Open Mic for the week of 3/25/2024
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Gonna try something new, though. See if it sticks.
On this day in history, Sarah Jessica Parker was born. Sex and the City premieres on Netflix on April 1st.
The reason to be excited about the Sex and the City premiere is not because of the show.
It’s because of all of the Gen Zers who will watch it for the first time.Report
Because they can’t stream the original?Report
On HBO Max. Maybe you have enough money to pay for Doordash *AND* Netflix *AND* HBO Max but not all of us have that amount of privilege.Report
I don’t door dash. The only streaming service I have is Prime, and that’s just a perk of how much we use amazon to overcome living in a relatively small town.Report
It appears that the courts are getting wise to Elon Musk’s “Free Speech Absolutist” schtick:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/25/tech/judge-tosses-elon-musks-case-against-hate-speech-watchdog/index.htmlReport
Freddie has what I would call a must read epitaph for the era of social justice/”woke” journalism. IMO it is among his best ever pieces.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-trueReport
I thought “It’s pretty good, I don’t know it’s among ‘best ever'” but then I got to the part where he starts talking about New York magazine.
“Even accepting all of its values and beliefs, the social justice approach to politics of the past fifteen years has utterly failed on its own terms.”
Gosh darn, Freddie. You’re not allowed to notice that.Report
I guarantee the median 18 year old is to the left on all social issues than the median 18 year old in 2008, regardless of the freakout among my fellow lefties about that fact shitty teen boys still exist or a few bad polls that supposedly show lessened youth support for various issues at the same time there’s no shift in the voting patterns or in other polls.
The 18-29 youth vote, if there is a drop in turnout, will be due to a lack of progressivism on the Biden side, not an anti-woke reaction.
Now, Freddie won’t be happy about this, because the people he didn’t like and got into blog arguments in 2006 will still be more liked, more respected, and so on than he will.Report
Now, Freddie won’t be happy about this, because the people he didn’t like and got into blog arguments in 2006 will still be more liked, more respected, and so on than he will.
If it weren’t for substack, Freddie would be an assistant manager at a Lowe’s somewhere.Report
There’s “to the left by choice and politically active about it”, and there’s “to the left by default because having an opinion about things is cringe and sweaty”.
Like, you say kids don’t support abortion restrictions, but is that because kids are Politically Left and being Pro-Reproductive Freedom is part of the platform? Or do they not support them because the think putting restrictions on things just seems like a real hassle for everyone involved?
It’s really important to remember that up until Internet Antiracism got to be popular, libertarians were seen as left-wing.Report
I don’t know – median polling among 18 year olds is more socially liberal than the median 18 year old in 2009, regardless of random bad polls that can’t be repeated or the fact crappy teen boys still exist.
After all, the likely reason for a lack of 18-29 turnout is the Biden admin not being left-leaning enough. Plus, Millenial’s like me get closer to middle age everywhere, and have shown nowhere near the rightward swerve Gen.X took, even though, always remember – Gen Xers started out as Reagan voters when they were kids, and ended as Trump voters.
As Freddie admitted, the problem with media isn’t they got too woke really, it’s because it turned out people bought newspapers for sports scores and classifield ads, and not news, and magazines depended on a lack of online competition.Report
So the median polling demonstrates that the social justice approach to politics hasn’t necessarily failed, if you ignore that teen boys still exist?Report
The median teen boy is still better than the median teen boy in 2009, it’s just there are still asshole teen boys that exist (most of whom will be pretty normal the first time they get laid and/or have to interact with people in real life more regularly at college or a workplace), and people don’t like that.
It’s both overstated as a Left who makes cringe posts about it being an issue, and it’s overstated by the Right and Anti-Woke Centrists who point to it to prove that the wokes have failed, because some teen boys prefer sex traffickers who will tell them how to get laid.
That study that popped up a few weeks/month ago showing teen girls are sooooo much more liberal than teen boys had some pretty bad flaws. In reality, most teens of both genders are pretty apolitical.
Again, come back to me for the 2024 exit polling. It’ll likely show the same thing as the 2020 & 2022 exit polling did.Report
Well, it’s always true that progress will progress.
I’ll jump up to the whole Sex and the City thing that I pointed to above. Kidz These Days will watch Sex and the City and this show that, in 1999, was hip and caught a zeitgeist and was progressive will have commentators about it.
I imagine that several of the comments will be about how awful the characters are, how they make such awful choices, and how reactionary the show is.
I mean, seriously. SHE PICKED MISTER BIG INSTEAD OF AIDAN!!! AND THE SHOW TALKS ABOUT THIS AS IF IT’S THE RIGHT CHOICE!!!
But the complaints won’t be about that. They will, instead, sound like they could have been written by a right-winger in 1999.
The problem with progressivism is that, without a mooring, sometimes it progresses itself into weirdly reactionary positions and does stuff like reverse-engineer long-term monogamous couplings.
But we’ll get to that when we get to that.Report
Uh huh.
This documentary was published less than 2 weeks ago. Maybe Freddie was thinking of this case when he popped the champagne corks for his celebration of the end of social justice journalism.
After Bell was eventually able to come forward about the abuse, Peck was arrested on 11 counts of child sexual abuse in 2003. Because he was a minor at the time, Bell is referred to in court records only as John Doe. Even other child actors who had worked with Peck didn’t know the identity of the victim.
Peck, on the other hand, made a lot of friends in Hollywood over the years and turned to them for support after he was convicted in 2004. Unsealed court documents reveal that Peck got 41 letters from supporters asking the judge for leniency in his sentencing. At least some of the letter writers also appeared in court to support Peck on the day of his sentencing.
Some of the people revealed to have written letters on Peck’s behalf are actors James Marsden, Taran Killam, Alan Thicke, Rider Strong and Will Friedle.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2024-03-13/quiet-on-the-set-documentary-nickelodeon
Glad we no longer need to worry about all that.Report
I’m not seeing how this argues against Freddie’s point, Chip.
It seems to be making his point, honestly. Like, it’s another piece of evidence that he could point to as supporting his larger argument.Report
Exactly.Report
Can you give us a summary of Freddie’s argument, without using the words “Woke”, “DEI” or any other coded shibboleths?
Like, just a simple one paragraph summary of what he is going on about.Report
No, no, what you pointed out proves libs are bad because it’s libs defending groomers because libs want to turn the kids trans.
MeToo was also bad, because it was lib women trying to destroy men who just flirted a bit too much, and those evil shrews hate men, so of course, older men can’t ever help women in jobs now, because women be crazy and making accusations.
Always remembe Chip, no matter what, it’s always the libs fault, whether it’s the cons here or the anti-antis like Jaybird.Report
Um, sure. I’ll copy and paste what I said in an earlier comment:
Report
““Even accepting all of its values and beliefs, the social justice approach to politics of the past fifteen years has utterly failed on its own terms.””
If the answer is “read the article” just say so and I’ll try to find the time to. But — given the claim that the failure is based on a specific set of terms for measuring success… what were the terms for measuring success?Report
He gets into this in the next paragraph using the Men in Media list that we discussed way back when.
Now, I think he used a shaky example here.
The point of the list, in the first place, was *NOT* to have it be publicized. The point was that it was a scribble on a bathroom stall that said “keep away from Bob in Accounting. He’s handsy.”
And so asking whether the list helped anybody (and whether she’d know) is to miss the point. It’s to let people know that Bob in Accounting is handsy. (Well, ideally. Get rid of the whole “false accusation” thing and that’s what it does.) If the new hire makes sure to never go into the breakroom when Bob from Accounting is in there… was the new hire materially helped?
Who can say?
Mike Tunison wrote an essay talking about how his entry on the list was a lie. Is *HE* lying?
So maybe it’s a fair question.
Are women safer for this list existing?
And now that #MeToo seems to have receded… the benefits are stuff like Harvey Weinstein finally going to prison and we got Al Franken out of the senate. Those two things are not nothing!
But a handful of careers were wrecked as well.
You can’t make an omelet without breaking any eggs.
But I suppose asking “so where is the omelet?” might be a fair question eventually.
A less shaky example he gives is BLM:
Has BLM worked? Has the racial reckoning reckoned anything in particular?
So, at the end of the day, “what were the terms for measuring success?”
We have to hammer out what the goals were in the first place.
If the goal of #MeToo was not to bring anybody down but just to raise awareness and let a whole bunch of women who felt unheard finally let it off of their chests and say “Hey. #MeToo.”, then it was an unqualified success.
Same for Black Lives Matter.
What was the goal? If it was something more material like “legislation”… well…
It’s complicated, isn’t it?Report
Freddie doesn’t mention this, and he probably wouldn’t given that his career path wouldn’t give him much insight into it, but you could also add the steady crumbling of DEI in the private sector. Purely anecdotal (though there are articles from credible sources one can easily google) a lot of newly minted offices, officers, and personnel dedicated to those sorts of initiatives are already gettin the ‘so… what would you say you do here?’ treatment.
Obviously it will live on in academic and certain public sector domains depending on who is on office but I think it’s becoming clear that where results and cost effectiveness matter it will not be subsidized like it is in places where they don’t.Report
Data point of one: The #metoo movement encouraged me to be more reflective of mindful of my interactions with my female colleagues. And I made real change. For instance, I will never initiate a physical interaction with a colleague or “client” (e.g., parent). Even in a situation where a casual hug hello would be perfectly appropriate, I simply won’t initiate it. I’d rather not put anyone in an uncomfortable position. Etc etc.
Would you look at something like that as a mark of success for #metoo?Report
Would you look at something like that as a mark of success for #metoo?
Well, that’s a success story (of one, but a success story). How representative are you?
Are we, as a society, better off because of #MeToo?
Are we, as a society, better off because of the Crappy Media Men’s list?
If we’re doing a vulgar utilitarian calculus (nothing wrong with vulgar utilitarian calculi!), I don’t know how to measure this beyond accumulating anecdotes.Report
The pivotal word in social justice is “social” as in, the mores and social norms and guide our lives and interactions.
Its hard to see these moving until after the fact.
When was it, exactly, when a certain word changed from being a common adjective, to a “racial slur”?
When was it exactly, when it became taboo to slap a secretary on the behind or for a comedian to make everyone laugh by pretending to fondle a sleeping woman’s breasts?
Its only when someone crosses th line and realizes that its no longer OK, that we notice the social climate has changed.Report
Was that something that you thought was okay until 2014-2015, Chip?Report
Why were you ever of the notion that hugging a coworker was an appropriate method of greeting?Report
I’ve initiated one hug with a coworker, on her last day. I had another who was affectionate and somewhat simple, who would initiate a hug occasionally.Report
Many of my (predominantly female) colleagues will hug one another at various times. “Here’s the birthday card we all signed for you?” “Aw, thanks!” [hug]
Moments like that and many others.
To be honest, I never thought much about it one way or another. Was it appropriate then? Is it appropriate now? Lots of folks will answer those questions differently.
What I’ve decided, for myself, is that I will not initiate a physical interaction with a colleague or parent other than a handshake.
This may be an artifact of my particular type of workplace (a nursery school) but I will say that it is something I would say was pretty common to observe throughout my career working in various private schools.Report
One of the tasks I perform is inspecting buildings, often occupied apartments.
Most firms have rules about how this is done and one rule is that the inspector always has to be accompanied by a second person when inside a private apartment.
Ostensibly this is to prevent any accusations ranging from theft to damage (e.g. “I only noticed the broken vase/ missing ring after he left!”).
But the rules only became rigidly enforced after #MeToo since most inspectors are male.
This is where we see the permanent change in cultural norms.
It is just now commonly accepted that a male cannot be trusted to be alone with a female and that in any later “he said/ she said” situation, the male will automatically be suspect.
Most of the dialogue about social justice has as its protagonists, very affluent and influential people- academic, public facing professionals, people who are well-connected to the media megaphone.
But what doesn’t get commented on much is the downstream effects on ordinary people.Report
Hugging is perfectly acceptable if the huggee is OK with it. But that requires knowledge of someone’s beliefs and feelings, probably more knowledge than you would get from routine workplace acquaintanceship. So the safe default rule is not to hug unless you know better. Honest mistakes and over-reactions will crop up now and then, but there is only so much certainty one can reasonably expect in life.Report
Exactly this. It wasn’t a major shift… but the opportunity to reflect and say, “Wait… I don’t know if this person wants a hug.”
Similar to Chip’s point, I have a friend who spent time as a children’s performer, acting in the stage version of a VERY popular children’s franchise. She said they had strict rules to ALWAYS have their hands visible when taking photographs to protect themselves from allegations. It obviously isn’t fool proof but it was a layer of protection because of a changing landscape wherein accusations of inappropriate touching could (and should) no longer just be waved off.Report
In this case, “it failed” means “it succeeded but I don’t like it.”
What we are seeing here is what Chris noted about Freddie, the insistent negative criticism without any positive prescription.
Jay, you aren’t proposing anything, aren’t defending anything, but merely lobbing criticism at things you don’t like, in this case social justice.
This is why you and Freddie code as reactionary because the general inchoate malaise of being uncomfortable with the modern world is a central part of the reactionary sensibility.
It crops up in “things were better before X happened” and in “Things are declining and getting worse” and the ever popular “crime is outtacontrol”.Report
Chip, if things are worse, then saying “things are better!” is not addressing whether things are worse.
Jay, you aren’t proposing anything, aren’t defending anything, but merely lobbing criticism at things you don’t like, in this case social justice.
I’ve proposed stuff in the past. Material changes.
And for stuff like education policy, when it comes to stuff like “restricting algebra until high school”, the proper response is “NO THAT’S STUPID GO BACK TO THE OLD WAY” and calling it “reactionary” because it’s wanting to change something back to before X happened is an aesthetic argument more than anything else.
The good news, I guess, is that San Francisco went back to the old way. I think we’re better off for going back to the old way.
I have a handful of other prescriptions as well.
But it’s easier to deny that they’ve been made at all. And claim that harming people in novel ways is “progress” because, at least, we didn’t used to do it.Report
And for stuff like education policy, when it comes to stuff like “restricting algebra until high school”, the proper response is “NO THAT’S STUPID GO BACK TO THE OLD WAY” and calling it “reactionary” because it’s wanting to change something back to before X happened is an aesthetic argument more than anything else.
I’m old enough to remember when the “old way” was to offer algebra in high school, not middle school. Of course, in my day, algebra was relatively new and maybe middle-school teachers hadn’t heard of it yet.
While I wouldn’t argue with anyone who prefers it one way or the other, I have yet to see any evidence that it makes much difference.
