An obsession with politics is often the triggering factor. A man (women, of course, never go crazy) may swing from right to left, or left to right, on the great mental gallows. He may even do this without altering his voice; the tone may remain constant all the pendular way across; but still we spy the disconcerting movement. He walks from his commitments, and betrays all his friends.
Politics offers a terrible spiritual danger. To think politically, is an out-of-body experience. One is trying to imagine how the machinery of policy may engage with the machinery of life. It is a Cartesian operation; always short of the necessary information. Something similar may happen in an ecclesial stance. The man becomes detached from reality, by all this machinery in his head.
Career politicians seldom wobble quite so much, for they have little brain to loosen. The characters I’m thinking of are thinkers, intellectuals of some kind. Most know better than to run for public office; or if they do, the voters put them back in place. They are in product development; they tend anyway to sneer at the people in sales. A successful politician knows his market, instead. He knows what his constituents want to hear, and tells them. He remembers what side of the aisle he is sitting, and whom he owes for his seat. He is caught in a matrix of personal loyalties, with hell to pay when he skivs. His eye is fixed on the pay-off.
Whereas, your typical intellectual is coatless against the winds of fashion. He courts allies with a different kind of vanity. His party loyalties are ambiguous, and the cost of his betrayal is seldom very high. Friends become a fungible commodity, if all you require from them is Facebook Likes. He may actually improve his prospects by defecting. Depending where you live, there is a path of least resistance.
David Warren, “Brain disease”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-02-13.
January 19, 2019
December 28, 2018
December 15, 2018
December 7, 2018
December 4, 2018
Terry Teachout’s unhappy Twitter experience
While I don’t follow him on Twitter, I’ve long subscribed to the RSS feed from Terry Teachout’s website. On Sunday, he posted about a recent unpleasantness on Twitter that I thought was worth sharing:
… my Twitter account, was hacked on Sunday morning as part of a cross-platform attack on my social-media presence. The objective, it seems, was ransom: I actually received a series of telephone calls from the culprits, who appear to reside in England. Needless to say, I hung up and immediately started changing passwords and building a higher security wall. Alas, several hours went by before the powers-that-be at Twitter took notice of my plight, and numerous obscene postings are still visible on my old Twitter page as of this hour, as well as on the Twitter module in the right-hand column of this blog.
So, as you’d expect, the crack Twitter security team sprang into action, right? Er, no:
I received this message from Twitter Support late last night:
We’ve investigated the reported account and have determined that it is not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy. In order for an account to be in violation…it must portray another person…in a misleading or deceptive manner.
So that’s how Twitter Support responds when my verified account is hacked, obscene and racist messages are posted on it, and a ransom request is made to me by telephone. Is it any wonder that more and more people are getting fed up with Twitter?
November 24, 2018
October 30, 2018
The plight of Gab
Unlike other social media platforms that have hosted (and continue to host) legal-but-“hateful” content, Gab has suffered a de-platforming and is currently scrambling to get the service operational with a new service provider (reported to be a non-US site). On Monday, the Gab team posted the following static page in place of their normal UI:
The Z Man explains:
The question that normal people ask is how this is possible. After all, these companies sign contracts and in theory, we still have courts where contracts can be enforced by impartial judges. While that is a laughable fiction now, the reality is these companies are not bound by standard business agreements. They have been allowed to carve out new law for themselves, forcing their vendors and customers to sign off on what is called an adhesion contract. This gives the tech giants absolute power over everyone else.
An adhesion contract or “standard form contract” is a contract drafted by one party and signed by another party. The second party typically does not have the power to negotiate or modify the terms of the contract. Adhesion contracts are commonly used for things like insurance or rental contracts. When you rent a car or purchase car insurance, you just sign the contract, because you have to in order to rent the car or get insured. Every technology service provider is now basing their relationships on these types of contracts.
It used to be that the courts carefully scrutinized these types of arrangements, so the contract had to adhere to some basic principles. The courts would often use the “doctrine of reasonable expectations” to void all or part of these contracts, when there was lack of notice, unequal bargaining power, or blatant and substantive unfairness. The reason for this should be obvious. When a powerful company has the right to dictate the terms of the contract to their customers, they have all the power in the contractual relationship.
In western jurisprudence, a valid contract is one in which both parties freely engage and have equal opportunities to negotiate. When one party imposes the conditions on the other, that’s not a contract. That’s slavery. In a world where a handful of people control the public space, these types of contract give them arbitrary power over public discourse. If they become vexed with what you say, they can claim you have violated their terms of service and remove you from the internet. Again, the terms are dictated, not negotiated.
October 21, 2018
September 30, 2018
Moral panic à la mode: Witch hunt, 2018
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:
Signs that you're in the midst of a moral panic: there are calls to scrap due process and to believe each and every accusation, inflated statistics about the apparent problem proliferate, and memory is considered reliable information https://t.co/9tmrgi8Szk
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) September 29, 2018
September 27, 2018
France moves toward the Soviet system of psychological “treatment” for dissidents
You may not agree with much that prominent French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen stands for, but the recent court order that she must undergo a psychological evaluation as part of the investigation of a “hate crime” should worry everyone. Jacob Sullum writes:
Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons
France ranked 12 notches above the United States in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, produced by Reporters Without Borders. But such ratings can be misleading, as illustrated by the prosecution of Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front), for posting images of ISIS atrocities on Twitter. Last week Le Pen revealed that she had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation into her speech crime, which added another layer of Soviet-style thought control to the story.
