Is Mark Zuckerberg an alien?

   

Does he ever go outside in the sun?

The hearings on Tuesday in the Senate at which Mark Zuckerberg [...] apologized for Facebook’s role in the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election was one of the more surreal spectacles in the history of the world’s greatest deliberative body.

The ostensible subject was how Facebook handled a firm called Cambridge Analytica, a company with ties to the Mercers, a prime conservative sugar-family, which, in turn, had ties to the Trump campaign. The actual testimony, however, was a glimpse into how an 18th century institution, run primarily by 20th century white men, tries to cope with 21st century technology and its application to electoral chicanery. Most of them would have been better off letting their grandchildren question Zuckerberg.

[...]

Internet messianism always has made my skin itch just a little, and I think it pretty much died on Tuesday before the Senate. The members of the committee may have been several parsecs behind the times, but Zuckerberg came off not like a social and cultural visionary, but like just another reckless billionaire capitalist, clinging to his profits at all costs. He was the coal executive whose mine blew up. He was the oil baron whose tanker ran aground.

[...]

God love him, though, Tailgunner Ted Cruz [...] was most concerned about establishing social media as another context in which weepy conservatives could drive the nails through the palms of their own hands.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, the conservative self-martyrdom industry is in full cry these days over how their speech is being oppressed by Facebook and Twitter.

[...]

But, as many people have noted, Cruz somehow forgot to mention the fact that, during the 2016 election, it was his presidential campaign that was Cambridge Analytica’s first choice, which The Guardian hipped us to back in 2015.

[...]

I mention all this because I guarantee that this is going to be the main diversion over the next few months while the investigations into the Russian ratfcking heat up.

  Charles P Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 5/2/18: