My reference to 'the libertarians' was a joking response to Saul, it was not an endorsement of any particular argument.
You may be misreading me but that doesn't mean we necessarily agree. Google (and other corporations) do what they do because of the enforcement environment. There's more to this than social norms. Legislatures don't have to make laws prohibiting certain speech if administrative agencies are interpreting simple non-discrimination laws in extremely broad ways then threatening enforcement based on those interpretations. Companies predictably go in full throttle to cover their asses and avoid any type of controversy no matter how stupid.
So yes, the state isnt prosecuting for wrongthink but its setting incentives for third parties to sanction people for it.
My view is that rights don't matter very much if exercising them risks your livelihood (another spot where I tend to disagree with libertarians) which is where we are going and the government very much has a hand in it.
I apparently missed the conversation and so I won't rehash it. All I'd respond with is that if we are at the point where questioning the efficacy of a law and the way private entities are interpreting it is enough to get you fired due to concerns about violating said laws then the libertarians aren't as full of shit as some people would have us believe.
That's where the governmemt's role comes into play in this. No one wants to deal with EEOC complaints and investigations by federal and state enforcement entities. To tie it back to the OP, you get some person who feels that the content being hosted is offensive and they've got the ability to cause a headache of paperwork and outside counsel fees even for pretty meritless complaints. The incentive is to stamp out anything that could possibly rub anyone the wrong way and its only getting worse with the broadening and ever more subjectice array of speech deemed offensive.
Its possible that one day the Mathew Princes if the world won't need to arbitrarily shut down content. They'll do it because their lawyers advised them to.
Good post, Will. Having taken the time last evening to read Google Guy's post that got him fired I find this more disturbing than I otherwise would be inclined to. Now I get that some of these types of complaints boil down to 'its unfair that I can't use racial slurs or make lewd remarks to my female colleagues' but what James Damore wrote wasn't anywhere close to that. The fact that its being treated and reported on as though it was shows just how far down the rabbit hole we've gone.a
The First Amendment is all well and good but at the end of the day corporate compliance departments and internet mobs are quite capable of doing damage to the norms of open debate. This is especially so as what is deemed offensive becomes broader and broader and ideologue bureaucrats in the government put their fingers on the scales with arbitrary guidance and audit/enforcement threats. Even though they lack the force of law its enough to create a sort of ruthless culture of CYA. I know all about it since part of my job as an in house lawyer is to help build it.
I won't miss the Daily Stormer anymore than I'll miss some of the racist trash thats been pulled from Amazon. However at some point we need to ask where all of this is going. I'm not sure its some place good.
Apologies on the error in attribution (same to you @leeesq ). And yea, as hard as it is to imagine that there are people out there who aren't following every political development so they can eagerly go debate it I must concede that they do exist and vastly outnumber the likes of OTers.
I think your analysis is fair and largely accurate. The caveat to me is that there's a strategic trade off that comes with abandoning civility and crying wolf all the time and thats what we are seeing. Freddie has written a lot about this.
Maybe what I'm about to say is Pollyanna-ish but I think a large plurality of white people, even those with some latent racism or conservative views do not support the political vision of sieg heiling neo-nazis. What you're going to have trouble with is getting them to make common cause against racist groups when the perception is that they'd be standing with the type of Calvinist (to use your phrasing) SJWs on college campuses and elsewhere we've been talking so much about lately.
I don't think your average person sees this as small-l liberalism of the kind our Republic was founded on versus fascism. They see it as crazy/stupid versus stupid/crazy.
I think you're mostly right, but it's worth looking at why this might not seem totally clear cut, even to people analyzing it in good faith. I agree that you don't get to go goosestepping around with the flag of Nazi Germany then say your message isn't related to the things Nazi Germany stood for. They have to own that and any equivocation is pathetic and helps prove what cowards they are.
