Algorithms aren't our problem. The tech giants aren't really our main problem either.
Our big problem is that a large portion of the population no longer believes in free speech, and that portion skews young. And journalists--journalists!!!--are among the worst.
That's what enables the gradual strangulation of free speech.
I'm getting old, but I don't even know how to argue with these people. How can they not see how stupid this is, how it will certainly lead to disaster?
It's like trying to persuade people that oxygen is necessary.
I listened to Matt on Jane Coaston (great podcast) trying to explain to the host and another journalist why they should be bothered by censorship. He finally said is exasperation "yes, and why does that not bother you!" That's always rhetorical, since it's impossible to explain why you are not bothered by something.
If you were born before a certain date, the 1st amendment has a special status that simply doesn't exist today and no amount of telling people they should care will change that. We increasingly incarcerate people for doing things that in a previous generation would have fallen under protected speech. I'm reminded of that Star Trek Episode where a group of people who had a US Constitution now worshiped it as a religious document only the priests could read and even they didn't really understand it. You can create so many carve out and exception to a right that it ends up protecting almost nothing. US history is a 225 year process of doing just that.
I don't know if this helps, but a few thousand years ago Polybius discussed the problem you raise in "The Histories." The further people get from the reason people build a democracy, the more people undervalue, ignore and take for granted it's primary features. This leads to oligarchy, they dictatorship, and if you survive long enough back to democracy, but each fails because the next generation always forgets the reason it was established in the first place.
I listened to it since you mentioned it. An exercise in pseudointellectual bafflegab. The deep Manichan commitment of his two interlocutors to being morally right relative all that are pitiable/deplorable is depressing.
The systems of rewards for moralizing are a worry.
I don't know how much this counts, but I listen Jane Coaston's "The Conversation" regularly and it's usually quite good.
For some background, she grew up a minority within a minority within a minority (Catholic, mixed racially and gay) and so brings a unique perspective I don't always share, but enjoy and learn from.
When Matt concludes by suggesting there is perhaps a new consensus of the right and left taking shape, they dismiss him with a laugh as being "overly opportunistic about the future," without realizing there is a long history of opposing groups working together against a shared enemy (ask the religious right and the radical fem left how they both feel about criminalizing and reversing accepted free speech on the topic of porn sometime).
I would not judge the entire podcast by that one episode, but it was disappointing since Jane Coaston is often one the rare people in the room who may not agree, but seems to genuinely understand the perspective of her guest.
I should also admit a personal bias here. It was two women who agree interviewing a man who disagreed being pretty dismissive of his opinion. For good or bad, it's an experience I've experienced in life the way most men have and it makes me uncomfortable the way I assume many women feel when a group of men are dismissive towards their opinion. I will need to think about why the gender makes a difference to me here.
"For good or bad, it's an experience I've experienced in life the way most men have and it makes me uncomfortable the way I assume many women feel when a group of men are dismissive towards their opinion."
...ohhh yeah.
"I will need to think about why the gender makes a difference to me here."
I think it's less about gender per se and more about the in-group/out-group dynamic. You seem like a fair-minded guy and I trust you would have been just as uncomfortable, if not moreso, with two male panelists double-teaming a female guest.
...I know we have unfortunately gotten to this point in the ongoing culture wars, and it's easier said than done, but I think the only antidote is to push back respectfully but firmly when someone presents themselves as a checklist of identities and grievances -- instead of an individual human being -- and expects that in itself to make their argument for them.
The in/out groups were right there, plain as day. Coaston said that she must therefore, according to Taibbi's analysis, be the elite and then ruthlessly mocked the idea. She and Cottle are the elite and their job is to keep the terms of the argument away from those that Taibbi uses and all they had to refute it was ridicule. Weak tea flavored with contempt and dressed up to sound clever. Very NYT.
It's short enough. Might make a good subject for classroom analysis.
I read Taibbi and pay him money because he has balls and spine enough to go after the cozy inbred media crew. I am not from the media biz, but I speculate he could have had it a lot easier by toeing the party line and keeping a cushy name-brand magazine or newspaper gig. Instead he became an independent businessman and cheerfully endures all manner of online calumny. I approve.
I say without false modesty that when I assign the worst motives to myself and the best motives to others, I come closer to the truth than the opposite.
Still, I think you have something here with the In/Out group thing and the gender makes it more pronounced.
I need to give more thought to that last paragraph. I think I understand it and if so, I like it.
I think certain ideas and social memes take on a life or their own. If two men "gang up" on a woman, even if she is totally wrong and off base, it is seen as "just wrong." When the opposite happens it is perceived as "assertive woman" expose the dumbbell for what he is.
This is reflected in media and TV comedies and has been the "go to" cheap laugh by lazy comic writers. Naive Dad is schooled by his kids or his smart wife always solves the problem does not reflect reality yet it has become an underlying theme in many walks of life. May just be an over correction given the decades of dismissive attitudes toward woman by previous generations of male assholes who regardless of intelligence or talent got to run things their way. Maybe the next generation will get it right and be more balanced in their gender relationships -- if gender is in fact a describable condition in 25 years.
As your attorney, I advise you that reading my comments --and especially, responding to them -- is at best a waste of time and at worst may degrade your mental health and possibly put you at risk of performing illegal activities.
"The systems of rewards for moralizing are a worry."
Well said. At the very least, I'd like to see a system where being truthful and accurate is incentivized over being moral, or worse yet, apparently moral. Far too many people fail to recognize that proper moral sensemaking can only happen once the truth is thoroughly understood. We truly are living in a post-truth culture.
Someone close to me is in a constant state of "what are we going to do??!!!" despair about the direction of our country and culture. I tell him civilizations have their cycle, and ours is in its down cycle, but that those cycles don't have to define every person living in it, that you can have your own personal up and down cycles despite what your era has dished up for you. There are those who flail even when their culture is on the rise, and those who flourish and find meaning when theirs is in its death spiral. Let's find meaning, purpose and flourish.
You're absolutely right. I admit to spending too much of my life caught up in an idea of the US that turned out to be an illusion, but in the end, whose fault is that for failing to see the system for what is is?
Bitterness is poison. Time to take what we have learned and embrace the future.
It really is, isn't it? Really appreciate Areslent bringing up that word. It's evocative in it's ability to explain the root of so many poor attitudes.
Who's fault is it when belief and trust are shattered and betrayed like that? The deceiver and the deceived both profited from the arrangement. And I think that's part of the bitterness, the understanding of ones own culpability.
But that's also a reason for hope. A much younger and stupider self bought those myths and trusted the elders. That's not really the same person as today and the bitterness is the proof of the difference.
I was thinking about this a little more this morning as I walked the dogs (lovely day for it). There's a moment in the podcast when Coaston gives the whole game away without noticing.
COASTON: I think Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the greatest laws ever written in the story of collective time. With regard to giving these entities the power to moderate and edit third party as end user content and not get sued for it.
TAIBBI: Why aren’t you concerned about it? If you work in the media, they could say tomorrow, I’m sorry, we’re not going to distribute your material. And what would you be able to do?
COASTON: Yeah, but they could say that to me anyway today. I mean, The Times could do that right now if they wanted to.
Coaston is talking about her NYT job. She is saying that she is already censored, that she knows the boundaries of what she can and cannot say. That's correct. She is a part of one of the most important machines in the consent factory and she'll be disciplined or fired if she doesn't do her job right.
And she's saying that she thinks that's the way it should be for all the rest of us too, i.e. the platforms should edit us.
So she is equating Twitfaceoogle to NYT. She has to uphold a certain orthodoxy and so should everyone else. The enforcement she gets from her employer should come from the platforms for the rest of us.
I agree with her on section 230. It's essentially the 1st amendment for online speech and whenever I run into someone who has a problem with section 230 it seems to always turn out that they don't actually have a problem with section 230. They have a problem with free speech.
I would need to go back and listen, but I'm not sure how her support for section 230 tie in with her non-nonchalant attitude about censorship. There is no way we can guess at what's in her heart, but I have been listening to her for some time (other than this one interview she has been great. You can listen to her being interviewed on "The Fifth Element" if you want a better take on her views). What I can say about her is that she is smart. I don't mean book smart, although she is most likely that too, I mean she does not assume anything, she is not reactionary and she is not a joiner. Right off that makes her quite a bit different than most of those I read in the media.
