Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: Politics & Society
At present this includes posts on history of Zionism and modern Israel and Palestine as well as current events. Continue this setup? What of other histories? Adjust name of category? Currently includes Islamism (distinct from Islam) as an ideology of terrorism. Also currently includes Islamophobia and hostile denunciations of Islam — but see the question on Islam in Religion and Atheism.
Amazon is even working with local officials to change the time that lights outside the warehouse stay red so that organizers can’t speak to the workers while they wait at red lights.
To support Amazon workers and let the company know that we do not approve of their union-busting tactics, a one-week boycott of the company has been planned. From Sunday, March 7th to Saturday, March 13th, everyone is being asked to not use Amazon or Amazon Prime and do not stream videos using the Amazon Prime video service.
(LaGrange)
Interestingly, from Yanis Varoufakis’s novel of an alternative to capitalism, Another Now ….
The Bladerunners organized mass consumer strikes, targeting one big tech company at a time. Their first successful mobilization was aimed at Amazon. Akwesi issued a global call to boycott Amazon for a day in support of doubling hourly pay in its warehouses around the world. That Day of Inaction, as the Bladerunners called it, caused less than a 10 per cent drop in Amazon’s usual revenues. But that was enough for Amazon immediately to concede a 50 per cent pay rise. Encouraged by their success, the Bladerunners embarked on many more campaigns of widening scope.
Rallying support via social media, the Bladerunners’ Days of Inaction became worldwide events, enjoying mass participation, especially by the young . . . .
Prescient, one would like to hope.
Personally I have no struggle boycotting Amazon. I have been doing so for quite some time now. There are even cheaper alternatives when it comes to books: bookfinder.com, archive.org, Scribd, bookzz.org, and of course interlibrary loans. Also pdfdrive.com, en.booksee.org
I once read a thick biography of John Maynard Keynes and a less thick book by John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, that expressed a very high regard for Keynesian ideas, and over the years have often found myself thinking back on ideas and turns of phrase in both of those works. I suppose that’s a sign that both Keynes and Galbraith have had an ongoing influence on my understanding of economics. (An engaging high school economics teacher led me towards top marks for the subject in my senior year so maybe the influence goes back to him.) So I was not able to resist reading what looked like a promising refresher and update on the nature of economics by that same Galbraith’s son, James K. Galbraith, on the Brave New Europe website:
The end of that article asked the question, What about global Capitalism: can it survive in its current form? and his answer is a neat outline of the history of capitalism since its inception through to today:
Pure global capitalism, such as it was, developed from around 1500 to the end of the 19th century.
It was undermined by the Great War and collapsed in North America, Europe and the British Empire at the end of the 1920s.
It was replaced over the course of the succeeding decades by a mixed economy, rooted in the pragmatic reforms of the American New Deal, the exigencies of the Second World War, and in reactions and adaptations to the competing systems of fascism and state socialism.
The attempt to reconstruct a system of pseudo-unregulated global capitalism began only in the late 1970s, with waves of privatization, deregulation and austerity. That system never fully matured and it has already collapsed, first in the financial crisis [of 2008], and now in the pandemic. So the question of its survival does not arise.
The question now is, what should be built in its place?Answers to that question are already emerging, most prominently in China but perhaps also in Russia and in parts of Latin America. Europe, the UK and North America, where neoliberal ideologues prevailed for decades, must now come to grips with the urgent need for fresh thinking suited to free and democratic societies.
Now that last paragraph set me off on a quest to find what JKG has in mind, exactly, about those countries, especially China.
[John Galbraith] . . . in the 1930s, worked on the New Deal, was charged with price control in World War II, and was a close advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson while becoming Harvard University’s longest-serving professor. But it was in the 1950s and 1960s that he became the world’s most famous economist and the first ever to reach a mass audience without the backing of any state. (foreignpolicy.com)
Here is an excerpt from a piece written in April 2020. If America in the 1950s and early 60s was Galbraithian (see the insert box), then today China comes closer to that description:
And there is China. We need not be detained by squabbles over whether the Chinese system is capitalist or socialist, whether the most influential economist over modern China is Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, or Henry George. Elements of both systems, and inspiration from all three thinkers, can be found in the way China’s economy works today. But the large Chinese state-owned corporations and China’s presence on the world stage are unquestionably Galbraithian, focused on market share, learning, new technologies, and improvement of the national capital stock. And so, in important respects, has been the Chinese state, which prizes above all autonomy, predictability, and social stability, and if not always firm control of its banking sector, the willingness to override that sector’s autonomy whenever necessary. China is no democracy, and modern China was built on many epic disasters, including the famine and Cultural Revolution, none of which appeal as models. But that it is a functioning society capable of mobilizing to meet vast challenges has never been clearer than in recent days.
That’s quite generalized. Here is a more detailed explanation. It is a clearer focus on what our author means by “Galbraithian”:
In America’s heyday, the dominant economic formation was the large industrial corporation. Giants like General Electric, General Motors, Ford, Bethlehem Steel, International Harvester, and IBM provided the backbone of U.S. military power and technological dominance on world markets. These firms grew up on American soil, survived the Depression, and were buttressed by the New Deal and the mobilization for World War II. In the postwar years, their power was balanced by strong trade unions, the organized voices of consumers and independent scientists, and an engaged government that weighed those voices against those of big business. This was the reality described and endorsed by my father, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. That reality still exists out there—but America’s industrial firms are no longer the world’s leaders, and those that are, are not in the United States.
Enter Covid-19 to make for the rise of some and the decline of others:
The pandemic has now put Galbraith’s global legacy into stark relief. One can now map out the rise and decline of nations simply by distinguishing between those that have continued along the lines that once defined U.S. economic success as Galbraith saw it and those that fell under the spell of illusions about free, competitive, and self-regulating markets and under the dominating power of finance. The United States today finds itself sadly in the latter group, alongside the United Kingdom. . . .
