Musings from an iconoclast and hater of nonsense
The field is getting crowded. CNN’s entry has appeared:
It is headline like this that easily convince the rest of the world that when it comes to personal ownership of firearms, the United States has lost its fucking mind.
Around a year ago I made the statement that I would be spending a lot less time on Facebook and focussing on other social media platforms. More recently I began signalling that this was happening.
I have not been entirely successful in keeping to the intent of those statements. I would have to grade myself a C on it.
During 2017, I have been trying to ensure that any original content that I post is posted to my blog and linked to on Facebook. I dislike the implied gift of IPR to Facebook in their Terms and Conditions. I also have taken periodic timeouts from the platform whenever the online temperature rose, which has happened two or three times since last year’s election.
I tried returning to The Well, one of my long-time favorite online hang-outs, but The Well is a declining place, with no updates to what is an antiquated UI. I am actually, unlike most people, prepared to pay money for curated well-managed social media platforms, but The Well is too archaic and clunky for me, so i let my newly re-activated membership lapse this Summer.
I am behind schedule on way too many other things in my life right now, so Facebook is taking a back seat for the time being. I have a book project to finish.
I recently joined Mastodon, which IMHO is a much better place to be than Twitter. I am winding down my personal use of Twitter, although my Corporate Realist and White Cat Publishing accounts will be active this year and next as I plan to publish Corporate Realist Volume 1 next September.
Mastodon has more character space than Twitter, which allows for a move away from the soundbite pathology that I heartily dislike.
In the current toxic and polarized social and political climate, I have little interest in spending time on media platforms that are actively adding to that level of toxicity by their refusal to understand that they have to curate content if they are to have any chance of surviving and remaining credible and relevant. Facebook and Twitter, in their different ways, do not care about that, because their entire business model is based on volume, not quality. They don’t care if their platforms are infested with bots, trolls and assholes, as long as the click numbers keep rising. Both platforms have essentially been compromised by cyber-subversion.
The announcement by Facebook that it intends to hire 1000 people just to screen adverts is laughable, since it misses the point completely. The problem on Facebook right now is not adverts. It is lies, misinformation and trolling. Those require aggressive content and user privilege curation, but Facebook does not want to go there because it will impact volume, and also because it will undercut their Common Carrier defense to copyright claims. Twitter is impaled on the horns of the same dilemna.
Right now, Mastodon is not infested with bots, trolls and misinformation campaigns being directed by malevolent actors. This could all change of course. If it does change for the worse, I will move on. The distributed instance model for Mastodon provides a measure of protection. it was designed as a distributed platform where the users can set up curated private instances of Mastodon that function as islands of sanity in a sea of madness. Whether Mastodon as a platform can evolve sufficient defense against cyber-subversion in the medium term remains to be seen.
Due to their abject failure to behave consistently or equitably when dealing with player behavior issues, and their craven kow-towing to the forces of censorious asshattery by collectively refusing to employ Colin Kaepernick, I am currently boycotting the NFL.
However, this article shows the extent to which, despite the intellectually dense view that players earning $500,000 a year are more “privileged” than “exploited”, many players in the NFL, NBA and MLB are essentially subjected to a process when the join those leagues that is far from the exercise of free will. The current process is remarkably similar to the now-defunct British naval tradition of the Press Gang.The whole process is part of the weird Faustian bargain where schools and colleges act as training grounds for professional sports, while officially not paying the players.
Yesterday we lost yet another musician and artist with the sudden death of Tom Petty.
I will be honest and say that I was never a fan of most of Tom Petty’s music. He had an excellent backing band, but his songwriting to me lacked enough structural interest. he rarely used bridges on his tunes, and had limited harmonic movement in the tunes. Like R.E.M., another highly popular ensemble, most of Petty’s songs went through my head and out of the other side without engaging my brain.
However, it was clear that Petty was an all-round good guy. He gave generously of his time to numerous causes, and did not go way off the rails like some of his contemporaries.
