Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2018

Debunking state education rankings

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of Reason, Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly explain why you should ignore those “authoritative” rankings published by U.S. News and World Report and others:

You probably think you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong.

The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education system. If skinflint voters would just lighten up, the story goes, they too could become erudite and sophisticated.

Paul Krugman rehashes this narrative regularly in his New York Times column, frequently bemoaning the country’s purportedly miserly education budgets. Increasingly, he perceives libertarian barbarians at the gates of state governments, brandishing axes for dreaded spending cuts. In April, he wrote that “we’re left with a nation in which teachers, the people we count on to prepare our children for the future, are starting to feel like members of the working poor.… One way to think about what’s currently happening in a number of states is that the anti-Obama backlash, combined with the growing tribalism of American politics, delivered a number of state governments into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologues. These ideologues really believed that they could usher in a low-tax, small-government, libertarian utopia.”

In Krugman’s view, which reflects the education establishment’s view as well, those attempting to keep the size of government in check are a danger to your child. To support this claim, education wonks and activists point to state rankings in U.S. News, Education Week, or WalletHub — outlets that grade states according to a few key measures, such as graduation rates, education spending, and test scores. When education is discussed in the news, these rankings are often cited to illustrate the havoc that restrained budget growth and right-to-work laws can wreak.

Indeed, such rankings do seem to show that the highest-quality state educational systems tend to be in big-spending states in the Northeast or Upper Midwest. These places apparently honor and respect teachers, while Southern states inexplicably abhor them. But the cheapskates in cheap states get their just deserts: Sophisticated northern jurisdictions grow ever smarter, while stingy conservative backwaters sink into ever-lower depths of ignorance. The solution is obvious: Pay up or your kids will suffer.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: Traditional rankings are riddled with methodological flaws.

October 4, 2018

The True Frontier – Cordwainer Smith – Extra Sci Fi

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 2 Oct 2018

The godson of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, Paul Linebarger led an exciting life of unusual achievements well before he got into writing science fiction — including setting up one of the United States’ first psychological warfare units. Under his pen name, he wrote the trend-bucking work Scanners Live in Vain.

October 3, 2018

QotD: The state of American journalism

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the day, reporters (they didn’t insist on being called “journalists” back then) were told that the way to frame their stories was to answer a series of questions which boiled down to:

  • who
  • what
  • when
  • where
  • why
  • how

The emphasis was on actual facts and objectivity. But now, with “advocacy journalism” having completely taken over the J-schools and pretty much every newsroom, the emphasis is on changing the world rather than reporting a story fairly and accurately. Especially now, when no less a paper than the New York Times announced before the election that Trump is so bad that objectivity should be thrown out. So the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions were changed into:

  • who (can we quote to damage Trump)
  • what (can we publish to damage Trump)
  • when (should we run it maximize damage to Trump)
  • where (do we get more material to damage Trump)
  • why (Donald Trump’s presidency is an existential threat to America and to the world)
  • how (can we write our stories so as to cause maximum damage to Trump)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the state of journalism, 2018.

OregonMuse, “The Morning Rant”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-09-12.

September 30, 2018

Contempt for the voters (even their own voters)

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Steve Kates has been watching the confirmation hearings and associated circus acts in the US senate:

Let me start by explaining the basic framework. This is all politics. No one among the Democrat senators believes a word of Ford’s testimony. Not one of them would say a word were Kavanaugh a Democrat nominee. It is all show for the morons who vote for them. The disdain the Democrats have for their own voters is gigantic. They see them in the same way as I do: as low information, dumb beyond belief fools without a shred of common sense. They can see perfectly well that all of this has no other purpose but to make it harder for a government from the other party to govern. They want to pack the court with judges who will vote to do those things that cannot be done via a democratic legislative process. They understand perfectly well that they are trivialising accusations of rape. They comprehend without a shred of doubt that they are making the United States less governable. They can see without any hesitation that Ford is a stooge that has been put forward because the saps in their electorates across America eat all this up and hunger for more. They therefore do it because they enjoy the power this provides to them. They do it because they believe it will attract more voters than it will repel. They are making it as plain as day that they think their own constituency is ignorant and repulsive. But this is their line of work and if they are to keep their jobs, this is what they must do.