I think you may have misunderstood her comment about "she could be fired for the NYT" and the point she makes here is not crazy. There are a lot of people out there with enormous power like governor Cuomo, or Taylor Lorenz at the NTY who have enormous power, but play the "I've been cancelled" card to defect valid criticism of their actions. I think Coaston places herself in this category as having enough power to survive being cancelled just fine and was simply making the point that in many cases it is being misused, which I agree with.
Where I think she goes wrong is that there are also a lot of people and groups with no institution power who are also either being cancelled, or arrested and incarcerated for speech crimes. That is where Matt was coming from (more the former since he doesn't cover people who are arrested for saying unpopular things) and I think she would have been better off to acknowledge his point along with acknowledging that there are times where "cancel culture" is exploited by those in power. In fairness, Matt when through a period where he was entirely locked out of the media, which I don't think Coastan has never faced and she's not seeing the difference between being fired from the NYT and being undesirable anywhere because you say refuse to go along with the Russiagate scam.
Incarceration over things previously protected by first amendment is becoming increasingly common and is my biggest concern. It's obviously wrong to have your access restricted for holding unpopular views or because some stupid algorithm from Youtube or Twitter can't interpret Hitler criticisms from praise as happened in this article, but it's another thing to send people to prison for unpopular speech. Here are a just a few of many examples that seem to be increasing:
We also have the case of Julian Assange. The reality is the State is increasingly incarcerating people for speaking out in unpopular ways and because people don't care, judges are signing off on it and don't seem to care either. There is simply no push back against arresting people for saying unpopular things unless it is expressly political, which remains protected.
As I said, I listed to her regularly and she's very good. She was just wrong on this one.
Joking aside, the less I know about a person the more I can't help but judge them like it or not. My human brain needs to fill in the gaps and judgement ends up where knowledge ends for me. I think my advise here about not passing judgement is more a reminder for myself than directed at you.
It may not be worth your time, but I think her Interview on "The Fifth Column" (episode 309) helped me gain a better understanding where she's coming from and it's a different take than the typical criticism of Tahibbi. From what I can tell, many of Matt's critics can't tell the difference between him defending the right of someone to say something and defending the thing they are saying itself, which so dumb it's hard for me not to believe they are simply being disingenuous about their real motives.
Coaston's take is smarter than that. She understands the distinction, but simply doesn't think there is a problem because they people she hears talking about being cancelled are really just normal people being fired for bad behavior that would have gotten them fired anyway. She's not wrong, just only seeing a part of the picture.
The people who run the system were never on board with the Constitution since it limits their power. What changed was the number people outside the system that forgot the Bill of Rights is a group compact and ceases to protect any of us if it does not protect all of us. Otherwise you have "The Lottery" where you only defend your rights as the mob is stoning you to death, which is where we are now.
The 4th amendment was fatally damaged during the war on drugs and all but killed off completely during the war on terror and the rise of the surveillance state. The attacks on the 1st are more recent and only really gained steam in earnest over the past 20 years.
The 1st is simply the last of our rights to be taken down by the State as we create carve outs for everything from the extremely broadly defined hate speech, to commercial speech, to discussing crime you do not act on, to any other speech that can be pushed under the all powerful "protecting the children" exclusion.
By all accounts, the vast majority of people are rooting for the State against the 1st amendment in the final fight.
What too many seem to not get is that speech can now be censored because someone hearing what you say is "triggered" and or offended. That is now an excuse on University campuses to act against the person speaking even if it is the truth. Your speech rights are now controlled by the weakest and most easily offended persons who might read or hear what you have said. Currently we really are being muted by the least among us.
Those same flaccid individuals are of little or no use to society when the shit hits the fan. They will be the first ones ejected from any metaphorical lifeboat that will be necessary during a social breakdown or God forbid a war.
<<Otherwise you have "The Lottery" where you only defend your rights as the mob is stoning you to death, which is where we are now.>>
Shirley Jackson saw all of this shit coming. It's why independent artists are politically important. Also The New Yorker used to actually be good in 1948, but oh well.
You're probably aware how many death threats and requests for her to be fired she received after she wrote that short story. It was seen as deeply subversive, which surprised her. At the time she wrote it, her biggest concern was that no one would read it or care.
In today's climate, she would have been fired from the New Yorker 1 day after the public response started. In 1948, she was able to keep her job long enough to see that hate mail turn into fan mail.
I'm not sure the propensity to promote censorship Is primarily among the young. Those who reached their 20s and 30s during the beginning of political correctness in the 1990s seem to have no qualms with censorship.
I appreciate the common sentiment that "a large portion of the population no longer believes in free speech," but I think it's far more correct - and the point is not at all just academic - to say that these people never believed in free speech to begin with. They maybe fooled themselves into thinking they did, but this was only because they saw free speech as serving their own interests at the time. The second it stopped serving their interests, the second they stopped supporting it in any meaningful way.
If your free speech beliefs go up in smoke the moment you get the power to censor, your free speech beliefs never existed to begin with.
I graduated from law school slightly more than 30 years ago. In our class, apart from one Maoist weirdo who literally ended up in an insane asylum, there was zero disagreement over virtually absolute protection for political speech under the First Amendment. Conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and progressives all agreed that the Nazis at Skokie, communists, and everyone in between should be allowed to speak freely, as long as they weren't immediately instigating violence.
There was some disagreement about whether 1A protects pornography, with some feminists and conservative Christians teaming up to argue that it doesn't (an interesting coalition!) But over political speech? Nada. We sang in harmony.
And while I haven't kept up with everyone, I believe they've mostly kept that line, except for those whose jobs may require them to say otherwise for survival.
It's not that some people showed their true colors, or at least not mostly. It's a generational change. These younger folks just don't have the same values.
"...I believe they've mostly kept that [pro-free speech] line."
I'm talking about those who haven't kept the line, and clearly they are many. Yes, many of the pro-censor crowd are young and so cannot really be said to have ever strongly professed pro-free speech credentials, but the reality is this: those who hold most of the power to allow or deny the censorship are old. The soldiers are young, but the generals who set policy most definitely are not.
If most of the 60s-80s generations - most of whom would've sworn on a stack of bibles all through their lives they'd raise all kinds of hell if free speech were attacked - were actually raising that hell *and voting accordingly,* today's censorship wouldn't have nearly the necessary political support to exist now, much less to continue as it appears very set to do.
Instead, it's mostly crickets. If I were wrong about this, then our state, local and federal offices would not be so densely packed with political and moral cowards who refuse to fight this scourge on our freedom to communicate freely with each other.
<<If most of the 60s-80s generations - most of whom would've sworn on a stack of bibles all through their lives they'd raise all kinds of hell if free speech were attacked - were actually raising that hell *and voting accordingly,* today's censorship wouldn't have nearly the necessary political support to exist now, much less to continue as it appears very set to do.>>
As a person of a certain age I find this to be a strange time to be living. The US federal government, at least in elected positions, is almost uniformly a gerontocracy, but it seems that intends to fulfill the demands of the modern-day equivalent of Mao's Red Guards.
Referring to Mao's Red Guards is a reference that is lost on most of the young voters of today. The activities of China's Cultural Revolution appear to be the template being utilized by our gov't and big tech to bring that pernicious method of social change to the US.
The cancel culture is just one step from the forced re-education camps and the executions carried out during that dark period in China's history. "Out with the old and in with the new" when applied by politically driven individuals always results in injustices and serious dislocations within any society. America might rue the day it did not recognize and put a stop to this newest attack on our Republic.
I doubt the government and big tech literally looked to the Cultural Revolution, decided it was the template for implementing their dastardly plan, and applied it.
However, the similarities are striking. But I suspect there are other examples.
In other words, it's A Good Trick, in the Dennett sense. It's going to be discovered by more-or-less natural selection in the memetic evolution of our political economy.
You are manifestly NOT WRONG about this, but neither is Skeptic totally off the mark in my perspective. I was born in 1948. I was raised with a *knee jerk response to protecting the First Amendment. It is not the *FIRST Amendment by accident.
