L'Hôte

yet again, the conventional divorce rate is pure bunk

2012-02-01T11:09:00.003-05:00

So Matt Yglesias and Mike Konczal and presumably others are talking about divorce rates and the economy. Unfortunately, they are taking the conventionally-calculated divorce rate at face value, when in fact the statistic is useless. I bring this up again and again. As it only tracks number of divorces compared to number of new marriages, the conventional divorce rate is both easily susceptible to small numbers of serial marriers, and more importantly, matching the data pool of divorces from all existing marriages against the data pool of just new marriages. A couple that has been together for years and stays together has no positive impact on the divorce rate of any given year, despite the fact that this is precisely what we're interested in. Indeed, a couple that stays together until death is never represented in the divorce rate at all other than in the year that they are married. A more accurate divorce rate, tracking individual marriages until they end in divorce or don't, is a much more difficult statistic to derive, but much more accurate. The best info I've seen is that the true divorce rate peaked in the early 90s, never exceeded 40%, and has declined since.

This isn't some crank view of mine, by the way, but a well-known problem in sociology. Quoth the New York Times:

But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will.

This particular discussion that Konczal and Yglesias are having is actually the perfect example of when the conventional divorce rate is most misleading. I don't blame them at all for using the conventional divorce rate, as despite its lack of analytic rigor, the popular press never stops using it. Maybe somebody with a better reputation than I have could get the word out.

it's all fantasy to me

2012-01-30T09:38:00.000-05:00

I said this in the comments to my previous post, but it's worth pulling out and repeating: this is all hard for me to discuss because none of it-- loyalty to nation state, loyalty to religion, loyalty to ethnicity-- makes any sense to me, for Israelis or Americans or Iranians or anyone else. I am an internationalist and an egalitarian, and I reject artificial divisions between broad groups of people. Because of the unique history of Judaism and Israel, these issues come up more often, but that doesn't mean the contradictions aren't there for America or any other country. I happen to think that what we butt up against in these discussions is an inevitable tension between the liberal ideal of equality across difference and the dividing lines of national identity.

The issue of divided loyalties rests on assumptions I simply don't hold. As near as I can figure out, the complaint about divide loyalties stems from the assumption that loyalty to one's home country and country of citizenship must always and necessarily be the first and most important loyalty. Suggestions that any individual has loyalties that trump those to the nation state are, in this reading, insulting to that person, and in the case of superior fidelity to Israel, anti-Semitic. Even within the context of nationalism, this does not make sense to me. I don't understand why it is impossible that someone could feel greater loyalty to Israel than to the United States, or why this greater loyalty to Israel would be so horrible. This, after all, is what Ackerman was saying. My commenters yesterday fixated on the term "Israel firster," insisting that the point was whether the term has a bigoted history. But that is not at all what Ackerman said. His entire piece insists that any consideration of a conflict between loyalty to America and loyalty to Israel is prima facie anti-Semitic. It has been pointed out that some people have said quite straightforwardly that loyalty to Israel trumps loyalty to the United States. This observation has been met with total silence.

Set that all aside for now. What use is any of this if we don't assume that loyalty to one's home nation state trumps all? I am an internationalist. I recognize no loyalty to the United States beyond that of personal self-interest. I am legally prohibited from undertaking actions that oppose the security interests of my country, forcing me into a loyalty that I never chose (and thanks for that, nation state). More immediately, there are innumerable advantages to being an American, and I'm thankful for them. But loyalty, against principle or family or friends? I have none at all. I categorically reject any notion that I am duty bound to my country. The nation state is a fantasy, and an explicit one. The founders of the modern nation-state were perfectly frank: they devised it to make militarism and imperialism easier. I find the mythology of patriotism just as disqualifying as the mythology of religion.

Abandon the pretense that loyalty to America is an assumed good, and the whole case against dual loyalties falls to pieces. Nationality, religion, and ethnicity are all constructs, and ones totally incompatible with an egalitarian, liberal political ethic. That the world has not caught up to this fact is irrelevant to me. My distaste for national identity is equivalent whether we are talking about the United States or Iran or Israel or whomever. But in the case of Israel, the embrace of nationalism, and my democratic polity's considerable investment in same, is leading us toward regional war. (In contrast, my democratic polity is investing considerable sums in undermining the nationalist desires of Iran.) For that reason my duty to speak is clear. I can't be accused of "alleging" dual loyalty because I find the assumed loyalty to America unsupportable to begin with.

Perhaps, in the tangled, anachronistic competition between dueling loyalties to country and religion and ethnicity and principle, there are those conventional liberals who express anti-Semitic accusations of dual loyalties at Jewish writers. If so, that's a problem, a very big and very unfortunate problem. But it is most certainly not my problem.

The discussion of the term "Israel firster" has gone almost completely off the rails. Most discouragingly for me, it does not appear to be tied to any coherent attempt to demonstrate that the people accused of using it are actually animated by anti-Jewish hatred. I've never used the term myself. If the etymology of the term is indeed linked to a bigoted past, I think that's a good reason we should all avoid it. Surely the profound issues that confront us are how to speak fairly and constructively about Israel, whether critics of Israel's policies are in fact anti-Semitic, and whether they are motivated to speak by anti-Jewish animus. Glenn Greenwald has been writing online about foreign policy and social justice for half a decade. Has he been motivated by anti-Semitism the whole time? Isn't the purpose of our inquiry here to determine whether Israel's critics are in fact guilty of anti-Semitism? I ask and have asked none of my questions rhetorically. The silence towards simple questions asking for simple answers to simple inconsistencies and contradictions says everything.

How are we to righteously discuss Israel, when Israel's defenders constantly invoke Israel's status as a Jewish state? In that same (execrable) story from yesterday's Times magazine, Ehud Barak insisted that his responsibility included "in a very direct and concrete way... the existence of the State of Israel — indeed, for the future of the Jewish people." As long as Israel's defenders speak this way, Judaism and the Jewish race will be present in the conversation. Are we not adults? Is it really not possible to discuss these issues with enough nuance and care that we avoid saying bigoted things? Yes, of course, absolutely: anyone who evinces suspicion or antagonism or criticism towards Israel because it is a home to Jews is an anti-Semite, and such people should be treated accordingly. But plenty of people are not doing that and yet are dismissed as bigots regardless. When Norman Podhoretz says straightforwardly that "the role of Jews who write in both the Jewish and general press is to defend Israel," he makes Ackerman's rules nonsensical and impossible.

One day, there will be no nation state. No America, no UK, no China, no Iran, no Israel. Until that time comes, liberals who delude themselves into thinking that they can maintain their ties to exclusive categories like nationality while embracing egalitarianism will struggle with these discussions. Israel simply throws them into sharper, more immediate relief. When an American liberal flails about, trying to define why he should care more about someone born five miles north of the Mexican border than someone born five miles south of it, he is running into the same elementary contradictions that this discussion reveals. The truth is that only with the abandonment of useless, agitating inventions like country or religion or race or people will we find true enlightenment and true justice.

separated at birth

2012-01-29T14:25:00.000-05:00

Pointed out by my brother:

because policing the discourse is punk rock

2012-01-28T11:45:00.000-05:00

Spencer Ackerman is upset that sometimes adults have to speak like adults, and that countries having explicit ethnic or religious characters sometimes makes conversations complicated, and that democracy means having to wade through righteous arguments that sort of look like ugly arguments if you squint hard and read uncharitably and (especially) if you have clear and obvious political motivations for dismissing those arguments. Oh, and Hitler Hitler Hitler.

Whenever I compare these situations to their analogs in discussions of race, or in discussion of other countries like China, the response is always the same: Israel is different. Israel cannot be discussed the way other subjects are discussed. Of course, voiced in a different context, that sort of talk is taken as self-evidently anti-Semitic. You see, it is not merely wrong but anti-Semitic to judge Israel differently than you judge any other nation-- except when it is not merely wrong but anti-Semitic to judge Israel in the same way that you judge any other nation. When it is necessary and convenient, defenders of Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people insist that any discussion of Israel that does not treat it like any other country is offensive. When it is necessary and convenient, failing to note how Israel is not like any other country is offensive. Leap from foot to foot as is necessary to win.

Glenn Greenwald is getting the usual treatment, in large part because he pointed out that taking a loyalty oath to another country might potentially be evidence that one has loyalties to another country. (Imagine that! Swearing loyalty to Israel might give someone the impression you're loyal to Israel!) Is it possible that Israel could have gotten involved in an armed conflict against the United States, during Jeff Goldberg's tenure in the Israeli army? Remember, it is not merely wrong but anti-Semitic to suggest that the relationship between Israel and America is unusually close or complicated. Suggestions that Israel functions militarily as an extension of American armed forces, after all, are routinely dismissed as anti-Semitic. It's therefore possible that armed hostilities could have broken out. So what would have happened, had Israel gotten involved in an armed conflict with America? I don't presume to know the answer to the question. What Ackerman and others are insisting is that any suggestion that Goldberg might have held to his loyalty oath and backed Israel is self-evidently anti-Semitic. Am I guilty of anti-Semitism for even thinking of the possibility? Are thought experiments, predicated on the simply observations that separate countries can go to war, potentially anti-Semitic? Are there any Israeli Americans who might consider their dedication to Israel more important than their dedication to America? Is asking that question anti-Semitic? If an Iranian-American joins the Iranian military, and war breaks out, would asking the same questions be indicative of anti-Persian racism? I no longer know how to even broach the question.

One could go on. As Philip Weiss points out, Ackerman attacks Max Blumenthal for referring to Goldberg as a former Israeli prison guard, which seems like an odd thing to complain about, considering that Goldberg is a former Israeli prison guard and that he was referred to as such on the jacket of his own book. Or we could talk about the fact that Goldberg uses Jewishness as license to psychoanalyze anyone and everyone. He engages in an absurd laundry list of claims about Glenn Greenwald. How does Goldberg know all of this about Glenn Greenwald? The only evidence for all of his claims is that Greenwald is (presumably) Jewish. If you've read Goldberg for as long as I have, you'd know this is his specialty. Once he knows a writer is Jewish, he feels that he has total authority to discuss that writer's character, beliefs, and psychology. That this is the elementary logic of bigotry-- the notion that one can know all of this intimate knowledge about someone thanks to his or her ethnic character-- seems not to bother Goldberg in the least. Perhaps I'll publish a piece psychoanalyzing Goldberg, each observation derived solely from his status as a Jew, and see how long I remain in polite society.

All of this happens for a purpose: to make it clear to anyone who might have a moral conviction about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians scared to talk about it. I know many people who have political stances on everything, and voice them without regard or fear, on questions of race, abortion, poverty, Afghanistan, gay rights, health care.... But about Israel, they won't speak. It has simply been drummed into their heads, by people like Spencer Ackerman, that this is no-go territory for them. They are mostly gentiles, as I am, and they know that speaking on this issue could easily result in accusations of anti-Semitism. So they shut up. And here comes Spencer Ackerman, and his red-baiting essay, and the predictable Hitler graphic. And so the task of pressuring "a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran" just becomes harder.

If you'd like to consider how a man's obsession with the meta and his social positioning overwhelms his moral and philosophical understanding, just peep the sub-head to this piece.

Note to some of my fellow progressives: If we can’t argue about Israel without using anti-Semitic tropes, then the debate is lost before it even begins

I have to tell you, I just have no idea what that means. Just no idea at all. I can't fathom what that sentiment could entail. Who is the "we" who could possibly win or lose? This is not a debate to be lost by unaffected American writers. It is a matter of vital life and death, for one of the most powerless, beleaguered, and oppressed people on earth. No matter who wins or loses these arguments, the situation in Palestine endures. Ackerman's piece is one written by someone who has become completely unmoored from the actual, physical, material reality that he is purportedly writing about. I assure you: Ackerman, in the context of the conflict, has already won. The losers are the people who live in cities subject to 24 hour curfew, whose communities are illegally encroached on by settlers, whose homes are bulldozed without due process or review, who are intermittently subject to the horrible bloodletting of another Israeli incursion, as they have been for over 40 years. There's none of them in Ackerman's piece. None of them at all.

That it is self-evident that essays like Ackerman's make it materially harder to secure justice for the Palestinians will make no difference to him. He is proudly basking in the approval of people like Jeff Goldberg and Eli Lake, men who have never met an assault on Muslims and Arabs they didn't approve of. For a creature of Washington, as Ackerman is, justice and morality are minor concerns compared to the preeminent priority of securing the blessing of Very Serious People everywhere. Doubt me? Wait and watch, as the usual suspects in Washington flock to his aid. Spencer Ackerman cares more about their approval than he does about the security of the Palestinian people. And now you know his character.

there are reasons not to go to grad school, but Red Lights is not one of them

2012-01-25T17:45:00.000-05:00

Alyssa Rosenberg has an odd post up on her generally excellent blog for CAP.

The essential weirdness here is that Rosenberg is taking the fictional world of a movie and using it as proof positive that you shouldn't go to grad school. Making this even stranger is the fact that she herself admits that the situation in the movie is a fantasy. The plot, apparently, involves two skeptical professors who are losing their prestige within the department and university to a parapsychologist. I am very aware that there are failings in the modern research university, but I assure you, the creeping influence of parapsychology is not among them. So... what?

Rosenberg writes, "No self-respecting university would put this much muscle behind paranormal research, but no matter." Um, why is that no matter? Isn't the plausibility of the given situation precisely at issue when considering if a movie works as a critique of the academy? Rosenberg had very little regard for the movie The Ides of March; I doubt she'd take it as an effective critique of the state of political journalism, precisely because she finds it such an implausible document.

She continues:

Silly stuff, but it conveys some of the desperation of being shut out. I can imagine graduate students struggling to keep their funding will empathize. Ultimately, it’s Sally and Ben who make a critical discovery, rather than Tom, and their revelation turns out not to matter very much anyway. While I won’t reveal it, Tom ends up meeting a more dramatic fate that suggests whatever time and money he spent on his PhD may have been a waste. Academia has rarely looked worse.

But how is a fictional movie specifically constructed to attack the academy a critique of the academy at all, particularly when the situation has such little relevance in actual scholarship? If the idea is that patronage and personality matter in the university, sometimes to the detriment of scholarship, I am on board with the critique. I must point out that political blogging is among the fields where social capture and patronage dominates the most. (I mean, really.) In any field, any field at all, talent and ability can take a back seat to likeability and social influence. The fact that the university resides in the real world and is subject to all of its problems is not an argument to avoid grad school.

Rosenberg shoe-horns a bit of a critique of the economics of graduate education in, by talking about graduate students who are in danger of losing their funding. This is an issue, though perhaps an overblown one. I've said it a thousand times: don't go to a PhD program if you're not funded, and be ruthlessly mercenary in your professional choices in pursuing this life. (I have myself.) It's just that this a wholly separate issue from which kinds of research and scholarship grant one authority in a given field. The declining fortunes of certain areas of scholarship relative to others is a product of a confluence of political and economic factors, such as the perceived practicality of a field or the ability of research to fund itself.

For the broader issue of graduate school and whether it makes sense, I wrote a long post about this awhile back that I think still stands. To put it simply, there are smart ways and not smart ways to go about graduate school. Sure: many people go and find that they can't get the jobs that they wanted. But many thousands go and find themselves gainfully employed. Individuals have tremendous ability to make sane, informed decisions about whether and how to proceed. As I say in that post, going to graduate school is announcing that you want to be a researcher. Those who attempt to gain entry without doing the necessary due diligence in researching the job market have no one to blame but themselves.

What's more, this is an odd time to critique going to grad school. As I mention in that post, criticisms of graduate school often revolve around opportunity costs. But opportunity costs imply opportunity; for recent college graduates, the job market is terrible to begin with. If you are funded, as you most certainly should be if you are going to get your PhD, your opportunity costs are only as large as the opportunities you actually had. Finally, I will note that, from a social justice standpoint, nobody should be weeping for the plight of the American PhD. The unemployment rate for such people is below 2%, lower than any other education level and far lower than the national average. Sure, there's selection bias and ability effects there, but from the position of social justice, that's irrelevant: people with PhDs are in great shape in great majorities, both in a national and worldwide context.

Even in failing fields, there are more practical and less practical paths, ways to take more or less risks. Choose, take your best shot, and see where you land. That's capitalism.

Ultimately, political punditry's ceaseless war on graduate education comes down to a very strange misreading of what getting a graduate degree means. Pundits and bloggers act as though graduate school has ever amounted to a guarantee of a certain job or a certain lifestyle. But in this system, employment and fulfillment are always a gamble, whether you pursue your dream in a comparative literature department or go full mercenary at a Wall Street bank.

Update: Incidentally, I've gotten some emails saying that I shouldn't have written this; I'm guilty of the sin of taking what Alyssa Rosenberg wrote seriously. Though the emails think that they are defending her, they both, in fact, operate on the principle that she was just a girl writing about movies. I don't play that.

difference/disorder

2012-01-23T14:28:00.000-05:00

Today on the website of the Atlantic, Emily Richmond has a brief piece that illustrates many of our pathologies about children and disability.

I'm not an unbiased commentator on the particular school district on issue: I am a (proud) product of the Middletown public school system. My eldest niece went to Farm Hill school, where this controversy originated, and my youngest niece attends now. I also have worked at the school district as a substitute teacher, in years past. Most significantly, I worked for a program that was of particular relevance to these issues.

I worked in a special program within the district's elementary school system. It was a program for kids with certain kinds of developmental, social, or cognitive disabilities. Most of the students suffered from some form of severe emotional disturbance; some were autistic and had difficulty making it through their day without attempting to harm themselves or others. The program was housed within a regular elementary school, and some of the students were significantly "mainstreamed" into the general school population, in keeping with the Americans with Disability Act case law. Many students, however, could not attend the regular classes due to the severity of their problems, and the program itself was separate. Support staff were specially trained to physically restrain students when they were a physical danger to themselves or to others. (The state's euphemism for this was "therapeutic hold.") There was also a room that, I suppose, could be referred to as a "scream room": a small space with padded walls, where students could take out their frustrations without the chance of harming themselves. The lock on the door required you to hold down a button, and there was a window in the door, meaning that a member of the staff had to continually stand at the door watching the child. Not that anyone in the program would have just put a child in there and walked away, but it was a good idea to make sure.

I only worked in the program for a little over a year, as I was filling in for a support staff member out on medical leave. I found it very difficult work, both emotionally and physically, and to this day I admire the permanent teachers and staff who worked with these children and attempted to teach them amid all the difficulty. (I should hasten to say that many of the children improved markedly and moved on to regular classrooms.) As most neighboring school districts had no similar program, children were often sent into ours from other towns. For many of these children, the program represented the end of the line; those who proved too difficult even for the special program might well move on to the state mental health system. The educators in the system were doing their best in a very difficult situation, and the compassion, energy, and dedication they showed after decades of doing this work humbled me.

One night, while working for the program, I went out to drinks with a few friends. There was a woman there who I had only met a few times before. I began to talk (in general terms, so as to preserve the privacy of the children involved) about a particularly difficult day from the past week. One of the children had had a major event, throwing chairs, going after his peers, striking members of the staff. As was typical, the heightened tension and emotions of the moment caused some of the other children to escalate and need intervention as well. I talked about it and admitted that the program was become emotionally punishing in a way I wasn't quite equipped to handle.

After talking about it for awhile, the woman I didn't know very well broke her silence and said, "you need to honor that." I told her I didn't know what she meant. She said that, in acting out the way he had, the child was expressing who he was. Our attempts to control his behavior was in fact an unwarranted restriction on a person with a disability. She even analogized our removing him from his peers with preventing a paralyzed person from entering a public building.

I told her that I didn't see things that way. I pointed out that, had we not intervened physically, he would have hurt himself, the staff, his peers, or all three. I said that I hated when students went into the padded room, as all the staff did, but that there didn't appear to be any other choice that kept the rest of the population of the school safe. I asked her, point blank, what else we should have done, what "honoring" a dangerous and self-destructive behavior could have meant.

She only said again "you need to honor that," and as I could tell she was becoming upset, I changed the subject.

That was an extreme case, but I have come to realize that this idea is pervasive: that any behavior that can be plausibly attributed to a medical or psychological condition is a behavior that must exist free from the appearance of judgment or reproach, particularly in children. Well: it happens that I didn't and don't blame these children, at all. Many of them had lived incredibly difficult lives. I didn't and don't doubt that there are serious medical and psychological issues at hand here. The point was not punishment. The point was that there were no alternatives to removing these children from a position where they could hurt themselves or others. That notion, that physical separation might be the product of pure, grim necessity, is totally absent from Richmond's piece.

In my short time there, I saw students throw desks at their peers with every intention of doing severe bodily harm; I saw a student hit himself in the face repeatedly with a heavy medallion; I saw a girl tear the stuffing out of the wall in the padded room and attempt to swallow it; I saw students struggle with police and EMTs who were attempting to load them into ambulances; I saw kids who were totally out of their own control. I have nothing but sympathy for them and respect for the parents and teachers who work with them day in and day out. My question for those who oppose physical separation is, what else would you do?

We've come to a place in our society where optics are the only prevalent concern in discussions of disability and mental health. What matters is how things look, the aesthetics of our behaviors and language, rather than what is being accomplished. Look at Richmond's piece: these interventions appear archaic, they "silence" troubled schoolchildren, they make them frightened. I'm very sorry for that, I am. I'm very sorry that children have to go through any of this. If I have to choose between silencing a child and letting that child break her own nose, I know which I'm going to choose. I'm sorry if that puts me on the wrong side of an empty, self-satisfied ethic of positivity, of "honoring" conditions that only hurt people's lives. These behaviors are not just different, and they are not the legitimate expression of individuality.

The details matter. How children are treated when they're removed from their peers, how long they are so removed, the level of training the person doing the removal has, the conditions in the separate space... all of these are legitimate subjects of inquiry. Whether physical separation is being undertaken responsibly, and not done merely to avoid working with a difficult child, has to be adjudicated by impartial agencies. But as to the fundamental question, of what critics of physical separation would do with a student who can't be talked out of dangerous behavior? I haven't got a clue.

missed opportunity

2012-01-23T09:53:00.000-05:00

The bullying, consensus-enforcing power of the Internet was on full display last week, as the digital jet-set went about paving over anyone who questioned the narrative. SOPA and PIPA were bad laws, terribly bad, and I'm glad they were opposed, but geez. Still, the anti-SOPA movement still lacks an effective spokesperson. Perhaps we need someone who truly represents the revolutionary struggle, speaking truth to power and giving voice to the powerless and afflicted.

Finally, a hero emerges.

Yes, modern day Robin Hood Kim Dotcom stands apart. He is the brave hero millionaire who will oppose the evil villain millionaires. From the vantage of his fabulous mansion, festooned with luxury and opulence during a global financial slowdown that has impoverished millions, Kim DotCom provides the kind of proletarian credibility the movement has been lacking. True, he's previously been arrested for insider trading and stealing phone card numbers, but hey, victimless crimes, right? (I mean, insider trading-- when have the machinations of stock traders and bankers ever been shown to have negative impacts on ordinary people?) Plus, I'm sure he looks cool when standing next to his fleet of luxury cars. That's got to count for something.

I truly cannot understand the broad swaths of people who look at the MegaUpload situation and continue to speak in the same self-congratulatory terms that have attended the entire anti-SOPA/PIPA fight. Does the fact that the IP reform movement wants broad change mean we can make no distinctions between actors? And don't fool yourself if you think that there is some sort of anti-capitalist bent here. "Freeing" information does not make it free. It only means that you change who gets paid. I know: you hate the music and movie industry. I'm not a fan either. But a site like MegaUpload doesn't make that value magically disappear. It just shifts it to people like Kim DotCom, to the ISPs, to the people who control the server space, to the aggregators and the search engines. And it takes it away from the session guitarists and struggling actors and others who want only to make a decent living producing art. And, yes, to giant soulless aggravating entertainment companies.

Yes, of course: every defendant deserves due process. Of course the fact that the government can do so much without proper due process is atrocious. That ship has sailed, hasn't it? When I bring this argument up to progressives about Obama, I'm told that civil liberties are a niche issue nobody cares about. When it comes to MegaUpload or torrenting, suddenly, due process is imperative. It doesn't say much about our current character that due process becomes important when it comes to downloading IP, and not when it comes to Guantanamo. And if we're asking for procedural justice here, doesn't consistency require that we ask what procedural justice exists in what MegaUpload does? I keep reading posts that demonstrate the limited economic impact of piracy. Is there no consideration of whether IP violations are right or wrong?

Those who spend lots of time on the Internet have a bad habit of believing that they represent the public. Ask the makers of the NBC show Community; they'll disabuse you of this notion. The fact of the matter is that there is a broad majority of Americans who have little or nothing in common with the blogging set, and ultimately the appeal for a saner set of IP laws has to be made to them. Now imagine: you are a typical recession-hit American. You've heard about the SOPA fight. You're sympathetic, to the degree you understand the issues in play. How are you going to feel, when you see the same people who opposed SOPA rallying around a German millionaire, living in absurd opulence in New Zealand, by providing digital content without compensating the people who made that content?

I have asked and asked and asked for those who keep arguing against IP law, in totally black and white terms, to consider those at the bottom in the content-generation world. No one has ever even attempted to answer my questions, instead preferring to complain about me (as is typical). I love the writing program Scrivener, a labor of love by a particular person with a tiny company, the kind of company where small differences in profit and sales can mean everything. Can you easily download a cracked version of Scrivener? Do you even need to ask? Look: I believe that in this capitalist system, those who work hard to create valuable digital content have the reasonable right and expectation to be fairly compensated for that content. I have previously mentioned the unauthorized downloading of the Humble Indy Bundle, a package of games by independent developers, offered on a "pay what you can" basis for charity. Yet these conversations constantly devolve into the flatly untrue notion that people only download IP from large corporations or rich people. There appears to be no coordinated movement online to discourage or stigmatize such a practice. And it's precisely those at the bottom end of the power and profit spectrum who are the most vulnerable. Ultimately, the point isn't the companies and products I can name, it's those who were strangled in the cradle in the first place. Sure, Jay-Z can make a living selling Vitamin Water and champagne. The artist who you'll never hear because of the collapse of the music industry has no such luxury.

At some point, you have to ask: do people who produce the cultural and media objects we love deserve to be compensated for their work? And will those cultural and media objects continue to be created if the answer is no?

The IP debate is the purest expression of a contemporary American conceit: that we can have whatever we want at no cost, that digital technologies have meant the end of the class antagonism that animates human history, that you can identify goodies and baddies and proceed accordingly. Every political question is a battle between winners and losers, every last one. And in this battle, you want me to rush to the aid of someone like Kim Dotcom? No thanks. The information is never free. Somebody gets paid. The question is, which soulless millionaires and corporations do you want to pay? The ones who made the content, or the ones who didn't?

Chinese lobby, Israeli lobby revisited

2012-01-20T08:56:00.000-05:00

Three and a half years ago, I tried to draw a particular parallel, which I think is still relevant today.

Remember how, during the later stages of the Clinton administration, a popular right-wing meme to attack the Clinton White House was to say that the Chinese lobby was too powerful? That the Clinton administration was in thrall to the Chinese, that there was too much Chinese money and influence within the administration and other elements of Democratic party leadership? It was a favorite talking point of Rush Limbaugh et al.

Now, do you remember a hew and cry about anti-Chinese racism following those accusations? Did anyone get pilloried for suggesting that the Chinese government's lobby was overly influential? Did merely asking the question mean that, ipso facto, the asker was an anti-Sino bigot? Was the rise of these questions seen as portending the rise of the "new anti-Chinese racism"? Were there articles full of stern warnings about the great danger to the average Chinese person posed by these questions of Chinese influence on American government affairs?

Of course not. Because there was and is a Chinese lobby, a lobby for Chinese interests, as there is for just about any country of a certain minimum level of power. And it was appropriate to ask whether that lobby's relative strength compared to other lobbies was a detriment to the overall interests of the United States. It wasn't racist to ask because the country of China is a political, governmental body, not a race or ethnicity, and the country of China has interests that (believe it or not) are not always 100% congruent with the interests of the United States. And asking whether or not what the lobby wanted was in the best interest of the USA was no insult to the people of China, or of Chinese descent. It made no statement whatsoever, as a matter of fact, about the merits of the Chinese people at all. Accusing Rush Limbaugh or anyone else of anti-Chinese racism would have been a non sequitur.

I was drawing a connection, of course, with Israel. It's important to say (and I said at the time) that context is everything when it comes to histories of oppression. While there is a long and corrosive tradition of anti-Sino racism in the United States, and that tradition includes the idea that the Chinese are corrupt schemers, this is not the same as American anti-Semitism, particularly where conspiracy theorizing is concerned. However, the major point remains: we generally understand that in the context of international relations it is inevitable and necessary to discuss the conduct of different countries, and that we can and must recognize a difference between criticizing the actions of a country and expressing bigotry against its people. Criticism of a Jewish state is an inevitable byproduct of the existence of a Jewish state. That's life.

Ultimately, the major problems in our discussions of Israel stem from the desire of many defenders of Israel to have it both ways: they want at once to point out (reasonably and righteously) that it is offensive to judge a nation's people for its actions, but also to insist (unreasonably and unfairly) that judging a nation's actions is the same as expressing bigotry for its actions.

If your interest is only in reducing criticism on the Israeli state, the path is the same as it has been for 45 years: end the unconscionable oppression of the Palestinian people.

It's not about Ron Paul. It's about you.

2012-01-16T21:10:00.000-05:00

A hole dug to excavate a mass grave in Amalpura, via Fourth World Post

When I was a child, we would travel to Indonesia, where my father conducted his research. It was the time of Suharto. His research mostly took place in Bali, where, due to the high concentration of tourists, the regime was careful to limit its presence, but still the signs were there. Every once in a while, a black army truck, filled with soldiers; your odd military checkpoint; and, always, Indonesian friends and peers of my father who were critical of the regime, and afraid. It was difficult for Western academics. No one wanted to be a collaborator, and among the many I met, none had anything but disgust for the Suharto regime. But to complain publicly risked being barred from the country, which did no good for anyone. I believe the tension haunted him.

When I was thirteen I took a trip with him there, just the two of us. One night, he woke me gently and led me outside, where one of his Balinese friends waited for him. We were in the village, inland, where few tourists ventured, at least at that time. We got in a bemo and drove for awhile, and when we got out, my father led me by hand in the moonlight to a mass grave.