By the way, for future reference, I’m putting “algebra” on my updated Jaybird bingo card.Report
I have yet to see any evidence that it makes much difference
Is this an invitation for me to find some?
Because if I find it and you ignore it, I can’t help but notice that you will still be able to make that statement 100% truthfully.Report
Do as you see fit. I neither assign homework nor take homework assignments.Report
Well, here’s a study on what happened.
You can jump down to page 7 and read the section on “results” and see what happened.
In a nutshell, “overall enrollment in AP Calculus — which requires a strong foundation in algebra — initially fell sharply. Subsequent reforms allowing students to enroll in summer Geometry and Algebra II/Pre-Calculus courses attenuated this drop, but did nothing to alter the persistent disparities in black and Hispanic enrollment in AP math, which was the supposed point of Boaler’s reforms.”
Granted, some of the white kids that didn’t take AP Calc ended up in AP Statistics instead. The study gets into that.
Boaler sent her own children to a private school that did not enjoy these math reforms.Report
The link doesn’t work.Report
I just tested both and they both take me to where I expected to go.
The first takes me to https://tom-dee.github.io/files/ai23-734.pdf
The second takes me to https://www.piratewires.com/p/jo-boaler-misrepresented-citationsReport
Still doesn’t work. The first one gets an error message and the second requires a subscription to view.Report
Huh. The first works for me and the second lets me read when I click “continue reading”.
I guess you will continue to not have seen any evidence.Report
“In this case, “it failed” means “it succeeded but I don’t like it.””
Please present some examples of how it succeeded.Report
I think the part Jaybird quoted mostly said it.
I’d revise it slightly and say that the social justice approach to politics as practiced by the journalist class has failed not just generally, but on its own terms.Report
Except the “failure” of the journalist class is not stopping the Internet. Woke, anti-woke, political, non-political, everything but the New York Times and various left and right-leaning orgs backed by rich patrons has basically fallen apart.
That’s not even getting into the parts where VC ownership had made a bad thing worse at various newspapers and such.Report
He’s not talking about the failure of the journalist class.
He’s talking about how the social justice approach to politics in general that has failed. The “THIS GARDEN IS FOR BLACK AND INDIGENOUS FOLKS AND THEIR PLANT ALLIES” kinda stuff.Report
I think the verdict is still out on whether the Social Justice/Woke approached failed. A lot of ideas that used to be on the fringes of academia and activist circles are now part of the common parlance. They have very little effect on practical politics yet but more and more non-activist types are aware of them and talking about them.Report
Chip asked a great question: “And what would be the metrics of success or failure?”
Getting high schoolers to use the word “problematic” about Charlotte’s Web is a victory… maybe? Is San Francisco deciding to make algebra available to 7th graders a setback for Social Justice or is it a Social Justice victory?
“The long march continues and it will never end!” is one way to argue that the Social Justice/Woke approach can’t be said to have failed… but I’m pretty sure that that also means that it never will be able to say that it succeeded.Report
Freddie gets into that, and I agree with you (and him) that the newspaper/legacy media business was going to into a potentially insurmountable challenge by the internet and unbundling of information services. That was going to happen no matter what journalists did or embraced.
As I read him, what he would call ‘success’ would be things like significant changes to the law, permanent cultural changes (in particular the ability to permanently ostracize) , activist organizations with enduring popular influence etc. Instead I think it is proving to have mostly been a fad.Report
You’re still just using coded shibboleths.
If someone doesn’t already know what those words mean to you and your group, your comment is meaningless.
Like, what is the “social justice approach” to politics? As opposed to whatever the other kind is?
Were the media reports of predators like Cosby an example of “social justice journalism, or the other kind?
Was the recent documentary about the predatory practices at Nickelodeon an example of it?
And what would be the metrics of success or failure?Report
If someone doesn’t already know what those words mean to you and your group, your comment is meaningless.
Hey! Freddie wrote an essay about that too!
Please Just (frigging) Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
And what would be the metrics of success or failure?
This is a *GREAT* question.
If the politics is mostly performative and a variant of primal scream therapy, it’d be pretty silly to ask someone who feels better “but what did you actually *ACCOMPLISH*?”
“Accomplish? That’s a pretty toxic way to look at things.”Report
“If the politics is mostly performative and a variant of primal scream therapy, it’d be pretty silly to ask someone who feels better “but what did you actually *ACCOMPLISH*?””
One important thing to recognize is that one generation’s ironic affect is the next generation’s style and the third generation’s truth.
So you say “all that the ten-plus years of Social Justice War accomplished was to get people to mouth slogans as they did the same things they’ve always done”, but the thing is, if you can keep them mouthing those slogans long enough then it does matter, because everyone afterwards will assume those things were meant seriously.Report
I think we can define the Woke/Social Justice approach to politics as something that revolves around a lot buzz words that originate from academia and has a very confrontational style when it comes across people who disagree with it to one extent or another. There is an assumption that there are just policies that all true goo people believe in and anybody who disagrees in the slightest is evil per se even if they do a lot of virtue at work.
The most negative definition of woke politics is the type of style over substance type politics among the very online where reciting the creed in the right manner and using the right words is much more important than getting things done.Report
“Woke/Social Justice approach to politics as something that revolves around a lot buzz words…”
That’s what Freddie is doing here.
Like, is Freddie, or anyone here, opposed to diversity in hiring? Opposed to equity? Opposed to inclusion of previously excluded groups?
Oh of course not!
Freddie, and everyone here, hastens to proclaim how much they value diversity, equity, and inclusion!
They simply oppose Diversity, Equity and Inclusion aka DEI.
If you don’t already know the difference between dei and DEI, they can’t explain it. But the people they communicate with in their groups, they know what it means.
Its a codeword, a shibboleth used in the same manner as the HR directors they so strenuously oppose.
For example: A HR director might slip in some absurd program or requirement and say that it is part of DEI, and anyone who objects to it is an opponent of DEI.
Vice versa, Freddie might insist that an absurd requirement is a part of DEI and anyone who supports DEI supports the absurd.
If you are only capable of speaking in codewords, it becomes impossible to separate something innocuous from something absurd.
Which is usually the game being played.Report
Hey! I wrote an essay about this!
Would you like to pretend that we’ve never talked about this crap before and you’re being a bold truth-teller by being the first person to ever bring it up?
Well, good luck. I hope that everybody else has the memory of a mayfly. You’re going to need that in order to get that tactic to work.Report
Right, and its the conservatives who are now motte and baileying the issue.
Like, even here, no one can seem to explain whether the Nickolodeon expose fits into “Social Justice journalism” (Boo! Hisss!) or Good Ol’ Fashioned Journalism (YAY!)Report
Are you including Freddie under the “conservatives” umbrella there? Because he gets into that into the essay.
“no one can seem to explain whether the Nickolodeon expose fits into “Social Justice journalism” (Boo! Hisss!) or Good Ol’ Fashioned Journalism (YAY!)”
What *I* would categorize it as is something akin to whitewashing. Like, let’s say that the guy was guilty of Murder, Kidnapping, and Jaywalking and the documentary mentions Murder and Kidnapping only in passing and spends the rest of the time talking about Jaywalking.
“I shouldn’t have Jaywalked”, the guy says. “Those traffic laws are there for our protection. But, seriously, I looked both ways first!”
And we can discuss Jaywalking and whether it’s okay.
I live in Colorado Springs and sometimes I don’t cross the street at the corners. Is *THAT* something that should result in the cops being called? WHO AMONG US HAS NOT JAYWALKED?
Anyway, that’s what I’d say that the documentary is doing.Report
See response to Jesse re: what success would (presumably) be defined as. Beyond that if you don’t think journalism, and journalism enabled political activism, changed in some pretty noticeable in meaningful ways over the last 10ish years we may just have to agree to disagree. To me it is so obvious that it has I am not sure what would persuade you.Report
Journalism was always political activism, except maybe for some slight period from post-World War II to the early 80’s, but even then, that was only in the US, and a lot of people would disagree it was actually not activism, just a different kind.
Ironically, despite that time being hailed by centrists and Republican’s now, the Right called it liberal BS back then.Report
I don’t really see what Republican meta narratives current or in the past have to do with the substantive questions about what journalism is or should be, or the narrower issue of whats gone down with it over the last 10-15 years. It’s unlikely that conservatives would ever be particularly thrilled with what will always inherently be a small-l endeavor. But conservatives being mad about something doesn’t by itself equal vindication.
And to your point there is a long tradition of activist journalism. There is just a trade off in credibility that goes with it, and probably also a trade off in impact of the work journalists do. You can’t be both the voice of institutional authority that all sides have no choice but to take seriously and the voice for radical, highly contested revisioning of society at the same time.Report
*small-l liberal endeavor.Report
The press used to be more partisan but the Golden Age of the Metropolitan Daily (TM) was more about providing mass entertainment before radio, movies, and TV came along. All those salacious crime stories and political scandals plus the society pages were read for fun. What we would call the lifestyle section today existed and was a really big money driver.Report
Just as I started reading I started to ask myself about Twitter’s role and was not surprised to see him talk about it:
“You can certainly say that the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter played a major role in this lack of outrage. Following his acquisition of the network, many journos and other assorted liberals left; more, Musk’s draconian throttling of links from disfavored publications (like the Times), and later all external links, made “X” a terrible place to react to a published piece. And the ongoing and terrible collapse of media’s financial model has certainly put a damper on the ingroup social signaling that drove so much of the ceaseless screaming.”
Alas, I have to hope that somewhere over on Bluesky there’s an old fashioned storm…
As for the rest of the article, I was a little underwhelmed… I’m not entirely sure what we’re taking away from the Roy Price episode compared to other episodes that still rage. Reminds me a little bit of how civil war combat veterans would describe battle as having ‘seen the elephant’ in reference to the odd ebb and distant flow until the beast was suddenly and terrifyingly fully upon you. I’m not sure the elephant is dead.Report
There is the issue about how strong stuff like #MeToo was at the time. It was powerful enough to, for example, bring Al Franken to account.
Whether or not he deserved it, of course, is still under debate. (“It was only one person!” “There were eight accusers.” “The point still stands!”) but that itself was evidence that bad actors would be punished now that we understand what Justice really entails.
And now we have a case with someone who deserves it even more than Franken did… And nothing. Poof.
If I were cynical, I’d say that folks learned that having Actual Rules means that you not only get to apply them to enemies but you kinda have to apply them to friends and the vulgar utilitarian calculus was made that that was a price too high to pay.
But, being more of an idealist, I’d say that it was a less vulgar utilitarianism. Hey, not only does this work, it doesn’t work. And that’s not giving us the outcomes that we want. Not even close. Not even “well, there are always tradeoffs” close.Report
Well, not nothing… Price was suspended, resigned, and moved to Hong Kong in 2017. The ‘story’ is that in 2024 he could publish his professional observations in a field he’s been working in for 30+ years. Without the entire newsroom at the NYT melting down.
It’s something; I’m just not sure it’s dispositive of anything, yet. I want to believe.Report
When I was a kid, my mom told me “you’ve got a gun and a belt and the belt has bullets on it… you’ve got a lot of rabbit bullets. You’ve got a couple of wolf bullets. And you’ve got *ONE* elephant bullet. Be careful when you shoot your wolf or elephant bullets. Don’t use them on a rabbit.”
I didn’t understand what she was saying then but I’m older now.
The newsroom at the NYT managed to slay the dragon that was Dean Baquet.Report
Your mother must be very wise. And a good shot.Report
To me the real take away isn’t so much the anecdotal evidence specific to the Price situation. It’s that the power that once seemed to exist has proven to be a kind of confidence game that works for a while but eventually loses its ability to accomplish anything, not just over the long haul but in the immediate term as well.
The part that convinces me is really the reference to all those journalists out there that abruptly reinvented themselves and their personas totally out of nowhere. Maybe you’re right with the elephant metaphor. Personally I think we’re in the first little baby steps towards pretending the whole thing never happened. I suppose time will tell.Report
Sure, something’s a little different post-covid. I’m just not sure what it is yet. Have we returned to ‘normal’ or is there no ‘normal’ for us to ask about even?Report
I don’t think we’ll ever go back, but I also think what we most associate with the covid years was brewing well before it. In the piece Freddie puts it as taking off during Obama’s second term. What makes me feel good is the signs that whatever it was, it looks (to me, anyway) like very little of it will be enduring.Report
I think that lower education really, really did a number on the larger project.
I’m percolating an essay about this.
“Remote Learning Taught Parents A Thing Or Two” or something like that.Report
I think eyes were opened, yes.
But then I would, having defected from Public Education way back in 1999.
Then again, I think peak lesson learning was the Youngkin election in 2021… we’re back to making sure that the child-care must flow.Report
It’s one thing for individuals to notice things. Heaven forbid they become common knowledge, though.
Stuff like San Francisco getting rid of Algebra for middle schoolers injected some common knowledge into the debate.
That was the *LAST* thing that the debate needed.Report
“You can certainly say that the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter played a major role in this lack of outrage”
I posted about how an expose of child molestation in Hollywood was met with a lack of outrage by many insiders.
Does Elon Musk get the credit for this, too?
See, what is being hinted at here, (when not spoken outright) is the assertion that “Social Justice journalism”, or “#MeToo or any of the acronyms, are really just scams, fake drama and put-on poutrage by people who really just want to game the system and get power.Report
Social Justice/Woke People: It is important to listen to the lived experiences of minorities.
MENA Jews: This is what life was like under Islam before 1948…
Social Justice/Woke People: Shut up you.Report
I quite enjoyed it and found it quite interesting. I think Freddie exaggerates the importance of social justice/woke journalism but that is understandable since he was/is deeply twitter immersed; was/is deeply journalism immersed and has always had a strong opinion that all the energy he saw going into that phenomena was being profoundly wasted.
I also feel like he’s right about the tide of social justice/”woke”‘s manner of debate and thought being ebbing currently which doesn’t surprise me because it’s always had weak fundamentals. I don’t, however, think it’ll disappear without a trace- it’s assuredly introduced a lot of substantive changes in what is considered classy/polite/considerate and a lot of those changes strike me as meritted.Report
I generally agree. And I think it will definitely be back in some way (I often feel like this is round 2 of the same kind of thought, with round 1 being the early 90s). I was in college when this kind of stuff had been totally destroyed in the larger culture but there were still whiffs floating around that I recall and now recognize in retrospect.
There’s a parallel to the Trump movement. Even if MAGA were to be defeated beyond my wildest dreams it would be naive to think there would never be another corrupt demagogue type that catches a faux populist zeitgeist or just gets lucky and ends up posing a serious challenge to liberal society.