JKG explains again what the “Galbraithian” world was like before Reaganism and Thatcher when the shareholders, the investors, have become the decisive force. In “Galbraithian” times/nations . . .
The corporation, not the mythical sovereign consumer, set the terms of economic change. It designed, engineered, produced, and marketed to the masses. It was at the same time the architect of novelty and the stabilizing factor. Government helped by keeping predatory finance under strict controls and by vanquishing mass unemployment through public spending and tax reductions, in line with the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Progress, in a certain sense, was therefore ongoing, steady, and confidently expected to continue. . . .
Then there is China! . . .
Then there is China. In her forthcoming book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Isabella Weber demonstrates that China made an explicit choice in the 1980s to shun Friedman’s free market radicalism in favor of Galbraith’s pragmatism and gradualism. China’s post-Mao-era planners made a detailed study of American wartime price controls under my father’s direction at the U.S. Office of Price Administration in 1942-1943 and maintained a central role for large state-owned but autonomously managed corporations in their development strategy. Today, these firms and privately owned newcomers like Huawei are among the world’s leading Galbraithian firms . . . .
What about the Elizabeth Warrens who see the solution to America’s ills in the dismantling of the huge monopolies and Big Tech firms in order to restore a happily genuinely competitive market where individual entrepreneurship can flourish once more? Continue reading “The End of Global Capitalism and the Rise of China”
Further reminders that social media are not public, but privately owned, spaces:
On February 24, 2021, Twitter suspended the account of CODEPINK National Co-director Ariel Gold, an outspoken feminist advocate for Palestinian rights and an end to U.S. militarism.
Heresy against NATO has apparently joined the ever-expanding list of sins that will get one erased from Twitter, as Big Tech mounts a crusade against infidels at home and abroad on behalf of values of Our Democracy.
Twitter announced bans on 373 accounts it connected to “state-linked information operations” on Tuesday. Some of them, the company said, “amplified narratives that were aligned with the Russian government” or “focused on undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.”
We begin with an interesting observation of Rana Foroohar, author of Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles – and All of Us . . . After outlining how Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, arrived at their PageRank system that became the core feature of Google, Foroohar casts light on the engineers creating this new wonder:
Now their bots could roam with impunity all over cyberspace, tagging, tallying—and potentially trespassing over the copyrights of anyone and everyone who had created the content they were linking to in the process, something that Google would eventually do at industrial scale when it purchased YouTube years later.
All perfectly innocent, right? And all for the greater good, naturally.
To Page and Brin, there was nothing nefarious about this. They simply sought to capture the knowledge tucked away in computer archives across the country to benefit humanity. If it benefited them, too, so much the better. It was the first instance of what later might be classified as lawful theft. If anyone complained, Page expressed mystification. Why would anyone be bothered by an activity of theirs that was so obviously benign? They didn’t see the need to ask permission; they’d just do it. “Larry and Sergey believe that if you try to get everyone on board it will prevent things from happening,” said Terry Winograd, a professor of computer science at Stanford and Page’s former thesis adviser, in an article in 2008. “If you just do it, others will come around to realize they were attached to old ways that were not as good….No one has proven them wrong—yet.”
In earlier pages, Foroohar opened the door to the educational and cultural background (from Montessori to Stanford) of Page and Brin that fostered this attitude.
This became the Google way. As Jonathan Taplin wrote in his book, Move Fast and Break Things, when Google released the first version of Gmail, Page refused to allow engineers to include a delete button “because Google’s ability to profile you by preserving your correspondence was more important than your ability to eliminate embarrassing parts of your past.” Likewise, customers were never asked if Google Street View cameras could take pictures of their front yards and match them to addresses in order to sell more ads. They adhered strictly to the maxim that says it’s better to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission—though in truth they weren’t really doing either.
Oh, to have the freedom to create that only China can provide. . .
It’s an attitude of entitlement that still exists today, even after all the events of the past few years. In 2018, while attending a major economics conference, I was stuck in a cab with a Google data scientist, who expressed envy at the amount of surveillance that Chinese companies are allowed to conduct on citizens, and the vast amount of data it produces. She seemed genuinely outraged about the fact that the university where she was conducting AI research had apparently allowed her to put just a handful of data-recording sensors around campus to collect information that could then be used in her research. “And it took me five years to get them!” she told me, indignantly.
Like innocent children who believe they can create the brave new world . . .
Such incredulity is widespread among Valley denizens, who tend to believe that their priorities should override the privacy, civil liberties, and security of others. They simply can’t imagine that anyone would question their motives, given that they know best. Big Tech should be free to disrupt government, politics, civic society, and law, if those things should prove to be inconvenient. This is the logic held by the band of tech titans who would like to see the Valley secede not just from America, but from California itself, since, according to them, the other regions aren’t pulling their economic weight.
History and the humanities? Never bothered with them, but they do make a rich source of hyperlinks . . .
The kings (and handful of queens) of Silicon Valley see themselves as prophets of sorts, given that tech is, after all, the future. The problem is that creators of the future often feel they have little to learn from the past. As lauded venture capitalist Bill Janeway once put it to me, “Zuck and many of the rest [of the tech titans] have an amazing naïveté about context. They really believe that because they are inventing the new economy, they can’t really learn anything from the old one. The result is that you get these cultural and political frictions that are offsetting many of the benefits of the technology itself.”
Law? Ethics? We can’t code for those!
Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor and noted Big Tech critic whose bookThe Black Box Societyis a must-read for those who want to understand the effects of technology on politics and the economy, provided a telling example of this attitude. “I once had a conversation with a Silicon Valley consultant about search neutrality [the idea that search engine titans should not be able to favor their own content], and he said, ‘We can’t code for that.’ I said this was a legal matter, not a technical one. But he just repeated, with a touch of condescension: ‘Yes, but we can’t code for it, so it can’t be done.’ ” The message was that the debate would be held on the technologist’s terms, or not at all.
Initially, Eva had considered the harvesting of data by Facebook, Google and others for the purposes of advertising a pretty innocuous way for consenting adults to trade a little bit of privacy for some rather desirable free leisure services. But as Costa would point out whenever given half a chance, Facebook and Google, Twitter and Instagram, Amazon and the rest were not mere service providers. Nor were their profits rewards for services rendered. No, they were gigantic behaviour modification machines, addicting and provoking, teasing and enraging their users in order to maximize engagement and the profiling data – and profits – that came with it.
‘Big tech only enables two people to communicate if it can manipulate their behaviour,’ Costa would insist on the rare occasions that he and Eva had argued the matter.
This was what he meant when he said that social media was proletarianizing us all. Facebook’s users provided both the labour that went into the machine and the product that was sold by it.
‘Even Walmart, a company renowned for its capacity to squeeze every drop of value out of its workers, pays out 40 per cent of its total revenue in wages,’ Costa would complain. ‘But Facebook pays only 1 per cent of its revenues to its employees and precisely nothing to its users!’
That was back in 2019. By 2025, Eva had become convinced that no self-respecting liberal could condone big tech’s mass manipulation techniques nor defend its gains as a fair reward for entrepreneurship. Its returns were only made possible by a species of techno-feudalism that made billions of people work for it for free.
Varoufakis, Yanis. Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. London: The Bodley Head, 2020. p.144 (my emphasis)
At the end of 2020, I began to see the requisite social media posts asking what we’re tired of hearing or seeing in the news, and which words or terms we hope never to hear again. Not surprisingly, several people cited “systemic racism” (or, for that matter, systemic anything).
Throughout the previous year, pundits on the left (i.e., centrist liberals) and the right posted responses to what they see as the overuse of the term systemic racism. Disingenuous conservatives warned that blaming the system for generating racist ideas and exclusionary behavior would tend to absolve individuals for moral failings.
On the surface, they may seem to have a point. If the system causes people to behave the way they do, then how can we blame anyone? You may recognize this sort of argument when, for example, centrists and conservatives reflexively point toward the sin of greed rather than the underlying system that rewards or even requires it. They redirect our attention to failing people so that we don’t look too closely at the failing structure that nurtures and supports them. By focusing our attention on the actions of individuals they hope to prevent meaningful change.
Before continuing, we need to be absolutely clear about what we mean by “systemic.” In the mainstream press, we frequently see references to ideas, policies, and behavior that pervade the system. However, they focus our attention on the people who hold those ideas, promote those policies, and engage in that behavior. And where the right sees only bad actors, centrist liberals see bad actors working in a system that needs to be reformed. Neither view is particularly helpful; however, the notion that the politico-economic framework is a neutral playing field that just needs a fairer rulebook and better referees is comforting, but seriously wrongheaded. Continue reading “What the Left Means by “Systemic””
He stresses the importance of recognizing that conspiracies do in fact exist. Don’t come across like a condescending know-it-all and lazily resort to appeals to authority (the mainstream media sources, for example). Acknowledge that the conspiracy theorist may be motivated by a genuine concern for real injustices, so by laughing in the face of a QAnon believer in a vast pedophile ring led by the Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden, you can come across as not caring about child abuse. Colin Dickey proposes better ways to approach that kind of conspiracy theorist.
Here I would like to focus on his explanation of the differences between real and hoax conspiracies:
How Real Conspiracies Become Known
Conspiracies are real. Think of Watergate, the Iran-Contra episode, (I would add COINTELPRO and the conspiracy to lead the U.S. into the invasion of Iraq), the tobacco lobby, the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals. The more widespread a conspiracy the more effort is required into keeping more people quiet.
When comparing conspiracy theories to their real-world counterparts, what becomes clear is how conspiracists tend to see the world on a fairly abstract level. There is a purposeful lack of detail and specificity since such detail will reveal inherent problems and contradictions with the theory. The more you press for these details, the harder the conspiratorial mind will have to work to reconcile the theory with reality. . . . What are the mechanics of this conspiracy, and what is preventing the normal mechanisms of investigative journalism and law enforcement from kicking in here?
After all, even highly organized conspiracies with limitless government backing and resources can’t stay hidden forever.
Successful conspiracies take hard work to keep them secret. The bigger the conspiracy, the more people involved. Watergate became known through a bookkeeper for the Committee for the Reelection of the President, Judy Hoback Miller, who “felt frustrated” that the “truth was not coming out”.
People like Miller [are] the “so-called ‘minor people’” — the secretaries, security guards, and other low-level employees who worked behind the scenes for the big players who were often the first to talk. Such people are rarely ideologues nor are they being paid enough. The complexities of QAnon likewise would require a massive number of such minor people; people who, it stands to reason, have no ideological commitment to such horrors but are nonetheless employed in carrying them out. Such people ought to be easy to get to talk. When no such whistleblowers emerge, it speaks to the thinness of the story.
Compare the exposure of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program in the early days of the war on terror. This was
documented by none other than hobbyist plane spotters, who noted the tail numbers of flights taking off and landing.
The more wide-reaching a conspiracy — the more victims it has, the more perpetrators involved, the wider geographical distance covered, etc. — the more traces it will leave. A conspiracy theory that is widely hypothesized and yet unproven, in other words, requires a level of human infallibility that we have never heretofore seen.