What confuses this is that it happened in a college town where the protest culture is now heavily intermingled with the intersectionaly cult. We don't really know what the counter protesters stood for. To the extent its opposing racism and the ideology of the Third Reich they should be applauded. To the extent its related to intersectionality one side really isn't much better than the other in this context. They both share the same assumptions about race, their preferred heirarchies are just different. In that regard I can't think of two groups more deserving of each other.
@maribou I do understand why people are upset by it and I don't at all want to appear as though I don't sympathize with those who are afraid. The images are very disturbing and its exacerbated by our mass media culture that profits on fear and panic. Its when things like this happen that I think its most important to try to stay grounded in reason.
I mentioned the 90s as well, my point was that these things have been going on for a long time. Doesn't make it good, does mean we need perspective. Like with Skokie, it sounds like there have been arrests in Charlottesville, including of the murder suspect. I'm also not sure I buy your numbers logic. We are still talking about very insignificant numbers of people.
I'd have to look into the argument that these are more violent than past events. I'm open to the possibility that they are but haven't seen any evidence making the case.
The people who voted for him do have agency and I think there's a lot of worthy ridicule to be dished out (I'll be laying some on my dad later this evening). The same can be said for the right wing media outlets that turned him into a politician.
What scares me is losing perspective in comforting myths about who we are really up against. The parallels arent exact but it reminds me of the conservatives who had their own comforting myths about Obama being in league with Saul Alinsky inspired terrorists or the New Black Panthers keeping people from voting. The country collectively went through it with Islamic terrorism after 9/11.
In a group of 300 million you can find plenty of people with out there and downright crazy beliefs. Maybe the Trump presidency has emboldebed some nutty people (no one seems to have hard evidence of that). What we shouldn't do is mistake them as the cause of our various policy failures and other social and political problems.
You're incorrect on the facts. There have been periodic white supremacist marches and other protests in this country for years, most of which are as small as they are dumb. You can google "1990's kkk rallies" and find lots of news articles. There's also of course Skokie back in 1977. You can see pictures here at this retrospective on the court case:
Has anyone done an official estimate of how many protesters were actually there? Burt says "thousands" but I keep seeing hundreds which is more consistent with what it looks like in the pictures. Just an example:
On Friday night, hundreds of white nationalists carrying torches and chanting "white lives matter," "you will not replace us," and the Nazi-associated phrase "blood and soil" marched near a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of the University of Virginia, and were met by counterprotesters.
I worry that by treating the types of buffoons that 20 years ago got paraded on the Jerry Springer show for laughs as a threat far outside their numbers, popularity, or electoral significance justify we're creating a kind of al-Qaeda effect. Instead of rolling our eyes at the freak show and removing the statue as planned we've sent in CNN with breathless coverage and a megaphone. The worst outcome would be swelling their numbers by creating cause for fools and alienated people who want to lash out, and for whom the details of their professed ideology an afterthought.
The movie he's reviewing in that first link is Er ist wieder da which is based on a German novel. The basic plot is that Hitler for unexplained reasons wakes up in modern day Berlin and people mistake him for a method actor. He uses the controversy he causes to rise to fame and political fortune.
There are a few scenes where he does the Ali G thing but overall its plot driven. The movie doesn't have to do with fascism as an ideology, its more of a satire of mass media culture and to a lesser degree the hubris of the elite political class. I thought it had some effective moments but also some predictable ones.
The review is another example of Berlatsky coming up with a thesis then cherry picking something that maybe has a superficial resemblance of evidence supporting it even though it doesn't. But then he's a bad writer and thats one of the things bad writers do.
I'm not criticizing the individuals, I'm criticizing the expectation that entertainment produced for mass audiences at high expense is going to have artistic or moral depth. The target audience of this music is intentionally broad. The fact that it includes pre-teens and adolescents inherently precludes certain subjects and complexity.
You don't go into McDonalds expecting a world class dining experience. Doesn't mean McDonalds is fundamentally bad or that people who eat it are bad.