I am definitely among those who are shocked to encounter others who wish to be considered "thinkers" who do NOT perceive the importance of the First Amendment to living in a Democracy.
When that First Amendment is gone ...... so is Democracy. All attempts at ancient Athenian Democracy finally fell to the military Monarch, Phillip of Macedonia. Roman attempts at Democracy/Republic finally fell when Romans traded freedom for autocracy in the form of Augustus Ceasar.
Simple lessons from history. Democracies/Republics cannot CO-EXIST with Autocracy in *any form. This, dear reader, IS an "either/or" concept like being "pregnant". We are either a Democracy (which has been a *very shaky proposition for a *long time now) or we are an Oligarchy (or other form of Autocracy), but we are not logically *both.
Perhaps attacking the First Amendment is just an effort to force us to be HONEST with ourselves. Call our present form of Government what it *IS. And given the attack on voting rights, it is beginning to appear that the "ONLY" Amendment in the Bill of Rights that WILL survive, is the presently warped and badly bastardized Second Amendment.
I believe that a large percentage of the population just goes along with what they're told, and, scary as it may be, that comes mainly from the public schools and mass media. Your law school story is a sampling of an elite set of students. Think about all the people who will never have an education beyond what they received in high school. Do they care about the enlightenment? How many can even point out where Washington DC is on a map?
Has it ever been different? When vast segments of any population or in many cases a critical mass that might be less that 20% of a population gets discontented with the statues quo you might get a political revolution either utilizing force and violence or the ballot box.
The tectonic political shifts over the last 100 years have come from election processes. Now that way too many have abandoned the concept of a fair and unbiased election there are few avenues that can be traveled that lead to anything but revolution. Get Trump out at ANY cost has warped our reason and conscience.
Even the DOJ now advancing the idea that normal and reasoned election security is a plot to suppress voting rights. If that is so just point it out, outside the political pigsty, and allow the voters to decide. I know not ONE voterin. this nation who is on board with voter suppression except of course as a wedge issue to divide the nation along racial lines.
In Georgia the accusation of "Jim Crow 2", given the African/American turnout is so obviously bogus that those making it should be voted out of office and exposed as the opportunists they in fact are. Yet the media without a hint of integrity runs with these lies and political hit jobs. Leftists really know no bounds when it comes to grabbing power by any means fair or foul.
Our society has advanced to a degree where normal, teenage HS angst and bs is now considered a mental health crisis and a civil rights imperative. The younger generation(s)-young millenial and Gen Z are clamoring for the SC to be assistant principals, not Constitutional sentinels.
Big pharma is pathologizing everything it can, and it's sick. At my children's school I can't believe how many teachers with absolutely no medical background or training are advocating that parents drug their children. Many adults who have been taking ADHD type drugs since they were children are addicts for life, and will never have any idea of what it's like to feel normal.
It really does not matter what any individual "believes in." Someone might not believe in property rights but unless someone passes a law that abrogates pvt,. property I am free to do what is necessary to protect my property up to and including utilizing force to keep what is mind.
Problem is when vast numbers of individuals don't believe in or follow some law or restriction against the gov't that law ceases to exist; except on paper. Pornography laws were just ignored during the 1980's and soon they just were no more. That is what is happening to many of the restrictions against the government known as the Bill of Rights. These restrictions have not been vigorously enforced by the Courts and Congress so they are fading away like snow on the water. Soon we will be living under a government like the East German one of the 1970's where individuals were subjects of the State and informants were your neighbors and even your children. This COVID hysteria has opened the door for the power addicted control freaks to implement their "solutions" all in the name of;public safety. That has been the oldest and most utilized excuse given by every dictator who ever drew breath. If American society does not push back very hard against these tyrants sooner rather that later the American experiment in self rule will fade away without a whimper.
So, then, "there are more and more people who don't and never have sincerely believed in freedom of speech" whether they possess the insight to be aware of it or not.
"Pornography laws were just ignored during the 1980's and soon they just were no more. "
I don't know if you 've noticed, but the war on porn has come back into full force over the past 5 years with many of the groups that lost the battle due to free speech in the 1980's making far more headway now that the 1st amendment has been degraded beyond recognition.
Excellent point, thank you, with broader context and implications than free speech. One way to view the advancement and survival of any civilization is to look how we manage to retain the progress of science, the advancement of human rights, democracy between the generations and, move it forward. In my view it was happening using the pattern that Ken Wilbur called "absorb and transcend ". Young people were able to absorb accumulated knowledge through education, and push the boundaries further bringing new life, and new energy to the process. Older, tired generations would get out of the way by simply.. dying.
At least in the realm of physical sciences this pattern worked very well.
But this pattern is more fragile that we thought. It requires , for example, a level of trust in the student-teacher relationship. It requires that we have shared understanding that although no one owns the truth, but we can agree, at least looking at the same thing, what is the fact, what is not. That is broken. We get to the point when a university in Canada, is working on the project called "Decolonization of light", yes it is real, referring to the photon and electromagnetic wave physics of light as a white, colonial construct. There is no desire to absorb the current state of science, or transcend it, and our "learning" institutions do not see it as important. All effort goes into rejecting it on the basis of social "justice" criteria. This way the very foundation of communication between people, between generations, is being destroyed.
That how we got to the point where convincing a person who, using her iPhone, posts on Twitter that we need to question what is the value of 2+2 in a just society. Good luck with explaining to her what oxygen is.
I had to look it up to believe it. In case anyone was wondering this is being taught not through the humanities department, but through engineering. Concordia University's global ranking is #670.
"Often in Western thought, the concept of light has been accepted as a scientific concept through the work of the likes of Isaac Newton, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. Rarely do we examine how light is viewed culturally, or how light could be viewed from a perspective that isn’t strictly scientific."
"Journalists" are only creatures of their education in the J Schools. The teaching of "advocacy" journalism has decimated the ranks of independent and intelligent thinkers and replaced them with politically active and bias individuals who don't even know how to do journalism.
They cannot bring themselves to publish anything that harms or exposes their chosen political party. Nancy and Chuck would be great foils for some sarcastic commentary. Hunter Biden would have been fodder for Woodward and Bernstein before they became shills for CNN. An entire career could have been made just running stories on Hunter and his fathers families profiteering on their "big guy" connections. The actual FBI covering-up Hunters computer and their intimidation of Mark Zuckenberg regarding the fake Russian disinformation campaign was the stuff of dreams in the world of actual journalists.
Now the mealy mouthed cowards are full time hacks for their ideologically compatible political "brothers and sisters." Entire networks and cable outlets are dedicated to a particular political parties ideology without an actual investigative journalist on staff. The joke has been on the American public particularly readers of the NYT and other skewered providers of the latest political position of the Administration.
"I'm getting old, but I don't even know how to argue with these people."
It's scary -- like the CHILDREN OF THE CORN movies from the 1980s. There's no way to rationally engage with people whose entire life is lived and curated online 24/7. The "algorithm" is akin to He Who Walks Behind The Rows. https://youtu.be/dClKllEv5MU
Meanwhile, the rest of us humans have to piss, shit, pay bills, do house repairs, and all of the other unpleasant things that go along with having a physical body in the real world.
I'm not a parent; if I were, there is no way in Hell I would allow my children to have access to smartphones or social media.
Why collapse this nuanced in timely argument into just a free speech issue? Yes free speech is critical, but the nuance of bringing in algorithmic censorship is totally key for the contemporary zeitgeist.
They couldn't get away with algorithmic censorship or a lot the other restraints you see now if free speech had the same popular support that it did 30 years ago. In the end, civil liberties survive only if a critical mass of the population, including young people, support them with passion and vigor.
One of the greatest defect of any democracy lies in the tendency of a certain segment of the population to cooperate with the agents of oppression.
The Constitution was designed to create a wall between church and state and set limits on what the government could do to the state and through the 14th amendment it's citizens, but there was no wall built between the police state and citizens/company collaborators because they did not have police, let alone a police state to contend with.
The Constitution with all its Rights offers little protection if a sizeable portion of the population in the form of individuals and companies are willing to openly collaborate in helping their oppressors circumnavigate the limits the Constitution put in place.
It always surprises me when a poster here writes almost with glee "well they are a private company and can do whatever they want!" It's like they are celebrating a virus that was able to slip past the human immune system.