I think the larger lesson is that nothing is ever over, and the case for liberalism needs to be made generation after generation.Report
Y’all need to stop elevating televangelist-types.Report
No no Jay, that’s the right. On the left it’s non-profits.Report
The type remains.
Sadly, the type endures.Report
“another corrupt demagogue type that catches a faux populist zeitgeist or just gets lucky and ends up posing a serious challenge to liberal society.”
Would it be fair of me to say that this is just another way of what I noted above that the people who advocate for #MeToo/CRT/DEI are really just bad people:
Insincere, frauds, hypocrites who shouldn’t be listened to seriously?Report
I don’t think they’re all bad people. I think a lot of them are cynical or responding to incentives (or just what they perceive to be popular in their milieu), especially those whose livelihoods are connected to it. There’s definitely an academic/activism industrial complex. But I think many more are legitimately well-meaning people trying to make the world better, but are also deeply misguided about how to do that and/or just plain failing to think things through very well.Report
When reports came trickling out from altar boys attesting abuse, we heard that this wasn’t happening, it wasn’r real, they were just confused.
When stories circulated about Cosby and Weinstein, we heard that this wasn’t real, it wasn’t happening, these were spurned lovers or golddigging frauds.
When stories surface of brutality by cops against black people, we heard that this isn’t real, this isn’t happening, they are just race hustlers and con men looking for a buck.
This is why I brought up the Nickelodeon scandal. Would these young people have been believed prior to #MeToo? Would the documentary about the abuse been greenlit were it not for the movement?
Given the fact that even after all this, so many Hollywood players stood by the perpetrators indicates that, were it not for #MeToo,this all would have been swept under the rug.Report
I’m not sure I follow. Weinstein was convicted in a court of law where evidence was presented and he had a defense. Bill Cosby is a free man. The entire thrust of MeToo activism is that facts and due process don’t matter. Just believe women. I think they started losing credibility sometime around when they couldn’t tell the difference between Weinstein and Aziz Ansari. Then it all magically disappeared when Christine Blasey Ford was a credible accuser but for some reason Tara Reade wasn’t. Now the fever is gone and no one cares.
There were also journalists like Radley Balko focusing on police abuse before it was cool, and doing excellent traditional work. For some reason no one cared. Then a bunch of journalists embraced wild eyed academic Theory and people cared for awhile. Now BlackLivesMatter is seemingly devolved into a money laundering operation for its cynical founders, Ibram Kendi is out at Harvard after wasting millions with no results, and few meaningful changes have been made to law enforcement. Soon no one will care again. Maybe already no one cares again.
I don’t know anything about the Nickelodeon thing. But if the documentarians investigated and found real evidence of wrong doing then they are doing good traditional work. The proof of that will be in the pudding, i.e. if it results in successful lawsuits and/or criminal convictions and/or lasting policy changes. If it turns out the whole thing is a bunch of misleading ideological misdirection and hearsay then it’ll be a scandal for a few minutes buf soon no one will care.Report
This part (and the rest of the paragraph) is the most interesting part of the piece to me:
Of course many or most would slot me into that world without thinking about it. This is, as I’ve frequently said, a record of the poverty of this whole approach to politics, of this moment. I am a lifelong socialist who has engaged in more actual left-wing organizing than probably 80% of the people who yell about politics online; more importantly, the people who classify me as a reactionary never rise to my challenge of telling me what actual issues of substance we disagree on, and they don’t because they know they can’t
It’s the most interesting to me because Freddie is so commonly used as an example of leftists who tack right, and that he is used as an example of that can’t really be explained by his anti-woke politics alone.
I know people here don’t tend to hang out in left (not liberal, but left) spaces much, but non-“identitarian”, non-standpoint theory politics are very common on the left, and in particular the far left. Most people in those spaces don’t spend as much of their time going on about wokeism as Freddie does, but some do. Like Freddie, some of them have even written books about it. Granted, some of these people get a lot of criticism from other leftists (Cutrone especially, and one of the Bunga dudes — End of the End of History guys — has gotten heat for his writing on the Israel-Hamas war), but they don’t get the Freddie treatment.
I think there are two reasons for this: 1) liberals have never heard of these people, but they’ve heard of Freddie, who’s been pissing them off for like 20 years, and 2) unlike Freddie, their anti-woke politics, to the extent that they can be called that, are not only accompanied by, but generally justified using their leftist political philosophy. I have no doubt that if liberals were to discover Cutrone, say, they’d hate him just as much (he wrote an essay in ’16 titled “Why Not Trump?”), but also Cutrone will never have a far right audience the way Freddie does, both because of the reasoning behind his anti-wokeness, and the fact that he’s never going to do anti-wokeness without also doing Marxism, whereas Freddie usually at most mentions, almost in passing, that he is a Marxist or a socialist or whatever.
You could chalk this up to guilt by association, but there’s a reason Freddie is, or at least was for a few years there, attractive to so many far right “heterodox” sorts, while most “anti-woke” leftists are not. How he does anti-wokeness speaks to the right in a way that the anti-wokeness of most leftists does not, if Freddie is in fact not a reactionary? That is not something I’ve ever seen him address, but if he’s going to argue that the accusations that he’s a reactionary are ridiculous, it’s not something he can simply wave away.Report
Genuinely curious here: what reactionary positions is Freddie alleged to hold? As far as I’m aware he is in favor of all normal marxist goals and even the generally stated goals of the identarian/”woke” left- he just asserts, pretty concretely, that the methods and manners of the online identarian/”woke” left are both demonstrated ineffective at achieving their goals and are arguably counterproductive.Report
Freddie saves his worst vitriol for the left and he’s regularly incisive and sometimes funny. His criticisms are such that, with light polishing, they can be picked up and used by people who are right-wingers.
He’s effectively an arms dealer.
Wouldn’t you say that someone who sold machine guns to Robert E Lee would be a Confederacy sympathizer, even if they never so much as fired a gun themselves?Report
I don’t know that he holds any reactionary positions on social issues. At least, I don’t think remember seeing him express any, and he has, as he notes, been the subject of increasing hostility from his former far right readers because of his continued insistence on supporting trans rights. The question I find interesting is not whether he’s a reactionary, but is why did the right take to Freddie, but not to, say, Liu or Cutrone or the Bungacast dudes or any number of other left critics of “wokeness.” Hell, Liu’s book (Virtue Hoarders) makes Freddie’s same arguments (elite capture) better and in a much shorter form, and did so before Freddie, but I don’t think she’s ever really been accused of being a darling of the right wing “heterodox” movement, such as it is.
It could be that his arguments are meant to be more general, so that you don’t need to accept, or even know, a bunch of stuff about Marxism, but what does it mean for them to be more general in this regard? It could be that the elite capture theory fits nicely with the current populist right’s views of society , but so then would Liu’s, or Táíwò, whose arguments Freddie adopts pretty directly. It could be that they just like how mean Freddie is to liberals, but he’s not as mean as Liu or Cutrone.
So why did reactionaries love Freddie so much for a few years there, even if they’re abandoning him now? I don’t think it’s a trivial question.Report
Wait, so it’s not because of something he’s done but because of who consumes him?
That’s even more insulting than mine!Report
See below. I don’t think it’s as simple as “Freddie shouldn’t be blamed for the fact that a bunch of truly horrible people like a lot of his writing.” What’s important is why they like him, and what their liking him says about the effects of his writing: is he being helpful, or harmful? More specifically, are people who are actually interested in social justice finding things in his writing that they can use towards that end? Or is the only effect that people who oppose the goals of any genuine social justice movement are finding things in his writing that they can use towards theirs?Report
I’d humbly suggest that Freddie got a big right wing audience because he’s a fantastic writer and he was non-personed by the progressive left (at least partially due to his own mistakes both in his acerbic nature and his behavior-though that was also partially due to mental illness). Also his writing is relatively outward facing and blog focused whereas, if my understanding of your other examples is correct, the other authors you suggested primarily communicate via books yes?Report
Those other authors are everywhere, to be clear (podcasts, various publications, some blogging). I mentioned the books because Freddie has also written one.
If he has a right wing audience because he doesn’t have a liberal/left audience, that suggests that he cultivated the right wing audience, and that is one part of what I’m getting at. And it helps to brush away Jaybird’s criticism that Freddie is dismissed because he’s criticizing liberals/the left. If you cultivate a right wing audience, you are necessarily going to alienate a liberal/left audience. Not only does this mean that liberal/left readers have good reason not to like him, but it also means that Freddie has doomed his own project to failure by not addressing himself specifically at liberals/the left to the exclusion of a right wing audience that will never approach liberals/the left in good faith.Report
“Genuinely curious here: what reactionary positions is Freddie alleged to hold?”
He isn’t reactionary, he’s conservative, but he grew up in an environment (and he’s writing for an audience) that considers the two to be synonyms so he can’t accept that he’s the latter without thinking that means he’s the former.
Like, “hey guys maybe we shouldn’t go all-in on Radical Antiracism and making everyone sign on to a repackaging of Original Sin Doctrine before we figure out what that’s supposed to do and how we tell the difference between Not Understanding and Willful Resistance”, that’s a conservative attitude.Report
I actually kind of hate that part of Freddie’s writing, where he brings in his own personal baggage and online interactions and feuding into what are otherwise strong points that stand on their own. For me personally I started reading Freddie after Andrew Sullivan linked to some random (but really good) piece Freddie wrote for a now defunct site a billion years ago. I think he has an audience not just because of who he pisses off and/or whose sensibilities he flatters, but because from a pure writing craft perspective he is standout. But, again, classifying Freddie seems like a really uninteresting discussion to me.
To your larger point I don’t think it would be the worst thing in the world to get another flavor of left wing thought into the debate, even if it isn’t necessarily my cup of tea or something I’d be likely to wholly endorse. The strongest criticisms of identitarian or woke (or whatever) social justice politics are IMO materialistic in nature, while that other ideology that shall not he named and some would say doesn’t even exist is the epitome of post material politics. From that perspective I would think a lot of leftist thinkers are extremely adverse to it, given that if you really had to break leftist politics down to a single concern it would be about who gets what, with the what being actual needs met and other tangible things of value. But you know how politics and the discourse is, if you can’t write in a way that gets popular traction no one will ever hear of you. Maybe one day that will change.Report
I don’t even remember where I first encountered Freddie, but I think it was in comment sections of liberal blogs in the early-to-mid-Aughts. When I first started hanging around here (early-to-mid 2010), he was still posting, but others had largely taken over and the tone and direction of the site were fairly un-Freddie, for better or worse (probably for the worse, but it took a long time for that to play out). As an aside, he’s not the only openly socialist main pager this blog has had over the years, as Elizabeth Bruenig, before she married and changed her name, wrote a bit here as well, and like Freddie, she’s a bit of an, as Freddie himself says, “unorthodox” Marxist.
Anyway, I think the question of why he attracted an audience of pretty much the worst people is important, because it says something about the impact of his arguments, and that impact is all that really matters to me. We live in a time of reaction, as he himself notes in that piece and elsewhere, and I think Freddie, in a small way (he may be internet famous, but he remains pretty unknown offline), has contributed to this reactionary moment. He’s done so because his criticisms are rarely followed by positive prescriptions for social justice (in the broad sense, not as the term tends to be used on the right), or racial justice, or gender equality, or even trans rights. This is, I think, the big difference between most leftist anti-“woke” critics and Freddie: except for some brief asides, Freddie is mostly, if not almost entirely anti-, without telling us his vision for moving forward. Have the elites taken over social justice movements? Duh. Does the focus on identity take away from materialist politics (in the leftist sense)? Absolutely. What does a social movement look like without elite capture? What are the materialist politics that we should be focusing on? What vision do they present, and how does it differ from “identitarian” visions? These are things you’ll get from the other authors I’ve mentioned; it dominates their work. You could read a lot of Freddie and only know what his positive politics are because he says occasionally that he’s a socialist.
Without a positive politics, his anti-“wokeness” plays right into the hands of reactionaries, as we’ve seen from the reactionaries on this site, and from pretty much anywhere post-hiatus Freddie is discussed, and that’s why, even though I don’t think he’s a reactionary, I don’t care that he gets referred to as one, because without an alternative vision that he thinks will get us to where genuine social justice movements want to go, the distinction between a reactionary and someone who gives aid and comfort to a reactionary is one without a difference.Report
He brags about having organized stuff like “anti-war rallies” but what is he actually *FOR*?
Besides, we went to war anyway.
Anyway, that’s the background of what I’m going to be saying next:
Freddie is trying to get people to stop making things worse. When it comes to “positive politics”, his attitude isn’t “here’s what we should be doing” but it is, instead, “STOP MAKING THINGS WORSE!”
He believes that a better world is possible, but it’s not possible if people are busy making things worse. Get people to stop making things worse and then you can think about the right direction to go in.
If you understand that he sees the whole “woke” thing as making stuff like “marxism” or “socialism” *LESS* likely (as opposed to more likely), then it’ll help color your interpretation of his criticisms.
And I think that stuff like his active participation in such things as rather large anti-war protests are actively coloring his responses.
Sure, he’s against Bush. He put together an anti-war protest! But you know who showed up to the anti-war protest in addition to the anti-war people? People wearing Keffiyehs. People carrying “FREE MUMIA” signs. People looking to score and they heard that chicks were going to be there.
What I see Freddie doing is is this:
He’s Gatekeeping.
Because he knows that the folks in the keffiyehs, the “FREE MUMIA” people, and the guys looking to score are going to make things worse even if he has the best of intentions.
And now he’s looking at his Marxist/Socialist project and seeing the Wokanistas ruining everything. Not because he’s not opposed to “Capitalism” (whatever that happens to mean this week).
But because he doesn’t want the nuts to ruin everything. Again.Report
This is the most damning critique of Freddie I’ve ever heard.Report
You may be surprised to hear this, Chip, but in a thread where we have done a lot of disagreeing I agree with you here.Report
It’s almost enough to make you want to get him to stop, innit?Report
I’ve not always agreed with Freddie but I’d never want him to stop writing.Report
In fairness to Freddie, I don’t think it’s what he thinks he’s doing. Hell, I don’t think he thinks it’s bad to wear a keffiyeh or a “Free Mumia” t-shirt. Those are Jaybird’s biases, not Freddie’s. Hell, Freddie would have been miserable in the activist and organizing spaces I know for a fact he used to frequent (and maybe still does, though I’ve talked to some people, and I think he’s largely persona non grata in some of his former circles), if those were the people who bothered him, because they’re ubiquitous in those spaces.