We met an old man there. If you know the right people and know how to ask, you can still find them, I'm sure, older Indonesians who will tell you the stories. He walked us over to the roadside-- I have no idea where we were, geographically-- and showed us a shaded ditch. It was dark, and anyway, there was nothing to see. Just dirt, just earth. You would never have known that bodies were piled underneath, just a few feet down. The older man started speaking and my father spoke to him. (He spoke such wonderful Indonesian, and serviceable Balinese, I envy it even now.) He translated for me, briefly. I bent over and put my hand on the dirt. I tried to imagine my own family, what was left of it then, crammed down underground, with dozens of others. I tried to do whatever I could to make it real. The dirt made it corporeal. It was something I could touch, lay my hand on. I have never been the same, never.

Then we drove home and I went back to sleep.

I don't know if that grave was one of the few to be opened and explored. Even now the Indonesian government broadly obstructs attempts to investigate the events of the Year. The "conservative estimate"-- that is, the one that won't get you laughed at by Very Reasonable People-- is that 500,000 Indonesians were slaughtered, all under the considerable support of the United States. Some Indonesians I know find that estimate a laughable, inflammatory underestimation, but okay. Render unto Caesar. Half a million people, stuff underground or thrown into the sea. Lined up and shot in the back of the head, or hacked to death with machetes, after having been forced to dig their own graves and those of their families. You've heard it before. You've likely even heard that we supported it in every way conceivable, providing intelligence, arms, and funding to the new junta, including a literal hit list. If I know the average political mind today, many could read about these events with only eye rolls. They don't deny the factual accuracy of the claims. They don't even deny their horror. They just react as if talking about them is something gauche, uncool, boring. Few could deny their truth, at this point; the declassified CIA documentation is, as always, terribly frank. You'd be amazed at how many offer justifications to me. These people were commies, after all.

If you think that 1965 is ancient history, and that you are thus free from the burden of responsibility, I would remind you that the Clinton administration backed the Indonesian government in its atrocities against East Timor, where perhaps a third of the population was murdered; that Dennis Blair, former Obama intelligence official, had direct authority in our support of those war crimes; and that today, the Indonesian military is doing this to the people of West New Guinea:

I hardly need to tell you that our support of Indonesia and its military is ongoing. We are up to our elbows in the current regime, just like we were with the Suharto regime. (A Clinton apparatchik called him "our kind of guy.") And in a democracy that makes it our responsibility. A foreign army that takes our money and our training and applies them to the harassment, oppression, and murder of its own people-- that's our responsibility. Yours and mine.

*****

I know very well how this will go over. I know that this kind of talk is anathema to a new American liberalism that values only jokey cynicism and has contempt for the plain expression of values. Perhaps there's much to mock in my story; "he touched the earth!" I was thirteen, after all. But I was permanently changed, and I'm glad that I was, and I'm not ashamed to say so, however that might be taken by others.

Were I to allow comments on this post, I would immediately be greeted by the usual contention that I am being sanctimonious or self-righteous, or that I'm merely posturing, or that I'm trying to be leftier than thou.... In other words, the subject would change immediately from our country's actions and their human consequences to me and my failings. The message would get lost in a consideration of the messenger. When confronting establishment progressives with the reality of our conduct and how much it has cost some of the poorest and most defenseless people on earth, the conversation never stays about our victims; it inevitably changes to those attempting to talk about them, a knee-jerk defense that progressives have made an art form. That's why Ron Paul is so perfect, for establishment liberals. He is an open invitation to change the subject. The United States keeps killing innocent people, keeps propping up horrific regimes, keeps violating international law, keeps trampling on the lives of those who lack the power to defend themselves-- but Ron Paul is a racist, and believes in the gold standard, and opposes abortion, and in general supports some of the most odious domestic policies imaginable. What I insist, and what people like Glenn Greenwald keep insisting, is that Ron Paul's endless failings shouldn't and can't exist as an excuse to look away from the dead bodies that we keep on piling up. What I have wanted is to grab a hold of mainstream progressivism and force it to look the dead in the face. But the effort to avoid exactly that is mighty, and what we have on our hands is an epidemic of not seeing.

I could never vote for Ron Paul, for a thousand reasons. I have been arguing against many of his policies and the worldview that generated them for the entirety of my adult life. But I have to value his voice in the national debate because almost no other national political figures will raise these issues at all. I would love if these issues were being expressed by politicians and pundits who combined them with righteous views on domestic policy. But here, too, mainstream progressivism deserves a great deal of blame. Left wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich have embraced discussion of foreign policy and civil liberties, and for their trouble they have been dismissed as unserious by the self-same progressives who now dismiss Ron Paul's ideas. For far too long, mainstream progressives have signaled their "seriousness" precisely by denying the validity of people like Kucinich or Sanders, so taken with some bizarre definition of the reasonable that they effectively silence the leftist non-interventionists they say they want. If you want left wing criticism of our militarism and surveillance state, stop ridiculing those who express it.

The notion that there is something less disqualifying about support for murder and oppression than support for regressive and racist policies cannot stand scrutiny. The right to not be killed precedes all other rights. It is the foundation on which all other rights rest. What value can any rights have if they are not protected by a right to not be killed? Freedom of expression is no solace to a corpse. Likewise, what value do other rights have if those rights are not protected by rights of the accused? There is no value in freedom of assembly or religion if you can be thrown into a cage without a trial where you can invoke those rights. The right to protest has no meaning if the executive can respond to that protest by killing you without accountability, legal challenge, or review. Civil liberties are not merely right on principle. They are the necessary bedrock on which all conduct in a free society must rest.

What political philosophy supports this dismissal? Liberalism? Liberalism insists that all people, including poor Muslim people in antagonist nations, have equivalent rights. Egalitarianism? I can't imagine a greater failure of egalitarianism than the endless attempts to minimize and justify our crimes against those who have the bad fortune of not being American, or white, or affluent, or influential. I've seen them dismiss and deflect and deny and ignore conduct against poor children in Yemen they would never countenance in Baltimore. I've seen them put "dead Muslim child" in scare quotes, as if we haven't killed them, as if talk about them is some sort of con or game.

The whole argument has revealed American progressives at their absolute worst: incurious about the bad consequences of their positions; totally convinced that righteousness in intent can only lead to righteousness in effect; preemptively contemptuous of criticism from the left; dismissive of arguments that they themselves made under the last administration; and ultimately just as partisan as the conservatives they railed against three short years ago.

I want those who profess belief in liberalism and egalitarianism to recognize that they are failing those principles every time they ignore our conduct overseas, or ridicule those who criticize it. What I will settle for is an answer to the question: what would they have us do? If you can't find it in you to accept our premises, at least consider what you would do if you did. For those of us who oppose our country's destructive behavior, there is no place to turn that does not result in ridicule. Every conceivable political option has not only been denied by establishment progressives, but entirely dismissed. The idea that one should criticize the President from the left is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. The notion of primarying President Obama is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. The idea of supporting a candidate from a different party is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. Every conceivable path forward, for those of us who demand change in our conduct overseas, is preemptively denied. I want my country to stop killing innocent people. What am I supposed to do?

Update: Robert Farley has some powerful objections. I suppose I am using Paul as a proxy for my anger and disappointment that no credible alternatives exist. I appreciate Dr. Farley taking the post seriously.

Update II: I want to stress again, as this has been a source of consistent confusion in this debate, that I don't and couldn't support Ron Paul's bid for the presidency, on any number of disqualifying issues.

2012-01-10T14:19:00.001-05:00

taking my medicine department, Dana Stevens edition

2012-01-09T15:30:00.000-05:00

Just a note: years ago, I wrote a snotty post about Dana Stevens's work as film critic at Slate, over at the American Scene. While I don't take back all of the specific points I made in that post, I have since regretted it, and talked about the reason for my regret and the nature of the Internet here.

Anyway-- to take it a step further, just let me say that I loved this year's installment of the Slate Movie Club, and I found Stevens to be engaging and well-written in her role as host.

anonymous commenting

2012-01-09T10:50:00.000-05:00

My father once told me that in a free society, you say what you want to say and then sign your name to it. That's why I've always used my real name, always, in Internet commentary. That's the reality of accountability. It's no coincidence, meanwhile, that usually my anonymous commenters are the most nakedly establishmentarian or tribalist, constantly dinging me for not being a member of the Cool Kid Crew, not being a pro blogger, violating the "consensus," and all the usual attempts at disqualifying me that I've experienced for the last five years. At the same time, I am somewhat disturbed by the requirement for people to create accounts or identities online that might track them or whatever, and my general policy is just to let any non-spam comment stay.

So here's my compromise: anonymous comments won't be blocked or deleted, and other readers or commenters are free to read them and engage or whatever. For myself, this will be my personal policy towards them, as well as the perfect visualization of my attitude towards those who get on me for not being well-behaved, deferential towards power and influence, or apologetic:

Update: Psuedonyms are fine, but please pick one and stick to it. Even if you're just telling me how much of an asshole I am each time you post.

my old piece on conservatism

2012-01-08T06:41:00.000-05:00

In light of the success of Corey Robin's book, which I'm planning on reading soon, I thought I'd link to this piece I wrote about the death of certain desirable traits within conservatism awhile back. You'll note that my piece diverges from Robin's thesis, which is in partthat conservatism never had the kind of prelapsarian identity that my piece in part alludes to. To this I would just say that my major point was identifying two major strengths typically ascribed to conservative philosophy. If this stemmed from an unrealistically positive portrayal of the intellectual roots of conservatism, that's a failing, but I'd maintain that the argument for those two major insights is still germane.

Incidentally, the date on the piece is wrong; it was published right around when Scott Brown won his Senate seat, which is referenced in the piece.

the college "bubble" continued

2012-01-06T11:51:00.004-05:00

So here's this chart, via Yglesias. (I don't know the original source of the chart.) It shows that, as you'd expect, the recent growth in employment is concentrated among college graduates. This is both unsurprising and sad, and based on conditions both fair and unfair. Anyway, that's the reality: it's good to have a college degree.

A few months ago, some bloggers and online chatterers decided that there was a college bubble, and that getting your degree was no longer important or worthwhile. I choose the word "decided" carefully. This story was never really based on evidence. It was really a matter of conjecture and narrative. As was pointed out at the time, empirical studies that specifically controlled for selection bias have consistently found a significant college wage premium. Yet over and over again, bloggers and online opinion writers pushed the narrative that college was a poor investment. I remember Tyler Cowen, at the time, naturally asked what particular methodological criticisms these bloggers had with the extant research, but he never seemed to receive an adequate response. (Sorry for the lack of link, I can't find the post I'm looking for.) Maybe the college wage premium will be found empirically to have dissolved, and I've said many times that undergraduate education is ludicrously expensive. I've also offered many suggestions for why that is and how it can be changed. For now, though, the evidence is still that college is a wise investment in the contemporary American economy.

I was going to start linking to prominent examples of this phenomenon, but I gave up after seeing the dozens I had to choose from. You couldn't swing your arm without hitting a blogger making this dubious assertion. But why?

I'm on record as saying that I think that journalism and the professional opinion making professions are in a kind of resentful turf war with the academy over who gets to make knowledge and who gets to pursue the truth. I also think that a lot of this attitude was straightforwardly driven by bias and interested parties; many conservatives and libertarians distrust and resent the university generally, and the people who populate college faculties. There was always a lot of wishful thinking in the insistence on a college bubble. You would have hoped, though, that the consistent findings of empirical evidence would have splashed cold water on this phenomenon. But once it got rolling, nobody seemed able to stop it with reference to the real world. Enough connected and influential people wanted it to be true, so they represented it as true.

Blogging gets criticized often for being too meta or navel-gazing. Yet I confess that I don't see enough consideration of this kind of issue, the odd ways in which likeminded bloggers share bad ideas and justify poor reasoning. I still find a profound lack of bloggers asking simple questions: how do we as bloggers make knowledge? What are the internal systems of accountability to keep us from getting things wrong? What checks and balances work within blogging to orient us towards truth and to punish getting it wrong? What constitutes a settled argument? How do you know success when you find it? What mechanisms ensure reconsideration of received wisdom and previous opinion?

There are many, many problems with the way that universities generate knowledge. I could recount a host of pathologies within the system to you. But I also know that there is a mechanism for accountability, that it is regular and systematized, that it is inadequately but genuinely tied towards professional advancement, and that there are baked-in elements of critique and reform that can, if we're lucky, fix the things that are broken. I just don't see anything similar in blogging, and worse, I see widespread defensiveness and resistance from bloggers when the subject comes up.

Update: The inevitable whinge from the well-remunerated but wildly sensitive professional Matt Yglesias: "Certainly Freddie could stand to interrogate his own extremely sloppy analysis offered in that post."

As I thought I made clear, I am not offering an argument for a college wage premium in this post. I am pointing out that peer-reviewed, empirical literature that specifically corrects for selection bias has found a consistent and large college wage premium. I'm not trying to prove that myself, as a blog post is a poor forum for such a thing. Indeed, blog posts are poor for proving many kinds of claims. As Yglesias's output proves, they typically house those claims that are specious, purely speculative, and driven by personal resentment. Yglesias and people like him have exploited a unique historical moment in order to get paid to throw out wild speculation without accountability or evidence.

If Yglesias wants to challenge those peer-reviewed studies, he should generate empirical scholarship of his own, or he should find and identify specific disqualifying methodological issues within them. He won't, though, because he can't, because he has no formal training or qualifications whatsoever beyond his Harvard philosophy degree. An impressive achievement that I respect, by the way, tempered only by the knowledge that Yglesias has lived a life of affluence and privilege, attending high-profile and extremely expensive private academies, which according to both anecdote and empirical study confer massive benefits in gaining entry into the world of elite colleges.

Update: But then, I'm also overreacting. You know how I am.

In unrelated news, I hate the Internet.

the tribe

2012-01-03T23:10:00.000-05:00

THERE IS NO SUCH PERSON AS GLENN GREENWALD. COREY ROBIN DOES NOT EXIST. MY BROWSER CANNOT ACCESS NAKED CAPITALISM. THERE IS NO POSSIBLE POSITION TO THE LEFT OF ME. THE AMERICAN POLITICAL AXIS HAS A CENTER AND A RIGHT WING ONLY. MY BUDDIES AND I ARE THE COSMOS. END COMMUNICATION.

Helen Frankenthaler, RIP

2011-12-27T14:19:00.001-05:00

One of my all-time favorites.

still searching for an IP reform movement made up of grown ups

2011-12-27T01:39:00.000-05:00

Julian Sanchez becomes approximately the 9 millionth Internet denizen to point out that various IP frauds aren't "stealing" in the conventional sense. He's right, there.

If you feel like you've read it before, it's because you have, dozens of times. Unfortunately, you likely haven't learned much. There's just way too much focus on this petty semantic issue. No, downloading something you didn't pay for isn't the same thing as stealing a jacket. But that doesn't mean that it has no negative impact, or that a free society doesn't have a legitimate interest in regulating it. Two things can be different, and yet each can be problematic, wrong, or contrary to the public's interest. I think the focus on the semantic issue has a simple motive: because the "downloading an MP3=stealing a CD" argument is so easily dismissed, it is tempting to keep prosecuting it and acting like one has really achieved something. It's weak manning, something Sanchez knows about.

As for disliking the term "piracy"-- well, tough. That's language. Communities adopt terms, and they don't always make sense, they aren't always fair, and we don't always like them. The very fact that "stealing" is not a term conventionally used to refer to downloading and "pirating" is tells you something about organic etymology.

I would really like it if Sanchez would expand on the point that, yes, copyright fraud is problematic. I think that, rather than telling the same story that has been told over and over again, and always to the same sympathetic audience that accepts the premises in the first place, Sanchez could carve out something new and useful. I am someone who is temperamentally and intellectually predisposed to support reform of copyright and patent laws. I think that there are many problems with copyright, patents, and trademarks. But at times I feel almost physically ejected from solidarity with others who do, because the majority of people who argue against IP online do so in such a willfully immature and unrealistic way. I can't tell you how many people I meet who say that there should be in effect no check on digital copying at all-- that everyone should have unlimited rights to copy all media and distribute it to anyone, for free and without compensation or consequence. You might imagine that I'm exaggerating, but years of experience online tell me otherwise.

When I try to point out that this would swiftly mean the end of much of the media they enjoy, they have no real response; they are stuck in the present world and can't imagine how radical a change that would be. But with perfect digital copying and no impediment to that copying, there's no profit motive to be found in producing these expensive and resource-intensive works.

And, I'm sorry, but dedicated amateurs can't produce Call of Duty; they can't produce Lawrence of Arabia; they can't produce Sgt. Pepper. The dreams of people like Chris Andersen are utopian and false. As Doug Rushkoff has pointed out, they have a lot of schemes for content generators to be paid as public speakers or "personal brand builders," but no compelling mechanism for content generators to be paid as content generators when they give everything away for free. And there's lots of negative consequences from asking every writer or musician to not be a writer of musician but a "brand." Yes, Jay-Z can get by on selling Vitamin Water and t-shirts, but the guy who actually has a new sound and not much else can't survive on free.

Also from Rushkoff: it's never actually free. If you're using Google and your ISP and your power company and your HP laptop to get this content, they're all getting paid. The fact that the costs are so small isn't the same as free, and repeated across millions of users millions of times, that means lots and lots of money... just not for the person who actually created the content you enjoy. You can check out Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, for necessary pessimism on Linux and Wikipedia; for a description of how music piracy has devastated the musical middle class; and for an analysis and a lament about the death of the artist as a profession.

So many of the grand and self-aggrandizing claims of the pro-piracy crowd have fallen away, I can't even recount all of them. I've often heard that people who pirate something and like it will later pay for it, out of a sense of gratitude and obligation. Does that seem like an accurate portrayal of reality to you? How many people, honestly, do this? I was told for years that people who stop pirating music when there were cheap and reliable ways to access music online. Well, there are now literally dozens of ways to get music online, legitimately, in a way that gives at least a little bit of money to the artist who created it, and usually quite cheaply. Hasn't stopped piracy. People insisted that people only pirate from faceless corporate behemoths. Here's someone involved with the creation of the Humble Indie Bundle, an independent game pack produced for charity and available at whatever price the purchaser determines, showing that 25% of the people who downloaded the pack did so by pirating.

You also get hit over the head with studies that show, or purport to show, the limited effects of piracy, but they are either of dubious methodology or are wielded illogically. For example, a notorious study showed that people who pirate also spend more money on music than people who don't. OK, cool. It does not logically follow that the same amount of money is being captured by the music industry to cover what is lost in piracy. Pirates can spend more on music than their non-pirating counterparts and piracy can still be a net loss for the industry. I don't doubt that many interested parties often oversell the dangers or damages of piracy, and as I said, I support some very broad reforms of intellectual property law. But the loudest voices seem to want it both ways; they make a prescriptive claim that it should be legal to take what you want for free, and then do an end run around it by making the descriptive claim, with dubious evidence, that in fact taking everything for free doesn't hurt the profit motive.

More than anything, I'm weary of the historionics and self-aggrandizement of the pro-piracy set. To read about IP online, everyone who ever downloaded "Who Let the Dogs Out?" from Limewire is a truth-telling revolutionary, smashing a decrepit corporate structure and ushering us into a golden age of free culture, where movies and games and albums descend from heaven in a celestial ball of light into the waiting arms of the IP warriors, who send the love out through the tubes to all who desire them. Any notion of a "pirates code," the old scene ideas about rules and codes that you follow in pirating, has not been disseminated to the broader groups that download media now, apart from that specific cultural moment. Here's what I think: lots of people just want the stuff for free, and don't care about the consequences.

Well, I'll come out and say it: I think that's wrong. I think that it's wrong to make a digital copy of a piece of media that someone else has made and has offered up for compensation under the explicit condition that he or she be paid for it. I don't think that this makes me (or Doug Rushkoff or Jaron Lanier or anybody) some retrograde corporate stooge. And the constant effort to wrap this discussion up in revolutionary terms is just a distraction. I also think that the constant extension of copyright lengths is shameful, that DRM is almost always a useless annoyance and waste, that patents and patent trolling are totally out of control, that there has to be considerable reworking of conventions and statutes regarding fair use and appropriation, and so on. And I think that efforts like Steam and Amazon Music offer reasons for hope. I just think if someone works hard to produce intellectual content that other people want to consume, that person is entitled to reasonable compensation for that content. Call me old-fashioned. That attitude is less broadly assumed than you might think.

In the admirably level-headed and fair post I linked above about the Humble Indie Bundle, the blogger points out that they aren't going to slap lots of annoying DRM on the games, which I fully support. But he also says this: "No -- we will just focus on making cool games, having great customer service, and hope for the best. It sure seems to be working right now!" That's great, and I'm glad. But the fact that it is largely working for them doesn't mean that it will always work out for every producer. At some point, there's going to be (and have been) content producers who run the math and find that continuing to produce a given piece of media no longer makes economic sense, due to the erosion of revenues from piracy. Then everybody loses the product that would have come next. What I want to challenge is the pleasant fiction that such a decision could never be reached, or that our broader feelings about intellectual property and piracy don't make a difference in that regard.

I'd love to see Sanchez attack this issue not from a stance of aggravation, but from a devil's advocate or self-examination position. Take the hardest line possible against his own thinking and his own preferences and see how things hold up. It doesn't hurt to kick the tires. The argument about stealing just doesn't need to be made again.

Update: The inevitable whinge, with bonus retweeting by other paid-up members of the DC politico koffee klatsch. I was unaware that saying "I wish this person would write a bit about this other facet of an issue" is beyond the pale, but as time goes on, the DC social circle only gets more dedicated to circling the wagons.

Honestly, at this point, I really consider the DC blogging corp a pathetic environment. They are so enormously sensitive to any criticism (and this wasn't even really criticism!) that doesn't come from members of their own coterie and that doesn't meet preapproved standards of ass-kissing. I genuinely cannot fathom the mind that wants to be a writer but is afraid of argument that doesn't come wrapped in praise. Then again, I'm not living it up in the DC-area fiefdom, secure in the knowledge that social connections to my purported political antagonists will blunt any criticism. The whole edifice is designed to protect its members and quiet dissent; that is its first and last purpose. What a pack of pearl-clutching cowards.

Update: Since this has come up: SOPA is total, unequivocal bullshit.

the trouble with "progressive" (slight return)

2011-12-22T21:58:00.004-05:00

An emailer asks

What's your beef with the term progressive? I prefer liberal myself, too, but I feel like that ship has sailed, and it is only semantics, after all. I feel that, since you're already coming from a marginal place (as you say all the time), it doesn't make much sense to look for fights to pick that don't mean anything. I don't mean to scold but I alternatively love your work and hate your self-marginalizing thing.

Well, to the broader point about my self-marginalization, you know, it's complicated, and I have little to say in my own defense. But for the subject at hand, there's two major things.

First, I tend to see the use of progressive as a capitulation. Conservatives notoriously made liberal into a bad word in the 90s. (I know this because I got a Doonesbury collection when I was 12 and read it religiously, despite knowing essentially nothing else about partisan politics at the time.) To run from the term because conservatives tried to stigmatize it is emblematic of all that was wrong with 90s-era liberal politics. I don't say that in some martyring sense, either. I'm not saying that we should have accepted the term liberal and confined ourselves to irrelevance, but rather that the refusal to fight essentially did the work for the conservatives, which again was a running theme of the Clintonite 90s. You triangulate and triangulate and before you know it you've given away the store. I have a theory of political change (which could be right or wrong) that says that people don't get inspired by political movements that don't appear inspired themselves, that people don't sign up for causes when the people espousing that cause seem embarrassed or unwilling to stand up for itself.

Second, I care because language matters. I actually disagree that the difference is entirely semantic, actually; I think that progressive has come to refer to slightly different things than liberal, in both disposition and policy stances, in a way that reflects that legacy of capitulation. And remember the etymology of progressive, with its confused relationship towards the early 20th century Progressive movement, which had some good and a lot of bad. Matt Yglesias put this beautifully in a post from several years ago (inspired by some geek commenter):

while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives.

"Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy. I think the notion that something like contemporary American liberalism is, in fact, the correct instantiation of the historic liberal project for our times is a proposition that's worth fighting for.

Words to live by.

there's just no sense in being halfway radical

2011-12-22T11:12:00.000-05:00

Over time I've really come to see Kevin Drum as a symbol for modern American liberalism-- he's increasingly despondent and incredibly stuck. Modern American liberalism is filled with people who have righteous moral convictions that they have made totally irrelevant due to their dogged adherence to a broken system.

Take this post. It's called "How 2008 Radicalized Me," and it describes how the truly unbelievable events of 2008 (rightly, reasonably) caused Drum to become more radical. That's as natural a story as one can get; a small group of fantastically well-compensated people drove the entire worldwide economy to the brink of total collapse through their greed and incompetence. To not be radicalized in the face of such events is intellectual death. Of course, despite these events, and despite their being the inevitable consequence of our current macroeconomic policy, most people have not changed, and neither has that policy

The question is what this has actually meant for Kevin Drum in any substantive sense.

To be clear, I'm not at all a "where's the policy angle?" kind of guy. When people dismiss an argument by sniffing about "policy options," it's just about always a way to shrink the realm of the possible and discredit alternative opinion. But you'd like to get a sense of what radicalism means for Drum in context here. His post doesn't offer much to indicate what kind of radical change he'd pursue.

Maybe more executives should have been fired, maybe the Department of Justice should have tossed more Wall Street traders in jail, and maybe a couple of big money center banks should have been placed in temporary receivership.

In other words, the things that maybe should have been done in response to one of the greatest crises in the history of capitalism-- a systematic failure that resulted in incredible human suffering for those who were least responsible for it-- are exactly the things that wouldn't have created any lasting or fundamental change. A few of the actors would have been punished, but there would have been no systematic change that could have prevented the next crisis. More, there would be no challenge to the fundamental problem: that great economic resources give these corporations and individuals nearly limitless political clout, which prevents any real change or accountability. Just as the 20008 crisis resulted in essentially no reform or accountability of genuine impact.

Drum continues:

But hoo boy, what a contrast with how the rest of us were treated. Things like principal write-downs, second waves of stimulus, aid to states, and mortgage cramdown all got a bit of idle chatter but were then left to die. For some reason, it would have been unfair to hand out money to profligate homeowners, state and local workers, and the millions who have been unemployed for more than a year.

My endless frustration with this position is the notion that we our failure enact all these "regular person" programs is some preventable error, like it just sort of happened that way. I have no objection to the standard Keynesian case made by Drum and Krugman and Yglesias et al, that we could spend some government cash, loosen up our money, drum up aggregate demand, decrease unemployment, and do some limited good for a lot of people out there. I'd vote for such a thing in a heartbeat. But there's this bizarre failure to understand that these measures are not happening for precisely the same reason that no adequate regulatory power has been exercised over the banks, for the same reason that there's been no accountability for those responsible, for the same reason nothing has meaningfully changed: because moneyed interests control our system. To point out that those with vast financial assets control the Congress, the Fed, and our entire economic policy is at once to invite claims of crankery and conspiracy theorizing, and to state the painfully obvious.

Drum gets to the nut of it:

This is how 2008 radicalized me. It's one thing to know that the rich and powerful basically control things. That's the nature of being rich and powerful, after all. But in 2008 and the years since, they've really rubbed our noses in it. It's frankly hard to think of America as much of a true democracy these days.

So here's my question: what do you want to do about it? How do you rescue true democracy in the face of ever-greater capture of our political process by the rich and powerful? I've followed Drum's blog for years, but before or in the month since this post, he's offered little in the way of suggestions. He's got a lot of small-bore, CAP and WaPo-approved triangulating policy shifts, but nothing that can address complaints of this size. To me, all of this-- not just the financial crisis, but the continuing inability of our society to live up to its basic social contract-- suggests that we need actually radical reform. Moving the deck chairs simply is not sufficient anymore. You cannot overstate how close we all came to total economic collapse, yet in the face of that we have adopted terribly weak reforms.

Here's an idea: nationalize the investment banking industry. Eliminate the profit motive, removing the incentive to find ever-more-risky investment vehicles. Stop them from accruing enormous financial assets during boom times, which gives them the political power to ensure that the government will bail them out in bust times. (If you think that we wouldn't bail out BofA or Citi or any of the big ones should they start to fail tomorrow, or that they aren't busily building the next disastrous bubble, you're very naive.) Keep savings banks local, support cooperative credit unions, go the full "Sweden in 1992" on the big banks, but make it permanent. It's a start.

Of course, if Drum wanted to look in this kind of direction for real reform, he'd have to be willing to do what so many of them are unwilling to do: give up a seat at the table. The gatekeepers of liberal political discourse don't permit this kind of radicalism, and Drum would have to make a very direct trade between articulating reforms that can actually counter the problems he sees and being taken seriously by the liberal intelligentsia. (You'll note that this dynamic doesn't hold in the other direction-- Drum could advocate some radical conservative reform, like the gold standard or something, and perfectly mainstream conservatives and libertarians would stroke their chin and talk about what a bold iconoclast he is.) Drum isn't a "cocktail party at Nick Gillespie's house" kind of a blogger, but professional regard and reputation affect everybody. He is also not one of those common politicos who views politics as a kind of game or sport; he's always struck me as genuinely committed. But to be taken seriously, he can't advocate what it would take to create genuine change. So he's stuck.

In this sense he strikes me as emblematic of American liberals, or progressives, if we must use a term of defeat. Drum has articulated a radical's passion, and is hemmed in by decidedly anti-radical peers. Like many liberals, he can poignantly articulate our moral duty but can present no compelling argument for how to accomplish it.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Kevin Drum will continue to do what they all do-- chase merrily after the center as the conservatives drag it further and further to the right. I can't quite blame him. As someone who has never enjoyed influence, it's too easy for me to tell someone who does to abandon it. But over time, the gulf between the principles and goals which animates him, and the ability of establishment reforms to deliver them, will only grow. For people facing that kind of a divide, I'd say that there's three choices. Grow more despondent. Grow more compromised, and make the work of the nominally liberal the work of complaining about regulation, taxes, and impediments to "free markets." Or let your mind get blown.

misformatted post on Grantland I find bizarrely entertaining

2011-12-15T09:51:00.001-05:00

Epic Freddie joke getting FAIL. Redacted for self-preservation.

It's a funny gimmick, though!

why would the AV Club review a Korn album?

2011-12-14T15:24:00.002-05:00

That's what I wondered the minute I saw the review, by Jason Heller. Are there a lot of AV Club readers who are on the fence about buying the new Korn album?

