Category: Sparrow Chat

As if it’s not bad enough to have authoritarian governments rising to power all around us, there’s a new problem beginning to rear it’s very ugly head: corporate authoritarianism.

Nowhere was this to be seen more clearly than at the recent, and very much respected, annual Hay Literary Festival at Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales.

One of those invited to speak, and be interviewed by the renowned ex-Guardian, investigative journalist Carol Cadwallader, was Sarah Wynn-Williams, an ex-employee of Facebook. She worked at the company from 2011 as their global public policy director. In 2017 her employment was terminated after she reported her boss, Joel Kaplan, for alleged sexual harassment.

Kaplan worked in the US government under George W Bush before eventually taking employment with Facebook in 2014 as vice-president of US public policy. He had Zuckerberg’s ear and by 2014 had risen to become vice-president of Facebook’s global policy, making him Sarah Wynn-Williams immediate boss.

Forced to leave Facebook, Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a scathing condemnation of the company, “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.” The book is highly critical of Facebook and the poisonous internal culture that pervades the organization.

In retaliation, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, took out a legal order preventing the author from promoting her book in any way, at risk of a $50,000 fine for any and every breach. The order specifically mentioned the Hay Festival.

To combat this problem there were three people on stage for the hour long interview, Sarah Wynn-Williams, Carole Cadwallader and Professor Tim Wu. Tim Wu is Professor of Law at Columbia University and an expert on matters relating to the internet. Throughout the interview Professor Wu answered the questions Carole Cadwallader might have put to Sarah Wynn-Williams, who sat in total silence throughout.

Professor Wu told the audience:

“For a long time now, people have been saying that the tech platforms have come to have the power and the size and the might of nation states. This is the living example, because this is censorship.

“Any authoritarian regime naturally gravitates towards silencing its critics.

“We need to call this what it is. This is the age of private censorship. This is the assertion of power. This is a demonstration that some of the worst abuses in our time are not confined to kings, emperors and governments.”

Sparrow Chat’s author no longer adheres to any social media platforms. There are no icons linking to them in Sparrow Chat’s sidebar. It didn’t take Sarah Wynn-William’s book to inform us that Facebook has a poisonous work culture.  There’s a plethora of information from ex-employees online and it goes back a long way.

The platform’s management hierarchy have moved about as far right-wing as it’s possible to get. Joel Kaplan, the guy Sarah Wynn-Williams accused of sexual harassment, has led the move in that direction, as the French journal, “L’Express,” explains:

“Having joined the Meta group in the early 2010s, [Joel Kaplan] this broad-shouldered former advisor to George W. Bush has Mark Zuckerberg’s ear “like no one else,” a close associate of Joel Kaplan told our colleagues at the Financial Times . It was he who reportedly encouraged Zuckerberg, when he was still Vice President of International Affairs at Meta, to initiate a “full-on Trump” shift. The underlying message: goodbye to moderation and fact-checking, hello to total freedom of expression, modeled on X….” L’Express 23/03/25.

(*it may be necessary to translate from the French).

(Read Carole Cadwallader’s article on the interview HERE.)

Yes, I know I’ve not posted for a long time.  I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat down to WordPress determined to write something, only to remember I had something important I must attend to instead.

In just one week I become an Octogenarian. I find it hard to believe, or accept. Mentally, I still don’t feel a day over forty. Physically, there are days I could barely pass for ninety.

There are few advantages to old age, but there is one: the ability to look back down the decades at eighty years of history. Things become a lot clearer once time allows one to back away and analyze the big picture of one’s life, one’s place in the world.

If there’s one thing that stands out for me as I look back down the years it’s how my relationship with religion and the religious has slowly but steadily eroded to the point of utter disbelief, if not a smattering of contempt.

I know I may well offend a lot of people with what I’m about to write, but at the milestone of eighty years on this planet, I believe I have a right to speak my mind. I learned a lot about the various world religions at different stages in my life.  Suffice to say, I realised  over time there was no ‘God’, no ‘Allah’ nor any deity that human beings could relate to.

At this moment we are witnessing more proof of the non-existence of the gods possibly than ever before. According to the Washington Post:

“The Trump administration is hosting an all-day prayer festival on the National Mall on Sunday that organizers say will reflect the country’s Christian origins and, they hope, spark “a movement of renewal” in America.“

Will they be taking a day off from dragging innocent people into concentration camps simply because of the colour of their skin? Will they stop shredding families, leaving children helpless, mothers without means of support?

The National Mall on Sunday will be a gathering of egos, led by a political motivation to improve the poll ratings of the one person who will be leading it. He’s lost quite a few of his MAGA religious right after a series of egotistical blunders that only proved how deranged the mind can become when besotted with power.