I think what Freddie is trying to do is to convince liberals to be better about this; to drop the divisive language and approaches to social justice, and adopt a more universal, inclusive approach. That is what he was trying to do years ago, ineffectively, and I take it to be what he wants to do now, but even more ineffectively than pre-hiatus.
To the extent that he’s trying to gatekeep, he’s trying to keep out the people who don’t actually believe in social justice, but who, he believes, aren’t actual believers in the cause(s), but have coopted it for their own ends (the “elites” he talks about in his book and on his sub stack).Report
I don’t think he thinks it’s bad to wear a keffiyeh or a “Free Mumia” t-shirt.
By itself on a lovely day in the quad? Of course not.
At an anti-war protest? Can you *PLEASE* leave your hobby at home? We’re actually trying to change something here.
they’re ubiquitous in those spaces.
They sure are.
And who are you trying to kick out?
It ain’t them.
It’s Freddie.
And he’s noticed that too.Report
“Can you *PLEASE* leave your hobby at home? We’re actually trying to change something here.”
Honest question since I don’t know:
Did Freddie actually say this?Report
No. He did not.
However, he and I did discuss the anti-war protests and he expressed disgust at how journalists covered the protests by focusing on the crazy people who showed up in costume and not focusing on the criticisms on the war.
That is something that *DID* happen.
(This was during the whole “Tea Party” protest era. He was mocking some of the nuts who showed up wearing tricorn hats and whatnot. I asked him about the anti-war protests and he said that, yes, it was infuriating how the news covered anti-war protests.)Report
I’m not trying to kick Freddie out of anywhere. I’m evaluating his impact, and to a lesser extent, his ideas themselves (which I mostly find uninteresting these days).
And I don’t think Freddie cares about the keffiyeh at anti-war protests, or the Free Mumia t-shirt for that matter, but I could be wrong. Feel free to point me to a place where he says those things are bad. Those just sound like Jaybird biases, not Freddie biases, to me though.Report
Found the exchange.
Here’s part of what I’m basing this on:
We were discussing the 9/12 “Don’t Tread On Me” protests back in 2009.
We were so young!Report
So yeah, you’re treating Stalinists and Maoists, two groups Freddie knows and you don’t, along with the other things (maybe you know the Larouchies, I dunno) as coextensive with “Free Mumia” and keffiyeh-wearing people. Some of those groups (Stalinists especially) would never be caught in either, and while the others might (I’ve seen Maoists in keffiyehs), most people who wear those things aren’t either of those groups, and I don’t see Freddie trying to exclude them.
What’s more, he openly says he’s not trying to gate keep; he’d just rather Stalinists, Maoists, et al. not show up. And frankly, so would I; I can’t stand the former, and have literally been assaulted by the latter, as has my partner and many of my friends. So f’ck them. But please, wear a keffiyeh; they’re great, and not in any way a sign of Hamas-love or any other such thing.Report
I spent a few years 2008-2012 organizing MoveOn and Occupy groups and had much the same experience Freddie did where suddenly people show up who have nothing in common with your message and try to turn it to their aims.
But…that’s the whole problem of organizing, going back to the American and French revolutions and continuing to today.
Who speaks for the “cause”, whose issues get included, whose get cut out, who gets to lead?
If you can’t find a way to organize workers and recognize whose complaints are resonant and whose are just spurious, you need to get out of the game.
This is why I don’t really have much sympathy for self-proclaimed leftists who scorn the #MeToo or BLM components of social justice because these people’s claims to justice are legitimate in a way that the Larouchies or Ron Paulites aren’t.
We focus a lot on Weinstein as a sexual predator, but its commonly overlooked that Ashley Judd (and the kids at Nickelodeon) were first and foremost, workers being abused and exploited by management. This is a major issue in almost all workplaces dominated by female and minor workers like agriculture, health care, and service industries.
To their credit, unions like UniteHere!, and SEIU are aggressive in treating issues of sexual harassment and racism seriously and their leaders aren’t grinding axes of grievance about DEI or wokism.
The leftists who find themselves courted and quoted by the Quillette/ Bari Weiss crowd should probably ask themselves where they lost the plot.Report
I don’t know anything about Move on, as I’ve not spent much time with liberal groups, but much ink has been spilled about how too many voices really undermined Occupy, and I think that’s not wrong. Occupy had other issues as well, which were probably not serious, but everyone having their own agenda didn’t help.
DSA had a similar problem. Prior to 2016, DSA was a mostly liberal group, dominated by social democrats, with a handful of more hard core socialists (Amber Frost was a member, Bhaskar, etc). in 2016, it became the most visible socialist group, while the largest leftist group in America, the ISO, was in crisis, so in addition to being inundated with new Berniecrats, there were suddenly a ton of actual DemSocs, a variety of communists, anarchists, and everything in between. It was chaos there for a few years, until the Berniecrats won in 19 and things settled down to what they are now, largely a group aiming to pull the Democratic Party left. The chaos was fascinating, though.Report
And it’s weird. He’s the guy who gets far, far more venom from “the left” than the Stalinists, Maoists, et al.
I mean, crap. Freddie gets more venom than the people who literally assault others.
Because he’s doing what?
CRITICIZING.
And, I gotta tell you, that ish is *FUNNY*.Report
Again, I don’t think this is true. I don’t think most leftists pay any attention to him. He’s simply not a presence in left online spaces, and never had been.
I don’t even think most online liberals/progressives do. There’s a very narrow band of liberals/progressives of a certain age who know or care who he is and what he says. And any of those people he hadn’t well before his hiatus, he alienated with that cause of his hiatus, so they probably wouldn’t like him even if his post-hiatus transformations had been loving the libs. You have to remember, he was a real asshole online. His signature move was: criticize you or a group you like, and then when you defended them, insult your intelligence, your appearance, your social life, and if you persisted, accuse you of heinous things, which is how he got to where he is now, off most social media and completely alienated even from most of his offline circle.
So yeah, people don’t like him, and that he surrounded himself with the worst people didn’t help them stop not liking them, but ultimately, why people don’t like him stopped having to do with his ideas a long time ago.Report
There’s a very narrow band of liberals/progressives of a certain age who know or care who he is and what he says.
To the extent that that’s true of Freddie, it’s true of everybody. What leftists actually get play?
You’re stuck either pointing at bloggers, pointing at substackers, or pointing at, well, nobody reads magazines anymore.
Who is keynoting Netroots Nation? It’s in Baltimore!
I guess they haven’t released a schedule yet…Report
Netroots Nation is liberals.
And the liberals on this site talk all the time about their encounters with leftists, so people must be running into them.Report
I’m sure that if we interrogated their encounters, we’d find out that they were really merely encountering sparkling liberals.Report
Hey man, it’s a distinction Freddie himself makes, and has made for decades (often in a way that really riled up liberals in comment sections). You can take it up with him if you don’t like it.Report
Eh, I’ve partaken in the whole “Who is a *TRUE* Scotsman?” argument a handful of times and it’s always fun. Presbyterians baptize babies, dontchaknow.
Freddie wrote an essay about what he believes and it’s filled with the usual affirmations of faith.
Eh. He seems to believe things. He says he does, anyway.
He seems to be yet another old person who yearns for the progressivism of his youth.
The long march continues.Report
I think Freddie’s wrong about most of that. I think he’s misremembering the left of his Youth (there’s a reason the movie PCU was made), and I think he doesn’t know well the left of today. But that’s the sort of thing I would argue about with people whom I thought were serious about making the left better, but I do not include you or, for the reasons I’ve stated elsewhere in this thread, post-hiatus Freddie in that category, and I’ve already said too much here given that.Report
He thinks that the Left is ineffective and he wants the Left to become better and, by that, he means something like “be less ineffective”.
I think that the Left is ineffective and it’s funny. I want the Left to become better but, by that, I mean something like “stop believing false things”. Until they stop believing false things, I am 100% down with them being ineffective. I’m grateful!Report
He brags about having organized stuff like “anti-war rallies” but what is he actually *FOR*?
I feel like I’ve been pretty explicit in saying that it’s not a matter of what he’s for, it’s a matter of the effects of his arguments, and more specifically, the effects of his arguments right now.
But because he doesn’t want the nuts to ruin everything. Again.
Which I’m saying he’s doing ineffectively. Instead of gatekeeping in an impactful way, or keeping the “nuts,” as you call them, from ruining everything, there’s an argument to be made, I think, that he’s just providing ammunition, to use your arms-dealing metaphor, to the worst people, at the worst time to do so (in the midst of their political ascendancy, an ascendancy he recognizes, but blames entirely on the, er, “nuts”).
It’s important, I think, to note that his targets are not Marxists/socialists, or the people who tend to occupy those spaces, but liberals, and especially progressive liberals. With this in mind, I would further argue that he’s not only ineffective now, he’s been ineffective at it for decades. Comment threads he joined on moderately progressive blogs like Lawyers, Guns, and Money, once upon a time, were legendary, because the entire commentariat would turn against him, the main pagers would excoriate him in follow-up posts, and he would just generally have his ass handed to him, all for arguing that liberals were f’ing up activism and things like the anti-war movement. The difference between back then and now is that, before his hiatus, he was largely arguing on liberals’ terms, and was generally seen as a pinko by the reactionaries who became his fans post-hiatus, and was thus ignored by them. Hell, his Facebook page and Twitter threads about him after the hiatus were filled with reactionaries saying things like, “He used to be a pinko, but now he’s saying interesting things,” or something to that effect.
It’s not just about the audience: The scope of his arguments changed (now liberals weren’t just ruining the anti-war movement, they were ruining journalism and society as a whole), and the form and content of his arguments changed (now it wasn’t simply that liberals were getting bogged down in pointless side disputes, but that the pointless side disputes and language and such had become the substance of mainstream, elite-captured liberalism). This, as I’ve said a few times now, effectively provided aid and comfort to the worst people. So he went from being harmlessly ineffective to, at least in the online world, harmfully so.
Is he still a Marxist (in whatever way he always has been — he’s rarely discussed his actual politics, though I spent years on this blog only vaguely referring to mine, so I can’t talk)? I’ll take him at his word that he is. Is he disgusted by the anti-trans movement? I think yes, he’s shown that he is, lately at some personal cost. Does he believe in racial justice, reproductive justice, etc.? Again, I’ll take him at his word that he does. Is he deeply anti-war and pro-Palestine? Yes, I think so, these are things he’s demonstrated, also lately at some personal cost. But his views on these things, as they tend to take a back seat to, and are not part of his arguments for, his anti-“wokeism,” are at best orthogonal to his cultural and political impact, to the extent that he has any (and if he doesn’t, why are we even talking about him?).Report
Well, I think that the entirety of what he’s doing can be read through the lens of the anti-war protests and the responses of “serious” liberals to them.
He organized the protest! He put together an impassioned 14 second soundbite! Of which 2 seconds got used and the rest of the report showed a couple of people walking around with paper mâché heads of Bush and Saddam and a cosplayer who dressed up as Queen Elizabeth II for some reason.
He was serious. His protest was serious. The puppeteers weren’t serious. The cosplayer wasn’t serious.
The deepest cut? The journalists weren’t serious.
Anyway, I see everything he’s doing as having been processed through the trauma of the betrayal of the response to his anti-war protests.
I mean, remember the CHAZ/CHOP? I’m sure that Freddie saw that whole thing and had flashbacks. And the BLM mostly peaceful protests.
And now he’s having flashbacks again now that the dust has settled and exactly as much has changed.Report
I think there may be something to that in terms of the things that really stick in his craw and therefore animate him.
However I think the underlying truth is just that Marxism has had a pretty rough 40 years. Good luck getting that 800 word piece published.Report
Having spent a lot of my 20s, and a lot of my 20s (and, like Freddie, very little of my 30s) at protests and around organizers and activists, I think you’re just talkin’ out your ass, man. Sure, some people go to those for the wrong reasons, but if you’re taking the time and making the effort to go to a protest, often with the threat of violence (from cops, from counter-protesters, from just random assholes driving by) or arrest, I don’t think it really matters that you’re just there to meet women (as I admit I was when I first went to protests in the mid-90s) or look cool (though you’d have to be a fool to go to a protest to look cool; everyone looks kinda silly, and everyone’s aware they look kinda silly), because if you are there for the wrong reasons, the rigors of that life will quickly weed you out.
I, like Freddie, have spent a lot of time coming to terms with the failure of the anti-war movement in 2002 and 2003, though I generally haven’t blamed the anti-war protesters. Those protests were huge, some of the biggest this country, and in fact the world has ever seen, an because they were that big, they were dominated by normies. Were the actual organizers less normie? Sure. Did the movement fail for the reasons Freddie thinks? Absolutely not. To think so requires a level of ignorance of the way the American war machine works that is truly astounding. Freddie’s position on this is, as the kids these days say, pure cope.
We failed not because organizers were too obsessed with racial and gender divides, but because we had no chance of succeeding. The fate of Iraq was decided on September 11, 2001, if not on December 12, 2000, and we were just tilting at windmills, though I’d argue that in cases like that, it’s important that a lot of people very visibly tilt at windmills, so that others can see that there are people here who disagree with the war machine, even if there’s no stopping it.
I don’t want to overly psychologize Freddie and his current obsessions, so I won’t really speculate on why he’s doing what he’s doing these days, and why he embraced an audience of the worst sorts of people. It is probably relevant that he was pretty much excommunicated from the online liberal spaces he used to occupy (and it really is about liberals, not leftists; in 2024, far right folks are far more likely to have heard of, to say nothing of read, Freddie that leftists at any point in the last 2 decades). It’s probably also not irrelevant that his pre-hiatus career in academia was completely ruined by the events that preceded and ultimately led to his hiatus, and therefore he needed money, and to make money writing, he needed an audience, any audience. But I don’t think it has anything to do with the actual issues in organizing and activist circles today, because I don’t think he’s really in touch with those anymore anyway.Report
I’m not saying that Freddie is blaming the anti-war protestors. He likes the anti-war protestors.
He’s irritated by the nuts but he’s *INFURIATED* by the journalism that covered the nuts instead of the normies.
But I don’t think it has anything to do with the actual issues in organizing and activist circles today, because I don’t think he’s really in touch with those anymore anyway.
I’m pretty sure he’s on the outside looking in.
That said… he’s looking at stuff like the Black Trans Lives Matter march and the CHAZ/CHOP and Ibram X. Kendi and seeing exactly what they were able to accomplish.