The "F" was about as inevitable as such a thing could be. That's not even my complaint, though. It's just that I can't see any purpose for a Korn review on the AV Club beyond inviting the kind of hooting and condescension that the review and many of its comments contain. (I should point out that a commenter or two makes essentially the same point I'm making.) To me, it points to my recurring suspicion that a lot of our analysis of pop culture exists more to help people position themselves above (what they presume to be) culturally and socially undesirable groups, such as Korn fans. And that is happening with the large majority of the comments, people jockeying to see who can be more clever in declaring their superiority to those who like different media. (I tend to find that's true in any AV Club comment thread, but here it's a little more naked than usual.)

I remember being struck by the fact that Steven Hyden, in a piece explicitly worrying over this dynamic, couldn't resist saying that he "wouldn't know many of the newer bands lodged on Billboard’s top rock songs chart—Cage The Elephant, AWOLNATION, Five Finger Death Punch, Young The Giant—if they walked up to me in an Ed Hardy shirt and white baseball cap and handed me a lukewarm can of Coors." Ha! Ed Hardy! White baseball caps! Coors! And all of that while ostensibly writing about the legitimacy of the popularity of those bands. It's like he can't help himself. I've always been frustrated by the idea of coastal elites who look down their noses at their middle American counterparts, in large measure because I think that phenomenon is vanishingly rare. In contrast, cultural condescension (which has no convenient geographic or political groupings) is totally real and almost inescapable online.

sparkle motion

2011-12-14T10:16:00.001-05:00

For awhile now I've wanted to divert my online writing energy into different directions. It would be nice to fight less. Generally at this point I have a policy where I only post something critical of someone else if it passes the "can't sleep" test. If I have something critical to say, oftentimes I can't sleep well until I post it. If I'm not moved to that degree lately I just drop it.

I would like to write a blog called Interfaces of the Word, after Father Ong, and make it a blog about writing. I find people are very dismissive of what I do academically until they actually hear what it is beyond the field's name. I would love to talk a bit about the empirical research that is ongoing, both in terms of the large, traditional educational research about broad policies, but also recent scholarship in eye-tracking and brain scans. The exploration of the unique neurocognitive processes that go into the use of specifically written language is, for me, very interesting. More often, I could write about style, and what I perceive in the trends in Internet and blog discourse, highlight writing I like, point out bad writing, do a technical discourse analysis of a specific blogger, etc. There's a lot of research out there that people don't even know exists and I think a lot of it would be of interest to the broad blogging audience.

The question is always in what form and what forum. I don't know, it never seems natural to just take this here blog and change its focus. And starting a new thing seems alternatively invigorating and exhausting. I would like to stop fighting.

Perhaps the ultimate issue is that I just don't know if anybody would be interested. That's funny, because I've never cared much about that in the past; independence tends to trump traffic. But I wouldn't want to invest myself in something new if no one was interested. This blog has always been a service to myself. I would like to change that somewhat. Another issue is that, like a lot of academics, I am fearful of writing about topics related to my research interests online, for a variety of professional and social reasons.

I don't know, we'll see.

troubling

2011-12-09T05:09:00.001-05:00

A beautiful summation of your interactive scholarship of the past few months. I'm glad I was able to sit in and learn from your quest. -- a comment on Ta-Nehisi Coates's latest article for the Atlantic, arguing that the Civil War was not tragic.

For me, it's the same as always: the absolute refusal to consider the difference between sympathy for the South and principled opposition to war and killing makes the conversation useless. The essay is of a piece with everything Coates writes on the subject; again and again, I want to see a stance proffered on moral resistance to the act of intentionally taking human life, and instead it's a constant return to the old refrains against romanticizing the antebellum South. Well: yes, every facet of romanticizing the Confederacy is wrong and offensive. And there are many versions. But the refusal to condone killing out of a conviction that killing is always wrong is an entirely separate issue than supporting the "Lost Cause" or any other ugly trope about the South. Are Quakers allowed to oppose the killing that occurred in the Civil War? Are pacifists? Is there a moral difference between that kind of opposition and the kind that laments the loss of the Confederate way of life? I don't know, even though I've read thousands of words from Coates on the subject.

"But our general sense of the war was that a horrible tragedy somehow had the magical effect of getting us free. Its legacy belonged not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a time when we were property."

And what of those who revel in precisely nothing about it? What of those who find the condition of slavery tragic, and any and all consequences of it necessarily tragic, including the war that ended that condition? What of those who are invested in the Greek meaning of "tragic," the sense in which unhappy events are played out inevitably as a result of a flaw in character? What about those who simply do not confuse a moral conviction about killing with attitudes towards "costume and technology?"

"But we have stories too, ones that do not hinge on erasing other people, or coloring over disrepute."

This, is so powerful to me. Yeah, I want to be a part of this team.

Coates and his supporters are free to argue on whatever terms they want, but they also have to live within the confines of conventional language. And when they say that he has proven that "the Civil War was not tragic," I have to say, no, he hasn't. He has in fact refused even to consider the question beyond the narrow scope that he has defined, which is common to much of his work. And he and his supporters have shut down any proposed broadening of the discussion while basking in praise for having undertaken it. Whatever success in argument he's achieved has happened with distortion and sleight-of-hand, by insisting that principled opposition to war is the same as regard for the South when it isn't, or saying that tragic means "really sad" when it doesn't, or by acting as if proving one thing is the same as proving another. The more that a question is insisted away, the more pressing it seems.

I wish that I could articulate how this article reverberated in my soul. Better, I wish that you, TNC could feel that reverberation, and I could read how you described it.

Now there are a whole host of ways that Coates or anybody could attack the pacifist's position. Opposition to violence, after all, is far, far less popular than support for violence, particularly in politics and particularly online. I am perfectly used to mockery, dismissal, and invective for what I think, and anyone antagonistic to my views can rest assured that the vast majority of people out there will belittle my beliefs. (Hey, there's one in the comments now.) But the issue remains separate from antebellum romanticism.

Figuring out how to say what you're saying, without sounding whiney and petulant is a testament to your strong intellect and to your solid commitment to following the truth wherever it leads. Nice job.

BTW: Just for myself; for my part in any of it; knowingly or otherwise - and not because I think it's what you wanna hear, but for what it's worth, TNC - I'm sorry.

I have said before that I find the cult of personality he's created at the Atlantic a self-congratulatory creep show. If it were merely a case of someone on the Internet residing in a bubble of affection, hey, who cares. That's perfectly common. What disturbs me is that his defenders, largely white, express their support in terms so close to condescension, or offer praise so wild that it can't meaningfully regard the work at all. When I argue about this subject, his coterie inevitable says "for him, this is personal." That, to me, is a slap in the face, the kind of thing you say about someone who you think is incapable of defending himself. And it has everything to do with race, with a set of guilty white readers who are eager to be absolved of that guilt, and so seek really to deny any responsibility for their role in a racist society.

"For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props."

I suspect that a substantial minority of Coates's considerable following is made up of people who do not, actually, think highly of him, though they suppose they do. I suspect that he attracts admiring white people who experience discussion of race as a kind of panic. I suspect that he fulfills for them the role of a racial avatar, someone to hold opinions on race for them, so that they neither have to engage in the hard work of fixing our racial inequalities nor feel indicted by his own observations on race in America. I suspect that for them Coates is not fully human, that he is another in a parade of black symbols who assuage their guilt and massage their egos, that he is a stock character, a prop, but never a human being to be evaluated and thus capable of being truly valued.

The world is a strange place. In the last couple weeks I saw bloggers who Coates will break bread with arguing in support of The Bell Curve, a text which argues (if one bothers to actually check) that the large majority of black people are significantly less intelligent than the large majority of white people. As was inevitable, apologies were offered and friendships maintained, all without the repudiation of the text itself. Historical inquiry is important and I value it, but surely the opinion that black Americans today are inherently inferior is of greater meaning for the future of justice. And yet there is a regard for race science that people can live with, in a way that they can't live with the idea that war is universally tragic. It's no wonder that so many white people find solace in arguments about the Civil War; in them, they find the opportunity to take stands on race that cannot possibly harm them in their day-to-day. They enjoy conviction without consequence, much as they enjoy the promise of the exoticized object, which is to be understood without being judged.

TNC says what he thinks and it is a great pleasure to hear what he says. This essay ties up loose ends in my understanding of the Civil War like nothing else has. Not that there is any end to it. Slavery is the original sin in the New World. The Civil War was a step in the direction of obviating that sin. But we are still in process and always will be. I suspect that TNC has some well thought out views of Abraham Lincoln and look forward to hearing of them. He embodies all of the conflict and yet is above all of it.

I wonder about Coates. When he reads this endless commentary from white people trying to outdo each other in praising him, as the reach deeper and deeper for hyperbole, as they stretch their vocabularies to bless him with their benevolent white approval-- does he get embarrassed, at all? Does it become unseemly to him? Does he question where this all comes from? I imagine he must. Something is off, here. No one needs to have any sympathy for my convictions to say so. I find no value in universal assent, and beyond the poor optics of a bunch of people agreeing, I fear that it's exactly in those times-- in the deadening warmth of proud unanimity-- that something corrosive slips in the back door.

Update: I'm appending a link to this post by Tedra Osell, with bonus condescension from Belle Waring.

giveth, taketh away, etc

2011-12-01T17:27:00.001-05:00

This essay, from a Dr. Zachary Ernst of the University of Missouri, has been making the rounds, or a certain kind of the rounds. I have some things to say about it, and you should read it. Start, though, from this: this is someone using the protection of tenure to whine about tenure. It is the argument of someone who is criticizing the way in which institutional protection is distributed while clad in that protection, without any consideration that this tension is worth exploring, or that it perhaps undermines his position. Coming from my position as an impoverished graduate student, without the benefit of tenure or institutional protection or permanent employment or the middle class income it brings, this strikes me as a special kind of cowardice, a preening, proud kind. Take that, first, for context.

Dr. Ernst has complaints. They are, in my estimation, not quite minimally convincing, but then there's little indication that convincing others is the purpose of this kind of argument. Dr. Ernst's relationship to tenure is complicated; he pays lip service to its intellectual benefits, but he seems deeply antagonistic to the elementary notions that undergird the institution. He mutters darkly about the "worst politics" that one encounters in the university, apparently among those who feel that left-wing politics should be permissible in exactly no professions. (I have never yet met a conservative or libertarian who complained about bias in academia who wasn't, in the end, equating bias with "you aren't flattering my preconceptions.") He additionally has nothing but showy contempt for the fact that his peers have different ideas about what should be valued in scholarship, not seeming to care or understand that differences of opinion in what is best for the pursuit of human knowledge are precisely the reason for tenure. He is endlessly proud of his pugnacity but decries the "bullying" of others. In every respect he appears to be a man who loves to swing but not to be hit.

Indeed, you can search the piece all you want, but you won't find anything resembling self-criticism, or the notion that, when considering why his career is perhaps not what or where he intended, he should first ask whether there is something lacking in his body of work. The notion that in fact the beginning of responsible inquiry of this kind should require an examination of the self, waged as publicly and unsentimentally as the essay in question, has apparently not been considered. In any event, Dr. Ernst is unhappy with the systems of professional advancement within the university. He feels that the disciplinary promiscuity of his work is not valued in the university and that this is self-evidently antithetical to the academy's purpose. (That he sailed through his tenure review, by his own admission, somewhat blunts this criticism.) As is typical of polemicists, Dr. Ernst believes that as he is, so is the world. Coming from outside his field, the notion that across the university writ large is not friendly to interdisciplinarity appears unlikely, but I'm qualified to say. As someone with wide-ranging interests myself, I am inclined to value interdisciplinarity, but I also know that the fadishness and grand claims of working across departments often produces poor research. It is perfectly possible, after all, that interdisciplinarity is not properly valued in his field and that this has little or nothing to do with what is making him unhappy.

As for his unhappiness with the professional academic life... take a number. Here is what it means to be an adult: you have to eat shit. Repeatedly. You do things you don't want to do. You are forced to endure indignities. Your rewards have very little to do with your talents or effort. People who are less deserving are promoted while people who are more deserving are ignored. Life isn't fair, not in the academy or anywhere else. Yet Dr. Ernst is deeply unhappy with the way that professional laurels are distributed within the university (understandable) and also of the conviction that his unhappiness matters (absurd). Let me ask: in what professional field is there a perfect system of reward? What job is not riven with petty corruptions of "meritocracy"? Which jobs, I'd like to know, promise and deliver a fair system of review and promotion, free of politics and patronage and fashion?

I can tell you this: the vast majority of professions offer not even the minimally transparent or fair system of advancement that the university affords. And what almost no professions offer is the ability to openly and publicly complain about their systems of advancement. If Dr. Ernst were to undertake his criticisms in almost any other field, he would be on the unemployment line. Like all of his many privileges-- privileges that stem from the same institutions he deplores-- this goes unexamined. Dr. Ernst is a good example of a dynamic I have observed again and again in academics: he flagrantly romanticizes the university, and then tears down the university for failing to live up to that romantic vision.

Dr. Ernst says repeatedly that his argument stems from a simple assumption: that the university is resistant to change. I don't know that, in fact, his arguments follow. I'm no philosopher. But in any event, I reject it. Yes, I know; the Internet is rife with complaints about higher education, a few legitimate, most not. But I find the idea that university has not evolved and grown in great measure given enormous change to simply not be credible. I can only offer anecdote in response to his own. I will say this: there are 80 human institutions that have existed in the same form for at least 500 years. 65 of them are universities. Those human institutions that do not evolve wither and die. I do not believe that the university writ large would still exist if it were of the character that Dr. Ernst has described. You won't find this a popular position.

Here is not an assumption but merely an observation. The university has always been the target of a particular kind of resentment, from both within and without. It is the resentment of those who believe themselves to be unappreciated geniuses. I became aware very early on that the Internet is filled with people who resent and distrust the university because they became convinced, at an early age, that they were gifted, and that the failure of higher education to recognize the full flower of their genius was a great crime. So convinced of their own brilliance, they can't fathom any reason that they might go unrecognized other than the systematic failure of the institution of scholarship. When Dr. Ernst speaks about how philosophers believe "that entrenched belief systems may be overthrown by a single person," I hear the curdling exasperation of so many who felt that they were that single person, and that the university was obliged.

I'm not saying that Dr. Ernst is such a person; I don't know the man. But I know that they litter the Internet like flotsam. And I often encounter, in the world of academics, a group of people (both women and men) who walk around in a kind of daze, unable to understand why their work isn't being celebrated. They seem to believe that they were entitled to recognition before they arrived. Dr. Ernst is not in the position of these people; he is employed and tenured at a major university, in a field where the brutal competition for jobs ensures that anyone so employed and so tenured has been greeted with profound success again and again. His publishing history is the type most of us can only envy. (You would be amazed at how complaints about which research is valued evaporate, when one is defending one's own published, recognized work.) Looking at his CV, I can only hope to achieve what he has achieved, is achieving. Yet despite his considerable reason to give thanks, his essay is soggy with entitlement. That's ultimately what's at issue here. I don't question Dr. Ernst's right to complain about his department, the field of philosophy, or the many pathologies of academia. But what he says is riven with entitlement and defined by a strange incuriosity. Neither is conducive to the pursuit of human inquiry.

Dr. Ernst's essay concludes with a complaint about the difficulty his wife has encountered in obtaining tenure in his department. I don't have the evidence to evaluate his case, but I know enough about the world and sexism to not doubt for a second that a a self-confident women would have faced hardship in employment and promotion, regardless of her profession. It seems beyond probable to me that his wife has face these hurdles, and I'm very sorry for them. The fact that her university has disassembled its system of internal review is a major failure, and if Dr. Ernst is faithfully and accurately reporting the way that his wife has been treated, the conduct of those responsible is deplorable. I am just crude enough to point out that it is precisely the people with the "worst politics" who have insisted for decades that this kind of corrosive sexism has to be opposed.

It seems clear to me: Dr. Ernst should resign. He feels, after all, that the system of professional advancement and recognition in his department is deeply broken, that the wrong types of work are being recognized, that he is not receiving high enough raises, and that his wife has been wronged and insulted. Clearly, he should terminate his own employment there. Of course, that would involve material hardship for him and his family. But that's the thing about principles. They come at a cost or are worth nothing.

Whether he actually quits will tell you everything you need to know.

Update: My commenters are deeply critical of this post, and rather convincingly so.

if you want credit for endorsing something unpopular you better actually endorse what it says

2011-11-30T09:10:00.001-05:00

I'll take Ta-Nehisi Coates's lead and bring my thoughts on race and IQ to a close. I'll do it with a simple observation.

Perhaps what aggravates me the most about the position of Andrew Sullivan is how he, and others who endorse the Bell Curve argument, express that endorsement by essentially lying about what the argument says. To read Sullivan, or the myriad people who have popped up in my comments, one might think that these arguments offer minor distinctions between the intelligence of the black population and the intelligence of the white population, that we're talking nickels and dimes here. This is flatly untrue. Both the Bell Curve and the larger suite of arguments about race and IQ that Sullivan and others are endorsing say that the black population is significantly less intelligent than the white population. The Bell Curve argues that the average white person has an IQ that is more than a standard deviation higher than the average black person. Since the publication of that book, Charles Murray and those like him have endorsed the view that sub-Saharan Africans have an average IQ better than two standard deviations lower than the average white American. (See, for example, the notorious Rushton-Jensen article, co-authored by the president of the explicitly racist and eugenicist Pioneer Society.) In other words, they believe that the difference in intelligence between the average white American and the average sub-Saharan African is the same as or larger than the difference in intelligence between the average sub-Saharan African and someone who suffers from Down Syndrome. These are not fine distinctions.

Sullivan wrote "No one is arguing that 'that black people are dumber than white,' just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations." If you take nothing else away from me, ever, take this: this is wrong. To say that a standard deviation of difference represents a "slight" difference is simply untrue. To say that the two full standard deviations separating sub-Saharan Africans from white Americans, asserted by the race science crowd, is merely a slightly different distribution is to engage in some truly mendacious wordplay, or to betray a lack of even elementary statistical education.

Does accepting these premises equate with arguing that black people are dumber than white people? I would suggest that it does. As I said in a previous post, I don't doubt that people are accurately reporting IQ data for different populations. What I doubt is that intelligence is a quantifiable phenomenon; that IQ is a meaningful proxy for it; that IQ tests are free of systematic bias and data corruption; and that these differences can be responsibly asserted to be the product of heredity and not environmental and other factors. But if you do accept these premises, I can't see how there is any meaningful way you can deny that statement. After all, the Bell Curve's central argument is precisely that intelligence is real, measurable, accurately quantified with IQ and IQ testing, largely heritable, and that black people have low IQs.

(How long ago did Sullivan read the Bell Curve? I have it sitting in front of me. The data is right there. I can't understand how Sullivan can believe that he's arguing the same thing as the book and yet still call these slight differences in distribution.)

This divide, between the pride with which people assert their independence and honesty on this issue, and the way in which they relate the arguments of race science in the most anodyne and minimized way-- that's what bothers me the most. It's the hypocrisy in patting yourself on the back for facing "harsh truths" and then failing to accurately reflect what those "truths" you're endorsing actually say.

In the post I linked to above, Coates talks about his community.

I have lived in the black community virtually my entire life. I went to black public schools. I went to a black university. I have spent a third of my life with a black woman. When I wake up in the morning, black people are the first thing I see. My black mother and father hurled books at me. My black Howard professors shot down my dumb theories. My black book editor parses through my long unwieldy thoughts. My black wife reads my first drafts. In very literal terms, what you read here everyday is representation of the collective brain-power of a black community.

If I know the rhythms of blogging, this episode will soon draw to a close and everyone will part as friends. I must insist on pointing this out: if the argument of the Bell Curve and attendant views is correct, the majority of the people Coates has described here are likely of significantly below average intelligence. That's what the argument says, that a significant majority of black people have below average IQs and that these IQs accurately reflect their intelligence. Sure, some race science types might say that Coates is likely to run with an above-average crowd. But if you expand the ranks of people far enough, and statistics are true, and the Bell Curve is true, we're talking about a group of people-- the people this man loves and admires-- who are largely made up of the unintelligent. That's what the book says. And you, reading at home, the black people you know and work with and socialize with? The Bell Curve says that you can expect a significant majority of them to be significantly below average intelligence. That's the text of the book. It's right there, in black and white.

no, I'm not an IQ guy myself

2011-11-29T10:24:00.001-05:00

Since some have asked, in response to my recent post on IQ and race-- no, I'm not a booster of IQ. You can read far smarter and more qualified people than I describing why a measure like IQ (or g) is deeply insufficient to approximate intelligence, or indeed why even "intelligence" as a static, comprehensive, or meaningful term is deeply problematic. (Although there are of course those who will insist that these perspectives are merely the product of well-intentioned sentimentality.)

Additionally, "race" and "black" have never been defined to my satisfaction in these discussions. Again, this is the kind of stance that is commonly dismissed as politically correct or romantic, but I find it simply a sensible consideration of the facts. When we're talking about ancestry and heredity we're talking about complex genealogical lines that are particularly tangled when you're talking about black Americans. Using terms like "of African ancestry" is deeply problematic when talking about black Americans, who represent a totally unique group and who have a genetic heritage loaded with the influence of other groups such as white Americans and Native Americans. It seems to me, from a common sense (read: inexpert) position, that "black" can't mean much if it includes both a first-generation Somalian who now lives in Los Angeles and can trace his lineage to the same town going back hundreds of years, and also someone whose family in Cleveland came by way of Alabama via Haiti via being captured as a slave from what is now Liberia, and whose lineage includes a Greek grandfather and a Cherokee great-grandmother and the slaveholders who raped their way into his background. I'm willing to be educated on why the term is still useful despite this lack of common background, but I keep not hearing that argument.

I engage on this issue using those terms and those assumptions because I want to critique the arguments that flow from their assumptions. And even accepting their assumptions that intelligence is one quantity that can be distilled down to individual numerical scores, and that broad designations of race and ethnicity are meaningful categories for making informed assumptions, their arguments strike me as a comprehensive failure. Again, show me the actual mechanism at work here. Point to the genes, the chromosomes, the alleles, demonstrate how those affect gestation, and prove that they lead to the phenotypical outcomes of lower IQ.

I'll show my cards and say that I don't think that will happen, because I don't believe intelligence, whatever that means, is like having lobed ears or blue eyes. Even if it were, I don't think it can be boiled down to a measure like g. But even if I did, I'd need to see the mechanism. Call me a stickler.

narrative is distorting/the mechanism is what matters

2011-11-28T11:57:00.001-05:00

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, I see that Andrew Sullivan is lamenting a purported blackout of research regarding the race-IQ connection. This is not new territory for Andrew; he helped bring the issue into the public consciousness back during his tenure as editor at The New Republic.

Now: the first issue here is the claim that such a blackout exists. As Coates points out, the evidence for such a blackout that is presented amounts to the complaint of a single researcher, Dennis Garlick. The researcher is someone who could reasonably claim expertise on the issue, and he appears from my limited vantage to have an impressive resume. His claim, though, seems disturbingly unsupported. Whether or not research into IQ and heredity is being squashed is an empirical question. Coates links to a blogger who attempts to answer that question empirically, and while we couldn't call it scientific, I find it a sober and constructive attempt to find out the truth. The results seem to speak for themselves, but I can't know what goes on behind the scenes. I'm unqualified to say if Garlick is right, but as a consumer of research I also don't find his case compelling.

The fact that empirical inquiry cuts against the grain of what Sullivan and Garlick are claiming is resonant in the context of the race-IQ question. The "race realist" movement has always pushed a narrative where politics corrupts empiricism, but the movement's failures have primarily been empirical failures. When you strip away the endless paranoid conspiracy theorizing and the relentless flogging of the narrative, you get down to a robust set of data demonstrating differences in performance on IQ tests, then some fairly wild speculation about genetic causes. Over and over again, assertions about the genetic undesirability of black people involve making massive leaps from an observed phenomenon to a particular mechanism to explain that phenomenon, with dubious or nonexistent evidence to support those leaps.

It's true: a broad swath of research demonstrates that black Americans tend to perform less well on standardized tests of intelligence. This racial achievement gap is not adequately explained merely by controlling for socioeconomic status, as is commonly assumed, although adjusting for poverty does shrink it. There's no need to hide from that data, as those positing genetic determinism constantly accuse others of doing. If a connection between heredity and IQ can be discovered, it should be. (Measure what is measurable, etc.) But what empiricism requires-- not political correctness, not bleeding heart compassion, not even basic human decorum and civility, but cold-blooded rational inquiry-- is far more than the racial determinists have show us. The narrative they present is seductive, which is precisely why their insistence on narrative over the complicated and limited claims of science is disturbing. From my perspective, most people who assert racial genetic deficiencies seem remarkably disinterested in identifying specific mechanisms for the observed phenomenon. They instead seem primarily interested in flogging crude and reductive visions of our society and what ails it.

The rush to find genetic origins for any and all human phenomena has become so popular, particularly with the press, that the standards of evidence have eroded everywhere. Genetic or evolutionary speculation has become an obsession of our media, frequently undertaken without a shred of scientific credibility, and defined by faddishness and imprecision. Take homosexuality and genetics. I find it remarkable the number of educated people who I meet who assume, quite confidently, the homosexuality (in both men and women) is purely and straightforwardly the product of genetic predisposition. This is a politically palatable idea-- one might call it PC-- but it can't yet be proven, even conditionally. There are complications, such as the (controversial) older brothers hypothesis, which is important because it posits a mechanism that is non-genetic and yet nonetheless physiological in origin (and thus not "chosen"), as well as other evidence contrary to the assumed genetic origins of homosexuality.

But as it became politically important for people to insist that homosexuality is genetic, that insistence became more and more prevalent. Never mind that the dichotomy between "homosexuality is purely genetic" and "homosexuality is a choice" is flagrantly false, or that "they can't help it" is not a stirring cry for equality. Politics made the genetic origin necessary, so people believed in it. Indeed, it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where politics has more directly corrupted popular understandings of empirical questions than the widespread belief that we know for a fact that homosexuality is genetic. Yet curiously, I don't find Andrew railing against that assumption, or insisting on the supremacy of disinterested research, or leading the battle for more open-mindedness in the attempt to explain the origins of homosexuality. Perhaps we will identify specific alleles that determine sexual orientation; I wouldn't be remotely surprised. But jumping from observed phenomenon to the assumption of genetic origins of that phenomenon with limited direct evidence of a specific mechanism is unhelpful.

Compare these speculative genetic causes of low IQ or homosexuality to, say, genetics and sickle cell anemia. We don't have the presence of a human condition and vague talk such as "it's genetic." We have identified the particular gene, in a particular chromosome, that causes the condition. We know how the mutation changes protein structure, which leads directly to specific consequences in gestation that cause the negative health effects we see in people with sickle cell anemia. We identified the alleles responsible for specific phenotypic traits and demonstrated the connection scientifically. At every step, we have gone beyond "it's genetic," in regards to sickle cell anemia, specifically and constructively. We have identified the mechanism which causes the condition. That's the job of those who are dedicated to racial determinism: find the mechanism. Do your work. Show me the data. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you when you fail to prove your assertions.

My question for Andrew and others is whether my dissatisfaction with the assumption of genetic origins for the racial achievement gap is necessarily "PC," particularly when placed in context with our knowledge about genetic phenomena like sickle cell. Is the narrative so powerful that we couldn't merely be unpersuaded by the evidence?

Speaking as someone who is involved, for 14+ hours out of a typical day, in reading, researching, and learning about education and pedagogy, let me engage in understatement and point out that education and intelligence are remarkably mulitivariate phenomena. My continuing frustration with the ed reform crowd is how relentlessly reductive they are in discussing the origins of poor educational performance. Saying "it's those damned unions!" and accusing any dissenters of obstruction isn't just politically unfair. It's an incredible failure to soberly assess the depth of our problems and the complexities of their origins. Trying to isolate specific variables in education and intelligence research is incredibly hard. That's not politics. It's reality. To ascribe genetic origins without greater explanation of mechanism or the exploration of environmental factors which shape IQ is to engage in wild-ass speculation.

My own wild-ass speculation? The question of race and IQ will be answered in a way that is complex, rather dull, and totally useless for providing headline fodder for sensationalist publications like The New Republic or Slate. I wouldn't be surprised if a whole slew of factors, including poverty, exposure to lead, poor diets, parent educational background, the idiom tests are written in, neonatal health care, learning disorders, dyslexia and dyscalculia, lack of exposure to educational toys and games, low childhood reading loads, the persistence of syntactic immaturity due to parental modeling (my own academic obsession), and other environmental factors played a role. That doesn't even begin to untangle the web of what "black" means in terms of specific linear heritage, particularly since we are talking about a truly unique genetic history that has been conditioned by the rape and forced breeding programs that are common to chattel slavery. If I'm right and the origins of the racial achievement gap are revealed to be a stew of competing factors, it will make our job of closing the gap harder, but it will also hopefully blunt the words of those who ascribe vast social problems to the supposed inherent inferiority of our most oppressed group.

I chose the example of sickle cell anemia purposefully, of course. It's a condition that is generally found in those with sub-Saharan African lineage. What does that mean for American blackness? Is sickle cell anemia "inherent" in black people? Is there something essential about the disorder in black people? They're absurd questions. Yet they are of exactly the same character as claims routinely made about black people and intelligence. As I said, my unsupported speculation is that a large number of factors contribute to the racial achievement gap. It's possible that one of them is a genetic predisposition. If so, we'll need to know what genes are actually producing this trait, and how. Then what? If we find such a predisposition, does that make low intelligence "inherent" to blackness? Does it mean we send black people off on a barge? Is this somehow an insurmountable challenge to liberalism, or to our social policies?

Racial determinists say that they want rationality and then engage in hysteria. The first step in assessing these issues is getting to the truth of the matter, and their dogged insistence about what we know exceeds their evidence and thus hinders that pursuit of truth. They then dig deeper, insisting on a slew of negative social conditions that stem from these supposed genetic deficiencies. It isn't surprising where the conversation next turns, although those who embrace these ideas continue to feign shock when they find racists involved in race science. (I want to loathe Stephen Metcalf, but his prudence, intelligence, and fairness in this piece makes it impossible, I'm afraid. Seriously, read it.)

I find the case for racial determinism currently unpersuasive. I find the notion of a research blackout unsupported. I find the discussion of racial lineage and genetic diversity reductive. I find the description of a specific genetic mechanism nonexistent. I find the idea of essentialized blackness offensive. I find the suggested consequences unsupportable and the supposed policy responses laughable. And I find the case for egalitarianism, equal protection before the law, and the assumption of equivalent human dignity totally unchallenged, whatever the reality about the racial achievement gap.