Yes, they found an exploit in the Constitution and are now taking advantage of that. Why are you so overjoyed, rather than horrified by that?
But if the censorship were performed by trained armies of CM specialists, what difference would that make? The problem is not the technology that implements the policy, the problem is the policy.
think the political challenge is that those who are drawn to power tend to prefer that power to open debate. From Erdoğan to Hitler to those in all governments, free speech in a democracy is an access point to power, but state violence against your enemies is a better way to maintain that power. Why leave the door open to those behind you who want to follow that same path to replace you?
The temporary solution was the Bill of Rights and to their credit it lasted longer than I think even they expected. The idea of a set of inalienable rights that cannot be taken away through a vote of otherwise ensured the door would remain open to peaceful access by new challengers. It's what ensures liberty within the democracy by placing a inalienable limit on what can be done to those who attempt to gain power and change the system. The challenge is that despite calling it a Bill of Rights and inalienable, meaning it was literally beyond the law to change, there was nothing to stop those in power from attacking it by simply changing the vocabulary to ensure the words did not directly violate or Rights even as the laws behind those words drained the Rights of all their protections.
Many people will disagree with me, but I think that's much of what led to both the protests last Summer inspired by George Floyd and the attack on the Capital. Both were made up of people who have little in common politically, but believe the system no longer offers them the inalienable rights needed to challenge incumbents and change the system. Both groups faced enormous entrenched bureaucracies that reserves Constitutional rights for themselves, but limit those rights to anyone outside the bureaucracies.
I can't disagree with them on that, even if I don't always agree with their tactics.
The answer is yes, depending on who gets to set "community standards" Censorship of history is a goal of all tyrants.
Even though this instance can be blamed on an algorithm, what of the recent destruction and defacement of hundreds of historical statues and monuments by (corporate sponsored) radical activists? How about the "1619 Project" invading our classrooms and replacing history with racist propaganda? How about the widespread alteration of thousands of entries in Wikipedia and other digital reference works? How about the disappearance of videos and research articles which disagree with a mainstream narrative from platforms and search engines? These are examples of the ongoing effort to control information. Sadly for most of us, "community standards" is a vague enough term to rationalize an Orwellian level conformity.
So true…. Bonapartes actual quote, as near as my research will allow, is…
“The truth of history, so much in request, to which every body eagerly appeals, is too often but a word. At the time of the events, during the heat of conflicting passions, it cannot exist; and if, at a later period, all parties are agreed respecting it, it is because those persons who were interested in the events, those who might be able to contradict what is asserted, are no more. What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon. As it has been very ingeniously remarked, there are, in these matters, two essential points, very distinct from each other: the positive facts, and the moral intentions.”
It occurred to me to mention a quote from my favorite book of all time, Chandler's "The Campaigns of Napoleon"
"Never to the end of his life did Bonaparte master the intricacies of the French language"
He was Corsican, his first tongue was the Italian spoken there. The island was only acquired by France in the year before Napoleon was born. A lot of Napoleon's quotes (aside from being misattributed) are probably savaged in translation and don't necessarily reflect his initial intent.
I am sure the quote I provided was tarted up with gravitas and reflection that did not exist in his original words. If one digs into quotes, it's amazing how many are misattributed, or entirely made up. If someone told me the quote I provided was fallacious, I wouldn't doubt it.
Yup-and mass produced history textbooks are the compilation. They might not be “wrong” but are so horribly written, organized, and put together than no one will get anything “correct” out of them. As someone with degrees in education and history, I have literally told students they were absolutely correct when they told me “Help me-this question is literally impossible to answer from the textbook!!”.
Danno has said everything I would but a couple of things.
The victors write the history, and professional historians rarely declare as fact that for which there is no record and that is still young. A great tragedy is that Social Media have displaced historians, who no longer have a role to play in the U.S. So, Social Media plays handmaiden to an ideology that claims there are many truths, but rejects all save its own.
I don't have enough time left on earth or enough energy to do the job right, but someone needs to read Solomon Asch's work on conformity, explain it and the science behind it, and then examine Social Media and Legacy Media through an informed lens.
I have never heard of Asch, and so thank you for making me look him up. I did find this link which explains his conformity experiments. There's probably a lot more to his work, but it's a good place to start.
I could make the argument that all history taught in schools is indoctrination toward a particular set of facts desired by those in power. Objective history is about as true as objective journalism. While the 1619 project is a travesty, the history I was taught in school back in the 70s and 80s was also tripe.
I thought about that after I wrote it. While the objectivity of various historical accounts and history textbooks may be debatable, a debate among diverse viewpoints allows a subject to come into focus, and a reader or student can make up his or her own mind. If educators wish to advance Critical Race Theory, they need to tolerate opposing viewpoints, criticism, and, in their case, mockery.
This is particularly poignant to me after having listened to (I find it much easier to get time in the car to consume long books) Sjursen's "A True History of the United States". Despite agreeing with 60% of what Sjursen has to say, I still think it's a bunch of biased tripe.
One thing I noted about his account and that the 1619 project as well as my history textbooks from the 80s have in common is that they never talk about paths not trodden. In other words, the actors of every era had choices they could have taken but did not. The Confederates could have accepted the Crittenden compromise. Madison or Adams could have avoided war (or quasi-war in the latter case). McKinley could have disavowed conquest; Tilden could have demanded the Presidency he pretty clearly won. Wilson could have avoided declaring war. Kennedy could have pulled out the advisors from South Vietnam. The list goes on. But the history books never talk about this, acting as if history was preordained on a rail, and making you imagine for yourself the alternatives that the actors faced in their time, if it occurs to you to. Sjursen's book is very bad in this respect, criticizing the US for not taking choices that weren't even on the menu at particular points in history, instead of dealing in the reality of what was possible at the time. For instance, calling Washington a war criminal when the entire edifice of war crimes wouldn't exist for another 150 years or so.
That is, in fact, what a "Progressive" view of history believes. That we are gradually climbing upward out of superstition and unreason into the glorious light of... well, depending on who you ask, anything from Communism to a Neoliberal Democracy to the Star Trek Federation. The only thing they all agree on is that God^H^H^H history is on their side
Just philosophically, tho, how much "balanced history" is even within the grasp of human capability ?
In real time, five human beings can witness a bar fight, and you can get FIVE different accounts of what "really happened". During about the last 45 years, scientists have proven the almost *worthless rate of reliability with eye witness accounts.
Eye witness accounts for historical millennia have been the "coin of the realm" in courts ancient and modern.
Setting up experiments for eye witness accounts shows that the only observer getting the story *right, is the unemotional, unbiased by pre-conceptions and unconscious expectations, *camera.
I think that only historical evidence provided from *elimination, is about the best we can hope to accomplish with history. By elimination, I mean Character X is said to have done ABC in DEF.
So, if I can find documentary evidence showing that Character X was not *in DEF at the time in question, I can eliminate that accusation. Or that, by the time of the accusation, Character X was *dead for 12 years, you know, another example of proving by elimination.
If Character X *was in DEF at the time mentioned, I may have no way to *disprove the accusation against him. This is the way that *much of history is created.
Character X stood on his head and gargled peanut butter during the battle of San Juan Hill.
"Oh, Yeah? Prove that he gargled peanut butter."
"You prove that he did NOT".
That argument is only settled, lacking corroborating documentation to one side or the other, by what eventually
is placed into the History Book, on the basis of what *might have
happened. This is why History has *never fallen under the category of the "exact sciences".
There was a book called "North Dallas Forty", written, I think Dan Jenkins, in which the star of the Cowboys is told after they lost the Super Bowl in a fluky way, that they would have won if a ball hadn't bounced a certain way, and he replied, "The only thing that could have happened, did."
Our history is pretty well established; we are expansionary and militaristic, our military engaged in some sort of action somewhere for some or all of more than 90% of our years. How many other countries, over such a long period of time, who weren't outright admitted empires, can say that?