The Republicans think exactly the same – that Democrat voters are fools. And they know just as well as the Democrats that there is a proportion of the voting population that will make their vote depend on this and this alone. They understand rape is a terrible event in anyone’s life and would not nominate anyone if there were any genuine evidence that any of the accusations made against Kavanaugh are true. Aside from those members of their Senate caucus who prevented a majority vote from succeeding, they would have nevertheless taken the risk of the bad press that will follow when and if they confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination. They have a razor-thin majority in the Senate that can only survive a near-unanimous vote from their side of the aisle. They are counting on there being enough common sense and sound judgment left with the voting public to be able to succeed and retain the House and Senate majorities in November. They see the Democrat tactics for what they are.

As for the notion of sexual assault, to really believe that is the issue makes you so stupid that it is painful to see what nitwits politicians have to deal with routinely.

Moral panic à la mode: Witch hunt, 2018

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barrett Wilson compares a moral panic that convulsed the Wilson family (Satanic lyrics and overt sexual messages in contemporary movies and rock music) with today’s moral panic:

When my very Christian parents tried to throw away my 14-year-old sister’s heavy metal records, she ran away to her friend’s house. I cried for days. It felt like the end of everything. My sister would be gone forever. I would now live in what was referred to at the time as a “broken home.” I imagined that I’d be reunited with my sister in a few years—on the mean city streets after I’d been forced into a life of crime.

Both my parents and sister seemed to make good arguments. My mother and father tried to trash the records because they loved my sister, while my sister ran away because of her love for Dee Snyder. My parents wanted my sister to be safe. My sister wanted to express her individuality through music. My parents claimed that heavy metal was the cause of my sister’s rebellious behavior. My sister said that Judas Priest rocked, and elevated Ozzy Osbourne to secular sainthood. My parents thought my sister had fallen victim to satanic messages encoded in vinyl, while my sister believed my parents were enslaved to religious dogma printed in the Bible.

I remember the Bible studies and prayer groups well. There was a uniformity of belief and cause that united my parents and their pious peers. There was a collective smugness and sense of superiority that led members of the church to purge the culture (or what parts of the culture they could control) of dangerous and unholy influences. They wanted culture to be safer. Their targets: violence and overt sexuality in movies, music and video games.

So that was then, back in the benighted dark ages before the cell phone and broadband internet and all-consuming social media — they knew so little back then. We, as a culture, have grown so wise and mature that we’d never fall back into that kind of moral panic … oh, damn.

The right-left pro-censorship alliance that Gore formed three decades ago has its modern equivalent in the Twitter era. Right-wing men’s rights advocates and hyper-progressives found common cause in an online shaming campaign targeting Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, for instance, after she dared suggest that women born into their female bodies might have reason to see themselves differently from those born with penises. And the recent de-platforming of second-wave feminist icon Germaine Greer on the basis of perceived transphobia would be met with gleeful applause by stridently conservative Australians as much as by stridently progressive gender-studies post-docs. The tactics used by right-wing Twitter trolls such as Mike Cernovich to get James Gunn fired from Disney are identical to those used by the left to get Twitter troll Godfrey Elfwick de-platformed. Their crime was the same: tweeting controversial jokes.

But while all forms of social panic tend to resemble one another, there are some stark differences between now and then. For one thing, young people today seem more naturally censorious and culturally conservative than their parents. Peace, love, freedom, and experimentation have been replaced by an obsession with emotional safety. Today’s young men and young women seem scared to death of each other. The LGBT community has fractured into its alphabetic constituent parts. And racial tensions are fed by a steady diet of online microaggressions. Everyone feels at risk, despite the fact the free world has never been safer.

Of course, moral panics are not based on facts but fears. In Stanley Cohen’s 2002 introduction to Folk Devils and Moral Panics, he writes that in moral panics, “the prohibitionist model of the ‘slippery slope’ is common … [and] crusades in favor of censorship are more likely to be driven by organized groups with ongoing agendas.” They are driven by organized groups, yes, but they are facilitated by well-meaning, ill-informed actors such as activists, therapists, and law enforcement officers. From the censorship of comic books, to video games, to music, we’ve known about the agendas of these special interests for a very long time. So why do we keep falling for it?

Moreover, there seems to be more hypocrisy at play in 2018 than there was during the moral panics of the 1980s. Many Christians who embraced Tipper Gore’s campaign truly were sincere anti-sex and anti-violence crusaders. But the world that people inhabit in 2018 is at once hyper-explicit and puritanical. In one browser tab, we’re typing about how words are violence, while in the other tab, we’re engaging in malicious gossip that could ruin someone’s career.