Of course, I'm not without considerable biases, and I couldn't tell you that I have inhabited a space of pure rationality when confronting this question. But this narrative of a refusal to learn the truth due to political correctness, so self-aggrandizing to those who push it, is not credible and does not serve the cause of empiricism. The pursuit of the controversial for its own ends is as distorting as the avoidance of it, and nowhere is that more true than here. Many people have attempted to marshal the evidence for the race-IQ connection for quite some time. Rather than evidence, they keep bringing us the narrative. Remember that.

the racialized subject

2011-11-18T09:25:00.001-05:00

One thing that I really wish more people understood (to be more direct, what I wish more white people understood) is that for racial minorities, the sense of being racialized is nearly constant, and often uncomfortable even when it isn't direct, explicit, or expressed in behavior.

Here's what I mean.

I think most anyone who has gone through any level of higher education has had a particular day of class when race was discussed in a way that was uncomfortable for at least some in the classroom. A particular form of this discomfort often comes when white students feel that they are being personally indicted by discussions of white racism, whether contemporary or historical. It's a phenomenon I've observed over and over again, and I'm always discouraged by it. For a lot of people, any discussion of race appears to be close to a personal accusation; palpable tension fills the air. The more the conversation turns away from a historical perspective, where the distance of history provides a buffer, and towards contemporary racism, the more charged the atmosphere becomes. And god forbid someone actually say that someone is being racially insensitive. Then things get really unhappy.

I am not insensitive to the feelings of white students in this situation, nor can I claim that I have never felt this way myself. The righteous notion that racial issues are of deep meaning and great consequence naturally makes these issues charged for everyone. And as accusations of racism are something of a nuclear bomb in discourse, being sensitive to them is inevitable. But that discomfort, I think, is also pedagogically invaluable. Being challenged in this way is precisely what higher education should be about. It's also yet another example of why protections like tenure and seniority are so important. As the university plunges along towards a service model, we need to preserve the ability of instructors to challenge their students in ways those students don't like-- often precisely because the students don't like it. Being made to feel like a racialized subject happens to white people very rarely and should be cultivated in college, comfortable or not.

What I would like for more white people to understand is that this feeling that they feel in those moments-- that they have been racialized, made to feel like an avatar for their entire broadly-defined ethnic or racial group-- is a feeling that many non-white people feel all the time.

To be clear, I don't contend that this feeling is always uncomfortable. I'm sure that many wear it with pride. There are of course times when members of racial minority groups seek out this stance, as a matter of pride, community, and the declaration of principles. But it is important to point out that it is often unchosen, and that being racially signified in that way is something that my fellow white people and I can't fully understand.

So imagine that you're the only black person at an otherwise all-white party, a fairly common occurrence, particularly at college. Somebody says something racially insensitive. It doesn't have to be out-and-out racism, and it likely isn't intended to cause offense. It's just stupid, and indicative of quietly ugly attitudes, and the kind of statement that is expressed so banally that it seeks to implicate others in its assumptions. The stupid statement is made and there's a brief window to respond to it or not.

So: what do you do? Maybe you don't know the people you're with very well. Maybe you're not willing to deal with the social consequences of objecting, particularly because those consequences are likely to occur behind your back. Maybe you're just tired and don't want to deal with this shit. And as I can tell you from personal experience, the chance for an actual productive exchange is low. But then again, racism should be challenged. People usually take silence as assent. Worse, if you're black and someone says something stupid and you don't challenge it, there's a tendency for the speaker to take that as evidence that what he or she said couldn't possibly be racist or unacceptable. "Hey, I said that around this black guy, and even he thought it was funny!" All of this goes right back to W.E.B. Du Bois; black people in America have always been forced to exist as a kind of double, the particular and the general black subject.

I couldn't possibly tell you what the right thing to do here would be. I'm not black, I've never had to navigate this particular minefield, and I never will. My point is only to say that if you're a racial minority, you have to make a choice, even if that choice is inaction. Having to face that choice is in and of itself a way of being racialized that white people don't face. Sure, we've all been in positions where we have to decide whether to engage with racism or not. But as I said above, there is an implied responsibility when you are a member of the insulted group that doesn't exist for white people. And there is no not choosing, as choosing to do nothing is making a choice, and a socially loaded one at that. It's like the guy who passes you on the street and tips his hat to you. You have no choice but to respond. You can choose to do nothing, but doing nothing is itself a choice, and in context one that sends one of the loudest social messages. Now take that and multiply the importance by a thousand times.

I have myself felt some of the discomfort that I describe above in classes where we discuss race. Then I leave the class and I'm just some dude. Meanwhile a black student leaves class and operates in an environment where many white people will take him or her to be emblematic of all black people. That's a necessary context to understand race in America, and it points to the poverty of terms like "playing the race card." The race card got played a long, long time ago. You can try to ignore it but you can't put it back in the deck.

the presumption of innocence

2011-11-16T23:21:00.001-05:00

You know, I just feel compelled to point out-- this Jerry Sandusky situation at Penn State is precisely the kind of situation where the rubber meets the road for a belief in the presumption of innocence.

You've had a lot of liberals lamenting the collapse of the rule of law the last decade. This would appear to be a situation where the rule of law and rights of the accused are most important. It's precisely when the media and the people have already decided the guilt of the accused (and are competing to describe his evil in the most lurid hyperbole) that these principles are the most important. And yet I find silence on that presumption of innocence from most liberal commentators, or the outright abandonment of it, when it comes to this particular case.

This particular case involves disturbing admitted attitudes and behaviors and a great deal of incriminating testimony. But the presumption of innocence is the bedrock principle of our legal system, and it applies until the legal process has run its course. And it has nothing to do with belief that the accused will eventually be found not guilty, or sympathy for the accused. I can generate no such sympathy for Jerry Sandusky. But I have to point out that precisely the same liberals who beat their breast about the terrible collapse of the rule of law are now trying to outdo each other in the expression of their outrage, directly against the presumption of innocence. I don't expect any different from conservatives, who by and large believe that any accusation is true if it is voiced-- unless it's sexual harassment, rape, or police misconduct, that is. But liberals who have staked many claims on the rule of law and the principles which undergird it suddenly find that commitment unpalatable, when it has become so unpopular.

I doubt you'll find many expressing that perspective, though.

Update: mistermix made some astute points here. This is what I said in comments.

I recognize the distinction. I just think that trial by media is a poor idea, as Richard Jewel could have told you when he was alive. And while I recognize that the legal right to a fair trial is distinct from the opinions on guilt of the public, I also think that it becomes functionally impossible to get that fair trial when the public is convinced there's no chance the accused is innocent.

It's a fair point about the institution, but recognize that the same criticism holds: they are accused of crimes and deserve the presumption of innocence.

It seems likely to me that Sandusky is guilty, and thank god we don't have a legal system predicated on the opinions of those minimally informed by the media. If he is guilty, he should spend the rest of his life in jail. Just like those in Guantanamo Bay should receive appropriate punishments, if they have been proven to have committed crimes in court.

Finally, on the outrage thing-- for me, "child rapist" is enough. I don't need to dig any further into my vocabulary to find appropriately angry terms. "Child rapist" says more than any purple prose ever could. It's just like with bin Laden. Why is "terrorist responsible for 3,000 people killed on 9/11" not sufficient? When people dig so deeply into their bag of outrage, at some point it ceases to be about the victim and instead becomes about them.

Update II: The consensus is that I'm full of shit here. (Although you know how little I value consensus!)

history lesson

2011-11-09T18:54:00.002-05:00

check it out

2011-11-09T11:23:00.008-05:00

Interestingly, one of the posts that shows up in the sidebar on The New Inquiry contains a pretty forceful rebuttal of a lot of the things that I've been writing about.

Thus, to vilify or defend the Internet, or Blogs, or Facebook, or Twitter, etc., as responsible in and of themselves for the noisy meaninglessness of our cultural discourse, for the polarization of our politics, or for the history-eschewing 24-hour news-cycle, is to lose the game before you start. It would be foolish to deny the role of social media in the current Arab uprisings, for example, but it is even more foolish to ascribe responsibility or agency to the sites or media platforms themselves.

Yet we make this latter mistake all the time.

Read the whole thing.

what Twitter is for

2011-11-08T11:05:00.000-05:00

One of the unappreciated benefits of the Internet is the way that bloggers and commenters are constantly proving your points. If I critique an argument, and one commenter pops up to say "nobody argues that," another commenter will inevitably show up and prove, quite loudly, that people do in fact argue that. It's helpful and clarifying.

Nowhere is this more perfectly realized than in my complaints about Twitter. Whenever I make my standard critique of Twitter, someone goes on Twitter, says I'm wrong, and basks in the glow of the self-selected echo chamber which reaffirms every thought. It's as regular as clockwork and as self-defeating as possible.

So: they republished a revised version of my essay on the resentment machine in the New Inquiry, for which I'm quite grateful. Ryan Avent, economics guru and reliably "reasonable" correspondent, was apparently stung by it. Unfortunately, he didn't think to articulate an argument. He merely took to Twitter.

Now, I actually think this might be the platonic Tweet. It disparages without content. It dismisses without effort. It denounces without understanding. Its totally artificial length constraints shield it from having to actually express an argument. It is broadcast in an ostensibly public way, but its creator only receives and replies to those who he chooses, and he will only choose those who flatter and support him. And it produced exactly what Twitter is meant to produce, some random figure that emerges only to gently stroke the ego of the user.

I am angry, because Avent didn't just dismiss my essay without argument. He instead decided to attack my field. I'm not interested in defending it; the scholars who are producing knowledge in my discipline, and their work, can stand on their own. I will merely say that Avent has no idea what my field is, couldn't name three people working within it, doesn't have a clue what kind of research comes from it, doesn't even have a context for understanding what he is offhandedly dismissing. He has no idea, and he has the arrogance that can only come from ignorance and a medium that privileges it. This is what Twitter is for, and this is indicative of the entire operation of prominent bloggers: socially and professionally connected people who defend each other no matter what, excluding and marginalizing dissent, ignoring unpalatable arguments that they can't answer, and in every way undermining as illegitimate criticisms that don't operate from a position of privilege and social authority. You know why our media sucks? Why blogging sucks? This is why. Because bad behavior will never be corrected, thanks to the endless corruption of professional patronage.

This, above all else: I'm right here. Everyone who wants to rebut me has only to take to a blog and rebut me, or come into my comments section to argue with me, or send me an email. I fight a lot. I win some. I lose many. But I am willing to fight, and to lose, as long as my critics are willing to fight. But they never do. They take their whinges behind closed doors, or they back channel grief to me through mutual social circles, or they utilize the fake public forum of Twitter to dismiss in 140 characters what they couldn't rebut in 1,000 words. They do everything but have it out. So here is Ryan Avent, without an argument, without any knowledge whatsoever of the field he's critiquing, with nothing but the reliable certainty that some follower would soothe his ego, flatter his pretensions, and indicate assent. This is what Twitter is for: for those too weak to engage in actual antagonistic discourse. And did Avent retweet his useful pal? Oh, of course.

Unlike Avent, I lack the protections of working for establishment media, or institutional authority, or the pleasant cocoon of neoliberal mutual admiration. I don't have a host of paid-up members of the establishment blogosphere using their levers of control to defend me. It's just me, on this free blogging platform, and nobody else. Not a think tank, not a big media magazine, not a foundation or a set of fellow travelers. I have no institution and I ask for no supporters. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Ryan Avent can continue to hide in a coward's medium. I, meanwhile, will remain here, ready to fight. It's a small grace for a poor and tired grad student, one lacking all the amenities that Avent has accumulated in the world of privilege that establishment media represents, but in comparison to people who spend their whole lives hiding in a bubble of pleasant assent, I feel like a king.

resentment machine watch

2011-11-03T12:26:00.001-04:00

No, the way you mix your old-fashioned cannot reveal the depths of your character. The drink you choose says nothing of meaningful substance about you.

Google Reader to Google+: central planning even I don't like

2011-11-02T13:03:00.002-04:00

(I'm just kidding. There's lots of central planning I don't like.)

With this switch from Google Reader's social features to integration into Google+, forced from above, it's almost as if the Goog is trying to prove the point of the engineer who recently complained about Google's culture and its failures. Google Reader began life as a simple RSS feeder. Simple and powerful: a program that pushes the content you subscribe to and aggregates it in one place. Google, being a bunch of chronic tinkerers (sometimes to the good, often not), continued to develop Reader and added social features. Rather than using this set of social features in a limited way, a small but passionate group of users adopted Reader as their default social network. (For context, I'm not one of them.)

Designers and those who use designs are always meeting in the middle. Designers make certain plans for functionality and use, and users organically define actual use. Actual use can often subvert the intentions of designers in such a way that it undermines their motives-- most obviously their profit motive-- and as such are designed away. That's neither fair nor unfair in and of itself. The only question is whether designing away organic use makes the product more or less attractive to its user base, and whether or not that in turn undermines the primary motives of the designer. Think about Napster. I am dimly aware that Napster continued to exist following its initial use as a clearinghouse for unpaid for music. It may even exist now, but if it does, it's no Amazon or iTunes. They abandoned the use which its user base actually was attached to, thanks to legal coercion, and the user base vanished. That's an extreme example, but it highlights the delicate balance that designers have to strike in pushing users towards certain official uses without losing the functionality that made the product attractive in the first place.

What makes the Google Reader situation frustrating is that they are facing no coercion except the internal edict to integrate their services into Google+. Part of the early brilliance of Google was the way in which it understood that the profit motive could be an impediment to attracting a user base for new products. They didn't allow immediate profitability to get in the way of developing useful products. (This is like the now-overquoted but still clarifying part in the Social Network where Sean Parker points out that you don't put ads on Facebook because ads aren't cool.) Obviously, it helps when you have a central service, search, that is a cash cow and dominant player to subsidize experiments and new ventures. What's distressing is that Google now seems to be allowing integration to affect its products in a way that it never allowed profitability to.

One of the hardest parts about the kind of expansion Google is continuing to embark on is finding needs to fill. This was the problem with Google Wave, and the reason why Wave failed: it's see a need, fill a need, not design a product, find a need for it to fill. One of the saddest parts about that failure is that people wanted to use Wave. Remember that? People got excited ahead of themselves. Then they didn't end up using it, despite initial enthusiasm, because they didn't find a use. Contrast that with Reader as social feature: a user base that found an organic use for a product and have become attached to it without a coordinated effort on Google's part. Reader's social features are the anti-Wave. I can't understand how a company that is so smart in so many ways is being so stupid in failing to understand its own recent past.

Google is trying to build a mall where it owns all the stores. The problem is that part of what makes a mall work is that its individual franchise owners and operators are invested in their individual stores and not in some centrally-planned definition of the health of the mall. Cinnabon might have to live by certain rules, but it's going to advocate for its own good and not for that of the other stores in the mall. By using its central authority to force Reader to suffer for the good of Google+, Google is threatening an established product and user base for the potential good of an unestablished one that might never take off.

If I was on the Reader team, I'd be screaming now.

the security, prosperity, and peace of the Libyan people have not been secured

2011-11-01T18:55:00.000-04:00

Spencer Ackerman has declared that Libya is over.

First: if you believe that the manipulation of Libya by the United States and other western powers is over, you are ignorant of the history of Libya, Northern Africa, the 20th century, and the United States. Our country has been manipulating the course of events in foreign countries, and in particular in oil-rich countries, for the entirety of our modern history. We use coercion, violence, espionage, and diplomatic malfeasance to undermine the self-determination of sovereign countries. This is not conspiracy. It is a reflection of history, revealed in declassified military and espionage documentation that is freely available to anyone. We manipulated Libya when we backed Qaddafi as he ruthlessly murdered his people; we will do it in Libya by backing whatever new military junta ossifies in the coming months. It would take a special combination of ignorance and obtuseness to believe we have no operatives in that country now. We have interests in Libya and so we are manipulating Libya, and we will trod on person, property, and democracy to do so if it suits our ends.

Second: what actually matters-- what has moral valence-- is the material condition of the lives of the Libyan people. Nothing there is finished. Nothing is settled. To call it a democracy now would be an absurd act of projection. Many corrupt men are now freely operating in Libya, armed to the teeth and with a feeling of entitlement. Some of them want to execute homosexuals, oppress women, and adopt Islamic theocracy. Some want to ensure the ascension of their tribe or clan. Some just want to get their piece of the pie. But that's the reality. There is neither security nor stability yet, and anyone who actually cares for the future of the Libyan people would admit that.

But, of course, one of the most important aspects of being a professional pundit and advancing your career is demonstrating "even handedness," even for parlor radicals. So it comes as no surprise that Andrew Sullivan and his pro-Obama propaganda shop have blessed Ackerman with one of their patented Yglesias awards, which is (as I understand it) an award given to people who make stabs at being "reasonable" in a way that defies principle, reason, wisdom, ethics, or sobriety.

People respond to incentives. Behaviors that are rewarded are repeated. And in professional punditry, all of the incentives point away from truth.

dogged adherence to the Enlightenment is illiberal

2011-11-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

It's fair to say that I'm not a fan of the term "classical liberal." This is a term of self-aggrandizement adopted by people who claim to be the real inheritors of Enlightenment values and the tradition of Smith, Locke, and Jefferson. Calling yourself a classical liberal tends to beg the question; the legacy of that era is contested, with leftists like me insisting that the egalitarianism espoused by those thinkers necessarily includes reasonable equity in fact and not just in theory. Even the legacy of specific thinkers, like Adam Smith, are contested. He's generally taken as the patron saint of laissez faire capitalism, but he endorsed progressive taxation, and some read his work as an endorsement of markets specifically because he believed they would deliver egalitarian outcomes.

But even this discussion strikes me as being somewhat besides the point. One of the most obvious elements of the Enlightenment was the rejection of tradition, and particularly the idea that tradition should preserved simply because it is tradition. Embracing reason means embracing change, as what is dictated by reason will shape and be shaped by a changing world. I take the best of liberalism to be its refusal to declare an end to any inquiry. Like the scientific method, liberalism is not a list of truth statements about the world but a way of knowing. It is a process through which useful knowledge can be developed, but the self-critique within it suggests that this knowledge can never be considered the final word.

For this reason, I find constant reference to the ideals of the Enlightenment, like constant invocation of the framers of the Constitution, to be uniquely self-denying. To treat the words of the Enlightenment thinkers as inflexible authority is to reject those thinkers in the most real and distorting way. The world has changed and liberalism must change with it or be discarded.

(Incidentally, I am trying to write shorter posts, as I have been teased about it. I am apparently not entirely incorrigible, my showy assertions of independence notwithstanding.)

nobody knows anything about the movie business

2011-10-31T11:23:00.003-04:00

That's what screenwriter William Goldman once said, anyway.

Here's a little evidence. The A.V. Club declares Puss in Boots and its $34 million dollar weekend take a disappointment. The article also describes Justin Timberlake as "reliably bankable." Meanwhile, New York Magazine's Vulture blog describes Puss in Boots and the self-same $34 million dollar opening weekend as a winner that shows commercial "gusto." The post agrees with the A.V. Club that Timberlake's In Time was a failure, but identifies the main culprit as being... Timberlake and his lack of drawing power.

2011-10-30T22:02:00.006-04:00

I know it can be hard to demonstrate tone in text, but if you have to write "/sarcasm" or similar, perhaps you should just rethink things.

quality control levers in blogging

2011-10-29T12:54:00.001-04:00

Let me get away from my usual aggressive rhetoric for a bit to talk about the lack of accountability in contemporary political punditry.

If I didn't believe in the value and importance of political blogging I wouldn't spend any of my time on it, or on critiquing it. And if I felt that the people I write about most weren't worth critiquing I wouldn't bother. I think that political blogging, and many political bloggers, are worth investing in. But I am saddened and angered by the lack of accountability and quality control levers within the profession. Let me show you what I mean.

Here's Yglesias at his best, on education, a topic on which he and I have great disagreements:

My father dropped out of high school in the middle of 10th grade. As it happens, my father went on to have a successful career as a novelist and screenwriter and is by no means poor. Still the fact of the matter is that my mother could help me with my high school math homework and my dad couldn’t, since he has very little formal math education. A person who grows up in a household headed by a single mother who didn’t complete high school is going to be at a significant educational disadvantage vis-a-vis a person who grows up in a household with two college educated parents for reasons that are not going to be solved by a transfer of financial resources to the single mother. Similarly, a person whose parents were both raised in Latin America and don’t speak English is going to be at a substantial disadvantage. Literate English-speaking parents do a lot to teach their kids to read and write, parents who don’t speak English and may have limited literacy in their native language aren’t able to do this.

This is smart, and the kind of smart that reminds you why it's worth sticking with Yglesias through his less well-developed ideas, and why his prominent role in the political blogosphere is on balance a good thing. I'm not particularly pleased with the reference to common sense on what is an empirical question, but that's no big deal. I think he's making trenchant observations about how conventional wisdom can be distorted or distorting. This kind of thinking is the beginning of inquiry-- you've got to follow up with your empiricism-- but perfectly legitimate and necessary, and an example of the best kind of policy generalism, which is necessary for a functional democracy. You'll note, incidentally, that here Yglesias is moving in the direction of complexity.

Here's Yglesias at his worst, on education:

my experience is that a lot of people on the left, rather than arguing the merits of the issue, seem to take it as self-evidently un-progressive to try to improve the performance of a public agency in part by doing things that the people who work at the agency don’t like. When it comes to big city police departments, I think a much healthier attitude exists. Not one that says cops shouldn’t have rights in the workplace or that “cops are bad,” but one that recognizes a substantial tension between the liberal desire to have police departments work well and the police officers’ desire for high levels of job security and low levels of accountability.

I should hardly have to tell you that this is a specious and childish comparison, one that distorts more than it clarifies. There are a vast amount of difference between education and policing. As happens so often, his commenters just absolutely school him here, so you can look to them for a comprehensive set of critiques of this post. To stake out my usual position, I would just add that Yglesias continues to ignore (despite having heard this critique many times) that there are persistent and non-trivial epistemelogical difficulties in measuring teaching quality fairly, accurately, and to our practical good, and that accordingly we have far more reliable information about best practices in policing than we do in education. Also, criticisms of policing don't actually take the form of calls for widespread privatization, nor the destruction of police unions, which are the goals of the education reform movement and are transparently conservative/libertarian. You'll note, incidentally, that here Yglesias is moving in the direction of simplicity.

What I want is to get more of the former and less of the latter. I'm just one person, so my opinion individually should naturally be of little consequence. But there should be some mechanism of accountability through which the mass can influence professional bloggers. And you'd certainly like that system of accountability to privilege factual accuracy, reference to empiricism, and an appropriate acknowledgment of complexity.

The problem is that there's simply no reliable mechanism of accountability in political blogging to deal with the dross. People say that the oppositional ideologies within the blogosphere ensures pushback, but as I've been trying to document, that doesn't really happen. Social capture happens. Professional incentives distort. The think tank and media distortions in professional punditry, such as the massive over-representation of libertarianism in comparison to the number of American libertarians, upset the balance. Yglesias's commenters are often a good check on his laziness, but they are very easy to ignore, and he does. The Center for American Progress certainly doesn't seem to be imposing any accountability for him; they don't appear to ask him for accuracy or quality control. (They did, however, hijack his blog when he criticized Third Way, which should tell you something about CAP.) There are those few critics such as me, but I'm also ignorable, and there are standard measures to delegitimize people like me, such as the ubiquitous insistence on personal vendetta.

I just don't see any particular set of incentives or penalties for your average political blogger. This is exacerbated by the manic pace of blogging, which means that most posts are quickly forgotten, so there's little opportunity for public accountability. It frustrates me when professional bloggers don't evolve or improve, but I can't really blame them, as there's no concrete reasons for them to change.

I will be the first to tell you that knowledge making in the university system is imperfect. Many people can recount all the ways in which the publication/peer review/tenure process is politicized, detrimental to teaching, distorting, and inimical to certain kinds of inquiry or topics. But there is at least a clear process here. If I want to make an article and have it resonate professionally, I have to publish in a reputable journal. The editors of the journal will give my proposal an initial vetting. They reject many or most. If I get through that original vetting, my paper goes through the peer review process. The peer reviewers make comments and set standards. I have to change my article in order for it to be published. Once it's published, it's accessible to a field of experts who will evaluate it for quality and accuracy. If I'm wrong, others will publish criticizing me. Publication is rare enough that every piece really counts. If my work is consistently poor or inaccurate, it will deeply impact my ability to get hired, to gain tenure, and earn promotion and professional laurels. It's an imperfect system, but it's a system with a clear set of quality control levers that are directly tied to professional advancement. There simply is no equivalent system in political punditry. See the careers of, for example, Bill Kristol and Jeffrey Goldberg for evidence.

Oh, by the way: Yglesias's comparison is more apt than he knows in one particular way. As so often happens with policing, the inevitable result of the ed "reform" movement will be juking the stats. These educational problems are irresolvable given the realities of our system of resource distribution, inequities in quality of parenting, and the unspeakable but real fact that people are substantially unequal in intellectual aptitude. But since our society is incapable of recognizing that we don't have the tools to solve all of our problems, we instead cover those problems with pleasant lies. There is absolutely no question in my mind that the educational reform wars will cool through a consensus decision to pretend the problems away.

The question is, will we do so in a way that destroys unions, harms teachers, and hands yet more public over to private enterprise-- dare I say it, a self-evidently unprogressive outcome.

the tyranny of Washington DC

2011-10-28T09:42:00.002-04:00

Brad Delong was kind enough to link to my post about social and professional capture in blogging. I would just say that the point is less about who gets linked to and who doesn't and more about the pressures that professional or professionalizing bloggers feel to adopt certain mainstream positions, or to kowtow to certain prominent figures within the blogosphere. This problem is much less acute for someone like Dr. Delong, who has a day job and operates outside of the DC bubble.

On the subject of the DC bubble, and to defend myself against the typical claims that I'm just making all of this up, I would point you towards a great piece by Conor Friedersdorf called "The Tyranny of Washington DC." Friedersdorf comes from an entirely different ideological background than I do, is much more familiar with the DC bubble than I am, and comes to many of the same conclusions that I do. I'm not just making this stuff up.

In a situation where a close personal friend genuinely considered some action to be a personal betrayal, I'd try to avoid taking it even if I disagreed with his assessment. Washington, D.C. is a city where taking that approach can preclude whole classes of criticism directed at one's "own side," so stringent are the demands for a loyalty that is too broadly construed. Or else one can transgress, and be shunned by folks who were much friendlier when you agreed with them.

Read the whole thing.

here's the problem

2011-10-27T20:32:00.000-04:00

The problem isn't conservatives. That's not what I worry about, when it comes to my residual hopes for real change. The screeching of pathetic drones like Rich Lowry or Kevin Williamson is expected and immaterial. They don't change, nor are they corrigible, so they are ultimately irrelevant.

No, here's the problem.

Someone called Tom Bridge takes to the tastefully gated pages of Tumblr to express some sort of formless complaint about the Occupy protests. I've read it back three times and I'm still not sure what kind of argument is being expressed here. There appears to be an annoyance that Occupy protests are "taking up our public spaces," which is a criticism that is perhaps blunted by a familiarity with the definition of "public." He doesn't like the equation of the Occupy protests with the Arab Spring. I don't either, but then this is the kind of empty, citation-and-specific-target-free complaint that you can feel free to discard at any time without prejudice. He also is apparently under the impression that a police baton feels like the gentle caress of angel hair. Beyond that... what? What is the argument here? I haven't a clue.

What's funny is that this is a perfect inversion of the typical whinge about Occupy-- you don't stand for anything! Where's your list of demands! Who is the specific Democrat whose campaign you must be supporting!

You'll note, though, that this sentiment is popular. This Tumblr post has been reblogged and Tweeted and whatever else endlessly, despite not being insightful, fair, well articulated, specific, funny, meaningful, or intelligent. It doesn't need to be. Mr. Bridge is here operating as a cog in the resentment machine, and others celebrate his piece because they are afraid of what Occupy represents: the death of the idea that you can be protected from political impotence by apathy and your cultural convictions.

This photo is prime evidence for my conviction that anything, no matter how lame or poorly executed, can be celebrated online, as long as it speaks to some kind of base animal anxiety. For Hipster B. Cool here, the idea that politics is something that has flesh and blood consequences for humanity is a terrible affront; he and those like him have built an entire culture around self-defense mechanisms. To admit conviction is to admit the possibility of vulnerability. To admit vulnerability is to lose in the endless game of "I am on the Internet and I am better than you." So Jackof Smirnoff here doesn't have to have a point, funny jokes, meaningful criticisms or a political notion to get reblogged. He just has to reassure his "arty" koffee klatsch that they are protected and safe within the bubble of their meaningless convictions about media and culture.

I mean, really. "Call a Congressman." Yes, that's the way to create change! Remember how Congress took action after the financial crisis and all of our problems were solved? When the money stopped going to the same tiny group of rapacious financiers who drove the entire world economy to the edge of the abyss? When the unemployed got a comprehensive jobs program? When we stopped spending billions on misadventures in the Muslim world and instead stimulated the economy and rebuilt our employment base? That was sweet.

The idea that the Occupy protests have no core complaints is and has always been a pure media phenomenon. It is an invention, fobbed off on people like Tom Bridge or Beardo McNotFunny here by a media that plays them for fools. I'll say it again-- there are those who are so deeply savvy that they become immeasurably stupid. (Think almost everyone who writes for New York magazine.) Here's all you need to know. For the large majority of our country's people, the engine of economic improvement has stalled. You can look at any chart of inflation-adjusted dollars and see that for the average American worker wages have been stagnant since the early 1980s. Meanwhile, for a tiny sliver of our population, wealth has exploded beyond the dreams of avarice during the same period. And this sliver represents the same people who ruined the economy and cast millions into unemployment. What Occupy represents is the loud and angry reaction to that fact. This reaction has been deeply deserved. Meanwhile, the legislative branch which Seamus J. Ironic Mustache here supports has done nothing of substance to redress this injustice. Nothing at all.