Hiding 35,000 children
QAnon alleges thousands of victims yet has produced none. Timothy Charles Holmseth, a conspiracist who claims to be part of a (nonexistent) Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, alleged in May that this same task force rescued some 35,000 children from an underground network of prisons beneath New York’s Central Park.. . . . Who are these victims, and where are their families? Where are the obituaries, the memorials, the tearful mothers on the steps of the Capitol holding press conferences, demanding justice? “There’s not one of them out there who said, ‘Yeah, we’re glad our child was rescued from this giant underground war,’” Craig Sawyer, an anti-sex-trafficking activist and critic of Holmseth, told the Daily Beast.
Understanding
Colin Dickey’s article is worth reading for his insights into the psychology of the conspiracy theorist and for becoming aware of smart ways to approach discussions with those who may be part of something like QAnon. I mentioned above one possible concern: that people really are concerned for some injustice or crime or abuse. Another point he elaborates on is the possibility that for some of us, the idea of a vast and highly successful perfect crime is in one sense reassuring: the world is not so subject to the chaos, the randomness, the lack of controls, – the world is thereby, most ironically, made a more tolerable, safer, place.
Dickey, Colin. “How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist.” GEN, October 8, 2020. https://gen.medium.com/how-to-talk-to-a-conspiracy-theorist-20122a39ac8a.
Thank Clio that Biden withdrew the report on his first day but I still feel some dismay after having read it right through last night. It is the American counterpart of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, a treatise of holy writ as sacred and unquestionable Pat Robertson’s Holy Bible. My initial curiosity was stirred by having read only a few days earlier on page one of Rupert Murdoch’s leading newspaper in Australia a news item about a report by right wing “think tank”, The Institute of Public Affairs, for the incumbent Liberal Party, deeply critical of the way humanities courses are being taught in Australian universities. (The report can be found here.) The 1776 Report is more of the same, in particular more of the same of an earlier IPA report focusing on the teaching of history, or to be even more exact, many pages more of the same type sweeping bromides and absence of substance, ignorance about the nature of history, outright falsehoods about how it is taught and inability to comprehend the outcomes of history teaching today.
The 1776 Report opens by declaring that the United States was founded in “fundamental truths” that must never be abandoned. All political concerns of different sectors of society can be addressed harmoniously by a “proper understanding” of the words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Whether you belong to the richest 1% or are one of the long-term unemployed in a slum area, you are a part of a same nation, one people, and are part of a system that is set up to “promote your happiness” that all “the nations of the world” will envy and want to emulate. The purpose of teaching history is to create a people united in their beliefs about themselves as Americans, who feel “inspired and ennobled” by what they learn about America’s past. The opening sentence points to the spirit of fundamentalism through which it enjoins readers to believe in their history. Despite mistakes and wrongs from time to time, the American people have always been fundamentally good and righteous:
. . . . Americans will never falter in defending the fundamental truths of human liberty proclaimed on July 4, 1776. We will—we must—always hold these truths. [Later, seven times, the documents speaks of America’s “self-evident and eternal truths” — implying their ultimately divine origin.]
. . . the principles of the American founding . . . have shaped our country. . . . [The founders] sought to build America as a shining “city on a hill”—an exemplary nation, one that protects the safety and promotes the happiness of its people, as an example to be admired and emulated by nations of the world that wish to steer their government toward greater liberty and justice. The record of our founders’ striving and the nation they built is our shared inheritance and remains a beacon, as Abraham Lincoln said, “not for one people or one time, but for all people for all time.”
. . . .
The facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of history. Controversies about the meaning of the founding can begin to be resolved by looking at the facts of our nation’s founding. Properly understood, these facts address the concerns and aspirations of Americans of all social classes, income levels, races and religions, regions and walks of life. As well, these facts provide necessary—and wise—cautions against unrealistic hopes and checks against pressing partisan claims or utopian agendas too hard or too far.
. . . the American people have ever pursued freedom and justice, which are the political conditions for living well. To learn this history is to become a better person, a better citizen, and a better partner in the American experiment of self-government.
. . . America’s principlesare named at the outset to be both universal—applying to everyone—and eternal: existing for all time.
No nation, we further read, has “strived harder, or done more, to achieve” “equality, liberty, justice and government by consent” than America.
It is like reading a holy book, a promise that to “truly” understand American history is to enter a sacred experience and progress towards becoming an ideal citizen, one who is part of showing the world the epitome of universal truths, becoming part of the nation that is the envy of the world.
It does not replace religion, though. At least not directly. It lays claim, in effect, to being the one sacred place where one can find the true fulfilment of one’s religion. Religion is given meaning insofar as religion allows itself to become a prophet of the American experience. “God” and “Providence” are mentioned 26 times and Providence in the Project. “Religion” and “religious” 18 and 51 times respectively. “Faith” 29 times. “Christian” and “Christianity” 12 times. “Sacred” 7 times and “divine” 6. Two Bible verses are quoted. Even “miracles” and “miraculous” make mentions — each time to describe the creation of the United States of America.
the belief that they are part of an elect, a chosen;
the narcissistic self-perspective that they are part of something unique, special;
the conviction that there is only one true and correct way of life and there is no middle ground: you are either with us or against us;
there is a sacred founding book, a bible, (or sacred writings of the fathers,) to which literal obedience is mandatory;
the belief that law and authority come from God (or the worlds of nature and reason that God explicitly created as means of revelation of himself);
a spirit of nationalism.
I have adapted some points where I believe they apply to the perspective expressed in The 1776 Report but they all apply and so also, I suspect, do the others that I have not listed here.