Right now, with bad boy Trump out of power, Biden has asked for a Pentagon budget larger than any Trump requested, and that figure has already been upped another $25 billion by a Congressional committee. Had Trump been re elected, and withdrawn our troops from Afghanistan, which would be followed by an eventual Taliban takeover or domination of that country, the Dems would have played the he lost Afghanistan card just as surely as the Repubs will do when that happens under Biden. This is nothing but a continuation of the game played during the Cold War., that saw claims, mostly by Repubs, that someone had lost some country to the Communists, and is why both Kennedy and Johnson did what they did.
It's who we are, and always have been, and with an all volunteer military, coupled with a propensity to give ax cuts in the midst of wars, a trend that is only accelerating.
I'm sure you're correct. I graduated high school in 1966 in a segregated school system, but had moved to my final school from an integrated rural system. I knew about Tulsa, Rosewood, Juneteenth and a whole lot of other things that were only discoverable by research. Research? Without an internet? Yes.
I spent hours every weekend going through old magazines and newspapers, old books, and was able to find out stuff. I talked to old people (I'm one myself these days) and listened. I was lucky enough to live in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, and could visit the Archives and Library of Congress where I could examine the Congressional Record first-hand. I soon learned that the proceedings of Congress were irrelevant; the real work and decisions took place in committees and sub-committees. The Congressional Record is subject to members' whims. For example, Hale Boggs gave a speech in Congress the day after he died. A miracle!
This was a harsh realization for me as well. If I ever have kids I'm going to make sure they get a decent classical education, even if it bankrupts me.
That's it? What are you going to do about it for your own education?
My college diploma (circa late 70s, state's "flag-ship" university, later called one of the "public" (state university) "Ivies") was a joke. (To spare their feelings, I didn't say that in clear and unambiguous terms to my parents--who'd paid for all the tuition and were proud of having put three kids through university). But I refused to leave it at that. I decided I was going to embark on a remedial program of self-directed education and started reading--at first, to "fill in the gaps" (political history, sociology, French, U.S. history, history of Constitutional law) in my college curriculum's course-work and, later, I launched into areas of study I'd never undertaken in a college course: molecular biology and bio-chemistry, earth sciences, basic physics and cosmology, evolutionary biology, statistics and statistical methods and interpretation, European history from 500 A.D. to the present, literary criticism, anthropology, ethics, ethnology, religious history, Latin and Greek (still largely failures but better than I'd had), American literature from the 18th to 21st century, education theory and practice, Elizabethan poetry and drama (esp. "Shakespeare"). Things developed organically with the current reading always directing and informing that which followed. But there were many surprising twists and turns. I'd read anything which I stumbled upon (browsing bookstore tables and found interesting whether I had any prior knowledge of it or not. In that way, I took up genetics and molecular biology and read, going from one text to its cited works.
By now, I have a really good idea of how poor was my education straight out of undergraduate studies. I'd first considered going to graduate school and visited a campus far from my home area. But meeting and talking with several grad students about their (typical of other fields, too) lives and work in the field I was considering left me depressed and alienated. All of them were focused on a narrow topic and had to satisfy demands from an advisor's supervision and direction. I quickly decided that this was the last thing I needed or wanted--another "siloed" approach to learning and education.
I intend to educate myself as best I can, but the fact of the matter is that the best time to learn is in your youth when you're fully supported by your family and you have huge amounts of time to devote to the task. Speaking for myself, the realization that a massive and irrecoverable chunk of my life was stolen from me was the painful part of waking up to how terribly I was educated.
I think it may be wrong to think some were getting a much better education. The history of college educated idiots goes back pretty far. In many ways these schools are defenders of class structures much more than impartial centers of state of the art information, science, etc. In many ways they are businesses disguised as non profit collegial learning centers. I know people who went to "top" schools who rarely read anything of quality or challenge. Real learning is a life long appetite which you have pursued.
I know that some were getting or once had gotten very good educations because a number of my own profs were brilliant scholars and excellent teachers--just not enough of them; nor were the best of these also the most appreciated by my fellow classmates, by all indications.
But I think there's a good deal to your observation. Whether typical or not I have no idea but only a couple of times have I met and got to talk informally to young graduates of any of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge University--and this goes back several decades now, In no case was I very favorably impressed by their intelllect, their curiosity or their knowledge or awareness.
Are you familiar with the old U.S. television game show, "College Bowl"? It was a Q & A contest between panels of college students. There's a long-standing U.K. version (which may be the original, with "CB" the copy) and that's called "University Challenge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Challenge) with host Jeremy Paxman.
Of course, the teams, chosen carefully and competitively in advance by processes of practice and elimination in advance at the various campuses, cram furiously in preparation for the meets--which you know if you're familiar with the program.
What they can stuff into their memories and recall is quite as amazing as the stuff which stumps them. There's usually at least one quiz question which I imagined "everybody knows" which leaves them all scratching their heads. But, more often than not, they impress me greatly for their knowledge of the right answers.
Of course, they can't speak or write their own language (English) worth a damn--except for those visiting students from a Scandinavian country (not all the panelists are U.K. born and raised.)
What and where did you study, Joseph?, if you don't mind my asking.
I graduated the the same time from the same kind of university. I do not think my education was "second rate". It might have been, because I'm naturally lazy and easily distracted, but I was inspired by some dedicated professors, and began to seriously explore a lot of history and literature. Higher education is what YOU make of it.
Absolutely SO ! Getting an education is not a "passive" experience. One thinks of the University as an opportunity to educate *yourself ! They have the Labs, you choose which to use. They have the instructors, you choose whom you want to hear. They have the libraries, they have the resources, you decide the questions that you need to have answered.
University teaching, at the undergrad level, is simply a *GIANT menu from which you choose. You cannot direct your own education, if you don't even know what is on the MENU !
So you do a *lot of X Class 101 to find your area of interest.
Once found, you chase your area of interest like a wolf pack chases the elk, and soon you are ready for Grad School, or you are ready to go directly into your field of endeavor. From Grade One to Grade 12, you went to school because the law said that you *had to. In college, you are *paying to be there, and if you *fail to get an education, it is on no one but yourself. You *make them teach you. You do not profitably *wait to be taught. That is what you are paying for.
Yep. We don't even have to ask, "WWSD?" (What would Stalin Do?") We just have to look around at community standards" practices on " 'social'-media sites".
Oh, look. That didn't take long at all. Remember how just a few years (possibly months) ago, leftists were treated as paranoid and crazy for arguing that algorithms can be racist and sexist? The counter-argument back then was: of course they can't, algorithms are value-neutral, they're always fair and impartial. And the moment algorithms came for people and content non-leftists care about - lo and behold, suddenly everyone agrees that algorithms aren't fair and impartial anymore, and that humans create them in their own image.
t's a brilliant observation. No better proof of just how outcome oriented we all truly are.
If you go back to the 60's when large scale computers were first coming into use on a large scale, it's amazing to read just how much trust they placed in their ability to organize human behavior. They treated their output like the Oracle of Delphi because to them it was, even if to us that computer is the equivalent of a modern pocket calculator.
It will be interesting to see what those 40 years from think of our current faith in letting "cutting edge" computers use algorithms to guide our behavior and decision making.
Remember the Algorithmic Accountability Act? It was introduced in 2019 by three Democrats and zero Republicans. Republicans proceeded to fight it tooth and nail, and it went nowhere in the (at the time) Republican-controlled Senate. As of February 2021 it's supposed to be reintroduced in the current Senate session. Expect the Republicans to invent a new excuse to oppose it.
Don't doubt what you are saying, but, So What! Are the machines in charge of what is acceptable human behavior? Are they the gatekeepers about what we are entitled to know about human history, human knowledge? What do the machines know about empathy, or why we like puppies and kittens. This willingness to cede our lives to the machines makes me ill.
Kinda-sorta. Someone had to write the initial learning code, but after that the algorithms literally write themselves based upon the data they are exposed to, and the algorithm itself cannot be broken apart to figure out what the hell they are doing. The only way to do that is to run them on a corpus of data and view the results.
Well you can choose to have them learn or you can let them learn and then treat them statically. Microsoft found this out with their Tay bot, which started spewing Nazi crap because people were feeding it trash from the net. So most do not choose to let their live projects learn. They do that in the background and control the inputs.
Naive AI is what it is. It'll never replicate human intelligence, but what it does is create the equivalent of an expert system without having to code the rules.
The only problem, where history becomes "propaganda", is when it is taught as the only truth.