Thats still a movie about cartoon ass kicking. It would only count if instead of super hero redemption and celebration of power it chronicled Mr. Incredible's slow decline into cynicism, alcohol abuse, and baldness. The wife leaves him. The children resent him. He starts to get his life back on track, goes 6 weeks without a drink. Then a long day at the office followed by a bureacratic snafu at the MVA sends him back to the bottle. He's beaten and robbed by vagrants while pissing in an alley behind a dive bar. Hardly the stuff of childrens entertainment.
At least [LS1] sort of acknowledges that the shallowness of pop culture is an outgrowth of capitalist consumer economics. Thats a bit better than another meditation on why the latest Marvel movie is in some way #problematic.
Nevertheless I still wanted to ask the author what exactly she expects from art produced by billion dollar industries. Expecting Carly Rae Jepson or Taylor Swift to do a song about the complexities of adult womanhood is like expecting Captain America to trade in CGI ass kicking for the daily humiliations of a desk job in corporate America.
I've seen retrospective statements from Romero implying that there was some intentional political/social commentary in production but I've always found them kind of dubious, at least to the extent of there being a specific agenda. Like you (or as I read your comment) I think its more likely him and his team had a good sense of what would be generally subversive and used that to heighten the disturbing atmosphere of the film. Its a fine line that the best genre filmmakers (think Cronenberg and Clive Barker) figure out- working on social fears and tabboos without appearing to be advocates for a particular political cause.
I suspect something similar happened with casting Sigourney Weaver in Alien, again despite later comments from Ridley Scott suggesting that they knew what they were doing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Men Who Can Kick You Off The Internet”
My reference to 'the libertarians' was a joking response to Saul, it was not an endorsement of any particular argument.
You may be misreading me but that doesn't mean we necessarily agree. Google (and other corporations) do what they do because of the enforcement environment. There's more to this than social norms. Legislatures don't have to make laws prohibiting certain speech if administrative agencies are interpreting simple non-discrimination laws in extremely broad ways then threatening enforcement based on those interpretations. Companies predictably go in full throttle to cover their asses and avoid any type of controversy no matter how stupid.
So yes, the state isnt prosecuting for wrongthink but its setting incentives for third parties to sanction people for it.
My view is that rights don't matter very much if exercising them risks your livelihood (another spot where I tend to disagree with libertarians) which is where we are going and the government very much has a hand in it.
"
I understand why google did it and I think my post makes clear that I understand why they did it.
I also have no objection to unionization in the private sector and I'm not sure why you would assume that I do.
"
@saul-degraw
I apparently missed the conversation and so I won't rehash it. All I'd respond with is that if we are at the point where questioning the efficacy of a law and the way private entities are interpreting it is enough to get you fired due to concerns about violating said laws then the libertarians aren't as full of shit as some people would have us believe.
"
Sounds like a tragedy all around.
"
That's where the governmemt's role comes into play in this. No one wants to deal with EEOC complaints and investigations by federal and state enforcement entities. To tie it back to the OP, you get some person who feels that the content being hosted is offensive and they've got the ability to cause a headache of paperwork and outside counsel fees even for pretty meritless complaints. The incentive is to stamp out anything that could possibly rub anyone the wrong way and its only getting worse with the broadening and ever more subjectice array of speech deemed offensive.
Its possible that one day the Mathew Princes if the world won't need to arbitrarily shut down content. They'll do it because their lawyers advised them to.
"
The question itself is a microaggression. Your account has been suspended and your employer, the local police, and the NSA have been notified.
"
Good post, Will. Having taken the time last evening to read Google Guy's post that got him fired I find this more disturbing than I otherwise would be inclined to. Now I get that some of these types of complaints boil down to 'its unfair that I can't use racial slurs or make lewd remarks to my female colleagues' but what James Damore wrote wasn't anywhere close to that. The fact that its being treated and reported on as though it was shows just how far down the rabbit hole we've gone.a
The First Amendment is all well and good but at the end of the day corporate compliance departments and internet mobs are quite capable of doing damage to the norms of open debate. This is especially so as what is deemed offensive becomes broader and broader and ideologue bureaucrats in the government put their fingers on the scales with arbitrary guidance and audit/enforcement threats. Even though they lack the force of law its enough to create a sort of ruthless culture of CYA. I know all about it since part of my job as an in house lawyer is to help build it.