The idea of fundamentalism is not that one thinks oneself is perfect but that one is “fundamentally good”, and because one is fundamentally good, one’s failures can be minimized, swept aside, excused. So when slavery is discussed it is pointed out very quickly that “slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout history” and that the Western world only began to repudiate slavery “at the time of the American Revolution.” The same discussion takes a curious byway into a discussion of how the pro-slavery senator John Calhoun promoted a “new theory” of “group rights” (those of the slave-owners) that opposed the “unifying” “self-evident and eternal truths” of the Declaration of Independence. It is only when one reads further on and into the section on Racism and Identity Politics and one learns the purpose of this digression:
The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of “group rights” not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers. The justification for reversing the promise of color-blind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities.
It takes some chutzpah to find a way to compare advocates for affirmative action to Calhoun-type racism. (For a discussion on racism today see Racism (without the hatred).
Other noble movements in the course of American history that have been part of making the United States the “most free” and the “envy of the world” have been
abolition, women’s suffrage, anti-Communism, and the Pro-Life Movement.
Did you also find yourself catching your breath for a moment when you read some of those programs on a list of “great reforms” that have “come forward [to] improve our dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence under the Constitution”? I don’t think I need to elaborate here. Movements that oppose these, indeed, even today’s generation born from the Civil Rights movement, are condemned as being “fundamentally” anti-American:
More problematic have been movements that reject the fundamental truths of the Declaration of Independence and seek to destroy our constitutional order. The arguments, tactics, and names of these movements have changed, and the magnitude of the challenge has varied, yet they are all united by adherence to the same falsehood—that people do not have equal worth and equal rights.
Stick that, you Black Lives Matters protesters.
The 1776 Report informs Americans that
All the good things we see around us—from the physical infrastructure, to our high standards of living, to our exceptional freedoms—are direct results of America’s unity, stability, and justice, all of which in turn rest on the bedrock of our founding principles.
Clearly, the authors are all well-to-do, live in very nice surroundings and with high standards of living. What of the others? Well, the Project does happily say that Americans who are “down on their luck” (it’s luck that is to blame) are rescued by good religious folks:
Local religious leaders have been a key buttress supporting our communities. Neighborhood and parish churches, temples, and mosques still are the strongest organized centers of help for the local poor, jobless, homeless, and families down on their luck. For generations, neighbors have assisted neighbors through church networks, helping the needy avoid the dehumanization of prolonged dependency on government welfare. Today, countless men and women actively feed and care for the poor, house and speak for immigrants and the disadvantaged, minister to jailed and released criminals, and advocate powerfully for a better society and a more peaceful world, supported by the charitable funding of Americans of all faiths.
Interesting wording. Other more “socialist-inclined” nations consider it society’s responsibility to care for those who have been victims of an economic system that has penalized them through no fault of their own. That society would through the state care for these people is considered by the authors of The 1776 Report to be an act of “dehumanization”.
I could write much more but enough is enough. The 1776 Report is an odious document that would use a particular historical narrative to justify the present power structures in the United States and condemn those who would seek serious change and justice.
History as properly taught is not a single narrative designed to promote tingly feelings of being “the most exceptional people on earth”. There is no justice in promoting “unifying, inspiring and ennobliing” feelings if they hide one from the past injustices that have produced the divisions and inequities we see all around us today. I am not suggesting that one must hate one’s nation. Remember that one of the traps of fundamentalism listed above is black and white thinking. To critically understand and explore the truth, very often too long lost from view, of the past does not have to be an act of hatred but one of determination to make things better. That sort of determination is an act of love, not hatred.
There is much more to address, especially with respect to the emphasis in both the American and Australian reports on “Liberal education” (as in the sense of Classical Liberal). Maybe over time I can post more on why this kind of education is not necessarily the way to “human understanding and liberation” that it is cracked up to be, but why an education in the humanities is indeed an essential part of a just society.
The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit? — Timothy Snyder
Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.
Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.
Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”
One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.
In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”
The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.
The remainder of Timothy Snyder’s article is most disturbing reading. Trump can disappear but in the present context of disillusionment and loss of confidence in the political system that will open the door to a worse outcome. The potential for national fracturing violence and intimidation in 2024 is real. As per David Cay Johnston of DCReport.org:
It will be seen if the ruling elite in the US is capable of responding to the reality in their nation. Otherwise this was a poorly executed first try. The second will be better organised.
An excellent analysis of the deeper national pressures that erupted in the January 6 storming of the Capitol:
While the majority of Americans deplored the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, it was troubling to see a YouGov poll indicating that 1 in 5 voters approved of the assault. Their attitudes were buttressed by a significant number of House and Senate Republicans who have egged on the matter by continuing to call into question the legitimacy of last November’s election result. This is a sign that the rot in the American political system goes deep.
. . . .
Let this be our wake-up call, America’s “Beirut blast.” The bomb explosion that devastated large parts of Beirut last summer was not an isolated, unfortunate occurrence, but the profound manifestation of decades of incompetence, complacency, and corruption in the Lebanese government—an outcome of the ruling classes’ criminal neglect of essential public needs. . . .
. . . . The focus on the relatively small group that broke into the Capitol as a result of lax security is akin to focusing on the Beirut blast wreckage to the exclusion of all else. Far more significant are the surveys of representative samples of Americans that reveal deepening mistrust of the core institutions and a growing commitment to sectarian interests which have, in many parts of the nation, superseded commitment to the republic itself.
. . . .
. . . . for many the assault on the Capitol was also an insurgency against the entire political class. “All these politicians work for us. We pay their salaries, we pay our taxes. And what do we get? Nothing. All of them inside are traitors”—as a member of the mob stated.