I haven't read the 1619 Project, but what I hear is that it's got some things "wrong" but is mostly well documented. (I don't care enough to know because I don't think it's very widely read anyway.)
The problem people have is not its accuracy but the story they think it tells and what it says about us today.
There is good (well-researched and documented) history out there about colonialism and slavery and industrialization and war, etc. that if presented plainly would make people squirm. The patriotism crowd would want a chance to explain and rebut. And there is just as good history out there to support them.
The solution is rebuttal and addition and most important, humility. Being upfront in saying "this is what we've found, but we, nor anyone else, can draw definitive conclusions about abstract ideas."
This need for humility is a running theme in Matt's work here.
A couple of responses to your points: first, "The 1619 Project" is massively wrong as to matters of fact as well as interpretation, beginning in the very first paragraph when it claims that slavery began in Virginia in 1619 when the first slaves arrived from a captured Spanish slaver. Wrong. When those slaves were brought ashore, they assumed the status of indentured servants, and some later went on to gain their freedom. Race-based slavery in Virginia did not take hold until later in the 17th century, at least in part due to the desire to keep white and black indentured servants from joining forces to resist the planter elite. This fact has been well documented by scholars across the ideological spectrum. But it did not fit the "1619" narrative, so it was ignored.
Second: the authors of "The 1619 Project" claim that the American Revolution was motivated by a fear that Great Britain planned to abolish slavery. Wrong. There is virtually no evidence for that claim, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, etc. have been forced to back off from it. But that tells you the level you the level of sheer ignorance/malice that drives "The 1619 Project."
There is much more along these lines. I urge you to check out "The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History," put out by the World Socialist Website people. Despite their Trotskyite orientation, they have produced a volume that contains informed critiques from noted scholars from across the political spectrum. Maybe examine that text and then see what you think about all of this.
To me, "The 1619 Project's" view of history most closely resembles that of The Nation of Islam's "White Devil Theory of History," as described in "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." In other words, undiluted hate. We should not give in to it.
The 1619 project got the most fundamental thing of all totally wrong, which undermines most of the claims it makes:
Slavery in North America was not started by European settlers in 1619. It was widespread for hundreds of years before that, indeed common in many of the prominent American Indian tribes.
A "1019 Project" would have been closer to reality.
I am probably from the “patriotism crowd” (whatever that means) . My objection to the 1619 project is the claim that it is foundational to our history vice a part of our history. What I appreciated about the 1619 project was a focus and elucidation of our pre-Revolution history which is substantial and important and under valued
Saying that anything is "foundational" is the kind of abstraction I'm talking about.
It's a value judgment.
And yeah, any time you choose to present one set of facts rather than another, there's inherent editorializing, but again, the answer is to make it clear that any history is incomplete.
And I don't worry about the various "alternative" histories being presented (even if their authors have a polemic intent) because the "standard" version of history, the heroic version, is so deeply engrained in our education and culture and society, it's pretty safe.
"And I don't worry about the various "alternative" histories being presented (even if their authors have a polemic intent) because the "standard" version of history, the heroic version, is so deeply engrained in our education and culture and society, it's pretty safe."
Flipshod, this is a widely held view regarding the "standard" version of US History--that it is so "deeply engrained" that it certainly can withstand some criticism from polemicists. And years ago, I might have agreed. But in 2021, what is "deeply engrained" in our educational and cultural establishments is a Leftist perspective that aims to tear that "standard" version down, one book, one movie, and one statue at a time. And they are succeeding. The widespread embrace of such a shoddy piece of scholarship as "The 1619 Project" (put out by that great cultural influencer, the NYT) is strong evidence of that. As is the Biden Administration's support for it as an educational curriculum in the public schools. So, whatever your position might be on this, it is wrong to assume that the "standard" version of US History is "pretty safe" from going away completely. In fact, it's about half-gone already.
In fairness, there was a time when "Birth of a Nation" was considered a bedrock historical interpretation of the post civil war American South.
I have not read the 1619 project because I don't believe it's worth my time, but we have a long history of getting entire portions of our own history wrong. I think back to my own High School history book from 40 years ago and wince.
To me, the real danger is less about historical innacuracy and more the reactionary approach to dealing with it. We are good at identifying something wrong, then wildly over correcting for it. I suspect in 50 years no one will remember the 1619 Project as anything but noise, but they may very well remember how we reacted to it.
Thanks for you comment. A couple of responses: first, there is a world of difference between the US historical profession of 40 years ago and that of today. Recall that Howard Zinn's revisionist People's History of the US (1980) is among the most renowned and best-selling US history text of the last 40 years. Professional historians have long since corrected for the shortcomings of the traditional patriotic narrative, in fact they may have over-corrected, as evidenced by The 1619 Project.
Second, to make specific and factual criticisms of The 1619 Project is not "reactionary." The work is wrong in matters of fact as well as interpretation, and there is absolutely nothing wrong or reactionary for scholars from a wide range of perspectives to say so (if you doubt that last point, check out Bob Woodson's 1776 Unites project). This sort of critical discussion has long been at the core of the process of producing anything remotely resembling an accurate history. I strongly believe that the race and gender of an author should play no role in the response to their work. We must focus on the ideas expressed, not the identities of the author(s). But I'm old fashioned in that way.
The reactionary element in this controversy has been the tendency of defenders of The 1619 Project to frame every objection to its shortcomings as racist and to cynically claim that any criticisms of it is an attempt to entirely avoid the unsavory elements of our past, notwithstanding the literally thousands of examples of scholarship that in recent decades have examined that unsavory side from multiple (gender, race, class etc) perspectives. But they are figuring most people are not aware of that fact, I guess.
Who knows how all of this will be remembered fifty years from now?...I suppose that mainly depends on who's doing the remembering. All one can do today is to speak and to act according to what our conscience and our intellect tells us is right.
That "patriots" hate this attempt at the 1619 presentation of the history of racism and race relations and can provide only such feeble quibbles such as are generally welcome in discussions of history shows that there is more to their rage than a devotion to historical accuracy. The cruelty and distortions and theft and warfare justified by racial theories and the pursuit of land in American History would turn anyone's stomach who wants to believe we are a product of high ideals, christian virtues or anything all that admirable. I too dislike the NY Times and look to other sources. But the essence of the story remains deeply disturbing, and this reckoning with our history is long overdue.
It is wrong to suggest that only "patriots" object to the 1619 Project...the fact of the matter is, historians across the political spectrum object to the wholesale falsification of the past evident in The 1619 Project, but many are reluctant to say so publicly for fear of being called a racist or otherwise "cancelled." The people at the World Socialist Web Site are a notable exception to this trend.
Don't fall victim to the belief, widely trumpeted by defenders of The 1619 Project, that the only alternative to its bleak vision is a "patriotic" version of the American past. That is just not true.
This was the point Ray Bradbury understood that Orwell missed.
I revere Orwell, but think 1984 is both misunderstood and overrated. Orwell imagined a ruling class making rules for everyone else.
I think Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451" captured what tyranny in a democracy truly looks like. It's not the elites handing down "diktats." It's the mob calling for censorship of anything they don't approve of and the powerful exploiting their request to their own ends. It's the mob fighting for control of State violence to punish people they don't approve of.
"Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did.
…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator."
"I think Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451" captured what tyranny in a democracy truly looks like. It's not the elites handing down "diktats." It's the mob calling for censorship of anything they don't approve of and the powerful exploiting their request to their own ends. It's the mob fighting for control of State violence to punish people they don't approve of."
It is also -- importantly, in my opinion -- the mob watching TV all day every day. Bradbury prefigured the idea of constant media immersion in F451 well before the commercial Internet.
I love F451 because it is the most hopeful of dystopian novels (1984 is the least hopeful of dystopian novels; Zamyatin's мы is a contender, I guess). It has a happy ending. Moral is: when you work as an enforcer for a corrupt, dysfunctional system, quit your damned job and join the guerrilla forces.
"You'll stink like a bobcat for a few days, but it'll be all right."