I won't miss the Daily Stormer anymore than I'll miss some of the racist trash thats been pulled from Amazon. However at some point we need to ask where all of this is going. I'm not sure its some place good.
On “Morning Ed: Society {2017.08.16.W}”
Apologies on the error in attribution (same to you @leeesq ). And yea, as hard as it is to imagine that there are people out there who aren't following every political development so they can eagerly go debate it I must concede that they do exist and vastly outnumber the likes of OTers.
"
Fun times ahead.
"
I think your analysis is fair and largely accurate. The caveat to me is that there's a strategic trade off that comes with abandoning civility and crying wolf all the time and thats what we are seeing. Freddie has written a lot about this.
Maybe what I'm about to say is Pollyanna-ish but I think a large plurality of white people, even those with some latent racism or conservative views do not support the political vision of sieg heiling neo-nazis. What you're going to have trouble with is getting them to make common cause against racist groups when the perception is that they'd be standing with the type of Calvinist (to use your phrasing) SJWs on college campuses and elsewhere we've been talking so much about lately.
I don't think your average person sees this as small-l liberalism of the kind our Republic was founded on versus fascism. They see it as crazy/stupid versus stupid/crazy.
"
You could even kind of include the Simpsons in its early days as being about a working class family just getting by.
"
The Arnold movie you're thinking of is The Running Man.
On “Charlottesville Milepost”
I think you're mostly right, but it's worth looking at why this might not seem totally clear cut, even to people analyzing it in good faith. I agree that you don't get to go goosestepping around with the flag of Nazi Germany then say your message isn't related to the things Nazi Germany stood for. They have to own that and any equivocation is pathetic and helps prove what cowards they are.
What confuses this is that it happened in a college town where the protest culture is now heavily intermingled with the intersectionaly cult. We don't really know what the counter protesters stood for. To the extent its opposing racism and the ideology of the Third Reich they should be applauded. To the extent its related to intersectionality one side really isn't much better than the other in this context. They both share the same assumptions about race, their preferred heirarchies are just different. In that regard I can't think of two groups more deserving of each other.
"
@mike-dwyer
I agree. I don't think the culture of fear that seems to saturate everything benefits us as citizens at all.
"
@maribou I do understand why people are upset by it and I don't at all want to appear as though I don't sympathize with those who are afraid. The images are very disturbing and its exacerbated by our mass media culture that profits on fear and panic. Its when things like this happen that I think its most important to try to stay grounded in reason.
"
I mentioned the 90s as well, my point was that these things have been going on for a long time. Doesn't make it good, does mean we need perspective. Like with Skokie, it sounds like there have been arrests in Charlottesville, including of the murder suspect. I'm also not sure I buy your numbers logic. We are still talking about very insignificant numbers of people.
I'd have to look into the argument that these are more violent than past events. I'm open to the possibility that they are but haven't seen any evidence making the case.
"
@saul-degraw
The people who voted for him do have agency and I think there's a lot of worthy ridicule to be dished out (I'll be laying some on my dad later this evening). The same can be said for the right wing media outlets that turned him into a politician.
What scares me is losing perspective in comforting myths about who we are really up against. The parallels arent exact but it reminds me of the conservatives who had their own comforting myths about Obama being in league with Saul Alinsky inspired terrorists or the New Black Panthers keeping people from voting. The country collectively went through it with Islamic terrorism after 9/11.
In a group of 300 million you can find plenty of people with out there and downright crazy beliefs. Maybe the Trump presidency has emboldebed some nutty people (no one seems to have hard evidence of that). What we shouldn't do is mistake them as the cause of our various policy failures and other social and political problems.