Fading Illusion of Democracy
On this particular point, the grievances of the violent mob and the findings of scholars align: America is an oligarchy, not a functioning democracy, as the detailed study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argued in 2014. Thus, much as this was an assault on American democracy, the storming of the Capitol was also a sign that American democracy had already failed. Surely, these clumsy “revolutionaries” did not storm the Capitol because they are living the American Dream—and they are blaming, unsurprisingly, the whole political class for their malaise.
Whenever economic explanations of this radicalization are attempted, inequality is singled out as the root of working-class discontent. . . . A cross-party consensus is now emerging on fighting inequality through redistribution—from raising the minimum wage to increasing unemployment benefits.
One reason why inequality has attracted so much attention is that it is easily measurable. Indeed, reports of the top 1% . . . easily appeal to our sense of injustice. However . . . many . . . still admire the rich. Additionally, the singular focus on economic inequality obscures another phenomenon—the massive economic insecurity which is affecting broader swathes of the population beyond the ‘precariat’ (those in poorly paid and insecure jobs). While insecurity is not easy to measure and report, it is in fact at the root of the social malaise of Western societies.
Seeing economic precarity as a root cause also helps to better explain why so much of the working-class radicalization has taken a turn to the right. Right-wing populists specifically evoke language that triggers conservative instincts—the evocation of family, a desire for stability, for clinging strongly to what is familiar (“Make America Great Again”) . . . .
Even under recent Democratic Administrations, economic recovery from the 2008 financial meltdown happened through a growth in insecure employment. The services jobs that fueled U.S. economic growth for the past 40 years—until the pandemic began to destroy them—were numerous, but of low quality. . . .
The American economy has begun to resemble a new, modern feudalism with a small technocracy dominated by Silicon Valley tech overlords and Wall Street billionaires at the top, and a large, uneducated, rapidly growing serf class at the bottom with no social safety net to protect it.
Another analyst who describes today’s post-capitalist world as a “neo-feudalism“: Yanis Varoufakis, Designing a Postcapitalist Future in the Midst of the Pandemic:
This system, in which Big Tech and the financial sector yield immense power, and the ultra-rich own almost everything, cannot really be described as capitalism. Techno-feudalism comes closer to capturing the spirit of the present. Under this dystopic post-capitalism, our techno-feudal lords have the power to manipulate our behaviour at an industrial scale advertisers could never even dream of.
Shredding the Safety Nets
. . . the evisceration of unions, the deconstruction of the welfare state, and the privatization of public services. Most importantly, funding for public services and social programs has been persistently slashed. It is this impoverishment of the public commons that has increased the importance of personal wealth in securing essential goods such as healthcare and education.
Even with political efforts to reduce inequality America will continue to spiral into dysfunction
But no matter how equal society becomes in terms of wealth distribution, without a dramatic government investment in public services, notably education, healthcare provision, and job security, distrust and disillusionment in American institutions will persist, and with that also the rise of militancy by a radicalized underclass.
I especially loved these words towards the end of the same podcast — I cannot pinpoint a single “straw that broke the back” of my religious beliefs; I look back instead at a series of moments that led me towards atheism. One can also understand why it is so easy to demonize those on “the other side” of a political or religious fence and from there begin to appreciate what it takes for our minds to change.
People are not perfect Bayesian reasoners as much as we would like to aspire to be. People do not have a set of priors that are well delineated and then collect new data and update them according to Bayes’s formula, that’s not what people do. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t change their minds, people change their minds all the time.
soft landing
1:29:48.7 SC: What often happens is something that can be very familiar to physicists who know about phase transitions, the thing that causes someone to change their mind might not be, and in fact, rarely is the straw that broke the camel’s back. There can be a little thing that they get, the little piece of information and experience, whatever it is, that is associated in time with the moment they change their mind. But the actual cause of them changing their mind is a set of many, many things stretching back in time, okay? You have a person with an opinion, with a belief, a credence in a certain proposition, and they get data that is against that proposition, and data in the very broadest sense, it’s not like they’re being physicists, but they get information, experiences, new stories, conversations with friends, that cause them to think about that particular proposition, and then they don’t change their mind immediately, ’cause that’s not how people work, but that has an effect on them. Even if the effect is invisible at the level of their actual beliefs in propositions, hearing that thing can nevertheless affect them at a deeper level.
1:30:56.8 SC: And if they hear something else, and something else, and something else over a period of time, they can eventually be led to change their mind without it ever being possible to associate the reason for that change with a particular piece of information that they got. Not to mention the fact that often, this data in a very, very broad sense is not data. In other words, the thing that is causing people to change their minds is not some piece of information or some rational argument, but something much more visceral, something much more emotional. Realizing that this person who is a member of a group that they have hated and denigrated for years, they meet a member of that group and become friends with them, suddenly maybe their minds change, right? You are against gay people getting married and then you have a child who turns out to be gay and wants to get married, maybe you change your mind, right? For no especially good reason epistemically, rationally, but you realize that, “I wasn’t really that devoted to that opinion in the first place.”
1:31:55.4 SC: There are many ways to change people’s minds, and it really does happen, and all of this is just to say it’s worth trying. It’s not worth trying reaching out to the extremists, to the crazies, but there are plenty of people who are not like that. There are plenty of people who are just not that devoted. And those people might not be wedded to the views that they very readily profess to believe in right now. This is part of the challenge of democracy, those people count, just as much as the most informed voters count. And of course, there are hyper-informed voters who are extremists on both sides, so it’s not just a matter of information levels, but there are people who are, in principle and in practice, reachable and people who are not, and we should try to reach the ones who are reachable. And again, I would give that advice to the other side as well, if the other side thinks that they wanna reach some people who are on the opposite side, they can try to reach me and I’m here to be reached, right?