I absolutely understand why he’d write what he wrote about them in the essay that kicked all this off.Report
I wonder if our boy Freddie still drops by and reads comment threads here or something because the second half of his lastest substack piece is laid out like he read Chris’ criticisms and got annoyed.
Freddie, if you’re lurking, I still love your writing and I hope you’re doing as okay as you seem to be.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/
Edit: Oh it’s the Palestinian Painted Plates one.Report
I just read it (I subscribe to him) and I too wonder if he encountered some of those criticisms. I agreed with probably 85% of the piece, and it gets into the ballpark of why despite being unapologetically anti woke I’ve never seen the ‘IDW’ or Bari Weiss or Rufo or the rest as having any kind of appeal.
Of course what Freddie didn’t address is what I alluded to elsewhere in this thread; namely that anyone espousing Marxism has a severe credibility problem, well beyond most other stuff out there. That problem stems from a real world failure to operationalize into anything that has been able to produce mass prosperity. Regulated capitalism, warts and all, has done that, and social democracy (or even stingy welfare states like our own) have succeeded in softening the deprivations of 19th century capitalism that inspired Marxism in the first place. Now Marxism is mostly the redoubt of the most authoritarian countries in the world or guerrillas in remote jungles, where the name is mostly incidental. There and (ironically) among well to do academic types with 6 figure salaries and very soft hands. But you don’t hear about Marxist success stories because there just aren’t many.
So Freddie is right about a lot of the anti-woke industry, movement, whatever. But the reason people don’t really want to align with openly Marxist thinkers has a lot of similarities to why even people on the right are now skeptical of the neocons. This stuff was tried in the real world by actors with the resources and as good of a chance as any to realistically make it work. The data is what it is and it ain’t inspiring, to say nothing of an obvious upgrade or solution to the challenges we have now.Report
I generally agree with you on the Marxism bit though I suspect there’s getting to be enough water under the bridge now that our Modern marxists can “no true Scotsman” the negative examples you point out. Marxism, like its twin libertarianism, are vectors and critiques not free standing operational systems.Report
Probably so. I also think a lot of the people using economic leftist terminology (though not from Freddie, or Chris here at OT) ultimately mean something like ‘be more like Europe’ which is well within the Overton Window of American discourse, albeit a lot less provocative.Report
Yeah the number of people I’ve argued who’re like “We should be communist like the Scandinavian countries.” is not a pleasingly small number. They absolutely don’t believe me when I point out that the Scandinavians not only are market capitalist economies but that they regulate their businesses less than we do (but tax them more).Report
There’s an entire meme about that, of those two guys arguing and ne throws a chair.
And it works in the other direction too- Scandinavia is consistently rated one of the most free and most prosperous regions on earth, [despite/ because of] their free markets and social welfare system.Report
Absolutely! I’m a huge fan of liberal market democracies with safety nets. Historically they’re the hands down winner for human prospering. Beats the pants off command economies, which were disasters, and libertopias which never even managed to make themselves exist at all.Report
(For both you and InMD.)
It’s worth noting that a huge portion of the Marxist literature, from the 1930s to today (and especially after WWII), in Europe and the United States (often referred to as “Western Marxism”) has been an attempt to understand the failures of Marxism, both in the sense of the failed revolutions (particularly in Germany) and the failures of actual communist states (particularly the Soviet Union). Some of that has looked like a retreat from the political (Adnorno in the U.S., say), some of it has argued that the communist states quickly abandoned and betrayed their Marxist origins (you might call this the “No True Scotsman” argument, but I think it’s more than that), some of it has argued for completely different ways of doing leftism: e.g., a lot of the structuralist and post-structuralist movement was, if not openly anti-Marxist, at least tacitly so; the only people who hate “postmodernism” more than the New Atheist type rationalists are the hard core communists.
All of which is to say, Marxists and other leftists are aware, and while you might get some facile No True Scotsman arguments from young internet leftists, I don’t think it makes much sense to tar the left with their naivety.Report
Hey fair enough. I do want to clarify I didn’t intend to tar anyone as naive or anything else. I would think any serious thinker of a Marxist persuasion would have to grapple with the historical developments and I take you at your word that there are some out there doing that.
What I am saying is that there is a really big hill to climb to try to implement the ideas via any means relying on popular support, the hill didn’t come out of nowhere, and the hill casts a very big shadow over everything in the vicinity.Report
Fascinating, thanks Chris!Report
To be clear, I am not questioning whether, if we took his views alone, Freddie would be on the left; to the left of pretty much all the liberals here, I suspect, even. I’m not even suggesting that the fact that he criticizes liberals/progressives/leftists is bad. Criticizing liberals is one of the favorite pastimes of leftists! I’m all for it.
My criticism here has been toward whom he tailored those criticisms. Someone who wanted to change the behavior of the people they’re criticizing would, of course, tailor them to those people. However, that wasn’t the audience Freddie has, so he’s tailored them to people who aren’t liberals and aren’t interested in making liberals better.
You might say, “No, he hasn’t tailored them to that audience,” or “This is the only audience left to him, no matter what he says,” but I think the existence of people liberals definitely don’t like who make the same criticisms, and often better, who don’t have the same right wing audience Freddie has, suggests that there’s cultivation going on.
So yeah, in evaluating his body of post-hiatus work, I simply don’t care what his positions are and whether he’s a leftist. Yeah, I disagree with some of his criticisms of the liberals/the left, but even that doesn’t matter. What matters is the effects of his criticisms, and frankly, given his audience and the current reactionary backlash to a great deal of positive cultural change, the best defense he or his non-reactionary supporters could give of him right now would be to argue that he has no effect at all.Report
but I think the existence of people liberals definitely don’t like who make the same criticisms, and often better, who don’t have the same right wing audience Freddie has, suggests that there’s cultivation going on
This is why I listen to Skinny Puppy and not Nine Inch Nails.
Trent sold out. He sold out with his first album. He immediately went to “trendy”.
“But isn’t his music good?”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters who is listening to it.”Report
Look, if Trent Reznor had started tailoring his music to the far right, as they were trying to take over the industrial scene, I would also point out that what he was doing was bad.Report
I don’t think he’s tailoring it to them. They’re consuming it, sure. But not because it’s tailored to them. It’s because it’s insightful and accurate enough (as you say, plenty of folks out there are making these criticisms) and fun to read. He’s vitriolic, he’s funny (sometimes), and he’s quotable.
And it makes the criticisms of him based on who consumes him rather than what he’s cooking.Report
Yeah, your only explanation for why his audience is primarily right wing is that a.) he’s good, and b.) liberals don’t like people who criticize them. That seems pretty weak to me, but we’ve gone back and forth for a few days now, so I don’t think we’re ever going to agree on that.Report
Good? Who can say whether he’s “good”. I said he’s vitriolic, funny (sometimes), and quotable.
If I said “he’s good”, you could say “no! He’s bad!” and we’d be stuck. As it is, you have to disagree whether he’s vitriolic, funny (sometimes), or quotable.
And I don’t know whether “liberals” don’t like people who criticize them. I tend to think that they do, so long as the criticisms are useful/easy/flattering.
But we aren’t discussing “liberals”, we’re discussing the “Left”.
The main criticism the “Left” seems to like is “YOU’RE NOT LEFT ENOUGH!!!” and the one they seem to *HATE* is “you’re not effective”. As if it’s about being “effective”.Report
Jaybird, I think you would do better if you understood that Chris thinks media image doesn’t matter because anyone who might be swayed by a negative media portrayal wasn’t going to join The Left Army anyway. He’s not wasting his time on people who need to be coddled and soothed and talked around. He wants believers.Report
There are generally two types of critics: those who disagree with how you’re doing things and why you’re doing them, and those who agree with why you’re doing things, but don’t like how you’re doing them, and want you to do them differently/better so that you can achieve your shared goals.
Freddie says, and I am inclined to believe him, that he falls into the latter camp. His audience, mostly (if not entirely), falls into the former, as do you and Jaybird. Now, if you fall in the second camp, and want the people you’re criticizing to be more effective, you will tend to shape your criticisms in such a way that the first camp, who want the people you’re criticizing to fail, won’t find them as interesting or validating. If, it turns out, your audience is almost entirely made up of people who want the people you’re criticizing to fail, then you are probably doing something wrong.
So no, I don’t want believers. I’m just evaluating Freddie on his own terms, and attempting to give a left perspective, which is pretty much completely absent here otherwise. If I wanted to find believers, I promise you, I’d be doing it elsewhere (except on the left, no one reads Freddie, and few know who he is, so that would be a weird conversation elsewhere).Report
I’m not Freddie’s audience. I just read his writing, occasionally.
“So no, I don’t want believers.”
I’m sure that’s what you believe. But you’re having the same problem that the Left always does, which is that it’s trying to take a concept of political organization that evolved during the Russian Revolution and apply it to a modern high-communication information-economy environment, and you’re just continually focused on building a mass of movement and telling everyone that worrying about an actual plan or goals is something that can be safely put off until later (when you’ll pick whose ideas are going to get implemented and purge out anyone who thinks differently.)
“Now, if you fall in the second camp, and want the people you’re criticizing to be more effective, you will tend to shape your criticisms in such a way that the first camp, who want the people you’re criticizing to fail, won’t find them as interesting or validating.”
How exactly are you supposed to do that when the “first camp” (people who disagree that your ends are desirable) interpret any kind of criticism as supportive?
I mean, the thing is, reactions to any type of criticism as “the Enemy will see this as encouraging” aren’t actually wrong! The Enemy will see internal criticism as infighting, and consider that encouraging! It’s really not possible for that not to happen! Which is why I don’t see the kind of reactions people have to Freddie as well-posed, because they are far less often along the lines of “I consider your criticisms to be fundamentally unsound” and far more often something like “you’re making me look bad in front of dudes who laugh at me.”Report
But you’re having the same problem that the Left always does, which is that it’s trying to take a concept of political organization that evolved during the Russian Revolution and apply it to a modern high-communication information-economy environment, and you’re just continually focused on building a mass of movement and telling everyone that worrying about an actual plan or goals is something that can be safely put off until later (when you’ll pick whose ideas are going to get implemented and purge out anyone who thinks differently.)
Man, if you got all of that from my comments about Freddie, I don’t know what to tell you, except maybe LOL.Report
This also helps make sense of why leftists are so incredibly angry at Freddie, because he’s making people question their belief. And it’s not just Freddie, it’s anyone inside the movement who’s laying criticism out in public, because once you make people start questioning the cause, you make them wonder whether they ought to show up the next time The Cause Calls For Aid.
I mean, it’s like he says, “I disagree with some of his criticisms of the liberals/the left, but even that doesn’t matter. What matters is the effects of his criticisms[.]” It’s not about what he says, it’s about that he’s saying anything at all.Report
Eh, the “Left” has already unpersoned Freddie. They don’t read him. Indeed, they don’t even know who he is.
And those that do are either doing it to demonstrate that not only is he bad, he’s making similar criticisms to other less-well-known authors *OR* they’re demonstrating that they’re not *REALLY* on the “Left”. Merely “liberals” at best and rightwards/downwards from there.Report
Yeah, this is a good way of distorting what I said. I suppose I’ll move on (or talk to people more likely to respond in good faith, even when they disagree).Report
Then I have misunderstood what you’ve said.
Because it comes across as you (and, perhaps, the “Left”) as having beef with Freddie (and I’m not saying it’s not justified!) and giving reasons for your (justified!) beef as moral reasons when, quite honestly, they come across as different kinds of aesthetic criticisms.
I’m not saying that you’re obliged to like him!
But… your criticisms of him aren’t landing. Because different people have different aesthetic tastes.Report
It would be weird to say I have beef with Freddie. It’s not like we interact or some shit, or he pissed me off personally. Among former OTers (I talk to a bunch regularly), I’ve defended his apology, because I think he truly felt (feels) bad about what he did that led to his hiatus.
My criticism is simply that the effects of his post-hiatus works are at worst bad, and at best nothing, and the evidence of that is not that liberals don’t like him — they never have — but that he’s not talking to liberals, he’s talking to, well, you, and you don’t want liberals/progressives/the left broadly or narrowly to succeed.
I don’t particularly care whether that doesn’t bother you; that doesn’t change the fact that it’s manifestly true.
The only counter to this I’ve seen is that he can’t talk to liberals/progressives/the left, because they’ve unpersonned him or whatever. My answer to this is twofold: first, there are almost certainly fewer non-reactionaries who’ve ever known who he is than there are reactionaries who do, so it’s not so much that “the left” unpersonned him than that he was never even a person to them, in the same way that you and I have never been a person to them (because they’ve never heard of us either, in case that’s unclear). Second, the liberals who did know who he was mostly abandoned him pre-hiatus, when he was just an absolutely horrible person to most people who disagreed with him. I don’t mean he was a horrible person because he criticized their ways of doing liberalism; I mean he was a horrible person because he insulted them, accused them of horrible things, etc., that is, because he was just an asshole.
I realize that there were mental health issues that contributed to this assholeness, but even he has said in his apologies that this is not an excuse, and I think he’s right.
So in short, the path to a left/liberal/progressive audience for Freddie, when he published his first book, was very steep. The path to a reactionary audience was significantly less so, if not actually downhill. He chose the latter. He’s suffered the consequences, both in making it pretty much impossible for him to ever be heard by the people he’s criticizing, and in making it inevitable that his reactionary audience would eventually turn on him for not actually being one of them, as they are currently doing.Report
but that he’s not talking to liberals, he’s talking to, well, you, and you don’t want liberals/progressives/the left broadly or narrowly to succeed
But I don’t listen to him because he doesn’t want the “Left” to succeed (just like me!). I listen to him because his criticisms of the “Left” strike me as being in the ballpark of “accurate”.
As for his audience, I happen to be a freeloader. I subscribe, sure… but it’s the “free” one. His real audience is the one that ponies up.
I imagine that those folks in the comments are his audience.
Seriously: Go down his archive and look at any given post of his and see who is in comments.
You will find a bunch of different types that show up. They include people who self-identify as lefty types. I mean, sure, maybe your circle doesn’t give him the time of day but there are plenty of basements out there.Report
“Eh, the “Left” has already unpersoned Freddie. They don’t read him. Indeed, they don’t even know who he is.”
hehehe, yeah. “I care so little about Freddie that I’ll spend the next 2500 words describing exactly how little!”Report
Seems like you think I’m “The Left.” I’m not. I’m one dude. Sorry to disappoint.