A feverish approach that seeks to sanitize culture is harmful but is also futile. Forbidding people from consuming content can often serve to make that content more desirable to consumers, something similar to the Streisand Effect. This phenomenon is named after Barbra Streisand’s futile attempt to keep photos of her Malibu mansion off of the internet. The harder she tried to stop people from posting photos, the more photos appeared. Paternalistically making music and art “forbidden content” makes it sexier, and elevates its status. The PMRC’s Filthy Fifteen is chockfull of rock and roll classics that went on to make millions. My parents’ disdain for heavy metal certainly did not make my sister pop Perry Como into her Walkman – she just rocked harder. Fans and free speech advocates rally around Tyler, the Creator today now more than ever.

Update:

September 28, 2018

Arthur C. Clarke – Beyond Human – Extra Sci Fi – #2

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 25 Sep 2018

Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End explores his self-described “crypto-Buddhist” philosophy and the question of: are higher powers inherently, morally good, or is that something we decide as humans?

September 26, 2018

The New York Times on the minimum wage question

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore shares the key points of a New York Times editorial on the minimum wage:

The minimum wage is the Jason Vorhees of economics. It just won’t die.

No matter how many jobs the minimum wage destroys, no matter how many times you debunk it, it always comes back to wreak more havoc.

We’ve covered the issues at length at FEE, and quite effectively, if I do say so myself. But I have to admit that one of the greatest takedowns of the minimum wage you’ll ever find comes from an unlikely place: The New York Times.

There are many reasons people and politicians find the minimum wage attractive, of course. But the Times, in an editorial entitled “The Right Minimum Wage: 0.00,” skillfully rebuts each of these reasons in turn.

Noting that the federal minimum wage has been frozen for some six years, the Times admits that it’s no wonder that organized labor is pressuring politicians to increase the federal minimum wage to raise the standard of living for poorer working Americans.

“No wonder. But still a mistake,” the Times explains. “There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed.”

But why has the idea “passed”? Why would raising the minimum wage not help the working poor?

“Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market,” the editors explain.

But wouldn’t the minimum wage increase the purchasing power of low-income Americans? Wouldn’t a meaningful increase allow a single breadwinner to support a family of three and actually be above the official U.S. poverty line?

Ideally, yes. But there are unseen problems, as the editors point out:

    There are catches…[A higher minimum wage] would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

But if that’s true, why would progressives support such a law? What’s their rationale for supporting a minimum wage if it does more harm than good? Is it sheer political opportunism?

Not necessarily. The Times explains:

    A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable.

There’s just one problem with this logic, the editors say:

    The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs. The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable – and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

September 22, 2018

Arthur C. Clarke – Master of Science Fiction – Extra Sci Fi – #1

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 18 Sep 2018

Arthur C. Clarke is well known for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, but even more importantly he ventured into writing novels instead of just magazine serializations. Works like The City and the Stars asked big philosophical questions in science fiction.

“This is the religion of Wokeness, and this is the era of the Great Awokening”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Have you heard the word of Social Justice? Social Justice can save you, you know:

From the sun-blanched beaches of California to the snow-covered cities of New England, a religious fervor is sweeping the United States. PhD-toting preachers spread the faith with righteous zeal, denouncing those who violate its sacred principles. Sinners are threatened not by an angry god, but by a righteous mob. The impenitent among them are condemned to be outcasts, while the contrite, if they properly mortify themselves and pledge everlasting fealty to the faith, can secure enough lost status to rejoin society, perhaps forever marked by a scarlet epithet. Racist. Sexist. Ableist. This is the religion of Wokeness, and this is the era of the Great Awokening.

In the following article, we will explore this quasi-religion, Wokeness, as a status system that functions predominantly to distinguish white elites from the white masses (whom we will call hoi polloi). It does this by offering a rich signalling vocabulary for traits and possessions such as education, intelligence, openness, leisure, wealth, and cosmopolitanism, all of which educated elites value (for a similar analysis, see Rehain Selam’s August essay in the Atlantic, discussed by David French in the National Review article linked above). From this perspective, the preachers of the Great Awokening — those who most ardently and eloquently articulate the principles of Wokeness — obtain status because they (a) signal the possession of desired traits and (b) promulgate a powerful narrative that legitimizes the status disparity between white elites and hoi polloi. The elites, according to these preachers, are morally righteous and therefore deserve status, whereas hoi polloi are morally backward and deserve obloquy and derision.