"
You're incorrect on the facts. There have been periodic white supremacist marches and other protests in this country for years, most of which are as small as they are dumb. You can google "1990's kkk rallies" and find lots of news articles. There's also of course Skokie back in 1977. You can see pictures here at this retrospective on the court case:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-neo-nazi-skokie-march-flashback-perspec-0312-20170310-story.html
The neo-nazis were a lot more clean cut back then but the numbers I don't think were much different.
"
Has anyone done an official estimate of how many protesters were actually there? Burt says "thousands" but I keep seeing hundreds which is more consistent with what it looks like in the pictures. Just an example:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/unite-rally-virginia-sparks-counterprotests-state-emergency/story?id=49176243
I'm not trying to nitpick but I think the details matter.
"
I worry that by treating the types of buffoons that 20 years ago got paraded on the Jerry Springer show for laughs as a threat far outside their numbers, popularity, or electoral significance justify we're creating a kind of al-Qaeda effect. Instead of rolling our eyes at the freak show and removing the statue as planned we've sent in CNN with breathless coverage and a megaphone. The worst outcome would be swelling their numbers by creating cause for fools and alienated people who want to lash out, and for whom the details of their professed ideology an afterthought.
On “Morning Ed: The Arts {2017.08.09.W}”
@gabriel-conroy
The movie he's reviewing in that first link is Er ist wieder da which is based on a German novel. The basic plot is that Hitler for unexplained reasons wakes up in modern day Berlin and people mistake him for a method actor. He uses the controversy he causes to rise to fame and political fortune.
There are a few scenes where he does the Ali G thing but overall its plot driven. The movie doesn't have to do with fascism as an ideology, its more of a satire of mass media culture and to a lesser degree the hubris of the elite political class. I thought it had some effective moments but also some predictable ones.
The review is another example of Berlatsky coming up with a thesis then cherry picking something that maybe has a superficial resemblance of evidence supporting it even though it doesn't. But then he's a bad writer and thats one of the things bad writers do.
On “Morning Ed: Life & Society {2017.08.03.Th}”
I'm not criticizing the individuals, I'm criticizing the expectation that entertainment produced for mass audiences at high expense is going to have artistic or moral depth. The target audience of this music is intentionally broad. The fact that it includes pre-teens and adolescents inherently precludes certain subjects and complexity.
You don't go into McDonalds expecting a world class dining experience. Doesn't mean McDonalds is fundamentally bad or that people who eat it are bad.
"
Thats still a movie about cartoon ass kicking. It would only count if instead of super hero redemption and celebration of power it chronicled Mr. Incredible's slow decline into cynicism, alcohol abuse, and baldness. The wife leaves him. The children resent him. He starts to get his life back on track, goes 6 weeks without a drink. Then a long day at the office followed by a bureacratic snafu at the MVA sends him back to the bottle. He's beaten and robbed by vagrants while pissing in an alley behind a dive bar. Hardly the stuff of childrens entertainment.
"
At least [LS1] sort of acknowledges that the shallowness of pop culture is an outgrowth of capitalist consumer economics. Thats a bit better than another meditation on why the latest Marvel movie is in some way #problematic.
Nevertheless I still wanted to ask the author what exactly she expects from art produced by billion dollar industries. Expecting Carly Rae Jepson or Taylor Swift to do a song about the complexities of adult womanhood is like expecting Captain America to trade in CGI ass kicking for the daily humiliations of a desk job in corporate America.
On “George Romero Made A Perfect Movie”
I've seen retrospective statements from Romero implying that there was some intentional political/social commentary in production but I've always found them kind of dubious, at least to the extent of there being a specific agenda. Like you (or as I read your comment) I think its more likely him and his team had a good sense of what would be generally subversive and used that to heighten the disturbing atmosphere of the film. Its a fine line that the best genre filmmakers (think Cronenberg and Clive Barker) figure out- working on social fears and tabboos without appearing to be advocates for a particular political cause.
I suspect something similar happened with casting Sigourney Weaver in Alien, again despite later comments from Ridley Scott suggesting that they knew what they were doing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.