While I certainly admire the work of Ray Bradbury, today the threat of censorship does not come from the "masses," it mostly comes from elites in high tech, academia, and social media. Most "normal" people that I know don't want to censor things they don't approve of, they just ignore them. Again that is in 2021, not say, 1950. I don't hear of "the mob" fighting to punish people they don't approve of, unless it is a Twitter "mob," which from what I can tell is usually a relative handful of people talking loudly to get their way. The "censored" people we "meet" in Matt's interviews are not being censored by the "mob," they are being censored by elites, i.e. Facebook., et al., right?
I ask without sarcasm based on your racial comment about that quote from book below, have you read "Fahrenheit 451?"
I think this is an area where we will agree to disagree. I think Bradbury had this one right.
As Glenn Greenwald was written, for much of their history the Facebooks, Twitters, Instagrams and Youtubes had no interest in what people posted on their sites. None at all. Do you remember any debates around this topic 10 years ago?
Then right wing religious groups and rad fems decided to relaunch their failed grassroots war on sex from the 1980's and this time they found success. Suddenly, Cogress was passing laws like SESTA/FOSTA that took direct aim at online speech. They were pressuring credit card companies to stop payments for anything relating to sex and doing a dozen other things that would have caused an outcry 30 years prior.
Now, were there politicians and elites in tech along with the criminal industrial complex willing to use this new anti sex movement for their own gains in term of the right to censor? Yes, but they never would have had that power to impose online speech restrictions without the mob calling for censorship of the most marginalized members of society starting around 2010.
It's crucial to understand the new censorship war on sex because that is always the gateway drug to in America to greater censorship. Tech, the Government and the criminal system always start censoring the most marginalized groups where they will face the least push back, especially if they sell the entire thing as "fighting sex trafficking" rather than "censoring free speech."
From there, the censorship expanded until it took on a political roll in 2016 using all the same tools and arguments they used to fight free speech relating to sex 6 years earlier online, but now the tools were used against political opponents leading up to censoring even scientific discussions of things like invermectin. The president is deplatformed from Twitter in 2020. Guess what group was being deplatformed without protest or 1st amendment pushback years prior to that while people said nothing?
This is not a situation where everyone wants the first amendment and the elites are denying it to them. It's a situation where people want to censor their enemies and the elites are exploiting that for their own aims. That's not George Orwell Elites, that's the Ray Bradbury mob.
I'll consider Bradbury part of my new anti-bitterness campaign.
It's such a great point you make. Bradbury would have totally gotten people on their cell phones constantly and walking everywhere with earbuds on. Much more than Orwell would have. Orwell had different strengths.
I know I have a tendency to go on far too long in my posts, so try to be ruthless in my editing. Thanks you adding the quiet part I secretly wanted to add myself.
"White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin." Well, maybe some white people didn't/don't like it, but millions of others did/do--Uncle Tom's Cabin was perhaps the biggest publishing success in 19th century America (and Europe). It was later adapted to the stage in both the US and in Europe, and performed for decades.
Along the same lines, the eight part TV mini-series "Roots" (1977) pulled few punches about the horrors of slavery, yet it became one of the most successful mini-series of all time in a country that was a good deal whiter than it is today...the finale remains one of the most-watched TV programs of all time....guess the KKK must have promoted it amongst its members.
Funny how few times counterpoints such as UTC and Roots are remembered in these discussions. But I know, these two examples contradict the "all white people are evil racists" narrative, so they must be ignored/forgotten.
Maybe it would be best to just stay away from all forms of racialist generalizations. They just confuse us, even more than we already are.
Who is the 'tyrant' behind pulling down statues of the leaders of a bloody rebellion to keep slavery? Why is it tyrannical for citizens who have been for centuries targeted murdered and enslaved by white supremacists to engage in a symbolic renunciation of the heroizing of slaveholders and their wars to retain slavery.History is not statues. Historywas not censored by their removal. I support the right of a state to withdraw from the US, but the Civil war was not a pursuit of freedom; it was a defense of slavery.
Give me a substantive example of "racist propaganda" from the 1619 project and your statement might have some validity.
Yes I agree that we have a constitutional right to free speech but I also think public forums have some responsibility to prevent threats of violence.
First of all, Jones isn't even pretending to be writing history. It's a journalism project and primarily opinion based. So let's say that at the outset.
The assertion that George III was an existential threat to American slavery and therefore the Revolution was a pro-slavery exercise. Bullshit prima facie. Britain had bigger fish to fry with slavery than the American colonies - the sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean were some of the richest colonies in the world and all slave-worked. Britain didn't get around to emancipating all its slaves until 1833, long after (arguably insane) George III had died.
There's your one example. If I were interested in wasting my time, I could find a lot more.
Show me a quote from the materials of the 1619 project where this assertion about the revolution is made. Also if it is a journalism project and has questionable opinions as journalists sometimes do, whats the big deal? As to the revolution and slavery it is quite bad enough having a revolution proposing to end the cruelty of economic and political colonialism while engaging massively in slavery. One could debate the nature of the American revolution and history for days and pile up facts to the tree tops but nothing can erase the cruel foundations of slavery and racism against native peoples. I too have many problems with the direction of identity politics, but I think common sense and respectful dialog can resolve the issues. For me the glory of America is very dubious. At this moment in human history we are faced with an eco disaster that we can come together to address or we can insist on defending our comfort and denial finding anything else but this shared common ground for needed action.
The original article is paywalled at NYT, but someone reposted the essay on her blog:
"Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy."
If you want to talk about bad stuff that gets whitewashed in our mainstream history, broaden the scope to include all European colonialism. Check out Spanish silver mining. Or go beyond the Western Hemisphere and just start with Vasco de Gama (who first made long-distance ocean voyage feasible.) See India and Africa.
I was responding to a particular item from the 1619 project. No disagreement with your points.
The history of the US is full of bad stuff, with some ok stuff thrown in sometimes. Historical inquiry requires us to not push an agenda but to try to incorporate as much of this spotty history in our own views as possible.
(and forget about things like 1619 and the rah-rah patriotic crap I was taught back in the 80s)
If the problem is defacement of monuments by left-wingers, why do right-wingers constantly deface monuments as well? The George Floyd monument in Houston was vandalized multiple times, so was the George Floyd monument in Philadelphia, and so were many others. Sounds like an extremists-on-both-sides problem to me.
Sounds more to me like the left wingers started something they want to wind down but can't. Conflict is like that. Atrocity and counter-atrocity until someone yells uncle.
It would have been wise to think of that before the first statue came down.
Sorry, I don't follow your logic. Right-wingers vandalizing monuments *while at the same time claiming that vandalizing monuments is wrong*... is the left-wingers' fault? I'm sorry, but if you think that a thing is wrong, then you shouldn't be doing that thing. And if you continue doing the thing, then it's no one's fault but your own. It's funny how the right's obsession with personal responsibility immediately collapses the moment that they're the ones having to accept personal responsibility for their own actions.
If you're pointing out something about human nature, then you're obviously proving my point - both sides are human and therefore both sides are at fault here.
I'm not overly concerned about fault - once the atrocities and counter-atrocities start, it's pretty hard to assess who is at fault anyway. The only real human agency is stopping the conflict in the first place. This is why we talk and protest but don't do damage or kill.
Will it ever be possible to get away from this "sides" bullshit? I'm guessing the answer is "no." I'm unfortunately in a state of despair and learned helplessness from people treating politics like professional sports.
People on drugs have different color sense than others. The guy who owned my house before me had one wall in his kitchen that was semi-gloss black on the bottom and pink on the top above a chair rail, old dude who fancied himself an artist, he was taking opiates for pain amongst other things. The house had something like 14 different colors in it. The bedroom was painted like a bumblebee, with yellow and black stripes.
I considered it a reasonable house discount. Was going to repaint anyway.
Umm, his other three novels, THE DOG OF THE SOUTH, MASTERS OF ATLANTIS, and GRINGOS. There is also a compilation of his early newspaper and magazine work, ESCAPE VELOCITY, which contains one of my favorite essays "Motel Life, Lower Reaches."
So monuments can be vandalized if they're ugly and (as argued elsewhere in the thread) free speech can be restricted if you disagree with what's being said. This just gets better and better.
That's a distinction without a difference. Monuments to both kinds of people are an embodiment of history. If you destroy a monument, you destroy history - no matter whom the monument commemorates. Also - noted people of accomplishment? Confederacy figures are noted people of accomplishment? What's their accomplishment? Unsuccessful treason?