1:32:54.6 SC: Change takes time. Often it is not a matter of marshaling better arguments, it’s just setting a good example, providing people with a soft landing. One of the hardest things about changing your mind politically is that it is associated with a million other things in your life, your friendship networks, your families, etcetera, your beliefs about many different things. The joke we had back in George W. Bush’s days, I think Michael Berube was the first person who’ve made this joke, but the joke was, “Well, yeah, I was a life-long Democrat but then 9/11 happened, and now I’m outraged about Chappaquiddick.” The point is, for those of you young people out here, Chappaquiddick was this scandal where Ted Kennedy was in an automobile accident and Mary Jo Kopechne, a woman who was in the car with him, and he plunged into the river and she died, she drowned and he was able to swim to shore, and survived obviously, and continued in the Senate. And Republicans were outraged though, this was like a terrible thing, and Democrats made excuses for it.
1:33:57.7 SC: And the joke being that once you change your tribal political affiliation, your opinion about this historical event changes along with it, because these are connected to each other. And so, I wanna mention this in the opposite way also, so not just that all of these other opinions will change along with you if you do change your mind about something, but that in order to get someone to change their mind, you have to make it seem reasonable for them to live in a whole another world, right? For them to live in a world where a whole set of beliefs are no longer taken for granted in a certain way. That’s what it means by offering a soft landing.
Anthony Pinn
1:34:33.9 SC: One of the very first podcast I did was with Tony Pinn, who was an atheist theologian, who reaches out to black communities and tries to spread the good word of atheism to them. And one of the points he made over and over again is that black people are very religious in part because atheism does not provide them with a soft landing. You can make a rational argument that God doesn’t exist, but they need to figure out a way to live their lives and in the lives of many black communities, religion plays an important role, and if you simply say, “Well, we’re not gonna replace that role, you gotta learn to live with it,” then they’re not gonna be persuaded to go along with you. So part of persuading the other side and reaching out to it is making them feel welcome. And again, I get it if this seems hard to do, if you just want these people to be punished and they don’t deserve it, etcetera, etcetera, I get that, but that’s gonna make living in a democracy harder for all of us, if that’s the attitude we all take.
The key takeaway point makes the third point here the one to think about the most:
0:15:13.8 SC: . . . . the idea that the election was stolen was made by a whole bunch of partisan actors, but it was also, I think, importantly, taken up as something worth considering, even if not necessarily true, by various contrarian, centrist pundits, right?
0:16:32.1 SC: . . . . So the answer I would have put forward is, “No. [chuckle] It was never worth taking that kind of claim seriously.” . . . . We like to talk here about being Bayesian, and in fact, it’s almost a cliche in certain corners of the internet talking about being good Bayesians, and what is meant by that is, for a set of propositions like the election was stolen, the election was not stolen. Okay, two propositions mutually exclusive, so you assign prior probabilities or prior credences to these propositions being true. So you might say,
“Well, elections are not usually stolen, so the credence I would put on that claim my prior is very, very small.
And the credence I would put on it not being stolen is very large.”
So we collect the data that will help us assess which proposition is the more likely. If the data is not what we would expect if X were true, then we revise our estimation that X really did happen. If the data we collect is exactly what we would expect to find if X were true, then we can be confident that X is indeed most likely true.
0:18:51.0 SC: . . . . So in a case like this where a bunch of people are saying, “Oh, there was election fraud, irregularities, the counting was off by this way or that way. It all seems suspicious.” You should ask yourself, “Did I expect that to happen?” The point is that if you expected exactly those claims to be made, even if the underlying proposition that the election was stolen is completely false, then seeing those claims being made provides zero evidence for you to change your credences whatsoever. Okay? So to make that abstract statement a little more down to earth, in the case of the elections being stolen, how likely was it that if Donald Trump did not win the election, that he and his allies would claim the election was stolen independent of whether it was, okay? What was the probability that he was going to say that there were irregularities and it was stolen?
0:20:19.6 SC: Well, a 100%, roughly speaking, 99.999, if you wanna be little bit more meta-physically careful, but they announced ahead of time that they were going to make those claims, right? He had been saying for months that the very idea of voting by mail is irregular and was going to lead to fraud, and they worked very hard to make the process difficult, both to cast votes and then to count them, different states had different ways of counting, certain states were prohibited from counting mail in ballots ahead of time. The Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than the Republicans were, they slowed down the postal service, trying to make it take longer for mail-in votes to get there. There’s it’s a whole bunch of things going on in prior elections in the primaries, Trump had accused his opponents of rigging the election and stealing votes without any evidence.
0:21:15.3 SC: So your likelihood to function, that you would see these claims rise up even if the underlying proposition was not true, is basically, 100%. And therefore, as a good Bayesian, the fact that people were raising questions about the integrity of the election means nothing. It’s just what you expect to happen.
Oh someone claimed that something’s going on, therefore it’s my job to evaluate it and wait for more evidence to come in.
The data we need to see in order to take the claims of fraud seriously:
If you really want to spend any effort at all taking a claim like this seriously, you have to go beyond that simple thing, “Oh someone claimed that something’s going on, therefore it’s my job to evaluate it and wait for more evidence to come in.”
You should ask further questions, “What else should I expect to be true if this claim was correct?” For example, if the Democrats had somehow been able to get a lot of false ballots, rig elections, you would expect to see certain patterns, like Democrats winning a lot of elections, they had been predicted to lose different cities where or locations more broadly, where the frauds were purported to happen would be ones where anomalously large percentages of people were voting for Biden rather than Trump.
0:22:28.3 SC: In both cases, in both the idea that you would predict Democrats winning elections, they had been predicted lose and places where fraud was alleged to have happened would be anomalously pro-Biden it was the opposite. And you could instantly see that it was the opposite, right after election day.