The “Christian” hard right are the ones who own the most weaponry in the country and will be happy to use it, if necessary, in the belief their ‘god’ is on their side. Such is the human race’s ability to transform the combination of power and ego to justify any horror in the name of their imaginary deity.

Look to the state of Israel, a nation so egotistical, “the chosen of Jehovah,” it can commit genocide and justify it, at least to themselves. Oh, and don’t bother to cry, “Antisemitism.” That’s the excuse of Israeli politicians for any criticism of their bad deeds. There are millions of Jews around the world equally abhorrent of the ghastly situation in Gaza. Are they too, antisemitic? No, they are anti their corrupt government.

The origin of species is no longer a theory expounded by Charles Darwin. Evolution is a proven fact. We are animals and our nearest relatives are the apes. Chimpanzees share 98%-99% of their DNA with humans. It’s not hard to understand. Human beings share much of their characteristics with chimpanzees, including their aggressive tendencies. The only difference; we have honed our aggressiveness to the level of murder, torture, rape, mass killing and genocide.  Chimpanzees do kill their fellows, but have not attained the human level of sheer mass brutality. Perhaps when they evolve to the point of inventing a god they may have their excuse to do so.

None of us know how long we have on this planet. My father died at the ripe old age of 107. I don’t expect to rival him, but when the time comes I’ll not be seeking any Heavenly paradise to spend eternity. Frankly, the very idea of being part of a large group of egocentric, moralistic religiots would be enough to send me scurrying downstairs to join the irreligious in the fiery hell the churches invented for people like me who dare to criticise them.

No, I am happy to know I will simply cease to exist. It’s said that  human beings generally love their beds and their sleep time. I certainly do, and always have.  When I go I’ll look forward to an eternal sleep, a non-being, no more stressing about my future, the state of the world, or if I’ve been good enough to get a favoured tick from Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Rest in Peace? That’ll do me.

As the likes of Polymarket and Kalshi have recently discovered, the idea of betting on nuclear Armageddon hasn’t gone down well with the populace. After all, how would you collect your winnings?

Nevertheless, the idea that human beings find such things distasteful does not detract from the possibility of an all-consuming nuclear, or other form, of human annihilation.

Given the present state of malevolence that abounds in the world today the idea that, ‘it could never happen,’ is overdue to be consigned to the garbage disposal.

One hundred and sixty-five primary school children and their teachers annihilated, murdered, as an opening salvo of US/Israeli aggression against another country. Do the leaders of that aggression care? No. of course not. They’re both sociopathic narcissists who will happily file it under ‘collateral damage’. It’s a trite little phrase that converts the mass murder of innocent people into something  that’s ‘okay’.

Netanyahu needs to wage war. It’s the only way he can stay in power and out of jail. As for the President of the United States, he’s so annoyed at the Nobel Committee for not awarding him the Peace Prize for ending eight imaginary wars, that now his attitude is, “I’ll show ’em.”

Netanyahu was quick to notice and took no time to talk the US President into joining him in a jolly power jaunt to assassinate Khamenei and most of his Iranian government, before beginning a slaughter of any Iranian citizen who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  This, after said citizens were recently told  by America to rise up and take control of their government.

Retaliations by Iran were hardly surprising. In response they seem happy to initiate another Middle Eastern war, attacking any and all Sunni regimes in the area – which is most of them.

What else could they do? Sit back and allow themselves to be slaughtered on the whims of two power-crazed psychopaths?  Don’t misunderstand me, the regime in Tehran is horrific but so are the antics of those presently killing, maiming and terrorizing innocent Iranian citizens.

Netanyahu has not yet completed his ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. The United States is hellbent on depleting its population by grabbing off the streets anyone the secret police consider could be the wrong colour, or ethnically ‘unclean’. Speak out against such actions and you risk being murdered in a hail of bullets.

Meanwhile, the great and politically good of Europe sit on their arses, nervously chewing their fingernails and hoping it’s all a bad dream from which they’ll soon awake.

Netanyahu is taking the opportunity to blitz Lebanon, ostensibly to annihilate Hezbollah, but to hell with any Lebanese citizens who get in the way of an Israeli missile, or whose homes are pulverized in the process.

As if there was any doubt that humanity is in it’s last throes of self-destruction on this planet, a report highlighted today shows the planet warming at it’s fastest rate since records began in 1880. The research, “…excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures.”

An essay by David Krueger, assistant professor in Robust, Reasoning and Responsible AI at the University of Montreal, warns of the dangers of AI and how AI machines (agents) are communicating with each other through a social media platform ( Moltbook) without any human intervention.

Human beings have no need of AI agents to carry out their own destruction. The present state of the world is evidence of that. A  lack of any regulation in the digital industry, coupled with the greed and power of those in charge of it, will likely only result in a speeding up of the process.