He was also humble enough to pen this mea culpa in Rolling Stone a few years ago about how he ended up using the Confederate flag in his “Southern Accents” tour, and how he subsequently came to realize that it had been a mistake. It is rare for many famous people to admit to error, but Tom was a welcome exception.
Rest in Peace Tom.
The Toronto Star began recording all of Donald Trump’s false statements and claims late last year.
The number is how well past 600. This last week saw 40 new claims alone.
Several of Jay Rosen’s consistent commentary themes converge in this short posting.
Jay, long time ago, coined the phrase “The Church of the Savvy” to describe what he observed as a basic media pathology. It’s an assumption that most of the DC-based media starts from, namely that by virtue of being on the ground in the center of US government, that automatically makes them more knowledgeable about What Is Really Going On. They then can use that presumed knowledge to opine seriously on TV, cable, internet or in print. The implied message at least part of the time is “listen to us, we have the inside information”.
Leaving aside the issue that focussing obsessively on what happens in DC risks paying insufficient attention to what is happening in the rest of the USA (and I certainly think that this was a factor in the failure of the media to understand the scope and depth of the twin voter insurgency candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in 2016), there is a more fundamental issue that the rise of Donald Trump is now revealing.
The Church Of The Savvy pathology, almost by definition, requires that the media is able to explain everything in a way that makes sense. What, then, happens when you are confronted by a leader who appears to have no Grand Plan, who, to use an old expression, gets by on a daily basis by simply Making Shit Up?
Welcome to the confusion and head-scratching nature of Donald Trump.
The media, however, being mostly trapped in the Church Of The Savvy mindset, is not able to imagine or manage a scenario where anarchy and reaction are the predominant modes of operation. Their worldview has always been based on two underlying assumptions (1) every administration or component of the Legislative or Executive Branch has a Grand Plan, and (2) the media is in a uniquely privileged position to divulge elements of that Grand Plan to impress the hell out of its audience.
The media historically has relied for a lot of inside information from leakers in and around government. Of course, some of the leaks have always been deliberate. Over time, this has led to an unhealthy reliance by many media organizations on “unnamed sources” and other forms of non-verifiable information acquisition.
So, since Donald Trump was installed as POTUS, the media has been struggling to continue viably with the Church Of The Savvy approach. They have, like a lot of people, been attempting to amke sense of Donald Trump’s actions and pronouncements. However, their role as the savants means that they cannot throw their hands up and answer “I have no clue” when somebody asks them to explain why Donald Trump just said or did something. That does not make them look…savvy. It makes them look no better than the readers or listeners. What value can you add if you are not savvy?
So, in an attempt to perpetuate the illusion of savviness, the media are instead convincing themselves that there has to be a Grand Plan somewhere, somehow. This is leading them, in turn, to normalize Donald Trump’s behavior. The theory is that he has to have a logical coherent plan. Everybody else in that office has had one. Why should he be any different?
The logical next step, surfaced neatly by Rosen in this tweet, is that if there is no Grand Plan or playbook, then the media is Making Stuff Up if they claim that one exists. However, that gives them an advantage if they imagine one:
No, fellas. No. There is no political playbook. That's a fiction to make this sound almost rational. Read my piece. https://t.co/2FaxSbfI6Q pic.twitter.com/Vnmo3S1FNZ
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 28, 2017
It’s a neat response to being unable to divine a Grand Plan. If you make up your own Grand Plan, using tea-leaves, the leak from the guy in the DoD, some coffee-room chat with a guy who knows a guy who knows somebody who painted the Oval Office, and some stiff drinks at the bar in Georgetown, then hey presto! You have a Grand Plan which you can then leak as an “exclusive”. Of course it’s an exclusive. You manufactured it out of next to nothing.