I am interested in Freddie for reasons similar to most people here — I was around when he was writing here, and I’ve followed him since, though less closely for the last few years than before. I have always thought he’s a good writer, and sometimes an interesting one, though again, less in the last few years than before.Report
Liberals have always hated Freddie. I know a few people here are long-time LGM commenters, and probably remember how Freddie commenting there would produce a flood of vitriol.
I think back then you could legitimately claim that one of the two big reasons they disliked him was because he was criticizing them (the other being that he was a giant asshole, as a person). I don’t think, post-hiatus, you can really claim that. He chose his audience, and he’s cultivated it. If he wanted to start talking to liberals again, he could easily do so, and frankly, I think he might be headed in that direction given the way he’s starting to alienate his current audience on trans rights and Palestine. I don’t know if he’ll ever actually have as large of a non-reactionary audience as the reactionary one he’s had, but I would respect him for trying, given that’s whose behavior he wants to see change.Report
“If he wanted to start talking to liberals again, he could easily do so”
Hah. So you’re ready to accept him just as soon as he comes crawling back and admits that he was wrong all along?Report
Sure, that’s what I said.Report
“Anyway, I think the question of why he attracted an audience of pretty much the worst people is important, because it says something about the impact of his arguments, and that impact is all that really matters to me.”
Do those “pretty much the worst people” actually read what he writes and take it seriously?
Or do they just say they do because they enjoy seeing you get mad about it?Report
Heh, “puzzled” and “perplexed” the White House is.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4554624-white-house-netanyahu-delegation-dc/
The White House on Monday said it was puzzled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to cancel a delegation meeting in Washington after the U.S. abstained from a U.N. Security Council vote calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
“We’re kind of perplexed by this,” national security communications adviser John Kirby said when asked for President Biden’s reaction to the decision.Report
Since Israel doesn’t hold a permanent member seat with a veto, I guess they were figuring their benefactors would always cover for their actions. And the US always figured Israel could take a hint.
Go figure.Report
Sure. I’m chuckling over the puzzled and perplexed part.
But, say what you will about the Russians and Chinese, at least they always knew how to use the veto for allies.Report
One of Russia’s most notorious acts in recent years is dropping the Armenians like hot garbage because it was no longer convenient to support them.
In Israel’s case, America loses more credibility by not disciplining Tel Aviv than backing them. Netanyahu has been openly defying their patron’s wishes for his own personal political gain and Washington very much needs to demonstrate that a rogue client doesn’t keep getting milk and cookies.
Israel is an American client, not an ally and the differences need to be made abundantly clear.Report
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think Israel is a client (anymore)… at least not in the way you’re implying… that’s a big error if part of our calculations.
I also think reflexively targeting Netanyahu as somehow a focal point of bad policy vis-a-vis the war is also a mistake… there’s no Israeli ‘peace party’ and I don’t think Israel is amenable to the ‘hints’ being dropped with or without Netanyahu.
But if Biden wants to go full discipline on the ‘rogue client’ Israel in an election year? Well, there will be much else about which to be puzzled and perplexed.Report
There isn’t an Israeli peace party. There’s an Israeli “the settlements are a strategic disaster and catering to them is leading us to ruin” party. Senior IDF and Israeli intelligence services tends to be in that camp and they are effectively the Israeli center to center-left at this point.
The problem isn’t that the Israeli’s are in their hearts peaceniks but for their evil leader. Its that the war is being fought in a counterproductive way because strategy is based on the PM’s personal need to be prosecuted, which means strategic effort isn’t being focused on Hamas or defense of Israel proper, but to use Oct 7 as cover to expand the West Bank settlements.
And the United States needs to flex against this, because Tel Aviv has made the call that they can get the US and its close allies to spend tons of diplomatic capital to cover their bets due to internal political influence despite Israeli goals going against Western Alliance goals.Report
There used to be an Israeli peace party but it got discredited really fast after Ehud Barak’s offer was rejected without even a counter-offer. As for the Palestinians, there isn’t an even a Palestinian Gerry Adams let alone a Palestinian peace party. Most of Palestinian leadership believes that they can take on Israel and destroy it, sending the Jews home. They are egged on by other people.Report
That may be true, but it’s in many ways irrelevant to the western alliance – Government of Israel dynamics. What’s happening right now today is that Netanyahu’s government expects their western patrons to undermine their wider strategic and diplomatic positions all to expand the West Bank settler movement.
This relationship, where allied states continue to take bullets for the narrow political gain of venal Israeli politicians for no tangible strategic gain cannot be sustained long term. It may precipitate a complete collapse in Israel’s diplomatic position if opinion shifts to the point that Israel is too expensive to be worth backing anymore.Report
I’m in basic agreement but I don’t like that all these freaking anti-Semites are going to get away with this because of numbers. The settlements are a liability, they need to go but the sheer ability of the world to handle all the hypocrisy of the Palestinians or really wider Muslim world because there are 2 billion of them and 15 million of us is digusting.
I am feeling rather lonely as a Jew these day. You have the white supremacist on the right that just go on and on about how Jews are evil for the reasons the Right always held we are evil. On the Left, you have a sort of stategic silence because a quarter to a half of the Diversity Coalition doesn’t want to include Jews at all in their party. Jews should return to defensive communalism but you have too many Jews who can’t realize the danger we are in and believe they will be safe because they hold “correct” anti-Zionist opinions or think we can ecumenical interfaith talk our way out of this.Report
I dunno, maybe for a good place to start you should try to make amends to the Republican Party, as a credible gesture to repudiate all the elections in your adult lifetime where you’ve happily voted for the Hamas party.Report
Jews are under siege globally and we have no allies.Report
None that are high status, anyway.Report
I am probably going to regret this but who are these alleged low-status allies that we have? Without even going into differences in belief, the Evangelicals have some rather uncomfortable allies in the Further Right from the Jewish perspective in the form of outright White Supremacists.Report
This is one of those things where you’re seeing all of the “outgroup” as homogenous and you shouldn’t.
Try to be a little more open minded.Report
Yes, that’s the thing about the Israeli/Palestinian thing… very puzzling and perplexing and neither side ever does what we can see is clearly in their best interests.Report
I think Brent F. is spot on about this. I’m puzzled why you’d consider it a good thing, for Israel, that Bibi is steadily moving the question of Israel from a near universally (supportive) held position to a partisan one?Report
Yea, to the extent Israel fits into US/Western geopolitical strategy it’s something like ‘be a cornerstone of an anti-Iranian axis with the Saudis and gulf monarchies.’ Putting aside the wisdom of the strategy, Netanyahu’s approach to the war may have set it back years or more. I also read the puzzled/perplexed a little bit differently. I think what’s puzzling is that the Israelis haven’t gotten the message and are continuing to escalate in an increasingly fraught relationship with their biggest benefactor.Report
I don’t think its puzzling at all, its a matter of domestic politics being more important to politicians than foreign relationships and the Netanyahu belief that the United States is “easy to move.”
That’s why America and friends signaling is important, because taking steps that seriously communicate that the relationship is at risk is how you change the Israeli domestic politics.Report
Yeah the “puzzling” language is a nice little bowtie. A nicety to pretty up something rather sharp. In this case the bowtie is on the neck of a severed horsehead that’s being delivered to Israel’s’ doorstep.Report
Well they’re kind of stuck. The Israeli’s hate Bibi right now and want him gone but none of the members of his government are willing to precipitate a new election. The centrists due to there being a war going on and the right wingers due to knowing they’d lose in a landslide if the election were held now. And Netanyahu’s hope is to keep the war going and escalate matters enough with the US that he can market himself as the only person capable of defending Israel from foreign pressure. I’d say it’s a long shot but it’s the only shot he’s got and if that puts Israel in a worse position, well his responsibility is to Netanyahu first and Israel second (maybe- I’m being generous in assuming that).Report
I think you’re right. And re-reading my comment I probably wasn’t totally clear. I meant I read the ‘perplexed’ statement as a
subtle shot at Netanyahu from the Biden admin.Report
Gotta admit, I’m not seeing this one. Israel and the USA are in diplomatic tension because of the lib-nasties here in America.
I’m not getting the thing about Netanyahu’s political capital. I think that’s wrong, and more to the point, we should be hoping it’s wrong.
The nasties here in America oppose the settlements of course, but the juice in the issue is the support for Hamas in Gaza.
Netanyahu is trying to comprehensively defeat Hamas in Gaza. That’s also a very strong hegemonic consensus position in Israel. If somehow, that gets to be identified as Bibi’s partisan interest, all that means is that Bibi will be around for a long time.
Contra Brent and lots of American libs, there’s nothing really that Biden or the USA in general can threaten Israel with that will make Israel forgo a victory over Hamas if that appears to be plausible in Gaza.Report
Yes, at the end of the day Israel is a sovereign nation and can do what it wants. It’s not like we’re going to militarily intervene. What the US doesn’t have to do is shield Israel from the consequences of its own actions and it certainly doesn’t have to help Israel at the expense of our own strategic goals in the region.
The current priority for America in the ME is containing Iran. Israel can be a productive part of that but it requires rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Monarchies. That isn’t possible while this is going on and it may not be possible in the near future if Israel goes complete scorched Earth for no reason other than to prolong Netanyahu’s political survival.Report
I don’t see why not. This was the conventional wisdom among a number of libs and foreign policy establishment types say 10-15 years ago, subsequently repudiated by the Trump Administration and the Abraham Accords.
The diplomatic progress of that time occurred against the backdrop of increasing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which was a finger in the eye of the Arab ME nation-states but push comes to shove not really very important.
Israel is going scorched earth on Gaza as a matter of enormous vital Israeli national security interest, not Bibi’s partisan interest (it may or may not be that as well).
Frankly, I don’t know how this could possibly be any plainer.
It’s also worth mentioning that the American national interest there is opposed to Palestinian nationalism for basically the same reasons that it’s opposed to Iranian expansionism.
Of course, as things stand preventing Iran expansionism is more important than anything dealing with Palestine by orders of magnitude. So if there were a tradeoff to be made we could concede Palestinian terrorism in order to prevent Iran expansionism. But in reality there is no meaningful tradeoff there so we might as well stop both.
Finally, it has to be pointed out, that the main reason why Iran is a much bigger priority than Palestine is that Palestine is very very weak and Iran is not, at least in relative terms. And a very big part of that is that Iran is a nation-state and Palestine is not. Therefore, it is a substantial national interest of the United States that Palestine not become a nation state, so as to prevent the problems there that we currently have to deal wrt Iran.Report
I think the possibility of the Saudis and Gulf states moving forward with anything while this is ongoing are slim to none and that it will likely remain the same for some time after the dust settles. It’s just qualitatively different than the slow strangle in the West Bank.
I also think your analysis of the geopolitical situation is backwards. The question of Palestinian statehood isn’t per se relevant to American security or any other interest. Hell, Israeli security isn’t relevant to American security or any other interest. They’re a proxy not an ally. The only reason this matters from a US perspective is the extent to which our proxy who is supposed to support our interests in exchange for our largesse actually undermines us by failing to keep a lid on its little localized ethnic cleansing project.
Point being they do what we say or no weapons and UN vetoes. If they don’t want to do what we say, well, fine, that’s their call but we don’t owe them anything and we only look weak by letting the tail wag the dog.Report
Oh no. Not at all. Let’s stipulate for a moment that the US and Israel have no common purpose, something that I’m sympathetic to though maybe not always entirely true.
What we clearly do have, though, is common enemies. Palestinian nationalists, Iran, and crucially important for us, pro-Palestinian terror simps here in the US.
This isn’t to say that we can’t prioritize, or make tradeoffs when necessary or appropriate.
But if there’s no tradeoff, what’s the point? It seems to me to be more likely that by defeating our enemies in one place we diminish them everywhere.
Geopolitically, India has played the non-aligned game for 50 years, maybe 80. Always looking to play the middle against both ends. India is not Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, Eqyptians, Jordanians have very good, clear reasons to be on the other side of Iran, and therefore with us and Israel.
It will be embarrassing for them if Israel cleans house in Gaza without any meaningful intervention from the nearby Arab states, but it doesn’t change the geopolitical lay of the land for any of those countries.Report
The Palestinians aren’t our friends. No one in the Arab world is, and I think people that hold the belief that deep down they’re all secret Westerners ready to embrace our way of life are hopelessly naive.
But that doesn’t mean they’re our enemies either. The Palestinians have a specific beef with Israel over territory. We only figure into it as Israel’s sponsor, and our sponsorship of Israel is only worthwhile to the extent Israel advances American interests.
Now, I take your point that there are larger geopolitical reasons that one would assume put the predominantly Sunni states at odds with Iran over the long term. Maybe that is enough that they will come back to the table with Israel sooner than we think. However even then time isn’t frozen. While all of this is on hold Iran and its regional proxies are strengthening their positions. It’s also a mistake to think that just because facts were conducive to a deal for one moment means they will be in the next. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that a deal put on hold never comes to fruition. This history of the region is full of instances where that has happened. Which is why it’s completely appropriate for the US to lean on Israel right now to wrap this up and move to the next stage.Report
Oh yes they are. It’s useful to note, at least for me, that it really doesn’t have that much to do with Israel, and I don’t really consider myself a particularly Israeli-philic American.
But back to the Palestinians. Politically speaking, Palestinians are Hamas, who are terrorists, and Fatah/PA, who are also terrorists. Therefore, politically speaking, Palestinians are all terrorists, and it is in the US national interest that terrorists lose.
That was before October 7. The Hamas attack on Oct 7 and related atrocities were so evil, so obscene, so repulsive to any kind of humane life, that it must be repudiated as a matter of urgent public order.
The idea that anybody could possibly give a shyt about what Palestinians might think is unfair regarding some land beef with the Israelis, now, after Oct 7, it’s absolutely ridiculous and disgusting.
As to the bigger picture, again, if there is a tradeoff that has to be made in US national interest, then OK fine, do it you have to. But it’s not the sort of thing that we should be doing if we don’t have to.
Preventing things like Oct 7 is in a very large way the purpose of our statecraft in the first place. It’s why we want to contain Iran, Russia, China and other bad actors. It’s not at prudent or savvy to concede our deepest values right from the get-go absent a situation of dire necessity.
Regarding Iran and geopolitics, I concede that what you’re talking about is hypothetically possible. I haven’t seen any indication at all that it is actually true.
