want.
A post called “The Fall of Facebook” is brutally honest about its executive management:
The company’s pursuit of “growth at any cost,” which in biology goes under the name “cancer,” can’t go on forever. There are only two possible outcomes: either the growth is forcibly removed and destroyed, or the growth goes on to kill its host.
I think my favorite line in that post is one I’ve been trying to say here for many years now.
Facebook is different: the leaders have enabled catastrophe. They’re in free fall.
Also this line stands out.
It’s over. The only remaining remedy is law, leading to a criminal trial, leading to handcuffs.
While many of us have for years compared an immorality of Facebook executives (especially their CSO) to the tobacco industry spreading known harms for self-gain… this post seems like the first time I’ve seen a compelling argument made for Facebook being cancer.
“I’m sorry, as you can see here your insurance doesn’t include Facebook.”
Also it’s not just esoteric specialists, safety experts or ethicists making these arguments about Facebook. Here’s a high-profile 2018 CEO interview for perspective:
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, argues that Facebook is addictive like cigarettes, and that the social media platform can have serious effects on society.
The public shaming hasn’t done the job, clearly. Handcuffs for their CSO might.
…we see individuals fleeing slavery who are able to hold the Spanish Empire at bay and fight them to a standstill for almost five decades — and then negotiate for their freedom and right to govern their communities…
Update September 27: Five police officers injured by Tesla have filed a lawsuit.
According to the suit: “The officers want to hold Tesla accountable, and force Tesla to publicly acknowledge and immediately correct the known defects inherent in its Autopilot and collision avoidance systems, particularly as those impact the ongoing safety of our nation’s first responders.” The lawsuit claims Tesla’s autopilot system has been linked to at least 12 crashes in the United States involving first responders working active scenes with flashing lights.
Texas police officers are suing Tesla on a principle it “over serves” intoxicating information to car owners, which (like over serving alcohol) makes the company as liable as a bar or bartender for crashes.
Lately there have been multiple stories about drivers pulled from Tesla who are sleeping drunk and try to claim it’s ok because they were told by Tesla and its CEO the car could drive itself.
These five officers would thus be entirely correct to emphasize a need to “publicly acknowledge” known defects and stop such a poisonous scam.
Here’s just one example: recently in California (September 21) a driver asleep in a Tesla was reported by a car behind her (who happened to be her husband) and police used flashing lights on a vehicle in front to force a stop.
In radio transmissions the troopers could be heard describing how the car was driving itself with the unconscious driver in it. “The reporting party is advising that his wife is unconscious in a Tesla. The vehicle is driving itself,” the emergency dispatcher said on the recordings. “It ended up TC’ing (traffic collision) into the right shoulder wall, and, uh, still continuing.”The dispatcher then added that the suspect’s husband was following the Tesla in his Volkswagen car.
The Tesla hit the wall at low speed? The sleeping driver was awoken, given a DUI test and failed. And now onto the actual blog post…
The first Tesla “Autopilot” crash fatality was January 2016. It crashed into the back of a high visibility service vehicle with flashing safety lights.
Tesla at that time (again, we’re talking about January 2016) made bold statements it would be the one to take decisive and quick action to prevent it happening again.
Company founder Elon Musk said the firm was in the process of making improvements to its auto pilot system aimed at dramatically reducing the number of crashes blighting the model S. Autopilot can keep a constant speed, keep the car in lane and apply the brakes automatically. Musk has said that he wants to make improvements to Autopilot since last year, but he was told it couldn’t be done for various technical reasons. He said: “We really pushed hard on questioning all of those assumptions over the past few months. “It was just a very hard problem. Nobody else could solve this.”
Finally in August 2021 the US government announced it would look into this as negligence by Tesla, which seems ridiculously late when it could have been an immediate reaction to help avoid many preventable deaths.
NHTSA says it has identified 11 crashes since 2018 in which Teslas on Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control have hit vehicles at scenes where first responders have used flashing lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board or cones warning of hazards. The agency announced the action Monday in a posting on its website.
And then September 2021 the “Truth_Tesla” disinformation account on Twitter abruptly announced Tesla could now detect an emergency light and slow down for safety.
Source: Twitter
There’s quite a bit to unpack in that one tweet.
Of course this begs the question why the company waited five years? Why take sooooo long?
Why did so many people have to die first?
The answer seems to be a government action has scared Tesla into action, unlike the loss of human lives.
More to the point, “Truth_Tesla” points to a GAO report and shares a tiny snippet of the following paragraph:
These data indicate that there are relatively few fatalities and injuries from
crashes involving emergency vehicles in general. Our analysis of 2018 FARS and CRSS data shows that overall, there were 112 fatalities from crashes involving emergency vehicles, representing 0.3 percent of all traffic fatalities that year. The total number of traffic injuries involving an emergency vehicle in use was estimated to be about 8,000, or 0.3
percent of all estimated traffic injuries that year. Further, our review of the separate “related factors” data variable to identify emergency responders involved in crashes found that out of 14 individuals who were either emergency services personnel or law enforcement officers involved in a fatal crash in 2018, 11 were killed and 3 had non-fatal injuries.
The simple logic here should be if you can make a minor engineering change to save a life, would you make that change? The answer has to be yes.
However, at Tesla the answer seems to have been a big NO for FIVE YEARS despite many crashes.
Looking closer at the Tesla announcement, it also has caveats.
…detects lights from an emergency vehicle when using Autosteer at night on a high speed road…
Has to be on a “high speed” road at night time only? If it only functions on highways at night, that’s basically a sensor for lights where there are no other lights, which is like not being any kind of real flashing lights sensor at all (just a basic light sensor).
Important here to remember that the January 2016 fatality from running into emergency vehicle lights was… during the day.
If you follow all of the GAO analysis, they’re showing a lot of time and energy has been spent since the 1990s to get to a zero crash report. Tesla in 2016 should have sent alarm bells off, and certainly by 2018 should have been in serious trouble.
Now consider how “Truth_Tesla” offers a value system that argues if only a small percentage of people are dying or injured then why bother looking at Tesla being a cause at all. They literally say this in a tweet:
NHTSA is only aware of 17 such Ambulance injuries since 2018 that involved Teslas (!), well below Tesla’s share of miles driven.
Imagine if a driver drove into a service vehicle and killed or injured someone, then got out of the car and said “in my defense that’s one person, a statistically insignificant number, so I should get to do this wrong thing many more times”… or “this terrible crash I just caused is well below my share of miles driven”.
Truth_Tesla then attempts a “please clap” for a minor engineering change long overdue; a neck-snapping flip from “why care about statistically insignificant events” to “everyone look over here and care about us because we did something easy”.
