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When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term “the normalization of deviance,” she was referring to
NASA administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to explode, in 1986. The idea was that people in an organization can become so accepting of a problem that they no longer consider it to be problematic. (In the case of the Challenger,
NASA had been warned that the shuttle’s O-rings were likely to fail in cold temperatures.) Consider Facebook: for years, its leadership has known that the social network has abetted political polarization, social unrest, and even ethnic cleansing. More recently, it has been aware that its algorithms have promoted misinformation and disinformation campaigns about
Social media and the Democrats are suddenly struck colorblind. Thu Apr 8, 2021 Last Friday, a 25-year-old Nation of Islam supporter named Noah Green rammed his car into a barricade outside the U.S. Capitol, killing police officer William Evans and injuring another officer in the process, before Green himself was shot and killed by a cop at the scene. In stark contrast to the countless lamentations – by media outlets and elected Democrats – that the people who stormed the Capitol building on January 6 were an undifferentiated pack of “racists” and “white supremacists,” Democrats and their leftwing allies have been remarkably uninterested in the element of race vis-à-vis Mr. Green and the white policeman he killed on Friday. Senator Chuck Schumer, for one, soberly claimed, without reference to race, to be “heartbroken for the family and loved ones” of the fallen officer. President Biden offered his “heartfelt condolences” to Evans’ family. And Nancy