Please join the Ocean Beach Town Council meeting this evening, April 22nd, at 7pm on Facebook Live.
As always, you’ll hear from elected officials, public servants, and the board. Also Assemblymember Todd Gloria – who is running for mayor – will be joining the OBTC on the call.
Comments and questions will be taken live on facebook. At the in-person meetings, anyone is offered a 2-minute public comment during that section. If you’d like to participate in public comment, please reach out to the OBTC on social media and they’ll send you a link to join the call for that section.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m not an OB resident but it worries me to see public planning groups conducting business on Facebook. What happens to citizen input from people who don’t have Facebook accounts?
i quite agree. they should at least us zoom so that hackers can add some decent content.
It’s a valid worry, but just to be clear, the OB Town Council is a private 501c4 nonprofit organization. Not a planning group, and not subject to the Brown Act. Interestingly, the attendance online has far exceeded normal attendance at in-person meetings. Hopefully when we return to a regular in-person format, we can keep up the live online feeds to reach even more residents who may otherwise work or have children at home, or cannot attend due to any other reasons.
That’s true…but I meant my comment to apply to ALL groups — unless they intentionally mean to exclude people from having input if they don’t have a Facebook account.
i’m with george. it would be just as easy to investigate a feasible alternative as it is to deflect criticism concerning obligatory facebook membership. technically, there are 7.8 billion people in the world and as of 2018 an estimated 2.2 billion facebook users. you’re all totally outnumbered, dudes, although presumably if everyone in the world attended the online forum it could inadvertently overload the russian hackers’ mainframes…
…apologies re: the typo. pointless to be hasty at a time like this. we could all ‘use’ an alternative to facebook…
It’s not that some people don’t have Facebook that bothers me but the fact of Facebook’s willing involvement in spreading misinformation in the 2016 Presidential election that handed it to Donald Trump by encouraging misguided people into voting for third party candidates in electoral swing states.
i’m not fully up to scratch on that ‘russians ruined our democracy’ riff. maybe if the demos hum a few more bars of it. they were the ones who tried to foist hillary on us. it blew up in their face and they chose to avoid accepting responsibility. what else is new? i didn’t really need putin to tell me hillary was a bad idea. i guess the i-hate-russia crap is what you become familiar with if you spend your time on facebook. [are american voters really sufficiently weak-brained to vote for a candidate because of a facebook advertisement? if so, can putin really be blamed for a condition that has been developing gradually in our nation since 1789?] ergo, the requirement to be a facebook member to participate in a public political forum seems, how shall i say, moronic. and while i appreciate that others are not concerned re: my refusal to sign up for a pear when i am specifically seeking a peach, i humbly reassert that facebook is principally intended for dorks, dweebs and marmosets. peace, y’all.
Scott – please don’t downplay what the Russian leaders did – they clearly tried to manipulate us in favor of Trump. As “bad” as Hilary was, she was oceans better than orange-face – please! There was no moral equivalency. Let’s not continue that narrative.
i would instinctively respond that ‘you must be joking’, but clearly you are not. no worries. we’re all friends here hopefully. i would suggest that our much vaunted electoral system could conceivably have derived a better ‘choice’ of candidates than rump or ms. clinton — if it had been devised to do anything other than to perpetuate a global war machine that is essentially now out of control. obviously, i was not referring to russia, china, iran or venezuela in the prior comment, so i leave it to you to do the math, so to speak. our state-based war economy seemed to make a lot more sense when the british were hovering offshore with gun ships. the entire concept of ‘hating russians’ is outdated. let’s get past it. we know our own government and that of ‘friendlies’ are a lot more intimate in terms of electoral ‘decisions’, i.e., electoral college. let’s keep in mind that the drone wars did not disappear under obama. in short, it would be best to keep things real…and i appreciate the opportunity to exchange views, so much obliged to obrag! best wishes, all.
You make good points, but I always try to distinguish between the Russian people and the government/ Kremlin / Putin. Sure, there’s been this “Russian-bias” that goes all the way back to the Russian Revolution in 1917, and our government sent US troops to fight the revolutionary forces. Russia was the US ally in both world wars (it’s interesting to watch mid and late-40s films where the Russians are our “comrades”). And then of course the Cold War was ignited by right-wing forces in this country, Joe McCarthy and friends. And I could on and on. ….
The electoral college – a relic from slavery days – needs to be abolished – so, sure if we had a better democracy, we would have had better candidates. But we don’t and we didn’t. Stay healthy, mi amigo.
allow me to preface this comment by stating ‘for the record’ that i am a lifelong vegetarian pacifist commonly regarded by police as a ‘boy scout’: 64-years-old, clean dmv, no priors, no history of post-industrial systemic sabotage, no nada.
we’re just exchanging views here…
all true, frank. thanks for responding. invasions are intended to exploit perceived weaknesses. we’ll hopefully stick to venezuela, cuba and nicaragua in future decades under rump’s third and fourth regime, conceivably. forgive my sardonic approach: we used to hide under tables as school kids. we’re still doing it in a psychological sense. but here is my point in a nutshell.
the cold war, i.e., nuclear proliferation, should have ended in 1958. kruschev would have liked nothing better. quite likely jfk would have preferred that outcome, as well. the negotiations were sabotaged then and continue to be sabotaged by a military industrial complex that prefers expanding ‘competitive arms markets’ with predetermined and long-standing clientele [sorry, syria…].
should we expect them to close their plants, their ‘think tanks’, their lobbying efforts, domestic provocation and/or overseas destabilization simply because we want them to?
there is no need to distinguish between russian government and their people. not anymore than a need to distinguish between the israeli govt. and its people, or the us govt. and its people, or the french govt. and its people, ad nauseum. a militarized state is a militarized state.
Lincoln, Speech at Ottawa: ‘If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.’
oh, well. peace.