I genuinely believe that a person like Socially Approved Facial Hair here has to look out at Occupy with a kind of existential terror. Many people out there generate their self-worth from their ability to make fun of others. And who has traditionally been an easier target than the stereotype of an Occupy protester? Hippies are the people everyone can make fun of! Unfortunately for this anonymous man with his limp satire here, Occupy is not made up of the stereotype, and it has not been met with this kind of showy superiority. Instead it has been met with cautious but genuine interest, with critical examination, and with a deep interrogation of our current way of life. This kind of genuine, unfussy, and unembarrassed consideration of values and community morals is anathema to many, but they find their influence collapsing. In the face of that, they take cheap swipes like this.

Let me say this a thousand times, let me say it a million: I will take the most horrid conservative over this, any day of the week. I will take someone who is wrong, but is wrong about something, over this desperately preening, showy nothing. I will take total commitment to incorrect values over this proud emptiness. This kind of showy cowardice, this contempt for the notion of meaning, is what it looks like when you give any control of your country or your community away, or worse, when you sell it for some cheap commodity like irony or "wit."

Put that on your Tumblr, culture bunny.

what we mean when we talk about establishment media

2011-10-26T09:33:00.002-04:00

Fair and balanced!

hat tip to Shani O. Hilton, via Yglesias

we live in clarifying times

2011-10-24T18:37:00.000-04:00

"The documentary makes it clear how repressive and brutal Gadaffi's regime is. How he has locked up and tortured thousands of his opponents. But then it takes a fascinating turn. The interviewer asks Gadaffi to explain why he has sent Libyan troops to fight with the Palestinians against Israel, and why he has sent in Libyan agents to try and overthrow President Sadat of Egypt.

In response Gadaffi launches into an explanation that countries like Libya have a duty to intervene in other nations where the ordinary people are being oppressed by autocrats or oppressive governments - and help free them. That includes helping to liberate Egypt and Tunisia....

Kouchner quickly discovered that victims could be very bad. There was an extraordinary range of ethnic groups in Kosovo.

There were:
Muslim Albanians
Orthodox Serbs
Roman Catholic Serbs
Serbian-speaking Muslim Egyptians
Albanian-speaking Muslim Gypsies - Ashkalis
Albanian-speaking Christian Gypsies - Goranis
And even - Pro-Serbian Turkish-speaking Turks

They all had vendettas with each other - which meant that they were both victims and horrible victimizers at the same time. It began to be obvious that getting rid of evil didn't always lead to the simple triumph of goodness."

-Adam Curtis, "Goodies and Baddies"

"An analysis of video obtained by GlobalPost from a rebel fighter who recorded the moment when Col. Moammar Gadhafi was first captured confirms that another rebel fighter, whose identity is unknown, sodomized the former leader as he was being dragged from the drainpipe where he had taken cover."

-Tracy Shelton, Global Post

"The Arab Spring has provided US policymakers with a set of golden opportunities to help make the Arab World a better place for its people. The time has come to think boldly of a brand new course that will help the Arab World extract itself from the malaise it has found itself in since the end of the Second World War. After the fall of Qaddafi, we should seize the momentum the West has won and help the Syrian people topple the Assad regime."
-Colonel Cedric Leyton, "Beyond Qaddafi"

There you go, Andrew. You bought your tickets. Now you know your companions. Enjoy the ride.

Update:

"In a press conference, yesterday, Libya's transitional leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil said that Sharia law will become the 'main source' of legislation in a post-Gadhafi era."

-Eydar Peralta, NPR

understand what they're celebrating

2011-10-21T11:13:00.000-04:00

When you've got something like Steven Pinker's latest book making the rounds, it's helpful and clarifying to look to the pathetic spectacle of yet more whooping and hollering and celebrating of death at this high tide of rational civilization. The absurd rationalizations for our appetite for bloodletting tells you all you need to know about the state of Western civilization: we love murder, bloodshed, and death, but we cover it by pretending to feel bad about it. (I'm sure you really struggled with the decision to show Qaddafi's corpse, MSNBC. Keep the fires burning.)

Nothing can match the farce of the showy, desperately affected celebration that attended the slaughter of Osama bin Laden and unnamed members of his family. ("No, really, we really do believe we're number one again! We so, so believe it! Look at the excited and happy expression I'm putting on my face!") But the usual suspects are doing as they do. The prominent members of the establishment's messaging machine provide the pseudo-intellectual justification; the tabloid press operates most honestly and stimulates the public lizard brain by giving them what they really want; liberal members of the media provide the moral justification, and buttressed by their Lord of the Rings worldview, smack down any criticism or questioning with far more zeal than they employ against their supposed ideological enemies. There is a machine to justify our country's killing, even the killing of innocent children, it operates with great efficiency, and the ostensibly antagonistic liberal house intellectuals are in fact paid up parts of that machine.

Here is what I know more than anything else: no one who cares for Libyans themselves could see this turn of events as an ending, a conclusion, or a victory. The future is Libya could not be more unsettled, more dangerous, more precarious. What happens next is what is important, in the next month, the next six, the next year, the next five. Will a new flowering of democracy and freedom take hold? Will a new reigning military junta take hold, as appears to have happened in Egypt? Will a newly repressive Islamist state develop? Nobody knows. Nobody will know, for a long time. Those declaring victory today are doing it because they have achieved what they wanted, which is a justification for limitless American military aggression, and support for Barack Obama, one of the most unapologetic militarists in American political history.

So we know, for example, that John Heilemann doesn't actually care about Libyans at all. For him the story has concluded.

Look to the work of Andrew Sullivan in the near future. It will tell you everything about him and his agenda. Are the Libyan people his concern, or are they the means that support his actual concerns? Does he care more about Barack Obama's electoral chances than about the blood of the people that he has so ostentatiously draped around his blog for months? I'm afraid that the situation in Libya won't comport to the 2012 election cycle. Of course, for some, the important thing is merely the appearance of victory. For the "liberal interventionists," for whom the Libyan people have never actually been fully human, the material results of this situation are immaterial. They have only ever existed to support an aggressive military posture justified with a fig leaf of "humanitarian intervention." They are means to an end. The Libyan people have been instrumentalized.

Is that the truth about Andrew's regard for them? Initial reports are not encouraging. But I have hope for Andrew. I hope he will get out of the celebration business.

If your concern is for the Libyan people, you are quiet, afraid, hopeful, and unsettled. If you are interested in vindicating a strategy, if you are interested in crass partisan political concerns, if you treat living human beings as a means to an end, then you are happy and unconcerned. And with each passing day Libya will fall farther and farther away from your mind.

Update: This was too harsh on John Heilemann, who is only a symptom of a broader disease. I reiterate that it is wrong and ugly to discuss the political fallout and other US-centric issues as if there is something resembling a conclusion here, and I do believe that this tendency reveals a deeply disturbing set of priorities when it comes to the Libyan conflict.

Also, I was far too glib and mean spirited towards Adam Serwer. He's too much of a critical thinker to be dismissed in that way. The zeal with which he prosecutes his arguments against anyone on his left who questions his stances on these issues disturbs me, and I believe his certitude regarding the moral importance of killed-before-capture/captured then killed distinctions is misplaced. I have profound differences with him, obviously. I apologize for my characterization and my tone but not for my particular convictions.

recognize administrative work in tenure decisions!

2011-10-20T11:47:00.000-04:00

One of the sadder elements of the current difficulties in the university is just how little sway the faculty-- the people who actually disseminate and generate knowledge-- have in decisions about the fundamental structure of the university.

Here's what I mean specifically. It really does seem that, though there are a variety of factors, the biggest individual contributor to rising college costs is administrative costs. As I've told you many times, a lot of these issues are intertwined: more administrators is both a function and a cause of the rampant mission creep of universities, the rising number of activities and services that universities provide for students... which cost money. Now, part of our duty to tamp down these costs certainly involves cutting programs, which will be painful but necessary.

But there's always going to be administrative tasks that have to happen. Part of the rise in administrative costs stems from the fact that jobs that used to be performed by faculty members are now performed by dedicated administrators. That means that you've got to pay another salary and for another set of benefits, and since the university tends to give employees living wages and generous benefits packages-- to its great credit-- this is expensive. You might assume that faculty members want it to be this way, but many faculty members actually would relish the opportunity to take over some of the administrative duties that have been farmed out. (Personally, I'm pursuing a designation in writing program administration in my own doctoral program.) Benjamin Ginsberg wrote a really great primer on these issues called The Fall of the Faculty that I recommend to anyone with an interest in higher education.

A lot of the job of clawing back these appointments and responsibilities simply has to come from the upper levels of university leadership, and potentially from the state legislatures when it comes to public U's. But we also need to demonstrate to faculty that this work is valuable and valued within the institution. That's why it's imperative, if the faculty is to regain some administrative control and if we're to reduce costs, that we factor administrative duties into the tenure review process. I don't have a strict formula here-- a full year as a program admin is the same as one journal article, etc.-- but there's got to be allowance made for the fact that this is important, time-consuming work that should be professionally valued. Faculty members who feel the great pressure to publish have to know that they aren't endangering their careers by taking on this kind of work. This problem needs to be alleviated from above the faculty level, but it's also got to be addressed within the apparatus of professional advancement.

why Occupy Wall Street exists, reason #1,734

2011-10-18T09:04:00.001-04:00

I'm afraid I don't know who is responsible for this image, so I can't give credit where it's due, but I thought this was too enraging not to post. (Note that the bottom story is from 2009.)

blogging is a system of control

2011-10-17T04:55:00.000-04:00

Matt Yglesias calls attention to an interview with Glenn Greenwald. Both the interview and Yglesias's commentary on it invoke ideas that are close to my heart. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Yglesias and Greenwald are considerably more optimistic about the state of blogging than I am. In fact what's remarkable to me is that the current status of blogging is the absolute worst of both worlds from traditional media and the conditions of the early blogosphere.

The first and most important thing to understand about mainstream blogging is that it is made up of a numerically tiny and considerably homogeneous group of connected insiders. Criticisms of the prominent blogosphere are often blunted by online mythology, and that is nowhere more clear than in the idea that there is this vast swath of disparate people from different backgrounds, all of whom contribute to this open and accessible online forum where ideas are judged on merit.

The truth of the matter is that the blogosphere is largely a closed loop. The ability of individuals, particularly those dedicated to amateur blogging (out of principle or out of practicality), to penetrate the larger conversation is quite small. As Yglesias laments, the capture of the blogosphere by the media and think tank apparatus means that there are now a whole host of gatekeepers who rigorously police the online discussion and determine which voices are heard. It's hard to think of anyone who has come up in prominence the last few years who was not quickly co-opted into the service of a large media or political entity. This ensures that those who participate in the prominent blogosphere (the "official" conversation) are from a very limited set of backgrounds, both personal and ideological. Because mainstream media publications and major political organizations draw from only those blessed by the shambling apparatus of American achievement, those who make it in now are almost all coming from the world of status games, big name colleges, and perennial overachievement-- a subset of our young people that has far more in common, demographically and ideologically, than it has in difference. And because mainstream media and our political policy edifice are dedicated to the protection of a particular economic system and strata, getting in also means kowtowing to a narrow range of political argument. As is usual in our politics the appearance of internal disagreement gives cover for a broad conformity of ideas.

I am aware that, if this critique penetrates, it will speak against exactly what I am arguing. And I don't mean to suggest that the system is beyond reform, or that the broad conditions I'm describing don't permit exceptions. The question is whether the system is conducive to internal critique, whether ideas like mine could ever exceed my small readership, and whether this kind of criticism could come from someone who has not been met with considerable opprobrium.

Then there is the system of social control that I have long identified. The world of elite media and politics is dominated by social relationships. The environment in which most of these people work and live is a small fishbowl in which the connected and influential rub shoulders all the time. It's an open secret that those from supposedly antagonistic political backgrounds socialize together. There's nothing wrong with that in any specific instance of friendship and camaraderie, and even I'm not critic enough to suggest that people shouldn't be friends. (Indeed, it's precisely that this social environment is so natural, human, and understandable that makes addressing its consequences tricky.) But in aggregate you get a tremendous amount of social capture, and it has real relevance. Those who have social commitments to their ideological enemies have great incentive to moderate their political messages and express disagreement in particular and anodyne terms that lead towards certain outcomes in discussion. My standard example is the case of health care reform, a straightforwardly moral issue where the moral argument was often ignored in favor of a bloodless policy argument. In an environment where the public was often skeptical of or hostile towards particular policy details about health care reform, the refusal to speak about the need for that reform in unambiguously moral terms was a tremendous failure by the liberal messaging machine. I have no doubt that this failure was caused in part by the discomfort many connected liberal bloggers felt in expressing moral condemnation of the selfsame conservatives and libertarians they were drinking buddies with.

(You'll note that a lot of these problems could be avoided if the DC media and policy system was decentralized. Obviously, there's got to be a central locus of national government, and that requires a DC press corp. But in the Internet age, the vast majority of policy people have no legitimate need to reside in DC. Many of the media and think tank operations currently operating out of Washington could be removed from that environment without any meaningful impact on their ability to analyze, explain, or advocate. These institutions remain where they are, I think, primarily out of inertia and drift.)

There are exceptions. Greenwald has remained independent, and his geographical distance from DC is both symbolically and practically important. Atrios is truly independent, buttressed by his longevity and grandfathered in from a time when you could be prominent without being attached to any particular legitimizing institution. And there are of course plenty of voices that are smart and principled and worthwhile operating within the bounds of the conventional, approved ideological range. Being within the enforced political boundaries doesn't render someone unprincipled, unworthy of being listened to, or illegitimate. It's just that there are tons of those voices in the establishment blogosphere, almost none from outside the approved alternatives, and the common assumption that there is great disagreement and ideological diversity is the kind of distortion that has negative consequences.

As usual, this is a critique that people will think I am making with great personal judgment, and as usual I'm actually not. (Actually, the insistence on the personal origin of system-wide critique is one of the ways the system is protected.) I have a great deal of sympathy for a lot of the young people who come up into the political media world. People who have legitimate and noble desire to live and work in this environment aren't bad people in any sense. But they face an environment that relentlessly influences their political makeup and steers them again and again towards establishment orthodoxy. From the minute young politicos emerge into the DC system, they are taught the importance of coloring within the lines and of not rocking the boat socially. The message that is delivered unambiguously is that those who want to make a life and career in these fields must do so by playing ball and deferring to authority, convention, and the social authority. I'm sure many who have gone through the process or are going through it now could diagnose the problem far better than I can. But if they want to remain in the game, they have to play by the rules, and so you see their dilemma. The end result is that generations of passionate young people arrive fiery and combative, ready to buck the system, and leave as creatures of that system. It's perverse.

You should note that the personal doesn't have to operate in the actual social sphere for social conditioning to happen. Razib Khan mentioned me in a post earlier this year that I think is indicative of a certain kind of subtle control. Khan is right that I have a certain reputation, to the degree that anyone thinks about me online at all. (Which isn't much.) But note that he is both describing reality and reinforcing that reality. When someone like Khan speaks obliquely about bad reputations, he is reinforcing the idea of "blogosphere as high school," and further separating the officially condoned from the officially excluded. People are very aware of these kinds of cues, and they are all over the place in blogs. I imagine that Khan or others enforcing these social constraints would say that my reputation is the product of my conduct and not of the content of my opinions, but I find this divide totally illusory. People with fringe views are constantly buffeted with accusations of bad interpersonal conduct. But there's nowhere that the ideological ends and the social begins. People who hold ideas that are outside of the narrow partisan boilerplate will inevitable be accused of violating some sort of community standards, when in fact the reason for their marginalization is the unpopularity of their ideas.

(You'll note that these are not mutually exclusive. It could be that I both have a bad reputation because I don't conform to narrow political constraints and also that I'm an asshole.)

Finally, one of the most important mechanisms of control is the cone of silence. I've been making some version or another of this argument for the four years or so that I've been blogging. And while I've gotten some limited attention to some of the issues that I've written about in that time, I've gotten no purchase whatsoever for the ideas presented in this post. I am sure people disagree with my opinions on how blogs work, but I've never read any counterargument. I don't mean that I've never agreed with arguments against my ideas. I mean that I've literally never encountered one. I am unaware of anyone even trying to rebut me here. That doesn't mean that I'm right, but it does mean that these ideas go undiscussed and thus unamplified.

The point isn't that people should be paying attention to me and my ideas specifically. The point is that when such a small number of people account for such a large amount of the linking and commentary that creates discussion points, there's tremendous opportunity for unapproved ideas to disappear into the ether of an intentional lack of attention. Arguments don't need to be rebutted in a context where they can be effectively ignored. In fact the very act of rebuttal suggests that an idea has at least merit enough to require argument. An ignored argument enjoys no such legitimacy.

I'm not alleging coordinated conspiracy here. People don't email each other and say "shh, nobody respond to such and such argument, it's too uncomfortable for our social circle." It's just the natural consequence of symmetry in the professional and social needs of influential and connected people. Impolite and impolitic ideas are excluded by bloggers of influence because that is human nature. The conformity and homogeneity of bloggers of influence means that most will find the same ideas impolite and impolitic. Conspiracy isn't necessary when mutual necessity will do. The end result is an arena of ideas that is neither open nor varied nor democratic nor fair.

Now, in the interest of self-disclosure: as a graduate student, I am myself part of a system that suggests broad political and ideological latitude for its constituents that nevertheless influences and corrupts personal opinion endlessly. I think that the controls are far more subtle and effectively less noxious than those within the political realm, but as a paid-up (in all but the literal sense, I'm sorry to say) member of that system I am of course inclined to think that. I express no criticism here that wouldn't in one way or the other be an apt description of the compromises I make all the time in my own quest to professionalize. It's just that my own petty corruptions don't help to dictate the political policy of the United States.

the resentment machine in action

2011-10-15T15:20:00.001-04:00

If you'd like to see an absolutely perfect, absolutely dreadful display of what I was talking about, see the comments on this post.

I mean, Jesus.

Kate Bolick's piece in the Atlantic

2011-10-15T09:00:00.002-04:00

1. About that piece-- first, read Phoebe Malz, Amanda Marcotte, and this interview with Edith Zimmerman.

2. I really do think that this is a story that makes perfect sense to what is in context a tiny sliver of people, and would seem totally inscrutable to a lot of other people. That's just my intuition. I think if you are among a certain social strata and you live in a particular kind of urban enclave with particular dating dynamics and particular assumptions about gender roles and a particular type of educated, socially liberal, and ambitious participants, this all sounds like the world around you. I think for most Americans, let alone most of the world, this kind of article causes people to say "...what?" The most glaring problem with American media is that it is written by people who genuinely believe that their neighborhood is the world. And most of them live in the same half-dozen neighborhoods.

3. Marcotte's point needs to be repeated and extended. Writers of all stripes enjoy engaging in the most cynical readings of human behavior because they think it makes them appear hyper-rational. But in fact here is a perfect example of how trying to achieve that makes you irrational. Human emotion is real. It is an observable phenomenon. It observably influences behavior. Therefore to fail to account for it when discussing coupling and relationships is the opposite of cold rationality; it is in fact a failure of empiricism. Speaking as a social scientist (in training), for someone to write about human romantic and sexual relationships without reference to the reality of human emotions-- that is, that people feel love, affection, desire, lust, and other imprecise but physiologically observable phenomena-- is a profound mistake when trying to fully interpret the world of relationships. You don't get credit for a showy cynicism when that cynicism results in poor ethnography.

4. My least favorite aspect of contemporary long-form journalism: "as I am, so must be the world." I don't understand why an intelligent and educated woman like Bolick is so resistant of saying "this is the choice that I've made; others will and should make different choices themselves." Reference to evolutionary psychology is the last refuge of a lazy writer. I celebrate the fact that Bolick feels that she doesn't need to get married. I wish she had the confidence necessary to express that idea without having to make it seem as though it is the only valid choice, and one that is insisted on by evolution. Real confidence stems from the recognition that others make different choices than you do and remaining secure in your own choice; fake confidence insists that others cannot make choices different than the ones you've made, or that they are fooling themselves, or living a lie, or whatever else.

That's the persistent and sad subtext of Bolick's piece. She insists that she is comfortable with her choice, and yet she feels the need to justify her choice in ways that undermine that insistence. Saying "evolution makes me do it" is exactly the opposite of expressing confidence in a choice. It instead is denying that a choice was made at all. I celebrate that more and more women are choosing to stay single if that's what they want, and I hope that the cultural assumption that an unmarried woman is an unhappy woman continues to erode. But the fact that it requires a 4,000 word essay in the Atlantic tells us that this is still not a fully accepted phenomenon yet. I'll recognize victory when a woman as accomplished as Bolick doesn't need to spend so much time justifying her choice.

5. Here's why I think she's on the cover of the issue of the Atlantic in which her recent story appears: I think she is on the cover, and in pictures inside the story, because she is writing about her superior desirability to the men whom she might potentially partner with. And I think that in order to make that possible, she and the Atlantic need to show that she's attractive. And she is. If there were no pictures of her, that would be the question on most people's minds: what does she look like?

That, in and of itself, tells you a lot. Bolick can convey socially-relevant information about the relative desirability of the men she's talking about in the article, with words. She can write about education and ambition and drive and money and whatever else, and that says enough to make the point. But Bolick's desirability can't be meaningfully conveyed without showing what she looks like. For all the talk of the declining fortunes of men relative to women, and how women are gaining the upper hand in the romantic and sexual marketplace, women's desirability continues to be largely determined by their physical appearance. I wish Bolick's accomplishments were enough to convey her desirability, but the cold calculus her editors performed in putting her on the cover says otherwise.

As with Hannah Rosin's "The End of Men," this strikes me as an article that superficially details victory for women while the context in which it emerges reminds us of how far we still have to go.

2011-10-11T14:20:00.000-04:00

I'll tell you, one thing that I appreciate about getting older, you really do learn to let go of your own bullshit.

It's not that life stops being full of day-to-day indignities for you and injustice for those in a worse station than you, it's just that you can learn how to give yourself a break. You really do come to understand which of your responsibilities are real responsibilities, and which of them is nonsense that you've self-imposed out of some combination of genuine concern and self-importance. I don't even think that it's a matter of losing ideological purity, or anything like that. I think it's a matter of recognizing that you can't do any good for the real, important causes if you are so busy beating yourself up about illusory commitments.

And you do count your blessings. When I was younger I could rage about injustice but had no perspective on how profoundly fortunate I was, or was becoming. I knew to say it always, like a preemptive strike, and I insisted on it in the academic sense. It has taken a rehabilitation of myself in my own mind to realize that good fortune in anything like a profound or meaningful way. My self-hatred and self-inflicted problems, I've come to realize, were not the mark of someone wrestling with an unjust world but were rather an attempt to crowd it out.

The bias is always towards saying that you'd prefer to be your own age rather than younger. Most of us want to be younger, after all, but know that we're supposed to say that we're happy where we are. I'm not sure I can say either way. Here at 30, all I can tell you is that I am so much more of a healthy and fulfilled person than I was at 25, and I wouldn't trade this perspective for anything. 25 included. I'm trying to make 30 an age of letting go.

what to do for the young, debt-ridden and jobless

2011-10-09T19:13:00.000-04:00

Some people have read my piece on Occupy Wall Street as being more critical or unfeeling towards recent college graduates than I intended. I don't take back anything that I said in that post, but I want to point out that the point wasn't and isn't that these people don't have legitimate grievances, or that we shouldn't take their problems seriously. Some constructive ideas:

First, I have argued that college costs need to be reined in, perhaps dramatically, since before the financial crisis and the attendant hit in employment rates for college grads. I wrote a piece here on that issue. The takeaway, for me, is threefold: first, stop the rampant expansion in administrative costs at universities, which are the primary driver of tuition increases, in large part by second reducing the vast array of services that colleges are offering that, whatever their merits, are tangential to the educational mission, which is itself a part of the third element, stopping the manic physical expansion and focus on facilities, beautification, and high-cost/high-maintenance construction.
You can certainly find far, far more educated and nuanced discussion of Keynesian economics elsewhere, but I do believe in the general Keynesian countercyclical economic model as endorsed by Paul Krugman et al, and I think properly executed fiscal and monetary stimulus could do a world of good for our job market. (Unlike Krugman et al, I don't think the failure by policy elites to enact that kind of stimulus is a product of short-term political forces but rather is due to an endemic capture of the policy apparatus by our financial and banking system.)
Personally, broad student loan forgiveness strikes me as a sound policy both ethically and from a stimulus standpoint. You wouldn't have to make it complete, but could agree to waive some percentage or some fixed value off of anyone's load debt. I understand the sense in which this seems to punish those who paid off their loans, and I also know that the deficit hawks would howl. But this is indeed a great burden on our young adults, and I don't see a moral hazard problem per se when it comes to student loans.

Update: A commenter sends along this link to an argument against student load forgiveness from Justin Wolfers. My theory is that Wolfers has a lot of student loan debt himself, or his children do, so while his economic mind opposes the idea, it would be personally better for him if student loan forgiveness passed. That's the only explanation I can offer for why he would express seemingly sound ideas in such an irritating tone. I don't know, seems like loan forgiveness would be a bad idea, but golly. Scraping together a little sympathy for these people wouldn't make your arguments less valid, and would do your tone a world of good.

Incidentally, Wolfers's piece utilizes my least favorite bit of political illogic, the part where he say

Do this once, and what will happen in the next recession? More lobbying for free money, rather than doing something socially constructive. Moreover, if these guys succeed, others will try, too. And we’ll just get more spending in the least socially productive part of our economy—the lobbying industry.

Except, well, no. This kind of argument gets bandied about all the time, and it happens because when the future actually arrives, nobody remembers this hogwash and bothers to refute it. Look at it this way. We were in recession. Obama got a stimulus passed. We may have slid back into recession already or may be about to. Does that mean we're going to get more stimulus? Anybody who is politically engaged would say no. That's because things change. The political situation changes, conditions on the ground change. "If we do this now we are required to do it again," or "we did it then so we must do it again now" are arguments nobody makes, thanks to their complete emptiness, so using the prediction of those arguments to preempt potential policy is equally empty.

Finally, Wolfers is disingenuous when he says

Notice the political rhetoric? Give free money to us, rather than “corporations, millionaires and billionaires.” Opportunity cost is one of the key principles of economics. And that principle says to compare your choice with the next best alternative. Instead, they’re comparing it with the worst alternative. So my question for the proponents: Why give money to college grads rather than the 15% of the population in poverty?

This would be more convincing, and much closer to that cutting tone Wolfers is so transparently trying (and failing) to achieve, were the "worst possible alternative" not, in fact, the status quo. Wolfers is speaking here as if government supporting the richest and corporations over more progressive alternatives is some lame straw man. It is in fact standard operating procedure, as he is well aware.

solidarity first, then fear for this movement's future

2011-10-07T12:51:00.003-04:00

One of the frustrations of being a left-wing activist is that the admirable self-critiquing aspect of left-wing discourse often makes organization difficult. I put in years and countless hours in the antiwar movement in the mid-2000's. (I don't organize myself, anymore, although I feel plenty guilty about it.) Back in those days I was constantly frustrated by the smart liberal people I met who were dedicated and articulate opponents of the Iraq war who refused to ever sign on to any public show of support. The reason was often that they could express some fairly convincing critique of any given protest, group, or movement. Fairly convincing, that is, but not nearly proportional to the great necessity of opposing our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

There is frequently a tendency in left-wing circles to fail to see the forest for the trees when it comes to political expression. If you feel the way that I feel, opposing the war in Iraq, as with opposing the continuing capture of our political process by moneyed interests, is a matter of exigence and necessity. If you wait around for the perfect moment, the perfect movement, the perfect march, the perfect rally, and the perfect protesters, you will never protest anything. You will make the perfect the enemy of the alright and effectively self-censor. Yes, goals matter, process matters, message matters. First you take the streets. That's what people in right-wing protest movements know. First you take the streets. Perfect doesn't happen and you can't wait for it. You find the change that must happen and you advocate for it as fiercely as you are able. The self-critiquing aspect of liberalism is of great value to me, and I recognize that what I'm describing stems from that. But change can't come without accepting the non-ideal.

So let me say off the bat that I am in broad solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, that I celebrate the spirit of resistance for its own sake, that I welcome the recognition that our finance and banking sectors are the cause of a huge portion of our problems, and that I am thrilled at the existence of a genuine left-wing resistance movement. Those things come first. They matter most.

That commitment and solidarity expressed, I'm disturbed by a recent development in the Occupy Wall Street movement. I keep seeing photos of people holding signs, or watching interviews with people, or reading blog posts or on Facebook, that express some measure of this: the problem is that young college graduates have lots of student loan debt and can't get jobs, and so now they're taking to the streets. And to me, if that is the message here, heaven help us.

Here's a post by Mike Konczal that illustrates this idea. Here's Jonathan Alter expressing similar sentiment. Here is a piece from Reuters that explores some of these issues. This idea is all over if you look for it.

Consider what the idea here is: that this protest becomes something worth considering when and only when it becomes about those who are most visible. Only when the young and college educated begin to express grievance, and only when that grievance concerns their material wealth and opportunity, do the protests begin to take off. It is extremely disturbing to me how quickly a movement opposing our system of prestige and wealth becomes a movement about those who thought they were entitled to succeed in that system. Complaining that a college education hasn't moved you into the material comfort and social strata you wanted isn't an argument against this system; it's a complaint about the outcome of the system that tacitly asserts the value of that system. When someone says "I have a law degree and I work as a barista," the necessary assumption of that statement is that their law degree entitles them to a certain material and social privilege. That privilege is precisely what animates the system they say they are protesting.

If the message is "I went to college and I don't have the job and the car and the lifestyle I was promised," then none of this means anything. These complaints, I'm sorry to say, are ultimately a way of saying "I didn't get mine." That's not a rejection of our failing order. It is an embrace of it in the most cynical terms.

The educated unemployed young deserve better from our system, it's true. Recapturing some of the vast portion of wealth that flowed to the richest in the last decades will help them, and they are right to ask for that. But this country cannot be fixed by wishing to go back to the economics of 2005. The problem with our model is that it is inherently unjust and inherently unsustainable. Yes, we must take back from the wealthiest what they have taken. But we also must understand that defining success or failure based on who gets what level of security and luxury is to fall right back into the materialist trap that has created this system.

I have great sympathy for the people of my generation and those a little younger than me, as they are emerging from a childhood where they were told that they could have whatever they wanted into a world where they can't. But they must recognize that the problem was always the promise, and not the failure to get what was promised. You can't, actually, have everything you want. You are not entitled to the life you have dreamed. And we are not so wealthy that we can all live in opulence. If the goal is merely to restore the condition of the previous two decades and add more people to the ranks of the middle class, then that is the problem reasserting itself. After all, wages have been stagnant for decades. But the educated class was bought off by the widespread "prosperity" provided by endless easy credit and the phony growth of bubbles and illusory housing wealth. Those protesting because they thought they were entitled to a house and consumer electronics are announcing that they want to be bought off again.