The other part of the rationalization thought process being engaged in by the media, which is potentially a lot more dangerous, is the desire to somehow explain Donald Trump’s more vicious and malevolent outbursts. It’s a lot more comfortable for the media to explain that picking on Puerto Rico is some part of a grand strategy to rally his base than to state that the POTUS is simply being an asshole. Many media outlets described Trump’s war of words with the Mayor of San Juan as a “feud”, when Trump actually launched a series of personal attacks on her. That was a transparently awful attempt at “both sides do it” framing.
Explanations of politician behavior based on the existence of a Grand Plan always tend to sound logical. Explanations that somebody just behaved like an asshole sound vicious and judgmental by comparison, and the media does not want to be seen to behaving like that in the current climate. The media has been cowed for decades by accusations of “bias”, mostly by the authoritarian wing of the GOP, and on topics like this, is only too willing to behave like the abused partner in an abusive relationship, so the media will hem and haw, circumlocute their language in a way that would have gotten high marks from George Orwell, and generally avoid making a definitive judgment. That’s another problem entirely, but if they do not address both of the issues I am discussing, there will not be worthwhile media in the USA within a few years. The sink of internet-focussed misinformation will sink it.
This lede appeared today in the Washington Post.
First of all, note the masthead slogan “Democracy dies in Darkness”. Hold that in your head for a moment.
Now look at the text in the lede…
Oh My God.
This is supposedly a lede for a profile of a man who just shot nearly 600 people in Las Vegas, killing 58 of them on the spot.
Yet it reads like he is one of the victims.
I have been harshly critical of the US mass media for decades. They are superficial, non-inquiring and have spent the last 20 years mostly behaving like non-critical stenographers.
I don’t care about the accusations of “bias”. We all have biases. What worries me is the continual credulous reporting of bullshit as it it were fact, and the failure to understand how the entire news promulgation landscape has changed.
The media in the USA is already in a tough place, excoriated across the political spectrum for multiple reasons. Their previous niche as the unquestioned purveyors of information has been whittled away by internet-based outlets that learned a long time ago how to generate outrageous tosh to get attention. The current US government despises them, and is seeking to further de-legitimize them, because this is a government led by a demagogue who regards all dissent as disloyalty.
And then one of the oldest media outfits in the USA prints a lede like this?
This lede, like a lot of their headlines since Donald Trump assumed the Presidency, is just indefensibly stupid. It is part of a process where the media is normalizing events and people who should not be normalized. The lede normalizes mass murder in a single sentence.
One is tempted to wonder what this lede writer would have done with 9/11. “WTC hit by unscheduled demolition crews – some casualties”?
Jay Rosen has been writing about the media’s problems for a long time. This lede is perfectly illustrative of his diagnosis of their issues.
Unfortunately, ledes like this make media outlets, sooner or later, difficult to defend from malevolence.
The media needs to realize that history will not treat them kindly if they continue to be credulous, supine, and stupid.
Dear Fellow Americans,
On this Saturday, as the POTUS continues to blame Puerto Ricans for being poor and seemingly unable to overcome having most of their island destroyed, I am continuing to read that some of you are still Very Upset over the sight of players kneeling whenever the National Anthem is played before the commencement of NFL games.
There is a rather obvious reality that you are pissing and moaning about a sports event while a few hundred miles South East of here, people are struggling to stay alive, which makes me wonder which distant land your sense of priorities and proportion have disappeared to. But OK, let’s talk about protest in the NFL.
I am reading a lot of comments from a whole bunch of you. One thing to note about these comments is that many of them seem to begin with or contain variants of the phrase “I’m not going to tolerate”, as part of what usually comprises a rant to the effect that the players who kneel are disrespecting the flag, or the military, or the entire United States of America.
Well, OK. You don’t like the players protesting. That much is obvious.
But my follow-up to people who make statements like “I am not going to tolerate” is simple.
What are YOU going to do about it?
So, you intend to boycott the NFL and its sponsors?
Fine. That is a fundamental freedom that we all enjoy to spend our money as we see fit. Have at it.
But let’s be honest. That’s not all you want. No sir. What you really want is for these people to be forced to cease that form of protest.
Which brings me to my fundamental questions.