It’s important to note before we begin that this perspective does not contend that all the actors in this status system are cynical charlatans. In fact, it insists that many legitimately believe their assertions about pervasive racism, sexism, transphobia, et cetera, and feel compelled to preach their doctrine so as to make society more just. Sincere belief and status motives often conspire. For example, the famous preachers of the Great Awakening (from whom we derived our title) almost certainly believed the urgency of their message and the elaborate metaphysics of their faith, but also obtained status from their books and sermons.

Wokeness

Before analyzing Wokeness as a status system, we must understand it as a quasi-religious doctrine. Unlike scientific theories or other empirical claims, the basic tenets of Wokeness are held with sacred fervor. Those who challenge them are not debated; rather, their motives are denounced, and they are cast out of polite society like heretics. To take just one example, when someone objects to the Woke principle that “diversity is a strength,” committed believers rarely greet the objection as an opportunity for argument. Instead, they attack the apostate for his sacrilege, and accuse him of unspeakable moral treachery (see table below for other examples).

September 21, 2018

Doug Ford is a bit like Trump in the way he gets his critics to froth and fizz on demand

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For all the claims that Doug Ford would be “just like Trump”, they’re not all that similar, but one way the Ontario Premier does resemble the American President is the way that they both can send their opponents into rhetorical hysteria almost without effort:

Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

As much as Ford’s government has violated political norms, we shouldn’t want the remedy to do likewise — whether it’s the feds invoking Disallowance (as a majority of Toronto city councillors voted to support) or the Lieutenant-Governor refusing Bill 31 Royal Assent (as requested Tuesday by various petitioners led by former lefty Toronto mayor John Sewell), or a judge undermining provincial authority over municipalities on grounds that collapse in higher courts.

So now, perhaps, Toronto can return to reality — or as close as you can get during an election campaign.

No, there was no magic brand of fit Mayor John Tory or hypothetical mayor Jennifer Keesmaat or anyone else could have pitched that would have stopped Ford in his tracks. Torontonians’ fits are a feature for Ford, not a bug. In defending Bill 5 he has repeatedly namechecked various left-leaning allegedly do-nothing councillors. Their apoplexy sustains him. In his book about Rob Ford, councillor John Filion quoted Doug Ford on his plans for Tory after losing the 2014 mayoral election: “He’s going to take off the sheets in bed at night and find my teeth wrapped around his nuts.”

Note that Chris Selley is careful to include the “allegedly” there … no need to invite lawsuits for the National Post.

And no, there is no real hope of relief in the ongoing appeals process over Bill 5. Even if the Supreme Court were to side with Belobaba, it would only repudiate the way in which the province wielded its powers — i.e., in the middle of an election — not the powers themselves. Had the government waited four years, or even legislated a two-year council term at 47 wards to be followed by an election at 25, it would have been on plenty-thick ice. It could easily re-legislate a 25-ward Toronto after such a ruling, and without using the notwithstanding clause.

Toronto politicians are destined to be Doug Ford’s favourite punching bag at least until they stop reacting so hysterically every time he so much as looks in their direction. He may not be a Twitter troll of the same mastery as Donald Trump, but he doesn’t appear to need social media to get his critics all panty-bunched.

Similarly, while there is no telling how much Ford might meddle in Toronto’s affairs in the coming years, at every step along the way he will make the idea of meddling in Toronto affairs more toxic for future non-Conservative governments. All provincial governments have screwed over Toronto now and again; as of this summer, screwing over Toronto is Something Doug Ford Does. And no Liberal or New Democrat wants to be like Doug Ford.

When things die down a bit, the opposition parties will have to take a break from denouncing Ford and explain what they’ll do in future to strengthen Toronto’s democracy: restore control over its political boundaries, provide more taxation powers, allow road tolling, whatever. It would be Pollyannaish to suggest Ford has caused a political awakening in Toronto, but he has certainly made it more attractive for the other parties to take Toronto more seriously, and concurrently much more risky for them to be seen reneging on such promises in future.