To mean anything, this movement must be a movement that opposes both the means and the ends of the contemporary American engine of "success," both out of a conviction that it is unfair and that it is unsustainable.. It cannot merely be a complaint about outcomes.

All popular movements are more likely to fail than to succeed. This is the reality of power, the momentum of entrenched systems, and the truth of where power resides in capitalist democracy-- in capital, and not the people. But if this movement becomes merely about the failure of our system to provide our educated young people with the material goods they thought they were entitled to, it will be a victim of a kind of philosophical suicide. The reality is that the rampant materialism of the past order was unsustainable on its own terms, even absent a moral critique. That we cannot return to that system is non-normative, but merely descriptive; it is neither left nor right wing but rather simple reality. Many of these people seem to have entitlement to material goods so ingrained into their core philosophy that they cannot imagine an alternative. But an alternative is what we must develop, not because of what any of us wants but because of cold reality. If their antipathy for Wall Street is merely anger that the old system has failed to give them the life of their dreams, they will switch targets until they run out. Eventually they might find that there can be no protest because no one can restore that empty and unhealthy dream.

A new order is possible but it can only be a genuinely new order, and it cannot carry with it the empty promise of boundless wealthy that preceded it. If this protest becomes a complaint about what people thought they deserved and didn't get then the movement has been strangled in its crib.

Remember Fred Shuttlesworth

2011-10-05T21:56:00.000-04:00

A hero died today. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was not merely a prominent and important leader of the Civil Rights era. He was a repeated victim of terrible violence who remained dedicated to nonviolence and a symbol of what genuine courage represents-- the refusal to compromise ones principles in the face of fear. His courage in the face of physical danger is an inspiration to all of us. Read his obituary.

I've chosen to use this mugshot of Shuttlesworth because to me it symbolizes how oppression and adversity can reveal strength, and how defiance in and of itself can be a kind of grace. As the Times obituary recounts, Shuttlesworth was arrested dozens of times, brutally assaulted, targeted by politicians and police, and the victim of repeated attempted murder. He neither backed down nor succumbed to cynicism or the use of violence himself.

What's more, Shuttlesworth demonstrates that pacifism is natural partners with radicalism, pugnacity, and a refusal to compromise. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are such toweringly complex and symbolically rich figures-- and our public consciousness has such little space for history-- that there is an unfortunate tendency to think of the Civil Rights movement as being defined only by the conciliatory message of King and the combative message of Malcolm X. This itself is a reductive reading of history. But Shuttlesworth was at once dedicated to the vehicle of nonviolence that King espoused and yet was fiery and obstinate as well. And he came from the same poor background that defined the lives of many of the black Americans living during the Civil Rights era and continues to define the lives of too many today.

A culture makes choices in the virtues it celebrates. What is celebrated determines what is valued and what is valued determines what endures. It is necessary for us to remember men like Fred Shuttlesworth, and in doing so to remember that what should endure in memory is real heroism, real sacrifice, and real principle.

the resentment machine

2011-10-04T01:15:00.000-04:00

Note: the post appears, in a somewhat updated form, at The New Inquiry.

The popular adoption of the Internet brought with it great changes. Communication, commerce, media, and government had already each been impacted by the earlier Internet and proto-Internet technologies that were developed as early as the 1960s. But these were truly transformed, often quite radically and in relatively short order, following the broadening of access and sudden media attention of the mid-1990s.

Many of these changes-- reported accurately, greatly exaggerated, or outright invented-- have been recounted by those who have embraced the Internet most fully. One of the peculiar aspects of this particular technological revolution is that it has been historicized in real time. In a strange type of autoethnography, those most taken with the popular Internet of the late 90's and early 2000's spent a considerable amount of their time online talking about what it meant that they were online. As impressive as the various changes wrought by the exponential growth of Internet users were, they never seemed quite impressive enough for those who trumpeted them. In straightforwardly self-aggrandizing narratives, the most dedicated and involved Internet users began crafting a pocket mythology of the new reality. Rather than regarding themselves as consumers of a unique set of interesting and productive technologies, the most dedicated Internet users spoke instead of revolution. Vast, life altering consequences were predicted for these rising technologies. In much the same way that those speaking about the importance of New York are often actually speaking about the importance of themselves, so those who crafted the oral history of the Internet were often really talking about their own revolutionary potential. Not that this was without benefits; self-obsession became a vehicle for an intricate literature on emergent online technology.

Yet for all of the endless consideration of the rise of the digitally connected human species, the sociology in real time that has documented and dissected every minute evolution of the Web, one of the most important aspects of Internet culture has gone almost entirely unnoticed.

The Internet has provided tremendous functionality in a variety of contexts. But for a comparatively small but vastly influential group of its most dedicated users, its most important feature, the killer app, is its power as an all purpose sorting mechanism, one that separates the worthy from the unworthy-- and, in doing so, gives some meager semblance of purpose to generations whose lives are largely defined by purposelessness. For the post-collegiate, culturally savvy taste makers who exert such disproportionate influence on the Internet as it is experienced, the online world is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.

The vehicle of modern American achievement prepares thousands of upwardly mobile young strivers for everything but the life they will actually encounter. The endlessly grinding wheel of American "success" indoctrinates a competitive vision in our young people that most of them never seem to escape. The numbing and frenetic socioacademic sorting mechanism compels most of the best and the brightest adolescents in our middle and upper class to compete for various laurels from puberty to adulthood. Every aspect of young adult life is transformed into a status game, as academics, athletics, music and the arts, travel, hobbies, and philanthropy are all reduced to fodder for college applications. This instrumentalizing of all of the best things in life teach teenagers the unmistakable lesson that nothing is to be enjoyed, nothing experienced purely, but rather that each and every part of human life is ultimately fodder for what is less human. The eventual eats the immediate. No achievement, no effort, no relationship is to exist as an end itself. Each must be ground into chum to attract those who confer status and success. As has been documented endlessly, this process starts earlier and earlier. Far less attention has been paid to what comes next.

It is of course possible to keep running on the wheel indefinitely. There are those professions (think: finance) that extend the status contests of childhood and adolescence into the gray years, and to one degree or the other, most people play some version for most of their lives. But for a large chunk of the striving class, this kind of naked careerism and straightforward neediness won't do. They have been raised to compete, and endlessly conditioned to measure themselves against their peers, but they have done so in an environment that denies this reality while it creates it. Many of them were raised by self-consciously creative parents who wished for children who were similarly creative in ethos if not in production. These parents operated in a context that told them to nurture beautiful unique butterflies while simultaneously reminding them, in that incessant subconscious way that is the secret strength of capitalism, that their job as parents is to raise their children to win.

It is no surprise that the urge to rear winners trumps the urge to raise artists. But the nagging drive to preach the value of culture does not go unnoticed. The urge to create, and to live with an aesthetic sense, is admirable, and if inculcated genuinely-- which is to say, in defiant opposition to the competitive urge, rather than as an uneasy partner to it-- this romantic artistic vision of life remains the best hope for humanity against the deadening drift of late capitalism. In the context in which this cheery and false vision of the artistic life is actually experienced, self-conscious creativity becomes sublimated into the competitive project and becomes twisted. Those raised with such contradictory impulses are left unable to contemplate the stocks and suspenders lifestyle that is the purest manifestation of the competitive instinct, but they are equally unable to cast off the social climbing aspirations that this lifestyle represents. They are trapped between their rejection of the means and an unchosen but deep hunger for the ends.

Momentum can be a cruel thing. High school culminates in college acceptance. This temporary victory can often be hollow, but the fast pace of life quickly leads that emptiness in the dust. Students at college enjoy a variety of tools to manage the competitive urge. Some find, in the exclusive activities, clubs, and societies of elite colleges, an acceptable proxy for high school competition. Some attack collegiate academics with the zeal that they once applied to high school. Some pursue medical school, law school, an MBA, or (for the truly damned) a Phd. Most dull the urge by persisting in a four or five year fugue of alcohol, friendship, and rarefied living. But all that survive eventually emerge from college and find a disordered world.

As dehumanizing and vulgar as the high school glass bead game is, it certainly provides to adolescents a kind of order. That the system is inherently biased and riotously unfair is ultimately besides the point. In the many explicit ways in which high school students are ranked emerges a broad consensus: there is an order to life, that order indicates value, and there are winners and losers. The end of college brings an end to that order, and for many, this is bewildering. Educated but broadly ignorant of suffering, scattershot in their passions, possessed of verbal dexterity but bereft of the experience that might give their words meaning, 20-something culture bunnies wander into a world that is supposed to be made for them and find it inhospitable. Without the rigid ordering that grades, class rank, leadership and office provide, the incessant and unnamed urge to compete cannot be easily addressed. The vague cultural liberalism that surrounds their lives like a haze makes the careers that promise similar sorting unpalatable. The economic resentment and petty greed that they have had bred into them by the sputtering machine of American capitalism makes lower class life unthinkable.

Driven by the primacy of the competitive urge, and convinced that they need far more material goods than they do to live a comfortable life, they get jobs. Most of them will find some gainful employment without great difficulty. Perhaps this is changing, as the tires on the Trans Am that is America go bald, and the entitlement that attends their horror at a poor job market tells you more than anything, but the numbers indicate that most still find their way into jobs that become careers. Many or most will have periods of arty unemployed urbanism, but after awhile the gremlin begins whispering "you are a loser," and suddenly, they're placing that call to Joel from Sociology 205 who's got that connection at that office. Often, these office jobs will enjoy the cover of orbiting in some vaguely creative endeavor like advertising. One way or the other, these jobs become careers in the loaded sense. In these careers, the find themselves in precisely the position that they long insisted they would never contemplate.

The competitive urge still pulses. It has to; the culture in which they have been raised has denied them any other framework with which to draw meaning. The world has assimilated the rejection of religion, tradition, and other determinants of virtue that attended the 1960s and wedded it to a vicious contempt for the political commitments that replaced them in that context. Culture convinces our young adults, or rather preempts the kind of conscious understanding that attends to conviction, that all traditional designations of meaning are uncool. If straightforward discussion of virtue and righteousness is socially unpalatable, straightforward political engagement is worse still. Pushed by an advertising industry that embraces tropes of meaning just long enough to render them meaningless (Budweiser clydesdales saluting fallen towers), and buffeted by arbiters of hipness that declare any unapologetic embrace of political ideology horribly cliche, a fussy specificity envelops every definition of the self. Conventional accounts of the kids these days revert to tired tropes about disaffection and irony. The reality is sadder: they are not passionless but rather have invested their passion in a shared cultural knowledge that denies the value of any other endeavor worthy of personal investment.

Without the traditional tools with which the self is defined, they turn towards the technology that they have been assured holds the key to all futures.

Where else would people who believe in the artistry of their young lives but lack the ability to create turn but the Internet? There have been many brilliant and despicable turns by the anonymous architects of late capitalism, but none is more effective or pernicious than the rise of the self-as-consumer. Contemporary strivers lack the tools through which people in the past have differentiated themselves from their peers: they live in a post-virtue, post-religion, post-aristocracy age; they lack the skills or inspiration to create something of genuine worth; they have been conditioned to find all but the most conventional and compromised politics worthy of contempt; they even are denied the cold comfort of identification with career, as they cope with the deadening tedium and meaninglessness of work by calling attention to it over and over again, as if acknowledging it somehow elevates them above it.

Into this vacuum comes a relief that is profoundly rational in context: the self as consumer and critic.

Part of the cruel genius of capitalism lies in its ability to make all activity within it seem natural and inevitable. What we describe as "consumption" can be seen from orbit as an incredibly complicated interchange, created by elite institutions, enforced quite literally with the threat of violence, propped up by states and coercive governments, and generally as far from a state of nature as is possible. Yet the steady accumulation of monetary exchanges over the course of life conditions each of us to see consumption as an inextricable part of our being.

Given the emptiness of the material conditions of their lives, the formerly manic competitors must come to invest the cultural goods they consume with great meaning. Meaning must be made somewhere; no one will countenance standing for nothing. So the poor proxy of media and cultural consumption comes to define the individual. In many ways, cultural products such as movies, music, clothes, and media are the perfect vehicle for the endless division of people into strata of knowingness, savvy, and cultural value. These cultural products have no quantifiable values, yet their relative value is fiercely debated as if some such quantifiable understanding could be reached. They are easily mined for ancillary content, the TV recaps and record reviews and endless fulminating in comments and forums that spread like weeds. (Does anyone who watches Mad Men-- I'm a fan-- not blog about it?) They are bound up with celebrity, both real and petty. They can inspire and so trick us into believing that our reactions are similarly worthy of inspiration. And they are complex and varied enough that there is always more to know and more rarefied territory to reach, the better to climb the ladder one rung higher than the person the next desk over.

There is a problem, though. The value-through-what-is-consumed is entirely illusory. There is no there there. This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Internet writ large is desperately invested in the idea that liking, say, the Wire says something of depth and importance about the liker, and certainly that the preference for this show to CSI tells everything. Likewise the Internet exists to perpetuate the idea that there is some meaningful difference between fans of this band or that, or Android and Apple, or that there is a Slate lifestyle and a This Recording lifestyle and one for Gawker or the Hairpin or wherever. Not a word of it is true. There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.

This endless posturing, pregnant with anxiety and roiling with class resentment, ultimately pleases no one. There are a vast number of websites and blogs devoted to media, culture, and fashion. When was the last time that you read one and emerged refreshed by the joy and authenticity of expression that you encountered? How many pieces do you have to read before you accumulate the satisfaction necessary for a single genuine smile? Yet this emptiness doesn't compel people to turn away from the sorting mechanism. Instead, it seduces them into drawing further and further in.

This is why the resentment machine is concerned with resentment. The bitterness that surrounds these distinctions is a product of their inability to actually make us distinct. Nothing is so endlessly provoking to us as those who are most like us, and the reality is that there is little to separate the cultural signifiers of postcollegiate middle class upwardly-oriented-if-not-upwardly-mobile Americans. But, again, people feel there is nowhere else to turn, so they invest more and more of themselves in what they consume. Faced with the failure of their cultural affinities to define an authentic and fulfilling self, they double down on the importance of those affinities, and confront the continued failure with a formless resentment.

The savviest of the media and culture websites tap into this resentment as directly as they dare. They write endlessly about what is overrated. They assign specific and damning personality traits to the fan bases of unworthy cultural objects. They invite comments that tediously parse microscopic distinctions in cultural consumption. They engage in criticism as a kind of preemptive strike against those who actually create. They glamorize pettiness in aesthetic taste. The few artistic works they lionize are praised to the point of absurdity, as various acolytes try to outdo each other in hyperbole. They relentlessly push the central narrative that their readers crave, that consumption is achievement and that creators are to be distrusted and "put in their place." They deny the frequently sad but inescapable reality that consumption is not creation and that only the genuinely creative act can reveal the self.

This, then, is the role of the resentment machine: to amplify meaningless differences and assign to them vast importance for the quality of individuals. For those who are writing the most prominent parts of the Internet-- the bloggers, the trendsetters, the uber-Tweeters, the tastemakers, the linkers, the creators of memes and online norms-- online life is taking the place of the creation of the self, and doing so poorly.

This all sounds quite critical, I'm sure, and there is criticism to go around. But ultimately, this is a critique I include myself in, or nearly enough. More to the point, for this to approach real criticism I would have to offer an alternative to those trapped in the idea of the consumer as self. I haven't got one. Our system has relentlessly denied the role of any human practice that cannot be monetized. The capitalist apparatus has worked tirelessly to commercialize everything, to reduce every aspect of human life to currency exchange. In such a context, there is no hope for the survival of the fully realized self.

because I am involved in mankind

2011-09-30T12:29:00.001-04:00

An interesting question from an email this morning.

I suppose that you object to the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, out of some sort of pacifist conviction. That's fine as far as it goes, I guess. But I'm curious about how this opposition can stand compared to your loud opposition to the execution of Troy Davis. [he's likely talking about this.] If you oppose all intentional taking of human life, doesn't that mean that there's essentially no difference between your opposition to killing Troy Davis, a likely innocent man put to death, and Al-Awlaki, a terrorist? Or Osama bin Laden? I don't understand how a blanket opposition to killing people gives you room to sort good from bad from worse.

There are some provisos and qualifications, but then there's the answer.

For a society of law, the killing of Al-Awlaki should be even more disturbing than the killing of Troy Davis. Davis at least enjoyed some kind of due process, although it was the flawed, biased due process of a hideously racist system and one that is massively bent towards maintaining guilt and punishment. Al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was given no trial, no representation, no appeal, no opportunity to defend himself legally at all. None. He was declared a terrorist by the government, again with no due process, and assassinated. That doesn't mean that the moral discrimination about the killing itself is changed, only that the consequences for a supposedly free society are different.

The two men are of course different animals and I judge them, in that way people do, as of different moral character. I have different feelings towards all of the many victims of murder that I'm aware of. I don't suggest that Anwar Al-Awlaki is the same as Troy Davis, nor do I judge Davis in precisely the same way that I judge the victims of any other killing. My stance on the righteousness of killing is not the same as my stance on the righteousness of individuals.

But let me be absolutely clear and unambiguous: on the moral status of the act of killing Troy Davis, or Anwar Al-Alwaki, or the victims of 9/11, or of American soldiers killed by insurgents, or of insurgents killed by American soldiers, or of Osama bin Laden-- I recognize no difference. Not one solitary ounce of difference. The character of someone killed is utterly and permanently irrelevant to the moral status of that killing. It is as wrong to kill Hitler as it was wrong to kill his victims. I have thought for a long time and I have decided that I am forever out of the business of adjudicating the rightness of this killing or that. It has taken time but my conscience has decided on "always wrong."

Please, tell all the keyboard warriors you know, and let them flame on. I really don't give a shit.

a thousand times, this

2011-09-29T23:21:00.003-04:00

Thank you marriedtothesea.com.

what the Catechism says

2011-09-29T08:56:00.002-04:00

Since people keep telling me the Catholic Church isn't officially against the death penalty, here's the Catechism:

Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."⁶⁸

Update: I am fully convinced by all the people telling me that the prohibition against the death penalty is not of the same binding nature as the prohibition against abortion or gay marriage. Trust me: I now understand that a Catholic is not bound by his or her Catholicism to oppose state sanctioned killing.

PEG's open letter

2011-09-28T12:19:00.003-04:00

Pascal Emmanuel Gobry has written an open letter to me here. I am copying and pasting my reply from the comments there below.

So, trying this again: I wish you would consider the possibility that I described that post as fascist not because I wanted to use that as a vague insult but because I find that a fair description of the platform you’re describing.

The text of your piece advocates the imposition of an economic platform that you admit is broadly unpopular, enforced if necessary with emergency powers, and dictated by small committees of elites. By invoking emergency powers and admitting that this program would be deeply unpopular with the French people, you’re walking into disturbing territory. Corporate capture of government, enforced by the threat of violence and under the direction of undemocratic oligarchies, sounds like textbook fascism to me. I am opposed to fascism.

Also, I just disagree about the nature of Catholic teachings on the death penalty. The pope is not only the leader of the Holy Roman Church but according to doctrine an infallible (literally) leader of God’s vehicle for righteousness on earth. The last pope wrote unambiguously and explicitly that the death penalty is cruel, unnecessary, and anti-Christian. If your morality is informed by Catholicism (as Douthat’s surely is) when the topic is abortion, it is fair for me to ask that you be consistent when the topic is the death penalty.

Further, I disagree with your argument that it would be better for those condemned to death to be executed rather than spend life in prison. It seems to me that this is straightforwardly contradicted by the fact that most of those on death row (and certainly Troy Davis in particular) fight desperately to prevent their own executions.
I don’t find anything particularly personal about any of that. If you are really personally affronted, please email me at freddie7 AT gmail DOT com.

those to whom evil is done

2011-09-26T08:50:00.001-04:00

Our fingerprints are all over this. Tell Nicholas Kristof if you see him.

why do they pay bloggers, anyhow?

2011-09-15T23:13:00.002-04:00

Yglesias has always written very thoughtfully about the university, so I'm a little disturbed by his recent forays into fortune telling. (I wonder if its a matter of that product differentiation he's always talking about.) His argument is that newspapers have been dying out because delivering information online is very cheap, and their business is delivering information in a more expensive way, and the university's business is also to deliver information, and so the university is imperiled. No, not imperiled, which implies there's some chance it'll survive. It's just doomed in its current form. As is usual with this sort of "digital revolution" talk, essentially evidence-free speculation is married to a rhetoric of certainty.

Now, I could respond to this in several different ways. I could point out the vast differences between what newspapers do and what universities do. I could point out that everything but the feel and smell of the newsprint can be delivered entirely digitally, but that only a tiny fraction of what universities do is adequately digitized. I could point out that universities are willing to offer this content online for free precisely because they know it represents no threat to them. I could point out the simple fact that the purpose of the university has never been solely, or even primarily, or even largely to deliver information, that this is not why they are funded, and that this is not why students attend them. If I'm provoked enough, I might write all that out.

But let me try a different tack and take Yglesias's analogy in a much more convincing direction: paid blogging is doomed. Utterly, totally doomed. It's only a matter of time, and anyone who maintains otherwise is simply standing against progress.

How do I know? Well, many, many people are willing to blog for free. Thousands. Some of them are quite good at it. And since the costs of starting a free blog are close to zero, and even poorly paid bloggers cost a lot more than zero, professional blogging is doomed. You might well argue that the quality of blogs would decline without for-pay blogging, and I might even concede the point. But as Wikipedia shows, pretty good and free trumps great and for pay all the time. So clearly, professional blogging is dead. Like me, Yglesias should be hitting the want ads, because our professions are doomed.

Of course, I haven't remotely proven anything at all, and I would never act as if I had. That kind of speculation can be fun, but it doesn't have anything to do with genuine knowledge generation. It's perfectly reasonable to think that paid blogs, like other paid media, aren't going to survive. And, indeed, analogizing paid blogging to paid newspaper writing is vastly more coherent and convincing than the analogy to college. But reasonable analogies can be applied to an entire host of topics without having any genuine predictive value at all. Life is like that: difficult to predict. Yet there isn't the remotest indication in his post that Yglesias believes his prediction could fail.

As it happens, pay blogging has actually been on the uptick, as Yglesias himself has pointed out-- with reference to evidence, making this post vastly more valuable than his recent ones on college. If he treated them in that way, I wouldn't mind the conjecture, but that's not the case. There is no indication in these posts that Yglesias takes one more seriously than the other, or that he recognizes the value of empirical evidence and the poverty of speculative claims about the future. This is a really good example of what I was recently complaining about on Balloon Juice, the conspicuous lack of epistemological distinctions and accountability in the blogosphere. Yglesias is essentially making things up here, whereas he was responsibly reading empirical data when it came to the blogging boom. Yet there's no consistent system of knowledge generation that privileges the latter over the former, and no accountability to be found within blogging to correct his poor reasoning.

Somehow I doubt that Yglesias will sign on to my claim about paid blogging, even though consistency would seem to require it. Personal investments are like that, and adopting a breezy, showy certainty about the supposed doom of a cherished institution strikes me as cruel.

life in the time of the great kludge

2011-09-13T15:19:00.001-04:00

Today on the quad at my university there was a kind of showcase by potential employers, designed to lure the many brilliant, technically and scientifically minded students we have here. These firms are among the leading innovators in the world, giant tech, aerospace, and communication companies that create incredible tools for our age. You have young students who are quite literally the future of digital and technical innovation being wooed by companies that represent the present. And they brought toys-- lots of attractive, impressive, cutting age digital toys to show off.

Yet I was struck by a glaring contrast: many of the tents were being powered by a loud, smelly generator, belching out black smoke and making the immediate area rather unpleasant. It probably wasn't meaningfully different from one you could find a quarter century ago All of these near-miraculous modern technologies, produced by companies with massive resources and engineered by people who understand things I couldn't if I spent the rest of my life trying, are still tied to the burning of dirty fuels which pollute our air, warm the planet, and perhaps are coming close to depletion. You can stick as long of a power cord on there as you want; sooner or later, the chain leads to fossil fuels and pollutants. It has me thinking back to the central question of near futurism: do we have the tools necessary to end our dependence on fossil fuels? There's a great faith out there that, well, we'll think of something. We always innovate when we have to. But it's remarkable when you observe how much of the innovation of the last several centuries was made possible by incredibly abundant, incredibly cheap energy. Those invested in the idea of the singularity sometimes point out that, in their view, human progress is exponential. But is that because of some magical property of progress, or because of a uniquely powerful but dangerous set of technologies?

In the era of cheap fossil fuels, we've enjoyed the fruits of what might prove to be the ultimate kludge. Many people writing on the Internet have faith that a long term, better solution is coming, and that it will be one that won't call for great sacrifice and great hardship for a species that has grown used to cheap energy. Only time will tell. Maybe they will prove to be right. This post is all just conjecture, really, and you know what that's worth. I do believe our lives as they exist now are lived on borrowed time.

issues that aren't

2011-09-08T17:30:00.000-04:00

Now, here's the sort of thing that just goes and gets me really cranky.

Look, friends and sundry: moral stances only have value beyond their correctness to the degree that they involve risk. Sometimes the risks are big, like "I may get killed if I speak out against this that I find immoral, or in favor of what I find moral." Sometimes the risks are medium, like "I risk ostracism and serious social unrest from my peers or community if I speak out on this moral issue." Sometimes the risks are minor, like "speaking out on this might make this party awkward and harsh my mellow."

Then there's the risk of opposing things no one supports, like genocide. One way to term this would be to call it "no risk whatsoever." That's probably the best way to describe Andrew Sullivan's showy opposition to Che t-shirts. It is a proud denunciation of that which no one of consequence condones. I mean, if I stood on a street corner, yelling that people shouldn't randomly walk up to strangers and punch them in the dick, nobody would be nominating me for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nobody would imagine that I was making any kind of morally proud stance. Indeed, even taking a stand would be praising too highly. It's an enterprise without moral weight because it does nothing but suggest the superior morality of the speaker at no cost to the speaker.

Yet, to my surprise, not only did Andrew stamp about on his blog, burnishing his credibility by opposing tasteless casual wear, we now get a post (likely the first of several) where his emailers can participate and let the world know what lions of liberalism they are by denigrating laundry.

You might well ask what important news event inspired these posts. Did some unthinking public figure praise Che Guevara? Or, worse still, Stalin and Hitler? (They of course have been brought into the discussion, for reasons that escape me)? No. Nothing at all happened. Somebody else wrote a post expressing the utterly banal and thus utterly unpraiseworthy commitment against genocide. That's all. This post could have appeared five years ago and could appear five years from now and nothing would have changed. It's inspired only by the desire to be seen.

What is being accomplished here? Who is being served? What positive impact on the world can this possibly have? What is at stake? What matter of genuine controversy is being debated? What minimally mainstream figure is out there singing the praises of Che?

Sadder still, they can't even get their story straight. Since this is the Internet, and you have to say these things: no, I am not at all an apologist for Che Guevara. But genocide-- well, that's the sort of term that's supposed to have a special meaning, you know? Aside from how unseemly it is to trade on the victims of real genocides for psychic comfort, it's unhelpful (and that's being charitable) to dilute the term to mean any kind of senseless slaughter. A barely literate weak man emailed, but even with his limited abilities, the emailer makes the essential point that Andrew has equated Che with Stalin, Mao, and Hitler without actually pointing towards the actual genocide. In response, Andrew links to a similarly self-aggrandizing piece from the Independence Institute:

Guevara might have been enamored of his own death, but he was much more enamored of other people’s deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.” ... It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people—proven enemies, suspected enemies, and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine.” Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim “was really guilty enough to deserve death,” he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: “He had to pay the price.” At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.

I'm happen to be one of a tiny handful of people in the blogosphere who is willing to voice a blanket denunciation of the intentional taking of human life in any context. But this is not genocide. Killing rivals when you take power is not genocide. It is monstrous and it is senseless but it is not genocide. If it is genocide, it is a genocide that has been perpetrated by the vast majority of what are commonly referred to as "great leaders." Is Augustus Caesar guilty of genocide? He was ruthless with his rivals to power, absolutely ruthless. There were a lot of people put to death when he took control. Is having a bust of Augustus an equally terrible crime in Andrew's eyes? If not, why not? How about Vlad the Impaler? Is dressing up as Dracula for Halloween an equally repellent act? I oppose Che's murders because they are murders. To dress this up as genocide for the purpose of grinding an axe against imaginary enemies is, at the very least, a distortion of history.

To reduce genocide into a generic term for violence that is politically unpalatable is childish and dishonors genocides victims. Again, Andrew's post and his emailers have directly equated Che with Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. This is simply a category error. You don't have to praise Guevara to recognize the carelessness of such a comparison.

It gets worse. Because despite Andrew's considerable distaste for hipsters who wear Che t-shirts, he actually has equal disdain for hipsters who... take meaningless statements against genocide. He mocks a photo from Look at this Fucking Hipster featuring a women with "Fuck you Hitler" written on her arms. So hipsters who wear Che t-shirts, an utterly meaningless act connected to no existing power or political movement whatsoever, is bad, but so are hipsters who make empty waves against Hitler. As I hope is clear, there is no difference between that woman's photograph and these posts. They are the same animal.

Look: right now, this country is killing innocent people. Right now. We are using lobbing ordnance on completely innocent civilians as a matter of course. We are involved in two official wars and perhaps five unofficial ones and in all cases we are sowing destruction on people who have absolutely no recourse against it, no democratic or legal process to oppose it. These actions are being undertaken with the blessing of Barack Obama. Now a real moral stance, one that would actually involve sacrifice and risk, would be for Obama's champion Andrew Sullivan to invest as much outrage and anger against Obama for presiding over it all. That would cost something. That would be a stance that would carry risks. That would have relevance to actual, existing, meaningful, contemporary political debates. That would involve an actual painful choice, given Sullivan's regard for Obama. And he might even contribute to the cause of right, rather than the cause of righteousness.

no words

2011-09-08T14:53:00.001-04:00

This isn't some random Twitter asshole, by the way; that's the account for the manager of a PAC.

we can't selectively invoke parental satisfaction

2011-09-06T21:04:00.002-04:00

I think it's important for those of us who are critical of the school reform movement to be consistent in our application of evaluative criteria. Part of that lies in taking empirical measures that demonstrate benefits or strengths of reform efforts we don't like as seriously as those that demonstrate deficiencies or weaknesses. There are of course complications. One of the difficulties for the reform movement is that it typically weds a strong faith in standardized testing as effective assessment to a belief in particular mechanisms for raising them. That means that when structures like private school vouchers are advocated as a solution for raising standardized tests scores, and then fail to, those advocating them have to deal with their preferred method of improvement failing on their preferred method of assessment. Those critical of much of the school reform movement often criticize both the method of improvement and the method of assessment-- leading us, at times, to embrace data that discourages particular reforms even though we might reject the tests that were the mechanism through which the data was gathered.