I also have another particular reason to be skeptical of your theory. From say, 2005-2015, the libs and a large portion of the foreign policy establishment believed that Israel, and the settlements in particular, were the underlying cause of conflict in the ME. That theory was bullshyt, in particular bullshyt that was repudiated by the Abraham Accords. Israel is a burr under the saddle no doubt. But it is not the fundamental cause of conflict in the ME. The fundamental cause of conflict is Arab/Islamic society-level dysfunction. In order to make progress in the ME, that’s what has to be addressed.
So, your idea that Iran geopolitics means we have rein in the Israelis, for me that’s the same as what the foreign policy establishment believed from 2005-2015. They were wrong then, and I don’t see anything meaningfully different now.
Finally, it’s also useful to know, that the path to progress represented by the Abraham Accords, is not about pretending that the nation-states in the ME are Western democracies waiting to break out. It’s about isolating bad actors, specifically Iran, and denying the strategic and diplomatic ambiguity to benefit from chaos at the regional level, without making unrealistic demands for reform inside any nation state.Report
By deciding they are necessarily an enemy I think you are making a similar kind of mistake as those that believe that the Arabs are all deep down yearning for democracy. After the post 9/11 debacles in the ME I’ve come to think those views are almost two sides of the same coin.
What we learned over there in Iraq and the other theaters is that, whatever their rhetoric, their primary focus is in regional blood feuds between tribe and sect. So sure they’ll rail against America and the West on the internet but at the end of the day they’d rather be killing their neighbors over some obscure heresy or tribal vendetta than messing around with us.
The settlements are just another example of this kind of conflict, and it doesn’t matter that its Jews and Arabs rather than different sects of Islam. The region drags everyone to its mean. We are the ones that by projecting our own values into their fundamentally different and less developed views of these things turn their molehills into our mountains with corresponding waste of time, attention, and resources.
To further lay my cards on the table, for purposes of this conversation I’ve assumed that the powers that be have made an accurate assessment of the risk posed by Iran. From my perspective I am not sure that they have, and especially in light of American near energy independence it is far from clear to me that it should matter to us whether Shiite theocrats or Sunni monarchies dominate the region.
However the powers that be disagree with me on that point and think we need to be in this game. While I wish people would finally realize none of this is remotely existential to America, but if we’re in this game then we need to play it to win, not because we think we’re on some side in this fight and that the Israelis are also on that side. They’re in it for themselves just as we should be (again, if we have to be in it at all).Report
The settlements maybe, but not Oct 7. I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest to pretend that Oct 7 is one of those things that just happens.Report
The Kurds against everyone for the last century.Report
Given the cascade of errors in judgment, QI reform would not likely have altered this outcome.
https://www.kcur.org/news/2024-03-25/a-missouri-police-sniper-killed-a-2-year-old-girl-why-did-he-take-the-shotReport
Do you think it would have done better than burning down bodegas and demanding the police be defunded?Report
Ironically, we do need to spend more or probably just adjust fundings…but on training, and force cops to get college degrees, like in many European countries.
Make the Police PMC’s
But the issue, is most of the current police don’t want that. They want to be unaccountable, and will silent strike if need be, and people like you will defend that because some people with blue hair said some mean things about the police.Report
I’ve been calling for stuff like abolishing police unions, Jesse. I’ve been calling for stuff like cops to be tried if they can’t be fired.
It’s the people who tell me “Ending QI isn’t a silver bullet” who get to explain why the identity of Sniper 1 remains a mystery. They’re the one who defend his still being on the police force with “At least he’s not still on SWAT!”
Not too late to give up hope. Maybe you can fix this by throwing a homemade Molotov into an empty police cruiser!Report
F that sideways. Cops cost way too much as it is.Report
More random musings based on a certain conflict in the Middle East but with broader applicability. Has it ever occurred to you that humans don’t really live in the same world? I was walking around Oakland with my girlfriend and we stopped at several book stores. This being Oakland, the books on the I/P conflict generally took the side of the Palestinians. They printed a rather different telling of Israel than what I grew up with but it all seemed still a bit much.
There seems to be a tendency on the Further Left to want to depict Israel as the European expansion into the Americas with the accompanying destruction of the Native Americans, the European colonial empires, you know what Germany, and Apartheid South Africa/French Algeria rolled into one. Very little or no mention is made about the persecution that Jews faced in Europe or the Ottoman Empire and Iran and that led to the rise of Zionism or that the Jews who migrated to Israel/Palestine between 1881 to 1939 faced certain death of they remained in Europe. Its like reading a very bizarro version of history that leaves out key elements of the story. Even if you don’t really like Israel, presenting it as the MOST EVIL COUNTRY that ever existed seems strange. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are basically all the people of color in the world wronged by white people rolled into one.
The implications of this line of thought are not great. If Israel is really that evil than Israelis need to be forced to do justice to the Palestinians by the rest of the world. If Israel faces that amount of force, they are going to fight right back. It is basically the anti-Semitic telling of the Jews as the all powerful malevolent force while simultaneously being weak pushovers. What seems worse is that if you try explaining this very carefully to anti-Israel people, they seem genuinely confused. They don’t get it. We see this with the current Israel-Hamas War and how they just can’t bring themselves to mention the Simchat Torah massacre by Hamas because that would mean at least a faction of the Palestinians bears some responsibility for the current mess. So they create an alternative reality of Simchat Torah massacre trutherism.
It is amazing humans managed to do so much by negotiation and diplomacy when we can’t even agree on a common chronology more often than not.Report
The bulk of Palestinians are now paying a very heavy humanitarian price for the actions of a fraction. Just as the bulk of Israeli’s continue to pay a heavy price for the actions of a fraction. And?Report
I was talking about the various Pro-Palestinian people outside the Palestinians with the bizarre mindset that doesn’t conform to any factual history.Report
The same thing could be said about many supporters of Israel. Pointing that out gets you accused of anti-Semitism however.Report
I am sick of their bizarro world where the Simchat Torah massacre never happened and Israel just got up and decided to wage war against Hamas for no reason on October 8th. They could at least acknowledge that the Simchat Torah massacre happened rather indulge in their diabolical and devilish trutherism if they think the response is disproportionate or wrong.Report
And we are growing weary of the “Israel can do no wrong” response. That massacre was horrid. It did not occur in a vacuum.Report
The_Informant is reporting that TMZ is reporting that Fox is reporting that Officials are reporting that the Los Angeles home of Sean “Diddy” Combs was raided by Homeland Security Monday in connection with a federal sex trafficking investigation.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/26/entertainment/sean-diddy-combs-home-raids-investigation-tuesday/index.htmlReport
From The Telegraph:
Senior US journalist attacks leading scientists for ‘misleading’ him over Covid lab-leak theory
The entire story is fascinating.
Richard H. Ebright has strong, strong opinions about it. Read his entire twitter thread. It’s worth it:
Report
“The messages showed that in the weeks before publication the scientists had acknowledged that a laboratory leak was a possibility but were concerned about upsetting the Chinese.
Some of the messages also showed the researchers discussing how to respond to queries from Mr McNeil Jr about the origins of the virus.
Mr McNeil Jr emailed both Prof Rambaut and Prof Andersen on 6 February 2020 over a tip off that the government was trying to investigate the possibility the virus was made in a lab in Wuhan.
The scientists shared his emails on messaging platform Slack, with Professor Robert Garry writing Mr McNeil Jr was “very credible but like any reporter can be mislead [sic]”.”
“Prof Andersen added. “Let’s not tell him.” They told him the rumours were “demonstrably false” and 10 days later published Proximal Origins.”
There ya go. That’s lie number two in this whole fiasco, by my count, so far.Report
“If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”Report
AI is freaking me out again. Went here to generate a song: https://app.suno.ai/create/
I asked for a “A 90’s trip-hop song about being tired but going on anyway”
The lyrics are doggerel. But. The song is pretty darn good for taking 30 seconds and being written by a computer.
https://app.suno.ai/song/3e04aff8-f1b3-4d28-bfa5-0b44f3e54f47Report
I had it write a song about Rumpus called “Chubby Kitty” and it could be the American translation of the opening theme song from a Japanese anime about a tubby tom.
https://app.suno.ai/song/ac9e40c2-c225-41bf-bd68-ea991838023eReport
Here’s another one you might find amusing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMCCCvfaVeIReport
I had to spend a minute looking to confirm that they were AI. Holy cow.
I mean… I haven’t encountered anything that would make Rick Rubin say “yeah, sign these guys” after hearing it but the fact that we’ve gone from nothing to “I could see this being used as the intro to a children’s cartoon” in 3 years? 4 years? Is a mixture of wonderful and terrifying.Report
After an online discussion about browser user scripts to defeat the efforts of bad designers to make content ugly and unreadable, an acquaintance fed a short description into one of the code-generating AIs. The resulting script loaded and ran on Greasemonkey/Firefox/Linux. No errors showed up on the browser console. The code did what the description said it would. It chose reasonable values for the arbitrary constants it needed.
Some years ago I wrote a script to do similar things. The overall structure is more complicated because I had to do things to offset browser behavior that caused performance problems. The AI script is straightforward and doesn’t address those issues. It is entirely possible that between when I wrote mine and now the browser has gotten smarter and fixed those problems.
One of these days I’m going to simply a copy of my script, taking out the performance hacks, and see how it runs.Report
Here’s what has me worried. You know how you get a Level 4 Engineer?
You take a Level 3 and throw him (or her) into the deep end.
How do you get a Level 3?
Well, you take a Level 2…
And how do you get a Level 2?
Well, you start with a Level 1.
And you get Level 1s from the pool of younguns who have only recently started being old enough to vote and who call Mister Brightside “that old song that my mom likes”.
If you don’t have any Level 1s, soon you won’t have any Level 2s. Sometimes after that, you’re not going to have any Level 3s.
Anyway, now we have AI capable of producing mediocre songs suitable for cartoons.Report
Interestingly the father of one of my son’s classmates is a major enthusiast on this issue. So much so that he is now teaching a course in AI at the school on a volunteer basis in the hopes that introducing it at a K-8 level will eventually result in Level 1s who are masters of the AI as a tool just like a calculator or anything else. I have nowhere near the technical skill to comment on whether there is any merit to this concept, but there’s at least one guy I know in actual meat space out there trying.Report
Using it as a tool means a couple of things:
1. Knowing how to ask the AI for what you want
2. Knowing how to work around the stupid handcuffs that the stupid AI trainers put on it once they realized that people would ask for stuff like “OJ Simpson being a knife thrower for a carnival act” into the “draw me a picture” AI tool and we can’t have that.Report
Yea, I have similar qualms when people talk about the possibility of these LLMs showing up to take attorney jobs. And maybe one will arrive some day with its phase plasma rifle in a 40 watt range, kick down my door, and say ‘look into my sensors… I am the lawyer now.’
But your point 2 gets to about half of the reason I think that kind of revolution is still far off. In my industry I’ve been listening to people for 15 years saying AI or machine learning, or whatever, is going to revolutionize healthcare in similar ways. Problem 1 is that the quality of the data out there is inconsistent, often really bad, and the cost of cleaning it is so high no one wants to do it. It may not even be cost effective, certainly not in the short term. The quality of the input severely limits the quality of the output, no matter how much information you put in or how fast you do it.
The second issue is related to your point 2. Forget the matter of sensibilities. Where there is money it is usually to create systems towards some narrow commercial purpose that may work to the benefit of whoever is paying for it, but rarely money for the kind of neutral tool (to say nothing of greater good) model that would actually constitute a major advance. A lot of what you end up with are glorified marketing capabilities, or mirrors designed to say that the end user is the fairest of them all. Something like that isn’t going to kick too many people out of jobs that require actual skill and critical thinking, and the level of effort to advance beyond that is still really high, to say nothing of the cost.Report
I *do* wonder how many hours of unrecognizable screeching the people presenting “AI music” have thrown away. I recall learning that all of those wonderfully zany “we put every Pokemon name into an AI and asked it to generate new ones” listicles were curated and all the gibberish removed. So it’s not yet like we’re at “push button, get product”.Report
I have heard similar stuff.
The one you shared was entertaining, regardless of how much curation it took. So far it is a cool toy, with some rudimentary useful functions. Maybe one day it will be more than that.Report
We’re not yet at “push button, get *GOOD* product”.
We’re merely at “push button, get mediocre product”.
But try it out! You get five songs free!
Ask for an Irish folk song about eating too much at a fast food restaurant!
A heavy metal song about standing in line at the state fair!
A 1970’s funk song about the characters from the Wizard of Oz going to a car wash!
“Yeah, but it’s not as good as if Wayne Brady was doing it” is a criticism of that, I guess. But not all of us have access to Wayne Brady.Report
And honestly, the issue with AI for me is not that the top-end artists will be replaced by robots; it’s that the jobbers will be replaced by robots, the people whose whole career was writing jingles and doing backgrounds and making corporate-lobby artwork installations and advertising copy. The ones who couldn’t get much better than mediocre, but they never were asked to be.
Kind of more of that “hollowing out the middle” that’s a theme of the modern economy.
And maybe you’re thinking “well hey, that’s just the fate of the mediocre, to be replaced by less-expensive providers of the same service”, and that’s not a wrong way to look at it, but it also means that a bunch of people who were doing creative work, however mediocre, are now being told “your services are not required but the reduction of overall societal cost of operation means your dole card buys even more now”. And maybe we want to think about whether that is the story we want to tell.Report
Excepting the occasional prodigy like Mozart, the majority of the top-end artists spent some time being mediocre on their way to being good.
Mediocre is a pit stop.
We might be able to tune AI to be capable of making stuff that is pretty good. Maybe even something that would make Rubin sit up in his chair.
But we won’t make people who do that. Why would we need to?
Well… chicks, I guess.
Until we get AI capable of delivering an Elvis. And I don’t mean the songs.Report
OTOH, I maintain that there will always be bad or mediocre human-produced art, it just won’t be commercial.
I’m a hack, and I know it. I have five known fans: two granddaughters, two kids, and a woman I’ve known since graduate school. When granddaughter #3 is a bit older, she may also be a fan. Based on my experience with granddaughter #1, the AIs have a long way to go until they can respond to “Why doesn’t your dragon lady have legs, Grandpa?”
http://www.mcain6925.com/ordinary/little-monsters-tea.png
Retirees will continue to paint bad watercolors, and do bad landscape sketches, because it’s much more satisfying than telling an AI, “Start from this picture and do a landscape sketch. No, make the lines more irregular. No, make the steeple blue, not green. No, the leaves are too realistic.”Report
“I maintain that there will always be bad or mediocre human-produced art, it just won’t be commercial.”
I’m not talking about people who do art as a hobby, I’m talking about people who do art for a living.