September 18, 2018

The Sidh – Iridium

Filed under: Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

TheSidhVEVO
Published on 9 Jul 2015

The Sidh – Iridium (Official Video)
Pubblicato il 10 lug 2015 ©&(P) Artis Records.
“Si ringrazia l’Amministrazione Comunale di ZOVENCEDO per aver messo a disposizione il Museo della Pietra nella Priara de Cice”

Google Translate renders the quoted sentence as “We thank the Municipal Administration of ZOVENCEDO for making available the Stone Museum in the Priara de Cice”

September 15, 2018

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh hits a rough patch

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh on the federal NDP leader’s travails:

The thing about being a New Democratic Party leader is that there’s an oh-so-fine class line to walk, a line that is easier for the leaders of less socially concerned parties. No one really expects that the leader of the NDP will actually be a working-class person, and since Ed Broadbent’s time, even the expectation that the leader will have been raised working-class has diminished. Jack Layton and Thomas Mulcair have so many politicians brachiating in their family trees that if they lived in the U.K. they would probably have had peerages to renounce.

But until Jagmeet Singh came along, there was a still norm of personal austerity to be observed — a natural limit to how expensively one could dress, and how much conspicuous consumption one could indulge, while still serving up an NDP leader’s generous portion of lectures against selfishness and greed. Singh is the son of a psychiatrist: the tuition for the private American high school from which he graduated is, for the 2018-19 school year, US$31,260. He has been in GQ for his bespoke suits, and owns (according to Toronto Life) two Rolexes.

(I confess that the watches set me off. Rolexes aren’t arty like a Patek Philippe; they don’t do anything cool. They’re mostly kind of ugly. They are a pure, cold signifier of brute pride in wealth.)

Making Singh leader of the federal NDP was audacious. If ordinary New Democrats had a problem with his image and tastes, they probably felt that, with Justin Trudeau leading the Liberals, they had plenty of wiggle room on the left for a handsome leader with some celebrity dazzle. Trudeau had appetizing potential to make ghastly errors of Richie Rich cluelessness, and has delivered.

But it seems Singh will not entirely be able to avoid the day of reckoning, the day of exposure to a stricter New Democratic standard. The leader, as you probably know, has a problem in Saskatchewan, the party’s traditional heart. In May he threw MP Erin Weir out of the national NDP caucus after an independent investigation “upheld” complaints of harassment, sexual and otherwise, against Weir. Weir’s many friends in Saskatchewan are unhappy with how the case was handled.

September 14, 2018

The Mencken Society versus the alt-right “Mencken Club”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the current issue of Reason, Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers explains why the great essayist would not welcome the adulation of the alt-right “Mencken Club”:

Libertarians and conservatives have always admired H. L. Mencken, the 20th century journalist and satirist famous for his literary and political commentary. Now the Baltimore author and editor, whose heydey lasted from the 1920s to the late 1940s, has become a hero to the alt-right, who have cherry-picked his views to support their white supremacist vision. For white nationalist leader Richard Spencer and fellow enthusiasts, Mencken embodies “worthy ideals,” namely, a questioning of “the egalitarian creed, democratic crusades, and welfare statism” that American democracy has become since the New Deal. Such is the essence of humor: It is hard to believe that Mencken would have ever given his worshippers the time of day.

[…]

Unlike the Mencken Society — a scholarly organization founded in 1976 in Baltimore that hosts talks on Mencken’s life and works by such luminaries as the late Christopher Hitchens, Arnold Rampersad, and Alfred Kazin — the Mencken Club holds pseudo-academic conferences ranging in themes as “The West: Is It Dead Yet?” or “The Right Revisited.” In 2016, the club focused on the populism of Donald Trump and the preservation of white Christian heritage through anti-immigration policies. White House speechwriter Darren Beattie spoke to members alongside Peter Brimelow, white nationalist and founder of the anti-immigrant website Vdare.com — a gig that ultimately cost Beattie his job.

Speakers rarely mention Mencken’s name at their meetings, except for random recitals from Chrestomathy or his earliest works: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), whom the alt-right see as a great visionary, and from Men Versus the Man: A Correspondence between Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H. L. Mencken, Individualist (1910), an epistolary debate where Mencken explores Social Darwinism, eugenics, heredity, and race. In the most offensive passage, Mencken defines “the American negro” as “a low-caste man,” and that the “superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.” In its podcast, club members touted Men Versus the Man as “a fun book” and asserted “race realists, anti-globalists, educational reductionists and immigration restrictionists can draw nourishment from Mencken … and his disdain for the low-caste man.”