(The key, I think, is to be careful in saying "by your own preferred method of assessment, your program is failing to achieve the gains you have predicted"-- and incidentally, I'm actually fairly amenable to certain kinds of standardized testing in certain contexts, at least compared to other school reform critics.)

Additionally, I will continue to say that the mere efficacy of anti-union school reforms is not enough to compel their adoption. Union rights are rights. They are not legitimately curtailed simply because it becomes convenient to society to do so. School reformers need to do more than demonstrate the effectiveness of their proposed reforms; they need to demonstrate that implementing them will not illegitimately trod on union rights of teachers. (Of course, until the school reform demonstrates consistent, valid, and reliable gains that are not later revealed to be the product of fraud, the question is somewhat academic.)

Anyway, to be more specific and useful, I want to say that we need to take care not to trumpet parent satisfaction data as proof of success in public schools when we wouldn't do so when it comes to charter schools, private school vouchers, and the like. Many have pointed to encouraging statistics about parental satisfaction with their local public schools, and also to the disconnect between a parent's perception of his or her own child's school and American public schools in general. USA Today summarizes a study by PDK:

Nearly eight in 10 Americans — 79% — give an "A or B" grade to the school their oldest child attends, according to findings released today by Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) International, an educators association. That's up from 68% in 2001, and the highest percentage of favorable ratings since PDK began asking the question in 1985. That year, 71% of parents gave their kids' school top grades.

It is indeed encouraging and important that Americans feel their local public schools are succeeding, and there are some complex epistemelogical questions about how to evaluate and incorporate this kind of data. But let's be clear: if we consider this evidence for the success of public education, we must also consider similar data evidence of success in charter schools.

Susan Phillips's School Choice: Policies and Effects: An International Literature Review (2004), while not a text that I would endorse without qualification, has a good rundown of extant evidence. See also Buckley and Schneider (2006), available here (PDF), and this Pew Research Institute report (2010, PDF) which includes satisfaction data for parents of students in charter schools, local Catholic schools, and public schools in the Philadelphia area. Generally speaking, a broad collection of data suggests that parents rate themselves as highly satisfied with their child's charter schools.

As I've said many times, there is a fierce debate about how we develop knowledge and what constitutes appropriate epistemology hiding in the school reform debate. It's perhaps unsurprising that parents of both public school students and private school students profess high satisfaction with their child's school. Parents are the definition of invested respondents; to rate low satisfaction for your school is essentially to say that you're failing your child. I don't take parent's self-reported satisfaction too seriously for school quality for the specific reason that it's quite hard for anyone to effectively rate a school's quality and the general reason that self-reported data has to be taken with a handful of salt.

And, indeed, the self-same Pew report that shows high satisfaction levels with Philadelphia charter schools admits that this satisfaction comes despite "widely publicized reports of financial mismanagement at several schools and test results indicating that students in some charters are not performing as well as those in district-run schools." So we have again this basic dynamic in school reform: empirical evidence contradicts conventional wisdom, deductive thinking, and the opinion of interested parties. I will continue to say that we have to privilege that empirical evidence over the alternatives, which for now redounds to the benefit of critics of the reform movement like me. But I also think that we have to be consistent in how we evaluate our evidence.

inductive views of history and our postcapitalist future

2011-09-01T21:05:00.000-04:00

I've got a host of opinions on blogospheric orientation towards presentism, triumphalism, and belief in progress. But I want to make this point with as little provocation as possible, so let me narrow myself to a particular point: I believe we have a postcapitalist future due to a simple inductive vision of history.

I'm inspired to write this by this Dave Roberts post on the limits of economic growth. It's a rare bird in that it does not assert that our current system is essentially healthy and will exist into perpetuity. There is a cottage industry online of a kind of "everything's great and will only get better" essay. It's notable both for its frequency and its cross-ideological flavor. I read essays online that assert the basic health of our system and the inevitability of progress nearly every week, and I read them written by people who identify themselves as liberal, conservative, and libertarian. Many people are very dedicated to the idea that this globalizing liberal capitalism is, while not a perfect system, the best possible system, and one that is here to stay.

The existence of this trope is, in its own way, self-troubling: why do so many people who claim to be so confident in the state of the liberal democratic capitalist system spend so much time announcing that confidence? The repetition of these ideas itself suggests a profound unspoken dissonance. Those who are genuinely confident generally have little cause to say so. You can accuse me of a psychoanalytic reading here, and it's a fair criticism, but I tend to find these arguments pregnant with anxiety.

In any event, rearticulations of Francis Fukuyama's general thesis from The End of History are common and popular. Some prominent resistances include the (numerically tiny) orthodox Marxists, who believe in the classically Marxist or Troskyist notions of overproduction and exhaustion of markets of exploitation, and the inevitability of proletarian takeover; environmentalist critics, as one of half of Dave Roberts argues, who contend that capitalism depends on the consumption of material resources which can be exhausted and which despoil the planet in their collection and use; and a revanchist Christian conservatism which holds that Western civilization and its attendant strengths are the product of a divine moral framework that is expressed in the Christian bible, and that our turn away from that worldview dooms us to collapse.

I'm not going to articulate an argument for the mechanism by which capitalism will be replaced. I won't articulate what I think the next order will be. I'm only going to offer a weak inductive claim: human systems of political and economic organization are temporary. Human beings have declared their systems the final system, the truth of humankind, for the entirety of human history. One of the odd things about how people talk about Fukuyama is that they act like it is somehow unusual or even unprecedented. And yet people have assumed that their system would be perpetuated forever throughout history. (Well, absent religious belief in literal apocalypse, that is.) The Roman system, complete with such ugliness as slavery and rigid castes, was the right and sensible system of governance and resource distribution. Feudalism comported not only with divine law but with natural reality. The Catholic church was the most powerful human force in the world and would always be. Chattel slavery underwrote the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world and was supported by the widespread belief that those enslaved where inherently inferior and thus ineligible for liberty. Explicit and unapologetic imperialism by great powers was the inevitable result of inequities in national character or human capital. On and on: people believe that their way is the way that it will always be.

Here in the post-Marxist world, we enjoy an intellectual tradition that has a vocabulary of ideologies, economic systems, and sociopolitical orders. Yet we don't seem to enjoy the fruits of that sophistication. Premodern peoples tended not to think in terms of social or economic orders but rather simply of "the way things are." Here, we are aware that social orders change and that the human project has been marked by permanent impermanence, and yet the consensus view is that we have transcended change. I don't feel that way. I think that, since humankind is constantly declaring one system or the other the endpoint, and constantly being proven wrong, it is sensible to believe that the capitalist system we now live under will itself be swallowed by a new order.

Constitutionally, I'm not an optimist. Unlike what some people assume, I don't believe that a socialist system is inevitable or near. Predictions are hard, particularly about the future, and history is filled with events that were not only unpredicted but essentially unpredictable. I don't pretend that the next stage will be in keeping with my political or moral preferences. Nor, incidentally, do I think that the next stage will be the final stage; that too will pass. And you'll note that I haven't said anything about my various disagreements with the present age.

Like I said, it's a fairly weak claim; just because things have always happened doesn't mean they will always happen. I'm definitely not arguing with as much certainty as the other side, who are very, very certain. Like their forebears in every other era of history, they believe completely in their ability to assess the present and predict the future. I just think that history and human life teach us to expect change.

2011-08-29T21:04:00.001-04:00

fuck everything right now

2011-08-27T14:07:00.003-04:00

It occurs to me-- maybe some gaps are unbridgeable.

perhaps Andrew O'Hehir should say a little more about Colombia

2011-08-26T07:47:00.001-04:00

Andrew O'Hehir is, let's just say, not my favorite movie reviewer. That's no big deal. However, in a review of Colombiana, he responds to Colombians complaining that the film unfairly depicts Colombia by writing

One is that if your whole damn country hadn't been a failed state for 20 years or so, you might not have idiots from France like producer/co-writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton -- yeah, that's a put-on last name -- using it as a cheap pretext for a trashy and ridiculous blend of "La Femme Nikita," "Scarface" and "Fast Five."

Har!

Of course, it's precisely the complaint of the Colombians who are protesting this movie that Colombia is a not a failed state, that surely the whole damn country is not, and that Colombian demonstrates that even educated Americans like O'Hehir don't know any better. He appears to be proving that point. I'm not qualified to make the case for Colombia as an improving nation, but the case is out there for you to evaluate.

But set aside potential improvements in Colombia's condition. Maybe we should consider why the country has been in such dire straights for so long. Perhaps there's some giant rapacious superpower due north that has explicitly proclaimed its ownership of the hemisphere for centuries that has been causing a little chaos. We could talk specifically about Plan Colombia, which has included funding and arming right wing paramilitary organizations, funneling in money that corrupts police departments and empowers cartels, sending military ordnance into a country that doesn't need any more weapons, and spraying thousands of defenseless people with aerial fumigation of unknown medical consequences and sometimes devastating economic consequences. Or we could go beyond just Plan Colombia and look at our general, decades-long history of manipulation in Colombia and the region, undertaken in large part to secure valuable resources and perpetuate a useless and inhumane drug war. Or we could just talk about the fact that this country can't stop doing cocaine but refuses to decriminalize it, and what that means for Colombia.

You know. If you're into that sort of thing.

a refreshingly honest take on neoliberal "consensus"

2011-08-25T07:58:00.002-04:00

I really appreciate Pascal Emmanuel Gobry for just straight laying the neoliberal antipathy for democracy out there.

Gobry claims, with dubious evidence, that the French economy is on a precipice, and that if it fails the world will fail, and so France must reform. His preferred reforms are your standard neoliberal boilerplate, which has the usual dissonant logic going-- the US economy is on a precipice, and the US has pursued the neoliberal agenda for 30 years. Remember, though, that elites have decided that neoliberalism can never fail, and so there is no reason for concern. Three decades of committed deregulation and capture of our government by rapacious plutocrats and our economy being brought to the verge of total destruction have nothing to do with each other. Let's mimic the policies that have destroyed working conditions for the American people, created spiraling inequality, gutted our regulatory infrastructure, and handed more and more power to the richest few.

But this agenda would be deeply unpopular with the French people. Gobry himself acknowledges this. So what to do? Compromise? Do the hard work of advancing a position politically? Or, heaven forbid, accept that not everyone in the world is on board with the neoliberal platform, and stop acting as if the opinion of policy elites should be enough to counteract the will of the people.

Gobry picks a different option: literal fascism. Think I exaggerate? Look and be amazed. He wants Sarkozy to pass new regulatory and tax schemes "by decree" and to use the emergency wartime powers most countries have to enforce them. Yes, he wants to be able to institute martial law in order to force the neoliberal policy platform onto an unwilling populace.

Now, I ask you: can you imagine if some leftist advocated a similar thing? Can you imagine the reaction? The backlash? This isn't somebody noodling on a Blogger blog like me. This is a guy at Business Insider, a mainstream, professional publication. He's calling for military takeover to force the people to adopt the policies he wants. If someone advocated doing this in a professional publication in order to pass a carbon tax or single payer health care, I can't even imagine the reaction. Liberal bloggers would be leaping to distance themselves from such a statement. Every conservative would crawl out of the woodwork to say that this is how all liberals secretly think. It would be pandemonium.

This should be disqualifying for taking Gobry seriously, but I imagine it won't do any damage to his reputation at all.

Think about how the blogosphere creates insiders and punishes those who don't play the game. Look at Glenn Greenwald. Everybody acknowledges his work as prominent and important. But most in the Cool Kid Club talk about Greenwald as if he's some tiring fact of life to be ignored if possible and argued with only as a last resort. I'm hardly a blogging insider but even I know how much most liberal bloggers grumble about him privately. Why? Because he keeps bringing up politically inconvenient realities; because he isn't afraid to talk about morality and character; because he doesn't pretend that politics is a game; because he calls people on their petty hypocrisies. He violates the code. That's enough to earn him a lot of derision.

Well, here we have somebody who is advocating the use of emergency military powers to suppress democracy. Will people react to that? Or does the fact that Gobry is pushing the elite line mean that they won't condemn him at all? Gobry says "We find themselves in the same position today: what is desperately needed is decisive action and a wholesale abandonment of old, discredited ideas, in this case austerity." Actually, in this case, the "discredited idea" is democracy.

This sort of talk should scare you, but it's actually not that far out of the mainstream. Gobry is taking this to an extreme, but it's an extreme derived from the logical progression of neoliberal ideas. One of the things that makes neoliberals so creepy is that they always, always talk as if their ideas are agreed to by everyone when in fact they are and always have been resisted. Consensus and democracy have nothing to do with each other. Dissent is the life blood of democracy. But everywhere, always, neoliberals of all three flavors (called progressives, libertarians, and conservatives here in this country) insist that There Is No Alternative. You can see this attitude play out in the enforcement of the neoliberal agenda in the second and third world, where countries face coercion and violent reprisals from the first world nations if they don't get in line. You can see it in the struggle of indigenous people, like with the Zapatistas, who rose up against globalization and were swiftly branded terrorists. And you can see it in the way a small, elite group of bloggers, totally disconnected from the day to day lives of average Americans, assert the privilege of their access and their affluence and refuse to countenance contrary opinion.

As I am someone who believes that words have meanings and am not afraid to use them, I will say that this post (published at Business Insider!) is Gobry coming out as a totalitarian. But in a deeper sense, he's just taking the neoliberal attitude towards dissent to its logical conclusions.

Update: I sense I'm not being very articulate in the connection I'm trying to make here, so let me be more clear. I'm not the discourse police and my point isn't at all that PEG should, I don't know, get fired from Business Insider or something. I'm just saying that I'm consistently amazed by what does and does not get people put on the blogosphere shit list.

The point about Greenwald is that he's a guy who has undertaken a project I once thought any politically minded person would endorse, protecting civil liberties, and yet gets a lot of flak constantly. Here you have someone arguing for using emergency wartime powers to pass a set of laws and policies that many citizens would resist. That's pretty extreme! Yet I doubt that there will be any fuss about it at all.

Update II: Here's a point a couple commenters have made, as voiced by Anonymous:

Not to be too charitable to PEG, but if you actually RTFC, Article 16 is not about martial law and commandos storming the IRS (or whatever it is in France) - english translation here: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/english/8ab.asp
and it ends with

After thirty days of the exercise of such emergency powers, the matter may be referred to the Constitutional Council by the President of the National Assembly, the President of the Senate, sixty Members of the National Assembly or sixty Senators, so as to decide if the conditions laid down in paragraph one still apply....

preconditions of respect

2011-08-24T08:29:00.001-04:00

I keep getting comments and emails saying that it was mean to go after Zack Beauchamp because he is inexperienced, or because the person writing presumes that he's young. I have no idea on either front.

I think this sort of thing illustrates the great distance between some of my ideas about what argument is, how democracy works, and what real intellectual respect entails. I have a whole host of complaints about how discussion goes down on blogs, but I'll be brief and just say: when you are overly protective of a writer on the Internet, you inevitably create the impression that the writer needs protecting. So is Zack Beauchamp someone who needs protecting? I'll extend him the preconditional respect of saying that he is not.

doin' it up right

2011-08-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

William Brafford convincingly swats PEG. He's always been a sharp one.
Charles Davis tools Radley Balko. When Balko is right (read: writing about drugs), he is so, so right. When wrong-- oof.
Come September, the supple hair and fashionable glasses of Will Wilkinson will reside at a new venue, where he will doubtless continue to hate liberals far out of proportion with his disagreements with them. Note: the man's a fine, fine illustrator, and I wouldn't give out such praise lightly. Check him out at his new digs starting September 12th.
Erik Kain, who has paid his fair share of dues and then some in the blogging game, is also not so hot on Zack Beauchamp.
Karl Smith is one of those lonely voices speaking out against those who keep telling us dissenters that we don't exist.
Ezra Klein demonstrates what it means to be a contemporary American liberal. He shows that welfare reform was just straight class warfare against the poor, but has to keep that "if" in there. Otherwise, what would the community think?
Ta-Nehisi Coates again makes a great point and then drowns it in the bathtub of semantics and petty actor sorting. But his commenters loved it!
IOZ.

stop digging, Zack

2011-08-23T17:21:00.000-04:00

Beauchamp rebuts.

Now, if Zack is merely sore because I was being a bit of a jerk, okay. I apologize for being a bit of a jerk. I didn't, actually, mean to suggest that he is actually related to Tina Brown. (In certain technical circles, that is referred to as a "joke.") But if that was a bit too mean, fair enough. And, you know, the True Blood thing was just because he's got kind of a Cajun thing going there. I didn't even really mean it as an insult, and I do think this is more worthwhile an endeavor if you can have a little fun doing it. But names are touchy, I get that.

I have to defend myself: beyond those two things, I don't think I was engaging in name calling. I think I was forcefully replying to someone who was, to my mind, articulating bad arguments and doing so in a way that was dismissive of two bloggers who have invested considerable thought into articulating complex analyses of the Libyan situation.

For substance:

Now it should be clear from that excerpt that Matt's endorsing the Guardian article's argument that "bombing alone" will not end the Libya conflict as evidence for one of his own claim about air power. And the Guardian authors don't mean by that "bombing won't be able to produce a just post-war order" - they mean NATO will not be able to produce a military solution.

But this is precisely the point. What does "providing a military solution" even mean? Surely the military goals of ousting Qaddafi and taking Tripoli are important. But, first-- it is not clear that this has been accomplished. Does Beauchamp not think that this is a time for modesty in our descriptions of what is happening? Does he see no need for prudence in assessing a shifting and incredibly complex military situation? Events on the ground are still unfolding. What virtue is there in declaring a "win" now? I understand that politics are made of childish stuff, but there is no need for us to pretend as if the short term political consequences for Barack Obama are the most important thing, or even an important thing. And surely the kind of blogocentric axe grinding he is participating in is ultimately of little importance. If he were to stop feeling aggrieved for a moment and actually think it over he'd likely see that.

Second: what does Beauchamp think the purpose of the Libyan intervention has been? Is it merely to remove Qaddafi? Of course not. If your goal is to help Barack Obama's electoral chances, then sure, recent events in Libya are looking great. But that's not why we intervened, and it's not the reason people gave, when reading opponents of intervention like me the riot act. The reason was for the good of the Libyan people, for their safety and their freedom. So I ask Mr. Beauchamp: have the safety and freedom of the Libyan people been secured? If they haven't, then what profit is there in responding with such glee towards a temporary and conditional military victory? Beauchamp accused me of merely calling names when I said that he was unconcerned with the plight of the Libyans. But he is proving that point again today; he cares entirely about whether he can use Libya as a cudgel against people he disagrees with and seemingly not at all about whether this will result in a Libya that is safer and freer for most Libyan people. My point is simply that a true concern for Libya just has to compel someone to refrain from declaring victory, as recent history has shown time and again that short term military success and long term humanitarian success are very different things.
Today he's unleashed a rather more disappointing argument. See:

Will everyone who said that liberal interventionists "lost all credibility" after the Iraq War, and hence should never be listened to again, renounce their own credibility after predicting Qaddafi would fall? I'm not holding my breath, but I really hope pundits will think twice about essentially calling for other writers to be shunned by all right-thinking people based on one data point. Let's judge ideas on their merit, not the identity of the person propounding them.

I hope Zack is aware that all the terrible shit went down in Iraq after Bagdhad fell. I mean goodness gracious. This thoroughly misses the point. The large majority of critics of intervention weren't criticizing out of a conviction that the rebels had no chance to win. (I'd appreciate links if he thinks they were!) Rather, they were pointing out that military superiority can lead to lots of destruction but is often entirely incapable of reaching satisfying conclusions for peace and democracy. You can check my own record if you want: the concern has always been equally about what happens after the fall of Qaddafi. Beauchamp seems supremely confident that he has identified the good guys and the bad guys in the Libyan. But actual human life does not operate that way. Witness Kosovo:

But Kouchner quickly discovered that victims could be very bad. There was an extraordinary range of ethnic groups in Kosovo.

There were:
Muslim Albanians
Orthodox Serbs
Roman Catholic Serbs
Serbian-speaking Muslim Egyptians
Albanian-speaking Muslim Gypsies - Ashkalis
Albanian-speaking Christian Gypsies - Goranis
And even - Pro-Serbian Turkish-speaking Turks

They all had vendettas with each other - which meant that they were both victims and horrible victimizers at the same time.

It began to be obvious that getting rid of evil didn't always lead to the simple triumph of goodness.

I have a distinct lack of regard for Muamar Qaddafi and a serious moral and political investment in the idea of revolution. But I can't pretend that this revolution will not devolve into civil war, or lead to a new repressive regime, or collapse the state, or whatever else.
What is so disturbing and so disappointing about Beauchamp's posts today is that he seems to have missed the important point of all of us: if the goal is not to reach short-term military victories, which as any gloss of recent history will show do not always lead to humanitarian gains, but rather to achieve lasting improvements in the well-being and freedom of the Libyan people, then there is nothing yet to celebrate. History is riddled with new orders which ended up just as bad as the first. What makes me deeply uncomfortable with Beauchamp's commentary is that he doesn't even seem to realize that military victory doesn't lead inevitably to humanitarian benefit; or that short term successes can become long term failures; or that oppressed people can turn very quickly into oppressors; or that at the most basic and elementary level, the Libyan conflict is not resolved at all.

I have advice. Here is a response from Daniel Larison that should serve as a model for Beauchamp. It is, typical of Larison, measured and supported by evidence. Again, Beauchamp was mocking Yglesias and Larison for predictions that they themselves weren't making. They were reporting on and responding to the predictions of NATO officials, and the frequently confused positions of the Libyan rebels themselves. As Larison says in his own defense, he was merely echoing Admiral Mike Mullen. Does Beauchamp think that he was in better position to speak on the matter than Admiral Mullen at the time Larison made the original comments? I said that Beauchamp was being dishonest by acting as if Larison and Yglesias were making these predictions in a vaccuum, rather than responding to the statements of senior military officials and political figures. I firmly stand by that opinion.

Incidentally:

I know that the point here is that he didn't, actually, feel bad about my criticism. Fair enough. For what it's worth, I am sorry if Beauchamp felt personally affronted. The point was not that "I don't like him very much," as I hope is clear. I would remind him that he is writing on one of the most popular, influential, and powerful blogs on the Internet. Criticism should and will come.

so which of Tina Brown's relatives is Zack Beauchamp?

2011-08-22T18:10:00.000-04:00

I don't have time right today to go over the Libya magnum opus of one Zack Beauchamp (which is not, to my surprise, the name of a character on True Blood), but I will try to get to it soon. Spoilers: Beauchamp is one of those quiet Americans who thinks that if you wave vaguely in the direction of that oh-so-democratic-and-corruption-free UN you can essentially make a PowerPoint of every column Bill Kristol's written since 1998 and not get called a neocon. The whole thing deserves a real looksee-- this is, I assure, uncommonly terrible Internet commentary-- but given time constraints I just want to defend a couple bloggers.

One of the many reasons to be skeptical of the Dish's awards is that they encourage the kind of distorting category-ticking, context and argument-free "opinion through aggregation" that can make even the most thoughtful blog stupid and churlish. So see Beauchamp's two "Van Hoffman Award" winners for today, which celebrate bad predictions.

First, Matt Yglesias:

"Strategic air power still doesn't really work. Will airpower advocates ever learn?"

Well, OK, actually, no. When I copy and paste Matt's quote, it shows up like this:

Strategic Air Power Still Doesn’t Really Work

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 15, 2011 at 2:29 pm

Will air power advocates ever learn?

That's because what is being quoted here is actually the title of a post and the first line of a post. You wouldn't know that from reading Beauchamp's "award," but then that is of course the point of having this whole awards construction in the first place: it hides all that lame "intellectual honesty" business. Now, if one of my students cited something this way, I'd mark it wrong and make them fix it before I graded the paper. But perhaps such pedantry is really only appropriate when I'm actually being employed as a pedant.

No, the really galling thing here is that this bad prediction supposedly made by Matt is in fact from a 65-word post, more than half of which is a quote. That quote, meanwhile, is itself from the Guardian referring to anonymous military sources in the British military and NATO apparatus. In other words, the people actually making this asserted (but not remotely proven) bad prediction aren't Matt Yglesias, as would be clear to absolutely anyone who bothered to click through to the link. It's like a "Von Hoffman by convoluted proxy" award winner. Of course, Beauchamp is counting on most of Andrew's readers to not click the link, and he's right to assume that most won't.

Now, far be it from me to make Yglesias's argument for him. In fact, I don't have to, as he's written on strategic air power on several occasions. Not in short, off-the-cuff quotes of news reports like what is linked to here, but in substantive posts-- the kind with actual arguments that you actually have to rebut, rather than hide behind a fatuous and tired awards gimmick and the considerable institutional authority of a blog whose reputation you've done nothing to build. Here's a briefer one regarding Iraq and the fact that the media-ready good appearances of lower US casualties meant little for achieving the strategic aims of the Iraq campaign. If I would put my own gloss on it, I would say that Matt consistently argues that strategic air power is fine for blowing shit up but very limited in achieving the large host of strategic and diplomatic goals we tend to have in foreign affairs. That attitude has not been remotely challenged by recent events. Blowing the shit out of Qaddafi's military is the easy part. Building a democratic society, a humanitarian success, and a functioning post-Qaddafi civic infrastructure is what actually matters. This argument has the nontrivial benefits of being accurate, demonstrable through historical evidence (Dear Zack: Vietnam was a real thing!) and intellectually and ethically modest. But like I said. Argument=hard, played out Internet award meme=easy.

I'm afraid Beauchamp gave a second award, this one to Daniel Larison.

"We are no closer to finding a means by which Gaddafi would be forced to 'go' than we were four months ago."

First, tell Zack Beaucamp with my love and a kiss that if he is ever in possession of a tenth of the understanding of foreign policy and military affairs that Daniel Larison enjoys, he'll have reason for pride. This one at least meets the minimal standard of quoting someone who was not himself quoting someone else. It also seems to represent an actual prediction! Unfortunately for Beauchamp, it also contains some significant historical context and consideration of complex and nuanced recent events, which Beauchamp has not deigned to access today.

The rebels now say that the offer for Gaddafi to remain in Libya after stepping down has “expired,” which raises the question why it was ever made at all. It’s an odd bit of timing for them to extend the offer, wait until both Britain and France have endorsed the idea, and then withdraw it after Britain and France exposed themselves to no end of ridicule for having entertained the idea.

In case it isn't clear, Larison is here reacting to an actual overture made by the actual Libyan rebels, which seemed then and seems now like a curious and out of character move that suggested conflicting principles within that organization. This post (which is about a month old) is trying to make some sense of a rebel movement which has at times operated in the peculiar way that large, shaggy, and complex military groups do when they lack clear leadership, unanimity of principles, and clearly articulated political goals. Now, I wouldn't put this particular maneuver on equal footing with their history of assassinating one of their own generals or targeting sub-Saharan Africans as Qaddafi's mercenaries without evidence (little bits of nuance that escape the commentary of Mr. Beauchamp), but I think Daniel had a right to read about this information and question their capacity to take Tripoli, or even their will to.

Or here's this from Daniel:

As a matter of protecting the civilian population, the Libyan war was already lost shortly after it went from being a defensive operation to protect rebel-held areas to a campaign to topple Gaddafi, so it’s not clear what “finishing the job” could mean under the circumstances.

The operative distinction here being that Daniel Larison has long demonstrated that he actually cares about the material conditions of the lives of actual Libyans, and that he is possessed of a discriminating refusal to quickly describe actors or events as good or bad out of the sensible logic that these events take time to unspool. I don't doubt that in some vague undergraduate sense Zack Beauchamp wants nothing but the best for the Libyan people, but I have to tell you that it is likely just this simplistic: he probably imagines that there is some such thing as "nothing but the best," that it can be achieved here on earth by us fragile mortals without trampling the autonomy or rights of Qaddafi loyalists, and that he is in possession of such wisdom that he can know it when he sees it and bestow that vision upon the Libyan people. I have said it before and I will say it again: the surest, quickest test of whether someone genuinely cares for the well-being of innocent Libyan people lies in whether he or she is willing to wait beyond the news cycle and the election cycle to see what the long-term prognosis is. I don't begrudge the right of American people to view Libyan events through an American lens, but the Dish's focus on Libya's consequences for Barack Obama has been a little ugly.

Incidentally-- some might take from my post title that I am arguing that Beauchamp is unworthy of working at the Dish. Well, worthiness doesn't mean what it once did in blogging, but in any event, rest assured: I'm sure Beauchamp has a fine resume and a very shiny degree. He's likely a young guy and will have lots of opportunities. But he's compounded the sin of his adherence to what is in my view a very reductive view of the world with a flatly distorting attack on two bloggers who deserved better. He should reconsider.

nothing straight, but perfectly square

2011-08-21T21:39:00.000-04:00

It's funny. John Holbo posts a link on Crooked Timber to a forum where comic book fans fake a passionate discussion about comic books that don't exist. I can't help but see in that forum thread a critique of the very blog linking to it. I suppose it's just a reaction to a bunch of lefties who would ostensibly support dissent in form as well as dissent in content while practicing only a bloodless academicism. Most of the bloggers at Crooked Timber write about politics the same way: like it's a exercise in form. What good is dissent if it is discussed as dispassionately as a fake comic book?

I mean, shit, Michael Berube wrote a beautiful capsule on the Habermas-Lyotard argument. It would be nice if people understood that representation has to take the form of asses in seats to really mean anything. Just like you can't serve the principles of racial equality by merely enjoying the pleasant idea of a black guy on your corporation's board, you can't show that you support dissent by nodding vaguely in that direction while you argue with somebody who might one day work for Time magazine.

a reminder

2011-08-21T18:14:00.002-04:00

Even if I had a larger readership, it wouldn't much matter to post this-- American triumphalism draws its strength from American amnesia-- but I want to remind you that the game of politically pleasing intervention is short, while humanitarianism is long.