I mean, as Jaybird points out, even good artists usually pay the bills doing mediocre stuff. And one of the reasons they can take the time to be good artists is that they can pay the bills with the same process they use for that good stuff. So if we take away that line of income, there’s probably quite a few who’ll say “well I’d like to make art, but after working exactly thirty-six hours at Burger King and exactly thirty-six hours at Taco Bell I just don’t have the time or the energy…”Report
Author Joanna Maciejewska makes a good point:
Report
Unfortunately, since people fought literally for decades to say that Copying People’s Stuff Without Asking Or Paying Is OK So Long As You Don’t Try To Sell The Result, we’re now in a place where it’s actually easier for an AI to do art and writing than it is for an AI to do dishes or laundry.Report
Well, there’s also the whole thing where AI’s interactions are (theoretically) limited to that of “disembodied voice”.
Even a poltergeist could open a cupboard.
If all you have is a voice, you’re pretty much going to be useless when it comes to laundry.
Maybe you could help sort.
“That is an earth-tone t-shirt. Place it in the blue basket. That is a flannel nightgown. Place it in the white basket. That is a single white sock. Place it in the blue basket. That is a bathtowel. Place it in the green basket.”
And now I’m triggered.Report
“Problem 1 is that the quality of the data out there is inconsistent, often really bad, and the cost of cleaning it is so high no one wants to do it. It may not even be cost effective, certainly not in the short term. The quality of the input severely limits the quality of the output, no matter how much information you put in or how fast you do it.”
I am front row to seeing if this next wave of software/ai/compute will work — it might, actually. Natural Language processing and data quality are merging and emerging via ai and gpu’s. It’s ‘working’ in poc’s.
Probably just 10-years away…Report
Sam Bankman-Fried gets sentenced today. He *COULD* get 110 years in prison (along the lines of Madoff who got 150) but it’s more likely that he won’t.
The question seems to be whether he’ll get a Skilling (14 years) an Ebbers (25 years) or a Stewart (7 months).
I’m thinking Ebbers.Report
One of my pet peeves with crime and courthouse reporting is that journalists so often add up the maximum sentences for each count, run them consecutively, and breathlessly report that Defendant X could face up to XXX years in prison. The defendants almost never do, usually for excellent reasons.
There are lots of lawyers (not including me) who know the federal sentencing guidelines, where applicable, and the general sentencing practices in courts where they are not, who could either be a legal talking head or advise the on-air reporter about the realistic exposure. But hardly anyone does that. It would be work.Report
Good guess:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/dethroned-crypto-king-sam-bankman-fried-to-be-sentenced-for-defrauding-ftx-investors/Report
Most of Sam’s victims got most of their money back and have lost a couple of years worth of investments. Madoff’s victims got a lot less of their money back and lost decades worth of investments. The difference in opportunity cost is amazing.
There’s also the issue that Sam was operating in the lightly (if that) regulated wild west while Madoff was a legit businessman with a legit rep in a heavily regulated space.Report
ABC corresponded CeFaan Kim reports that a guy who punched a 57-year old woman in the face is not bail eligible and, therefore, will be released. “Has 7 prior arrests.”
The woman claims that the attack was unprovoked.
Various people are asking stuff like “why isn’t this guy going to prison?” and “why aren’t bystanders doing anything?” but, well, you know.Report
The NYPD has tweeted that they’ve arrested the guy again.
We’ll see if he’s let out again.Report
You (general, society, you) can
1 Get him treatment for whatever issues he has, and support him until he can get well and support himself (going on a limb thinking that when he’s not punching ladies, he’s not working 9-5 as senior accountant in a midsize construction company, or even as an assistant manager in a Dunkin Donuts franchise). Let’s call it the good solution.
2. Change the laws and get him in prison for the rest of his natural life. Let’s call it the quick solution.
3. Let him go.
Options 1 or 2 are fairly expensive. 2 probably more than 1 but I haven’t run the numbers. Which makes Option 3 the cheap solution. (*)
Now what do you, personal you, Jaybird, think we should do. Me, I’d go for option 1, and I’m willing to pay the additional taxes to fund it. But our US society is very reluctant to pay to solve social problems. Other societies mileage vary and their results vary too.
(*)Someone should make a catch phrase to describe these kind of conundrums, a triangle of something, something strong and rigid. The uncooked spaghetti triangle perhaps?)Report
What’s the downside to #3? It’s cheap and almost everybody won’t be affected at all.Report
Is that your answer?Report
My answer is something closer to “put him in jail until he is no longer able to break jaws”.
But if that’s absurd on its face, why not just continue to let him go free? It’s what we’ve done so far and the overwhelming majority of NYC hasn’t been hit in the face.Report
Have you bothered to ask why he is being released?
Can you explain it to us?Report
Sure. It’s officially a misdemeanor that isn’t considered bad enough to require bail now that bail reform has gone through.
Since it’s a misdemeanor, he gets to go free until his trial date.Report
OK.
So your proposal is that anytime anyone punches someone in the face, they should be arrested and held without bail until their trial?Report
When it comes to this very particular case involving unprovoked attacks on 57 year old women by recidivists?
Yeah, I’m down with that.
Are you against it?Report
So your proposal is that the NYPD should consult with Jaybird everytime someone punches someone in the face so Jaybird can decide if they are eligible for bail?
Or is there some general rule you would like them to follow for determining bail?Report
“Take recidivism into account”.
“But that isn’t what bail is for! Bail is just for whether someone will show up for their court date and that’s it!”
“Yes. We’ve discussed that before. I believe that bail should take recidivism into account.”
“But that’s not what bail is for.”
Yes… we’ve discussed that before.”Report
You’ve kind of answered your own question then.
If this guy had been given bail and posted it, would things have turned out differently for that poor woman he attacked?
Would you still be posting this as outrage-bait, and declaring that Something Must Be Done?Report
I’m pretty sure that the seven prior arrests, if taken into account, would have made bail prohibitively large at some point prior.
Would you still be posting this as outrage-bait, and declaring that Something Must Be Done?
I’m more declaring that something is going to be done.
And it’s going to be somewhat more unpleasant than the previous status quo on bail.Report
We are supposed to have rules and live with the consequences of those rules.
If you think the rule is all people accused of misdemeanors are to rot in jail until their trial is over, then let’s start building a lot more jails, and pay the taxes to pay for that.
The rule can’t be bail except for people that don’t deserve bail because they are bad people. Or don’t deserve bail because they are mentally ill, or don’t deserve bail because reasons.
Notable that option 2, jail, was more attractive to you than option 1, to try psychological treatment. Me, I prefer to try and get the guy to stop punching ladies. Your go to preference is instead punishment. Even though punishment in this particular case solves nothing, and will likely be more expensive.
And of course if he was actually a senior accountant in a mid size construction company he would post bail (can’t be too much in this particular case) and he will be as free as he is now.
Many people in America treat poverty as a sign of underlying immorality or sin, and not being poor as proof of a clean and moral life. I hope it’s not the case here.Report
I prefer to try and get the guy to stop punching ladies
Sequestration strikes me as more likely to work than therapy.
Like, sequestration would work 100%. I can guarantee that it would prevent something like this from happening.
Therapy? I can see how therapy could work but I can also see how it might not.
There’s an old joke about two social scientists finding a bloodied body in the bushes and one saying “we need to help the guy who did this!”
The joke was, I guess, that that was a strawman.
Welp. Here we are.Report
So… #2! Why didn’t you just say that?Report
I did!
My answer is something closer to “put him in jail until he is no longer able to break jaws”.
As it is, it looks like the official policy is #3.
Which doesn’t strike me as preferable to #2.Report
So…
Your proposed solution is that after a few misdemeanors, people should be locked up for life.
I’m not even arguing, I’m just trying to clarify that this is in fact, the proposal.Report
No, just until their trial. (Also, violent assault being a misdemeanor is kinda effed up too.)
How many violent assaults are okay?
I’m thinking “fewer”.Report
So it isn’t even bail you want, its just “pre-trial imprisonment for anyone with prior misdemeanor convictions”.Report
Worse than that. Enough arrests, pre-trial, would get me there.Report
But you can understand now, why people say your political orientation is on the extreme end of conservatism?Report
“Put the guy who punched the 57 year old woman in jail” is the moderate position, Chip.Report
I’m not even arguing against your position, just noting that locking people up without a trial or bail because of their prior misdemeanor convictions is the opposite of Enlightenment thinking about the presumption of innocence.Report
The law presumes innocence. And I would hope that his defense attorney would explain that to the jury before the trial.
That said, there is video of the woman being punched in the face.
This is something that happened. You’d be better off arguing “what proof is there that the police arrested the correct guy?” rather than “I can’t believe you want violent people sequestered away”.Report
Yes, I understand the conservative position.
I’m just saying that’s what this is.Report
I dunno guys. I think the idea that it’s either police state crack down or letting people walk around public transit committing violent attack after violent attack while their case is pending is a false choice.
NYC subway and DC metro are very different beasts but we’ve had a visible security surge on metro down here after a spate of incidents post covid and general deterioration of the safety situation. It doesn’t seem crazy that NYC should do the same (not sure if the highly publicized national guard thing accomplishes that or not). I’d also be curious if there isn’t a public safety component to determining bail eligibility in NYC. Maybe one of our NY attorneys can enlighten us. If there is it would be interesting to find out why it hasn’t been applied in these cases that go viral. If I was an NY tax payer I’d want to know.Report
With the information we have, which might be click bait wrong, the obvious issue is he’s an ongoing danger to the community and shouldn’t be out on bail.
I’d thought “ongoing danger to the community” was already enough reason to not give him bail. It’s like how we don’t give bail to serious flight risks.
The question is whether this is a system issue (i.e. are we letting go everyone who is an ongoing danger to the community) or whether this is an extreme anomaly.
Given that NY just reformed bail, it’s possible the system is working as intended and this is one of the unintended side effects, i.e. that we’re letting people like that go because we don’t have the tools to lock them up.
So the default is #2, and he should get #1 while in prison.Report
All possibilities. Assuming the reporting is accurate the piece that throws me for a bit of a loop is the idea that these facts would only constitute a misdemeanor in NY.Report
How should a free society prevent people from committing “violent attack after violent attack while their case is pending”?
Well, according to liberal Enlightenment principles, a person can be deprived of their life, liberty or property only after being given a fair hearing with a right to appeal.
And in fact, there is nothing in these principles to prevent the state from imprisoning a person when there is a reasonable probability of them being a danger to themselves or others. Governor Newsom here isn’t California is proposing to do just that, making it easier to involuntarily hold people with mental illnesses.
That’s actually Option #1 offered by JA, and which was waved away in favor of simply imprisoning a person without a trial or right to appeal.Report
No, pretrial detention is not in itself some unheard of, inherently illiberal concept. Obviously it needs limits (as the US and many state constitution impose) and oversight, but there are circumstances where it makes sense and is a completely legitimate use of state power.Report
Yes, and the state needs to define those circumstances and the accused needs to have the right to contest them.
“You have several priors so we can imprison you indefinitely” is inherently illiberal.
If you want, apply this to white collar crimes for businesses which have priors for wage theft or fraud or tax evasion, and imagine pre-trial asset forfeiture being the remedy.Report
I don’t think that’s the case when you’ve got overwhelming evidence of multiple violent felonies. Though again to my comment to Dark maybe NY is not considering these felonies? If that’s true though it seems.. strange.
And of course it can be challenged. Habeus corpus, homie. But a lot of those challenges fail too, and not without reason or to the detriment of liberal society.Report
felonies
I believe that the argument is that a punch to the face is merely a misdemeanor.Report
Right, and the state needs to demonstrate that there is in fact “overwhelming evidence of multiple violent felonies” in some sort of trial or hearing.
But that’s not what is being proposed.
What’s being proposed is just straight up 17th century conservatism where the government can just imprison you without a trial because well, they know you are a bad person.Report
“That’s actually Option #1 offered by JA, and which was waved away in favor of simply imprisoning a person without a trial or right to appeal.”
You have a touching faith in the ability of talk therapy to address the issues of someone with seven prior arrests for violent assault in public who, while out of jail and awaiting a trial for his eight violent-assault-in-public arrest, figures the appropriate action is to commit a ninth violent assault in public.
And you’re going to say “you’d literally put someone in jail for stealing a box of crackers from the store”, and you know what? Screw you. Yes, I would. I would do that. If someone genuinely honestly suffers from an uncontrollable compulsion to steal things then yes, they need to be in a place where they do not have access to things that can be stolen.Report
After he gets out of jail, should he be allowed to buy a gun?Report
“Allowed”? By whom? I’m not getting the feeling that “going through the proper legal channels” is anywhere near this guy’s list of priorities.
Which makes it a fairly uninteresting question.
Here are the interesting questions, it seems to me.
Should he be allowed to punch 57 year-old women in the face?
Should the 57 year-old woman have been allowed to buy a gun?Report
If we agree that people like this “need to be in a place where they do not have access to things that can be stolen” or where they are not able to punch people, wouldn’t it make more sense to lock him up in a psychiatric hospital, indefinitely?
Instead of a fixed jail sentence, after which we give him unlimited freedom to go back to punching 57 year old women, except this time armed with a deadly weapon?Report
“Instead of a fixed jail sentence, after which we give him unlimited freedom to go back to punching 57 year old women, except this time armed with a deadly weapon?”
Chip, I think maybe you’ve forgotten which side of this argument you’re actually on.Report
wouldn’t it make more sense to lock him up in a psychiatric hospital, indefinitely
Hrm. Without getting into the differences, if they exist, between “criminal” and “crazy”, I’d say “if you want to call it that, I’m cool with calling it that.”
“What? You’re locking him up?”
“No, you misunderstand. It’s a *PSYCHRIATIC HOSPITAL*.”
“Oh! That’s much better.”Report
Yes, it is much better.Report
I agree that the guy should be sent to Riker’s Island Psychiatric Hospital and Rehabilitation Center.Report
“You have several priors so we can imprison you indefinitely” is inherently illiberal.
Depends on who makes that judgement.
He’s inside the system so our assumption should be that decision is being made by a judge. That’s also the guy who decides if bail is needed or even allowed.
Attacking random people for no reason is really bad. From the very little we know, he shouldn’t have bail.Report
I think that the conservative position is less extreme than the whole “we should pay for therapists for this poor man” progressive position.
I mean, good lord. What if they caught the wrong guy and forced the wrong man into therapy?Report
I am appalled by the contempt for the rule of law shown by the police, who continue arresting him despite the courts having made it abundantly clear that he has a right to continue offending unmolested.Report