The Democrats lost elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate that they were favored to win.
So they were very bad at packing the ballots, if that’s really what they were trying to do.
In cities like Philadelphia where it was alleged that a great voter fraud was taking place, Trump did better in 2020 than he did in 2016.
So right away, without working very hard, you know this is egregious bullshit, there is no duty to think, to take seriously, to spend your time worrying about the likely truth of this outrageous claim, all of which is completely compatible with every evidence, the falsity of which is completely compatible with all the evidence we have.
0:23:32.2 SC: So just to make it dramatic, let me spend a little bit of time here… Let me give you an aside, which is my favorite example of what I mean by this kind of attitude because it is very tricky. You should never, and I’m very happy to admit, you should never assign zero credence to essentially any crazy claim. That would be bad practice as a good Bayesian because if you assign assigned zero credence to any claim, then no amount of new evidence would ever change your mind. Okay? You’re taking the prior probability multiplying it with the likelihood, but at if the prior probability is zero, then it doesn’t matter what the likelihood is, you’re always gonna get zero at the end. And you should be open to the idea that evidence could come in that this outrageous claim is true, that the election was stolen, it’s certainly plausible that such evidence would come in.
0:24:21.9 SC: Now it didn’t, right, when actually they did have their day in court, they were laughed … out of court because they had zero evidence, even all the way up to January 6th when people in Congress were raising a stink about the election not being fair, they still had no evidence. The only claim they could make was that people were upset and people had suspicions, right? Even months later, so there was never any evidence that it was worth taking seriously. But nevertheless, even without that, I do think you should give some credence and therefore you have to do the hard work of saying, “Well, I’m giving it some non-zero credence, but so little that it’s not really worth spending even a minute worrying about it.” That’s a very crucial distinction to draw, and it’s very hard to do.
We were promised the Internet would be better than democracy. But then it got privatized. Corporations own it. There is no online bill of rights. There is only the frenzy of the mob and fickle choices of a few billionaires.
Please spare me the impoverished argument about the free market and private companies not being bound by the constitution. Barring businesses from using online payment systems; removing companies from the App Store; banning people from social media — these are the equivalent of telling people they can’t open a bank account or start a business or drive down a street. (To my mind, David Sacks, who has spent his career building and funding tech companies, has been articulating this more powerfully than anyone out there. Follow him here.)
That almost every credentialed journalist and liberal public intellectual appears to be cheering on this development because it’s happening to the Bad People is grotesque. They will look like fools much faster than they realize.
Fortunately, Dorsey and Zuckerberg will get a second chance to sue for peace when they are hauled before the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 17 to discuss how Section 230 could be meaningfully reformed. This could be an important moment for the entire internet and Dorsey and Zuckerberg should meet it by offering the terms of a peace treaty in which they pledge the following:
1. We will protect any speech that is protected under the First Amendment. Rather than trying to improvise our own policies with respect to speech, we will instead focus on operationalizing these First Amendment principles based upon established Supreme Court case law.
2. We will double down on our authenticity rules and procedures. To say anything on our platforms, you must really be who you say you are. We will crack down on impersonation, fake accounts, “sock puppets”, or any kind of foreign interference.
3. We will provide users with the tools they need to curate content for themselves. For instance, we will give users the ability to hide or delete offensive comments to their posts. By having users regulate speech instead of us, it preserves neutrality because all users have an equal opportunity to decide for themselves what speech they do and don’t want to encounter on our platforms. User curation will reduce offensive content, without the need for censorship.
4. We would welcome further guidance from the Supreme Court as to when and how hate speech can be regulated. If the Supreme Court were to define a segment of hate speech not currently covered under the existing First Amendment exceptions and declare it unprotected, then we would regulate that speech on our platforms according to their guidance. But we realize that as the de facto public square, we are better off adopting the First Amendment as our standard than trying to improvise our own, and don’t want to arrogantly substitute our judgment for that of the Court, who has a more than two-century head start on us in grappling with difficult speech issues. The Court’s history shows that there will always be hard cases when applying First Amendment principles, but at least we can all agree on what those principles are.
5. While we are proposing to abide by First Amendment guidelines voluntarily, we understand if you insist on binding our hands by altering the language in Section 230(C)(2) to require it. This will put the First Amendment in its rightful place as the arbiter of acceptable speech in the public square. Once those changes are made, we hope you will agree that the rest of Section 230 has been a boon to online innovation and diversity that is worth keeping in place. To paraphrase Bill Clinton on the subject of affirmative action, “mend it, don’t end it.”
Conclusion
Such a set of proposals could really improve the perception of Facebook and Twitter, in Washington and throughout the United States. In the short run, it will lower the political temperature and tamp down calls for Section 230 repeal. Long term, it will make life as a social media platform so much easier. No more will the C-suites of these companies have to white-knuckle it through every election cycle, worried that some decision they made or didn’t make will get them blamed for the end of democracy. Yes, politicians will still “work the refs,” and ambiguous cases will present themselves, but if the First Amendment always gets the last word, everyone will have to respect that. What is the point of Twitter and Facebook taking so much flak for creating their own standard of protected speech when one already exists that has been chiseled into the granite of American custom, tradition, and law?
The Bladerunners organized mass consumer strikes, targeting one big tech company at a time. Their first successful mobilization was aimed at Amazon. Akwesi issued a global call to boycott Amazon for a day in support of doubling hourly pay in its warehouses around the world. That Day of Inaction, as the Bladerunners called it, caused less than a 10 per cent drop in Amazon’s usual revenues. But that was enough for Amazon immediately to concede a 50 per cent pay rise. Encouraged by their success, the Bladerunners embarked on many more campaigns of widening scope.