In reality, Mencken would have shunned the white identity politics of the alt-right. To Mencken, Nietzsche’s “superior man” was the enlightened individual of honor and courage, regardless of race, creed, or social background. Soon after 1910, Mencken reversed his views of white superiority and began calling for civil rights for African Americans. Despite the fact that his Diary contains racial slurs and ethnic slang, Mencken rebelled against “the Aryan imbecilities of Hitler” and stated: “To me personally, race prejudice is one of the most preposterous of all the imbecilities of mankind. There are so few people on earth worth knowing that I hate to think of any man I like as a German or a Frenchman, a gentile or a Jew, Negro or a white man.”

He was especially contemptuous of white Anglo-Saxon Southerners, describing them as “shiftless [and] stupid,” and extolled African Americans as “superior to the whites against whom they are commonly pitted.” Unique for the mid-1900s and into the ’20s and ’30s, he collaborated with black intellectuals and was the first white editor to publish their work in his magazine, The American Mercury, and energetically promoted their writings in his books and columns and to his publisher Alfred Knopf. He was relentless in his campaigns against the Ku Klux Klan, and he joined forces with the NAACP to testify against lynching before the U.S. Congress. He repeatedly wrote against segregation; behind the scenes he discussed strategies with African-American leaders to promote civil rights.

September 11, 2018

The tiny, airless, self-censoring world of Canadian literature

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jonathan Kay on a recent thought-crime, show-trial, and tentative rehabilitation of a part-First Nations poet in the minuscule, suffocating world of Canadian literature:

While I rarely like to concede defeat in a Twitter smackdown, I had to admit that this festival’s social-media people had me dead to rights — for it’s absolutely true that Webb Campbell wasn’t censored in any formal sense. None of the events I am describing here involve the government. Nor was Webb Campbell muzzled in any way by Book*hug, which presumably would have been only too happy to have her publish her book elsewhere. Webb Campbell could have put the controversial poem on Facebook, or Tweeted it out line by line. But she did none of this. Instead, she swallowed her pride, signed the confession that had been placed in front of her, and prayed that she would be readmitted into CanLit’s good graces — which, in fact, now seems to be happening, following what seems to have been an elaborate months-long display of performative contrition on Webb Campbell’s part. (The festival’s flacks also were correct that Webb Campbell never asked for my help or advice. Just the opposite in fact: I suspect that the poet would have opposed my involvement, since my views on free speech (and a dozen other topics) mark me as an outsider to her caste, and one badly tainted by cultural wrongthink.)

One thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four that does still ring true about the current age of crowdsourced censorship is the reverse classism at work. In Orwell’s Oceania, the intellectual class is scrutinized relentlessly for the slightest deviation in thought or speech, while “proles” are free to wallow in astrology, smut and sentimental storytelling.

    There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

The same principle applies in broad form today. Canadian tabloids publish material every day that would be deemed offensive to Ottawa Writers Festival types in all sorts of ways. But with rare exceptions, it gets a pass, because it is seen, in effect, as a sort of ideological Pornosec. The world of Canadian poetry, on the other hand, is a tiny rarefied world run by, and for, a few hundred Canlit Party members — all relentlessly scrutinizing one another for ideological heresies through the panopticon of social media. In this environment, Webb Campbell’s status as a reliably leftist, thoroughly woke poet who proclaimed her guiding light to be “decolonial poetics” was not a mark in her favor. Just the opposite: It confirmed her status as a full Party member, and therefore strictly subject to all the ideological strictures applicable thereto. When the scarlet letter is sewn upon such a specimen by one publisher within the tiny incestuous world of Canadian poetry, it is sewn upon her by all. And while it was once imagined that artists and writers had a special duty to speak out against censorship, dogma and speech codes, they are now conditioned to believe that their highest duty is toward avoiding offense and staying in their lane.

This, in capsule form, is how crowdsourced censorship works in the literary field. And analogous stories could be told about academia and other creative métiers. It is up to the government to maintain a free marketplace of ideas. But freedom from government censorship doesn’t mean much when the stall-owners in the marketplace of ideas organize their own ideological protection rackets to drive one of their own out of business. Venerable groups that once led the fight for free speech and freedom of conscience, such as PEN and the ACLU, seem completely unequipped to deal with the new threats. Their entire organizational culture always has been directed at pushing back against government monoliths, not decentralized mob subcultures.

But the fact that government has no direct role in this new kind of censorship does not mean that public policy can’t be part of the solution. For while it’s true that government isn’t directly engineering these newly emergent forms of crowdsourced speech suppression, the current public funding model can indirectly encourage them.