1. Who gave you the right to decide what form of protest is acceptable? Did you go to college to learn the rules?
2. Why should any other person or group of people in the USA be forced to modify their behavior because you find some aspect of their behavior intolerable?
3. How does your lack of tolerance of actions that you dislike have anything to do with anybody else? The players are not breaking any laws, and their actions do not harm you personally.
4. How conceited do you have to be to think that I even care about your tolerance?
But when all is said and done, this boils down to two things:
– your feelings are hurt
– you want somebody to damn well do something about it
Your feelings are hurt? Well, boo hoo. You know, one of the parts of life that being an adult imposes on all of us is to learn the ability to move past incidents where events or people upset us over events that are, in the grand scheme of things, nothing. If we can’t do that, we pretty quickly end up as resentful assholes that people tend to avoid. So, forgive me, I really am right out of fucks that I can give right now about your feelings about a controlled, measured peaceful protest at a sports game.
So you want somebody to damn well do something about it?
No. Hell no.
You don’t get to demand and expect somebody (the NFL, the law, Congress, the President) to coerce people into compliance with your worldview. That’s not in line with any of the principles enunciated in the Constitution, or any of the principles that we need to adhere to in order to have a functioning civic society. Actually, your whining and demanding that Something Be Done is a perfect example of the behavior pathology outlined many years ago by the psychologlist Robyn Skinner, in this quote:
“If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior.”
You cannot control your feelings over the anthem protests, so you just want somebody to make them go away.
So. Back to your “I find this intolerable” schtick.
I don’t care whether or not you find it tolerable or not. Your tolerance is a personal emotional part of your own behavior. It has nothing to do with me, I wouldn’t presume to ask “do you tolerate anthem protests”, because it is none of my business. However, when you start trying to persuade people that coercive action should be applied to other people or groups in order for your feelings to no longer be hurt…well, that is where I say Back Off. You don’t get to coerce other people to modify their behavior to suit your beliefs. That’s not tolerance. That’s trying to impose totalitarianism. That is deeply antithetical to America values. Knock it off.
At the age of 62, I have met enough mediocre, dumber-than-rocks people to have become somewhat immune to disappointment.
However, I can still be surprised when I find myself talking to people who, at least on the surface, look to be smart, intelligent and successful, yet, when the discussion shifts to specific topics, they show themselves to be glib, superficial, and utterly devoid of useful thought.
This last week that occurred at dinner on a client visit, when I found myself with a Vice President and an Account Executive. As was probably inevitable, the discussion shifted to current politics.
The VP said that he thought Donald Trump was “fine”, then, after a short pause, he said wistfully “I just wish they would take away his damn Twitter account”. The reality that taking away his Twitter account does not magically change a person’s behavior for the better was a fundamental fact that he had either not thought of, or was determined to ignore. The Account Exec nodded in agreement, then went on to say that he thought that government needed shaking up, and Trump was just the man to do it.
The discussion suddenly shifted elsewhere, which was just as well, since I was probably about to say a few things in response that neither of these supposedly smart Captains of Industry would have liked.
One irony, at least to me, was that the VP was Indian.
This incident is not new. I have become wearily used over the years to finding out that seemingly intelligent people are either politically disengaged (they often decline any and all opportunities to talk about politics, possibly fearing disagreement and disputes) or they have a knowledge that is hopelessly inadequate. I used to think that conspiracy theories were only attractive to dumb people, but over time I have had to accept that even incredibly smart and clever people quite cheerfully sign on to all sorts of cockanamie nonsense all the time. In fact, smart people become incredibly good at elaborately rationalizing their decisions to sign onto total tosh.
I used to wonder why electorates in the Western world often made awful decisions come election time. Leaving aside the fundamental reality that on average, 50% of the electorate is of below-average intelligence, the sort of shallow, glib, flip rationalizations for current events that I heard over dinner last week go a long way to explaining why, even allowing for the Dunning-Kruger effect, we cannot reasonably expect any uptick in overall electoral intelligence any time soon.