Update: Just to be as clear as I can-- everyone, with the exception of, like, Glenn Greenwald, Daniel Larison, and IOZ-- absolutely everybody will be out and about and crowing and celebrating for the foreseeable future. The political blogosphere is a vehicle for enforcing conformity through the appearance of difference, so it takes special moments like what's to come to see just the kind of corrosive unanimity that's about to come about. Very few will remind you of the brief peace following the fall of Baghdad, and very few will point out that the Libyan rebels are not opposed to assassinating undesirables. The next few days will be awash in an unseemly but profoundly American "party like Osama just got killed" revelry. The truth of life for your average Libyan won't settle for months or years.

You know I think if you wanted to keep a child in a state of permanent immaturity, the best thing to do would be to permanently hide the consequences of his or her actions.

a stomach punch of a sentence

2011-08-20T13:55:00.000-04:00

Check out this sentence from this sweet wedding vows story:

Years later, he felt, sort of, in a way, that he discovered Jacques Beaumont, now 86, when in December 1972 a mutual friend suggested that Mr. Townsend would be just the person to show Mr. Beaumont, visiting from France, around New York City for a perfect night on the town.

Oof.

As usual, the things that annoy us the most are the things that remind us of ourselves. When my prose fails me, as it frequently does, this is the way it most commonly happens: I try to build too grand a house of a sentence on a foundation that just can't support it. The rest of the piece, I should say, is written with a basic but admirable economy.

I recognize that she is echoing one of her subject's sentences herself in the initial construction, but it's there were she gets into trouble: her idea is more elegant than her words. Which happens to all of us, I think. Perfect symmetries in idea become disjointed by the vagaries of syllabification and how loaded sentences can become through meaning. The trick, I've come to believe, is to understand that ideas can be turned into good prose, but ideas about prose almost never can be turned into good prose. It's something I've had to learn only through experience: you can't keep a piggy bank of language. At times I've thought of these discrete phrases and constructions and admired them a little— a terrible sign— and tried to hide them away for later, to put into appropriate arguments once I had found them. It's always a little like buying furniture for the house you haven't bought yet. You've got to let the words be a product of the argument, and you hope that the prose quality comes. Attend to your rhetoric first and the art will follow.

All of this, of course, has almost nothing to do with Anemona Hartocollis, who did write a charming portrait of an old gay couple with a minimum of condescension.

Civil War tragedy, continued

2011-08-18T15:58:00.000-04:00

So I've received both criticism both constructive and not regarding my last post. It is well taken that I was too harsh on Coates and let my exasperation color too much of my writing. My exasperation comes in part because when Coates's obvious eloquence is married to a clearer aim and more focused project, he's very effective. Take, for example, his column on Obama and extremism. It remains, in my view, the definitive take on Obama's rhetorical style and its failings. I also take as constructive the point that I am critiquing his posts for a lack of clarity while failing to be clear myself. I hope to fix that below.

Comments that I don't find constructive (and you can consider this a bit of housekeeping) are those that make some sort of psychosocial comment on me by way of that post, or those that attempt to define my criticism for me in a way that contradicts the content of what I actually said.

Here is my critique as plainly as I can state it: I think that Coates is taking a broad, complex, and semantically loaded question ("Was the Civil War tragic?") and reducing it to a consideration of a much narrower set of questions. I would best express some of these as "Given the realities of the Civil War era, was it possible to avoid the war while moving towards the end of the slavery state? Would it have been morally preferable to avoid the war and its attendant bloodshed if doing so required a more gradual dismantling of the slavery state?" But that's my gloss, and I'm sorry to try and define his project for him. My specific complaint is not that he is this focused, but rather that he seems to regard the broad question as synonymous with the narrower ones, and further criticizes (quite harshly) those who respond to different aspects of the broader question, in essence accusing them of taking a position on the narrower questions that they perhaps haven't taken. And I finally think that he makes this conflation more likely and more difficult to navigate with some of his outsize rhetoric.

For example: this latest post crystallizes the way in which Coates is bringing up an enormously rich set of issues and yet balking at the idea that people might approach those issues from a different vantage. He says, "I don't know that the Civil War should, or shouldn't, have been fought." Fair enough! Some of us are interested in that question, and I have found that there's a consistent resistance from Coates, his commenters, and other bloggers to any consideration of different but equally generative criteria when it comes to this issue.

I understand that Coates is looking at these issues from a particular and limited vantage. That's his prerogative. What I object to is the way that he is attempting to police what vantage one can look from. When drive by-commenters said "Coates isn't arguing the point you're arguing," I say, yeah, exactly. He's reacting with a misplaced zeal against those who argue other points as if they are making incorrect arguments about his point, and he's doing it in a way that explicitly and purposefully uses our emotionally and racially charged dialogue about the Civil War as leverage to enforce his point. You can look to Erik Kain's considerations of this issue, and the way he has been consistently and shamefully misrepresented, to see what I mean.

If you merely think that I am wrong in ascribing a kind of myopic attitude towards Coates, fair enough. I would argue that he is so passionate about the issue that it effects his rhetoric in a way that makes his argument scattershot and vaguely targeted. Again, with the zingers-- "I decline all offers to mourn the second American Revolution. No one mourns the first." This has the typical failings of a sentence that is written to be admired: it swipes at a deeper resonance at the expense of meaning. Who is the target of this argument? If you can find someone who calls for mourning of these wars, context wouldn't merely be important; context would be everything.

And what does it mean to "mourn" the first or second American Revolution? Yes, there are ways that such an argument could be written which would be offensive, even racist. But isn't there a valid, humane, and entirely racially sensitive argument to be made that the human lives that were lost in the Civil War are in fact worthy of mourning regardless of the righteousness and importance of the war effort? If Coates was more deliberate in his use of mourning, if he took more care in defining his terms and arguments, there would be less indeterminacy in his judgment

In the specific way that he seems to define the contrasting viewpoint, yes, I find much that is offensive within it. Those who would have traded the bloodshed of the Civil War for a gradualist, compromised end to the American slavery state would be endorsing the continued imposition of one of the most noxious regimes in human history. The problem is that I don't see a lot (or any, really) of this argument. Yes, of course, demonstrating greater concern for white soldiers than for black slaves is cruel and wrong. But I frankly find no one doing that. In fact I find most people commenting on this issue to be falling all over themselves to point out that they aren't doing that. If some are, they deserve criticism, but in looking for his targets I mostly find straw.

As for the question of whether there would have been any way to simultaneously end American slavery while preventing the Civil War, well, yes, it would be very unlikely. It would not be impossible, and there's no greater virtue in denying the possibility of that in the pursuit of some blinkered notion of maturity through the insistence of the inevitability of violence. This is one of my consistent problems with the blogosphere, and particularly the liberal blogosphere: the constant desire to find examples of righteous violence. I can be persuaded that violence is sometimes necessary but I am disturbed by the longing for necessary violence. It's particularly a problem with liberal bloggers who are used to arguing against wars. They seem to be looking for their turn to celebrate bloodshed.

the Civil War was exactly tragic, or not, depending

2011-08-16T23:02:00.000-04:00

I'm never quite sure what to take from Ta-Nehisi Coates's series on whether the Civil War was tragic. It has the classic Coates trademark of at once wrestling with contentious issues while scolding anyone else engaged by them for doing similar wrestling. I never find a similar combination of interest in a showy search for truth and aggrieved huffing at others who are searching. We're talking about thousands of words written in pursuit of an interesting and fertile question, undertaken by someone with a deep knowledge and abiding passion for the subject matter, unspooled in a long and complicated progression of analysis, which ends, I'm sorry to say, with the insistence that anyone who considers the opposite conclusion is engaged in an act of terribly amoral privilege This might even be the path to truth, but Christ, it's cruel.

Look, the truth is that this is an argument in search of someone to be argued at; it's the kind of stance you take when you're most interested in sorting actors rather than defining correct action. There's no answer to whether the Civil War was tragic because the question is embedded in shifting definitions. It is a semantic argument that pays too little attention to semantics. I'm consistently disappointed that he doesn't spend more time considering the classic definition of tragedy, that the tragic is the downfall that springs from character, that tragedy occurs because there is some failing within the tragic character (here the United States) which makes that tragedy inevitable. In this sense I would say that the Civil War is precisely tragic: given the character of the early United States, it was both inevitable and necessary. That equality was codified in so many of our foundational texts while simultaneously denied to many millions of the country's people isn't merely an ugly contradiction but one which made violent correction inevitable. And it is the same elementary truth that constantly plays out in our conduct today: the United States pays lip service to a set of righteous values while acting in a way totally contrary to those values, and expects the world to judge it by the values and not the action. Killing innocent children with drones while we claim to hold values that renders that conduct unspeakable is how we operate. The Civil War killed 600,000 people because of the hypocrisy that is the living definition of the American heart; that same hypocrisy kills today. You could call that tragic. I don't know if I'd go along with you but I'm damn sure I wouldn't peer down from the mountain and declare monstrosity.

As I said, given the United States's character, the Civil War was inevitable, and given the alternatives, the war was preferable to the continuation of the violent apartheid state that existed. But the United States didn't have to have that character; that history unfolded in the way it did could itself be regarded as tragic.This is the problem with the way the blogosphere conditions Internet liberals to seek favor from one another: they're constantly looking for crosses to die on, boundaries of the acceptable that they can define and place themselves on the correct side of. In doing so, they dramatically shrink the bounds of the possible. So when Adam Serwer insists the moral equivalence of pacifism and barbarism, he does so by denying that there is an actual path of peace within the possible. But most of the evil in the world isn't done by people who know that they're committing evil. Most is done by people who think that they are the ones protecting the innocent from barbarism. It's practically tautological the way critics of pacifism insist violence is inevitable and thus must be opposed with same. Keep looking for it and you will always find it.

Perhaps whether the slaves could have been freed without bloodshed is just fodder for the dorm room. That the slavery state must have been ended is obvious, and given the past we've got, I much prefer the war to the continuation of slavery. But once you ask the question you invite the counterfactual, and any action undertaken by humans could have been replaced by better action.

I mean, Coates drops this.

"Slavery was an actual thing. All else is garnish."

If your primary interest in writing is to come up with zingers, this is satisfying. If not, less. If all of that is garnish, why are we here? Didn't I just read some of that garnish? What's the buzz? If this is all garnish, what's the point? Why is he writing it and not out enjoying life? Or has it only been rendered garnish by his declaration that the conflict is solved and the issue decided? I can't find a coherent reading of that other than "I, Ta-Nehisi Coates, have taken the tasty and filling lettuce that was this argument and rendered it shameful parsley through the benevolent powers of my mind." If you're just in the garage working out truth, without letting the rest of us see the moving parts, keep it to yourself. There's no value in it. Garnish is garnish on anyone's plate. Take it from a bullshitter: that line is bullshit. It mocks those who take the argument of which it is a part seriously. It congratulates its author for his position while it mocks those who are following along.

Coates has always struck me as a man who accesses nuance out of a desire to be given credit for it. But the trick isn't to wade through nuance like it's a swamp but to reside there, to rest in the discomfort of negative capability and accept a certain indeterminacy as the sad reality of the life of the mind. But you've got to be cool with wading alongside everybody else, and if there's one thing that Coates's corpus suggests to me, it's that he's unwilling to accept standing on the same morally queasy level as anybody else. He's self-critical, and to his credit, but he's not willing to be covered in the same grime of dirty argument that the people he's criticizing are.

It is a privilege to view the Civil War merely as four violent years, as opposed to the final liberating act in a two and half century-long saga of horrific violence, a privilege that black people have never enjoyed, and truthfully that no one in this country should indulge.

It's also a privilege to be able to reduce those for four violent years to the phrase "four violent years" rather than to lie dead in the mud during them. If one person dies in the commission of good, that is evil. That it happened to end another evil, that we often have to chose one evil over another, that calling two seemingly opposing actions both evil is so unsatisfying-- this is what we call the human dilemma. If you want to define terms so that the Civil War isn't tragic, go right ahead; it's your dime.

I just see no service, public or private, in regarding a question as vexing and vexed but insisting on arriving at an untroubled answer, and worse, for casting the cheap currency of privilege onto those who aren't similarly self-assured. I'm sure it's fun to abide above the fray like a Buddha but frankly I always found the idea unpalatable. The process of edifying oneself is important. To set it against edifying those who are reading you is a cynical, cynical thing to do. Maybe I just expect too much in thinking that putting something in a public forum means that you're willing to give a little of yourself and to accept the equal humanity of equivalent questions. The thing about real, profound, intractable problems is that there is no percentage in merely being right about them. But if your preference is to occupy wisdom rather than merely working with others to spread it, cool. Just don't expect everyone to watch you play by yourself. There's a lot of living to do out here.

today in inevitability

2011-08-16T20:34:00.000-04:00

I didn't notice until it got picked up by the Daily Dish but Even the Liberal Matt Zeitlin writing for Even the Liberal New Republic is just too perfect for words.

2011-08-11T23:08:00.000-04:00

from CAP, via MoveOn.

Those are the numbers, folks. Every civilization makes choices. This is the one we've made.

missing the point on spoilers

2011-08-11T15:38:00.000-04:00

So this study that suggests that people like spoilers is getting a lot of play today. Unfortunately, there seems to be an error going on with a lot of the commentary. The whole point of spoilers is that they're unchosen; nobody really thinks that there's something wrong with people accessing secrets and endings about art they haven't yet consumed. What they object to is when spoilers are presented in a way that an unsuspecting person might unwittingly read them. The study suggests that people have a preference for knowing the ending, but preference involves choice. You can't deliberately act on a preference for foreknowledge of plot if you are presented the information without choosing to access it. So I don't see what the point is, exactly. Whether people prefer to know the ending or not is irrelevant to our conduct when it comes to the decision to include spoilers; even if most everybody prefers to know the ending, the point is that some people don't and spoilers should be presented in such a way that people can choose whether to access them.

quote for the day

2011-08-11T07:41:00.003-04:00

"It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard." - Martin Luther King

revolution is the name you give the riots you like

2011-08-09T16:29:00.000-04:00

It's become an instant cliche-- if the protests in London were happening in Iran, everybody's blog would be covered in green ribbons. The question is, why the difference?

Because, dear reader, many of the self-same people who have such considerable solidarity for the Iranians don't see Persians as fully human. The condescension inherent in blogger head-patting of protesting Iranians was apparent from the jump. The source of that condescension was, in part, explained by the simple fact that most first world people find any populist expression of discontent threatening; it gives the lie to our own constant self-aggrandizing narratives of being a free people. Truly free people take to the streets. Those who find succor in playing pretend organize a committee. (And the criticism is apt of me too: I am not in the streets.) In the face of this discomfort, the actual on the ground disagreements between protesters and government are stripped away and reduced to a simplistic struggle between good and evil. Because we live without tyranny, casting the Iranian (or Syrian, etc.) conflict as a mere matter of good people vs. bad tyranny removes the unthinkable implied judgment.

This is simply true: there was more than a little violence involved in the Green Revolution, despite the desperate need among American politicos to argue the contrary. There are socialist elements within the Green Revolution. There is a comfort with religious governance that is quite at odds with American "classical liberal" sentiment. The Green Revolution is not and has never been the perfectly lily-white expression of Enlightenment values that it has been made out to be.

No, guilt ridden white first-world bloggers (of whom, generally speaking, I am a member) love protests in Syria and Iran and elsewhere because they can cast those people, members of an alien culture, race, and religion, as the perfect representations of resistance while totally stripping them of the actual thorny reality of political rage. Theocratic preferences are stripped away; violent behavior (and there was much in the Green Revolution, if you looked beyond the headlines) is ignored; the re-instantiation of sexist Islamic doctrine within the structures of protest movements are conveniently elided. This is the way of all patronizing attitudes from the overclass towards resistance: in order to preserve its romanticized view, it has to occlude the particular grievances and goals that make the protest meaningful in the first place. So the American civil rights movement becomes not a matter of black people undertaking both nonviolent and violent protest against a hideously racist system, animated at times by straightfoward ethnic nationalism, but a whitewashed, toothless prayer meeting where a rainbow coalition destroyed evil with protest songs. So India's righteous rejection of British domination is stripped of the violent religious conflict that attended its entire history.

Support for the Iranian resistance, with some exceptions, was one of those rare moments where people across ideologies came together in the blogosphere. Who could fail to stand with a people rejecting a thuggish and corrupt theocracy? I couldn't. But the realist in me insists that it was a moment of unity precisely because the protests had been stripped of all content. There was no disagreement about the movement because the movement was so taken out of context by condescension and guilt that there was nothing there to disagree about. That writers constantly sought out the elements of the resistance who expressed opinions that were palatable to liberal western audiences was as inevitable as it was distorting.

Does any of this mean that I now don't support the Iranian resistance? Of course not. It means that my support is founded ultimately on the principles of resistance themselves. It means that the beliefs and consequences of that resistance are, on balance, beyond my capacity to fairly judge. And it means that there is always a substantial risk of righteous resistance to oppressive governments becoming itself a vehicle of oppression. We have a very bad habit in this country of supporting the autonomy of oppressed peoples only when geopolitically convenien; that's the classic critique of realism, after all, and a powerful one. Yet I find something similar in the opinions of decent American liberals as they chew over the propriety of various resistance movements; in elevating or denouncing their interpretation of the values of various foreign protest movements, they confer precisely the moral authority of the West that so many of these movements reject. When I have argued about the Libyan revolution, I have tried to argue against American intervention by pointing out all that could go wrong, while not judging the actual content of the Libyan rebels themselves. I'm sure I've failed. And I'm equally sure that my criticisms here aren't lacking in incoherence, condescension, and white guilt.

(I read about that Zapatista movement and I support it. I think harder and think that they don't care about my support. It is a tension I am willing to own.)

Oh, and-- never underestimate the simple fear of angry people, particularly angry black and brown people, in the first world mind. "They're smashing windows and stealing DVD players" is about as direct of a dog whistle as I can imagine. And while Tehran seems a million miles away in the American mind, London might as well be main street. (That's where we took our honeymoon, Francine!) Violent protest in the streets of a major Anglophone city scares people who live in major Anglophone cities. (For contest, you might consider the historical narrative about black American riots in the 1960s, and how they were an unpleasant but inevitable result of a violently racist system, to attitudes towards the London riots.)

In that vein, the typical forces will insist "but Freddie! You can't possibly support this horror!" And I will say to you the same thing I will say to you regarding the Green Revolution: the idea that I am morally equipped to judge the consequences of all of that rage is exactly the paternalism that any protest movement rejects. Do I, in some distant sense, condone smashing windows and burning cars? I do not. Do I think that my moral judgment in that instance has any real valence when it comes to judging the larger motives of the riots in London? I do not. The brutal rape of Lara Logan opened a fissure in the standard, pleasing Western vision of made-for-TV Egyptian resistance. It reminded us that there is no such thing as moral coordination in combat, that there is no such thing as safe upheaval, and that the search for righteousness in violence is a game of willful blindness. That Logan's rape was an inexcusable crime seems obvious to me. What moral lessons about Egyptian revolution I could meaningfully draw from that act, I couldn't tell you.

For that reason, for the reason of the utter collapsing of my own capacity for meaningful judgment within the confines of protests that don't ask for or care for my blessing, I am sympathetic to those who think that they can perfectly judge. The only thing that bothers me is the pretense, here. The pretense that, were this exact behavior to happen in a regime that the United States is unfriendly with, there would be an equally pedantic focus on which windows get smashed and who gets robbed and whether it's fair game to throw at rock at cops-- that's what bothers me. Because it involves a holistic view of both Middle Eastern protests and first world riots that is vastly distorting of both. Because it assumes that financially secure bloggers sitting at computer screens thousands of miles away (like me) can fairly and neutrally judge the anger of distant people enraged by the status quo. Because it suggests that our discrimination is greater than our prejudice. Because it flatters us with its assurance that our opinions are formed by principle and not by signalling.

I don't know what the lesson here is, except to say that when we become enraptured by our own goodness, funneled through the conduit of expressing support for revolution in foreign countries, we should pause, and remind ourselves that this little piece of reflected glory comes with a price.

♫welcome back♪

2011-08-06T12:12:00.000-04:00

As an atheist I say there is no god, but I do not deny that God is real. He and his swishy kid are the most potent of historical forces; they are central to the whole history of Europe and the North American colonies; God is very real, even though he does not exist. When, as an anarchist, I say that there is no America, there is no government, there is no state, I mean it in almost precisely the same way. Its nonexistence has no bearing on its actuality.

-IOZ, for he is risen.

defining the fundamental character of Israel

2011-08-04T09:29:00.000-04:00

News out of Israel that, I imagine, will be seen as scary or mundane depending on your larger perspective on Israel and the occupation:

Forty lawmakers from both the coalition and opposition Wednesday submitted a proposal to the Knesset for a new Basic Law that would change the accepted definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state."

The bill, initiated by MKs Avi Dichter (Kadima ), Zeev Elkin (Likud ) and David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu ), and supported by 20 of the 28 Kadima MKs, would make democratic rule subservient to the state's definition as "the national home for the Jewish people."

The legislation, a private member's bill, won support from Labor, Atzamaut, Yisrael Beiteinu and National Union lawmakers.

Sources at the Knesset say the law currently has broad support, and they believe it will be passed during the Knesset's winter session.

According to Elkin, the law is intended to give the courts reasoning that supports "the state as the Jewish nation state in ruling in situations in which the Jewish character of the state clashes with its democratic character."

For as long as I've debated the larger issue of Israel's occupation of Palestine, the degree to which Israel's stance as a Jewish state and a democratic state are in conflict has been a sore point, and I've clashed with people for being too hard on Israel and for being too easy on Israel. Some claim that there is no more conflict between Israel's Jewish character and its democratic nature than there is between an American ethos and democracy. I find this far too pat, and I think a tremendous amount of the anger and confusion regarding Israel stem from fundamental tensions between the classical liberal values of egalitarianism under nation states and Israel's Jewish religious and ethnic character. I personally believe, due to a rather ordinary conviction that nation states must recognize all people within their borders with perfect equity, that many of Israel's policies are unjust.

On the other side, I have long disagreed with people who think that Israel cannot exist as Israel and be a righteous state. There are some who find the very formulation of a homeland for Jews racist in its character. But I believe, perhaps incoherently, that there can exist a prosperous and free state of Israel that recognizes no differences between its citizens based on religion or ethnicity or race but that nevertheless stands as a homeland where Jews can always come and be safe. I understand that immigration procedure becomes quite sticky, and I don't pretend that there isn't considerable tension there. Then again, I believe in totally open immigration as a matter of ideal theory, so perhaps that isn't my issue.

In any event, Israeli politicians seem set on making this discussion moot. For while Americans might find room for debate in whether there is a conflict between Israeli democracy and Israeli Jewishness, these politicians seem to think that the conflict is quite clear. And they are hoping to enshrine in law a clear and unmistakeable preference: that Israel is Jewish first and democratic second.

That this will have profound consequences for non-Jewish residents and citizens of Israel seems clear enough to me. Less clear is how the American political machine or the international community will react to an Israel that seems ready to throw off its long-celebrated position as the Middle East's premiere democracy. The Knesset appears to be on the verge of making a bold statement. I wonder who will listen.

the contempt gap

2011-08-03T10:20:00.000-04:00

Will Wilkinson does as he does and mocks the American left for thinking that we should try to advance our moral and ideological interests politically. He points out that our positions aren't super popular. Meanwhile, his cosmopolitan globalist liberaltarianism platform is sure to take off in the heartland. I expect it any day now.

It may be that the media's tendency to take any conservative populist movement seriously and to treat any liberal populist movement as a gang of crazies is too much to overcome now. I hear it constantly: "well, what liberals need to do is to start a tea party of the left." But the left wouldn't receive the fawning, credulous media coverage that the tea parties did. Look, from 2002 to 2005, I organized in the antiwar movement constantly. I knocked on doors and went to Departments of Licensing and Inspection and spoke to alternative media and attended meeting after pointless meeting. I still have the permits. You'd be surprised, if you live in the bubble of mainstream cable and Internet media, at how receptive and friendly most of the people I'd meet-- the mythical "average Americans"-- were to a dedicated and avowedly left-wing antiwar movement.

But that sympathy could never survive an incredibly hostile media environment, and both cable news and the establishment blogosphere-- even the liberal blogosphere-- took pains to paint the antiwar movement as a batch of Stalinist crazies. That this was perpetrated by corporate media is no surprise, but that progressive bloggers never learn that the extremes define the center is baffling. The Tea Parties don't get exactly what they want, usually. But they steadily and consistently push the conservative movement to the right, and in doing so drag the center with them. That's the salient lesson of the last several years: extremes define the center. Yet liberal bloggers delight in kneecapping the man to their left, while conservatives race to be the man to the right. How could anyone wonder why this results in a steady march rightward? What bothers me is never that liberal bloggers fail to adopt the ideas of the left but always that they don't understand that true left wing voices give them cover and help to establish a middle ground that is conducive to their interests.

Wilkinson's corpus is very odd to me, but it's odd in a way that's keeping with many other bohemian, culturally liberal libertarian writers. They have profound policy and political disagreements with American liberals and leftists, but on fundamental cultural and philosophical levels, they are far closer to the average American liberal than the average American conservative. The fundamental architecture of American cosmopolitanism-- the assumption of equal dignity across difference, the celebration of individuality over social constructs of religion or rank, the preeminence of the right to be yourself, the things that many of us truly value in the commission of personal freedom-- these have been built by the left. If you are more interested in specific legislative victories, I would remind you of who was the vanguard of civil rights for black Americans, women, and gay and lesbian men and women. But ultimately my concern here is social and cultural, and I don't know how anyone can fail to give pride of place to the left for advancing the right to be your own weird self. We've always been the home of freaks and weirdos and out theres, and I couldn't be prouder.

Cosmopolitan libertarians live in liberal urban enclaves, surrounded by liberals, taking advantage of the kind of governmental cultural and transportation infrastructure that liberals created. They consume movies, novels, music, and theater crafted in overwhelming majorities by leftists. They operate in environments where the liberal spirit of tolerance and freedom from conformity underpins everything, yet they will identify again and again the liberal hand as the one of villainy.

As is the case always on blogs, people will mistake the political for the personal. The point is not about the social ugliness of libertarian hatred for liberals. (Well, liberals they don't know personally.) The point is that rhetoric influences politics and politics defines policy. I don't understand why these people believe that they can express such disdain for cultural liberalism while maintaining the benefits of it. There's a bizarre faith among this country's rarefied political class that they can cede every major political battle to the the reactionary fringe and yet maintain their arty bohemian privileged lifestyles. I assure you: the average libertarian who disagrees with both sides but saves his invective for only the left does not want to live in Tea Party America. When ground has been given completely to the people who are bringing you this debt deal, they will find the consequences of their contempt gap to be quite non-theoretical.

I don't know what to take from the insistence like that of Wilkinson or the liberals he quotes that the public is not with us. Shall we give up? When I graduated high school the notion of gay marriage was a joke. We worked. History tells us that crazy commitments become less crazy. The Goldwater campaign happened. The idea that libertarianism would ever be as influential as it is was once a pipe dream. You are compelled by conscience, and so you work. Why that deserves mockery, whatever your ideological persuasion, will forever be a mystery to me.

do you really want what you say you want and are you really getting it

2011-08-02T15:34:00.000-04:00

There are quite a few things one could say to Andrew Sullivan for his dogged support of Obama; "of no party or clique" is of little use if your commitment to an individual person replicates the typical failings of party (or clique) loyalty. But the main thing, from my outsider's perspective, is that he seems to think that the deal is satisfying many of his commitments when in fact it does the opposite.

Now, me, my resistance to this deal is that I support Medicare and Social Security, which are absolutely threatened by the bizarre Super Committee contrivance, I support public education, I support healthy transportation infrastructure, I support subsidies for college and graduate school education, I support research and development funding for essential medical and scientific needs, I support a robust safety net for poor people and the elderly, I support the protection of the environment, and I support the enforcement of basic workplace health and safety requirements. I also understand that the United States enjoys a fiat currency, an unprecedented international dependence on that currency and our economic strength, and the printing press, vastly mitigating the danger of budget deficits and making the logic of countercyclical economics even more clear. But I'm crazy like that.

But Sullivan, according to his own posts yesterday and today, supports (to a rather crazy degree) his President appearing "reasonable," reducing the deficit, opposing the Tea Party, and the reelection of Barack Obama. The first is a matter of debate. There is nothing reasonable, in my mind, about supporting bad policy. There's also nothing reasonable about conceding to immensely unreasonable people. (People Andrew has been calling unreasonable for years!) I'll concede, though, that what is reasonable is in the eye of the beholder. The rest of these commitments are all hurt, not helped, by this deal.

This deal will not secure the long term fiscal future of the United States. Only robust growth will finally make the United States government fiscally solvent, and this deal will hurt growth, as averred by not just liberals like Paul Krugman but business journalists at Bloomberg and the Economist and analysts at Merrill Lynch and many many more. The deal doesn't put us in the black; it doesn't come close. Slowing the economy through austerity measures is going to lower tax revenue and make things worse.

This deal hands victory to the Tea Party and emboldens them. It both gives them what they want substantively and it demonstrates that thuggish tactics work. I will repeat: when you reward bad behavior, you ensure that you get more bad behavior. We don't negotiate with terrorists and hostage takers not to show how big our dicks are but because if you give hostage takers what they want then people will never stop taking hostages. What on earth will prevent this kind of behavior again? The President and Congressional Democrats just sent an unmistakeable message to the Tea Party Representatives and their constituents: if you are dangerously intransigent, we will fold.

Making Obama supporters zeal for this deal most inexplicable is the fact that this deal hurts his chances in 2012. There is a vast literature demonstrating that American presidential elections are determined primarily by economics. People vote for incumbent parties when the economy is doing well and against them when the economy is doing poorly. This bill does nothing to help the 14 million unemployed Americans. It does nothing to address the double dip recession we appear to be marching towards. And, again, in the eyes of many very smart people, it actually hurts. If this deal, which will slash thousands of jobs from the federal rolls and do nothing to stimulate the private economy, sends unemployment back to double digits, Obama is a one term president. (And lest anyone try to turn that into some grand narrative about Obama bravely doing the right thing and sacrificing his political future for the good of the country, I'll remind you that there are always other options. If you have no other options in a scenario so fluid and complex, it is a result of incompetence, not principle.)

I plum don't get it.