The reason Book*hug can pulp Shannon Webb Campbell’s book without worrying much about lost readers or earned revenue is that, to a rough order of magnitude, they don’t have any readers or earned revenue. Like most small, high-concept book publishers in Canada, Book*hug is overwhelmingly dependent on government subsidies, which are what allow it to publish obscure manifestoes and poetry volumes that, outside of copies assigned to review, libraries, friends and family, might be expected to sell a few hundred copies.

Or fewer.

I recently consulted an online index that tracks Canadian book sales. For the latest Book*hug releases, the average number of books sold, per title, for the 15 most recently published books seems to be about 60. The tracking service does not claim to capture all book sales, estimating its accuracy at about 85%. (Direct sales at book-launch events, for instance, may escape capture in the data.) So let us be generous and assume that the average book sells 100 copies, or even double that. It doesn’t matter: In commercial terms, this is a non-entity. Which means there really is little or no financial penalty to be suffered if Book*hug publishes, or doesn’t publish, Shannon Webb Campbell instead of some other author. Everyone in this heavily subsidized subculture is playing with house money — as are the niche literary journals run by charitable entities (including one where I briefly served as editor). And the real asset to be husbanded in all these places isn’t the affection of readers — there often aren’t any — but rather the editors’ reputation for ideological purity among peers, donors and Twitter followers.

It’s the CanLit version of Sayre’s Law: “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”

September 9, 2018

Hunter S. Thompson, Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone

Filed under: Business, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Darcy Gerow on the sudden rise and long, long decline of Rolling Stone:

The suffocating media bias of the 1960s was difficult to escape. A lethargic gray specter of middle-class America was distributed with cunning sterility through the generic, bogus smiles of cable news networks and traditional print. Despite the election and assassination of Kennedy and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, if you had turned on a T.V. this was still Eisenhower’s America: regimented, religious, conservative. And the cultural vacuum created by the Eisenhower years had began to suck even harder with Lyndon Baines Johnson at the helm.

American media was out of touch with this new generation. Elitist authoritarians were preaching their moral superiority stamped with stars and stripes to a generation of cynics. These kids didn’t have a fucking clue what they wanted, but they wanted no part of what they were being given. So rose Rolling Stone, a counterculture bible for babyboomers, co-founded by Jann Wenner.

[…]

Things were different in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were a just cause. The catalyst for a just movement of equal rights for women and gays and minorities was free speech, of which Jann Wenner was a huge proponent. When students at U.C. Berkley marched in the streets in the 1960s, it was an attack on the elitist, authoritarians and an establishment hellbent on keeping opposing viewpoints and the ideas of personal liberty stifled. The gang of “cruel faggots” kept the official narrative running but no one under 30 was listening.

The whole goddamn world had had enough of the travesty of war in Southeast Asia. There was no ignoring the ineptitude of American politics. The only reasonable thing to do in 1969 was to drive out to Altamont for the weekend, load up on heinous chemicals, hunker down and rethink your approach to the political process.

Thompson, the then-young, liberal anti-hero, could often be found gobbling LSD and firing his guns (he was a lifetime member of the NRA) at propane bottles for a crowd of jeering burnouts or Bay area bikers at his fortified compound, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek Colorado.

It was Jann Wenner’s idea to put Hunter, with all of his fear and loathing, on to the campaign trail in 1972. Why not get the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels? Hunter was someone with a penchant for dealing with vicious thugs and sick freaks gone crazy on power, someone who could draw a parallel between Richard Nixon and Sonny Barger.

Thompson’s openly-biased, subjective and wild account of the 1972 presidential election was the red Chevy convertible of campaign coverage. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on repeat and at full volume, barrelling across the country at 110 miles an hour or so and in search of an honest politician. In Hunter’s eyes, the only one that even came close was George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota.

McGovern’s non-interventionist platform focused on a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and a Milton Freidman-inspired, negative income tax meant to replace the bureaucratic burden of social welfare programs and a complicated tax code. Thompson’s version of events is the story of an idealistic underdog fighting against the odds only to be crushed by postmodern Americanism and the establishment incumbent, “Tricky Dick Nixon.” McGovern might have owed a White House win, in part, to Thompson’s and Rolling Stone’s relentless support had he not owed his White House loss to the mental distress of his vice-presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton.

There’s no way to properly explain how great Rolling Stone was in those early years. How well the magazine represented the anti-establishment culture, individual liberty and equality for everyone. It can’t be compared to anything else because there was nothing else, only the traditional mainstream garbage and Rolling Stone.

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