It is inconceivable that an American politician, no matter how extreme his views, would be prosecuted for doing what Le Pen did, because a law like the one she is charged with violating would be clearly inconsistent with the First Amendment. That law, Article 227-24 of the French Criminal Code, makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of €75,000 (about $88,000) and up to three years in prison, to distribute “a message bearing a pornographic or violent character or a character seriously violating human dignity…where the message may be seen or perceived by a minor.” Le Pen allegedly ran afoul of that prohibition in 2015 by posting three pictures of men murdered by ISIS—one beheaded, one burned alive, and one run over by a tank—in response to a Twitter user who likened her party to the terrorist organization. “Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is this!” she tweeted.
This case vividly illustrates why Article 227-24 would never pass constitutional muster in the United States. Le Pen’s tweet is indisputably political speech, sitting at the core of the expression protected by the First Amendment. The terms of Article 227-24 (especially the phrase “seriously violating human dignity”) are broad and vague, encouraging self-censorship and inviting politically motivated prosecution of people who irk the powers that be. Le Pen, who unsuccessfully ran against Emmanuel Macron in a presidential runoff last year, was stripped of her parliamentary immunity six months later, leaving her open to prosecution.
September 25, 2018
China’s anti-Japanese attitudes
From the time that Japan broke out of its self-imposed isolation in the late 19th century, China has been one of its main targets, first for military action and more recently for economic expansion and competition. Japan’s reputation in China would have been bad enough even without the Japanese Imperial presence in large portions of China from 1937 through 1945, but the wounds from the Second Sino-Japanese War have never healed.
Last week, Nick Taber reported on some surprisingly intense anti-Japanese sentiments he encountered in China:
In 2017 in a rust-belt city in Northeast China I hopped in a taxi and began chatting with my driver who, when the conversation turned to politics, nonchalantly told me that he wished that the Chinese Government would kill every single Japanese person on the planet. I found this extreme to say the least, so I double-checked just in case my Chinese was failing me, “You mean kill every single Japanese man, woman, and child?”
“Yes, exactly,” he said.
Guessing by his apparent age I wrote my driver off as a fringe extremist whose possibly restricted worldview was likely shaped during the throes of the Cultural Revolution. I presumed that the vast majority of Chinese people today would decisively denounce this kind of violent sentiment of genocide. This presumption was wrong.
Chinese genocidal hatred against the Japanese simply cannot be dismissed as the bigotry of a nationalist fringe movement. Anti-Japanese sentiment is in fact so engrained in Chinese culture that it has become not only a political utility and form of patriotism but even a solid go-to branding opportunity.
The CEO of a major company in Hebei province sets his username on Weibo (China’s Twitter) to “killer of Japanese devils” and likewise a news anchor of a regional TV station sets his Weibo username to “destroy Japanese devils.” Weibo also has hundreds of users with the phrase “bomb Japan” in their username, and after a devastating 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck Osaka in June, the natural disaster began trending on Weibo with a large number of Chinese netizens lamenting that more Japanese people had not been killed. As one user put it, “The whole nation of Japan should perish as soon as possible. It’s an evil race that has infuriated god.”
Certainly not all Chinese hold such genocidal or hateful views. There is a sizeable minority that even frown upon these views and a growing number of more internationally-minded Chinese who have Japanese friends or study in Japan so are at the very least suspicious of this hate. Some Chinese even see this sentiment, in part, as a product of government propaganda and brainwashing. As The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages uncertainty over the future of its leadership, it exploits nationalism to boost its popularity and the painful memories of WWII anti-Japanese sentiment provides a relatively low-cost, high-yield opportunity for this purpose.
Chinese citizens who do openly support Japan in any way, shape, or form also risk being seen as traitors. Another user commenting on the Osaka tragedy remarked, “Any Chinese people in Osaka right now travelling or shopping? They should be buried together with the Japanese”.
In 2017, the China Badminton Super League told their own Lin Dan, the number one badminton champion in the world, that he would be forbidden from competing in the playoffs because he had a sponsorship contract with the Japanese sports brand Yonex. In 2012, the Chinese actress Li Bingbing refused to travel to Japan to promote her film, Resident Evil 5, saying that she “personally cannot handle it emotionally”.
The origin of China’s anti-Japanese sentiment lies in the Chinese theater of World War II when the Imperial Japanese Army committed scores of harrowing war crimes on Chinese soil including the mass killing of civilians, sexual slavery, human experimentation, and cannibalism that resulted in the deaths of 10 to 20 million Chinese people.
Bodies of victims along Qinhuai River out of Nanjing’s west gate during Nanjing Massacre.
Detail of original photo by Moriyasu Murase, 村瀬守保 via Wikimedia Commons.