Great article. Historically illiterate "Woke" imbeciles believe history is supposed to conform to our current prevailing popular cultural ideology. History is to inform us in many ways, not confined to how people once were and that people were a lot like us and that we have changed a lot since then. It's a set of static jumping off points that launch us into the free-form of life.
But what is more distressing is the idea that something long since gone can trigger people who are alive now so much that it must be whitewashed. And yes, I use that term with appropriate and intentional irony. The two most offensive no longer in existence historical targets which cause knee-jerk blacklisting, persecution, canceling and deplatforming are the Holocaust and the Civil War. The Holocaust and anything connected to it is simultaneously unspeakable and ironically one of the most important teaching tools we have.
The Civil War flag and statuary are both very intriguing. The flag has long been a symbol of racism, but also a symbol of "F off" and it's not always clear in what way it was used. So I find it difficult to assign it automatically as racism when it's on somebody's motorcycle. It can obviously be both.
The statuary is even more interesting. It was a war between Americans. Brothers fought on both sides of that war. Blacks fought on either side. And after that bloody disaster, which was absolutely necessary for our progress as a people, ended, there were massive hard feelings on both sides. Part of the healing was that the south was welcomed back as our American brethren again. And that meant celebrating their heroes and honoring their dead. That was the wise and profound bargain to bring healing to a great nations. To say, that statue celebrates slavery is just idiotic. Sorry. It's even more idiotic when applied to the founding father or whomever. But specifically if you look at the southern people who buried their dead after the war and needed to heal in order to rejoin the union, you can understand why those statues are extremely meaningful to some. Do they trigger you? Does a Roman Emperor statue trigger you?
In every other part of the world, if people desecrate art and symbols of culture, we say they are committing crimes against humanity. But when it comes to our culture and history, we want to take a steamroller to it. This may be because we don't know we have a culture. But whatever the source of the ignorance, it's still wrong.
I think the same is happening in other places too. For example, Russia passed a law that would land Yuri Gagarin in jail for what he said (he didn't find a god while in space).
I remember when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddha statues and this action was-legitimately-cited as evidence of the depravity of their mindset. Statues of George Washington and Frederick Douglass in the summer of ‘20? CNN say you go pan-whatever, tear that statue down-at least tacitly.
Thank you for this significant commentary. Your points make good sense to me. We need to ensure that history does not disappear. The people who are most active in doing the disappearing do not seem to understand the true meaning of what they are destroying or censoring, which is I think one of your key points.
Yes from my lived experience the Dixie Cross aka rebel flag was always a symbol of rebellion, an FU to the status quo. Not a token of racism. I spent formative years (67-72) in TN and NC and since '73 in CA. I think folks that believe it's a symbol of racism either did not grow up in the South and/or got brainwashed in school much later than I.
Thank you for raising the issue of the Confederate statues. Their removal -- and the joyful media circus surrounding their removal -- was the shot over the bow with censorship. Slavery was an abomination and had to be ended (that we can all agree on). The fact that the majority of Southerners did not own slaves but fought to leave the Union for other reasons was treated as blasphemy and a cover for racism and this is true even today.
My big complaint is the "leaders" they chose to commemorate.
Bragg, Benning!? These are the people they choose to commemorate? It reads like a Special Olympics for military leadership. They should be grateful they had so many excellent junior officers who did not get statutes.
Excellent junior officers have an unfortunate tendency to get killed during the performance of their duties. I posit that this is why they are little remembered or celebrated.
To be fair, those locations - presuming you are talking about the Army installations in question - were created in response to the First World War. People were still alive that remembered these people as leaders. No one wants to think of their general that they served under as a bad general. Evidence: people who would hold up Omar Bradley or Mark Clark as some kind of competent general in the generation that just (mostly) died off.
I didn't say a word about the generals I have served under. Most of them were semi-competent. Some were nonentities. Most of the time their O-6 ops people and such were the ones really pulling the strings. I know a few smart colonels...who mostly get dumb when they get promoted.
Are you looking for a story? I get a lot of up close and personal time with everything up to O-8 because of what I do. I did serve in a unit commanded by Petraeus, but he was echelons above me and never got up close and personal.
"Historically illiterate "Woke" imbeciles believe history is supposed to conform to our current prevailing popular cultural ideology." -- This has been true for long before anyone thought of "Woke". For example, throughout much of the 20th century certain parties bought expensive bits of prominent downtown real estate in order to erect statues of Robert E. Lee, treating him as a noble personage for all to gaze upon, when in fact the was a person who believed and fought for the abominations of racism and slavery. That was their way of rewriting history so it would conform to popular culture. Few objected to this until recently, when the descendants of his victims began to -- quite justly -- tear them down. Then a great moaning arose. That's popular culture for you.
According to what I read Lee was an explicit racist and believed thoroughly in slavery, as did the leadership class of the Southern states according to the documents they themselves wrote.
So I have to ask what is being memorialized when a statue of this man is placed in front of us. Surely not his inner, ambiguous, unexpressed dissatisfaction with the slavery for which he fought.
And what reaction might we expect from the descendants of his victims, who are also targets to this very day of the same ideas which animated him and his colleagues? What would you all suggest?
Elihu Yale does not represent anything to most people. He donated some books to some college somewhere once upon a time and got them to paste his name over the door. Robert E. Lee is an explicit symbol of a living ideology. It makes a statement.
Yale University is named for slave-trader and merchant Elihu Yale. According to historian Craig Steven Wilder, Yale also "inherited a small slave plantation in Rhode Island that it used to fund its first graduate programs and its first scholarships... [the university] aggressively sought out opportunities to benefit from the slave economies of New England and the broader Atlantic world."[91]
"I was much pleased the with President's message. His views of the systematic and progressive efforts of certain people at the North to interfere with and change the domestic institutions of the South are truthfully and faithfully expressed. The consequences of their plans and purposes are also clearly set forth. These people must be aware that their object is both unlawful and foreign to them and to their duty, and that this institution, for which they are irresponsible and non-accountable, can only be changed by them through the agency of a civil and servile war. There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day. Although the abolitionist must know this, must know that he has neither the right not the power of operating, except by moral means; that to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master; that, although he may not approve the mode by which Providence accomplishes its purpose, the results will be the same; and that the reason he gives for interference in matters he has no concern with, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbor, -still, I fear he will persevere in his evil course. . . . Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom have always proved the most intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?" - RE Lee 1856
He manumitted the slaves that passed to him in 1857 via a will. It took him forever to do so (something like 5 years) but debt and war had something to do with that.
It might surprise you that U.S. Grant also was a slaveowner once upon a time.
He personally didn't fight for slavery, he made that clear on several occasions. He would have preferred to remain with the Union, but when his state seceded, he was compelled by honor to serve it. The view of people in the antebellum US was that it was "these United States" rather than "the United States". In many cases primary loyalty was to your state, particularly in the South.
Is tearing down that statue going to remove Jim Crow, which Lee had nothing to do with? It's futile and stupid. Besides which, Lee had a point about his appeal to Christianity rather than war. Sure, the war ended slavery de jure, but de facto it remained for at least 100 years more. Lee's solution may well have bent that curve without 700k people dying. He understood that the _white_ southerners had to be brought along for the ride to get rid of slavery for good.
Anyway, instead of slagging the guy without knowledge, you should find out more about him. He's not universally admirable but there was more to him than some slavery monster.
Rather than contest anything above, I suggest people simply do the reading. Grasp what slavery meant, what Robert E. Lee thought of it and did about it, what heroizing the Confederacy means today. It's all out there are not hard to find.
So, ignore the facts, read craptastic propaganda, either left wing non-relativist bullshit applying modern values to people from the 1860s or patriotic rah-rah crap claiming the Union was for the end of slavery. Got it.
When war was declared Lee was in Texas with the U.S.Army. His service prior to that included work in the engineering corps, and supt at West Point. O don't get me started on Crimea. Right you are.
Lee: "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things...."
Get readin.'
"His public pronouncements were sometimes at odds with his private actions. Despite the fact that Lee told the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that everyone wished the former slaves well, for example, the records of the Freedman’s Bureau show that students under Lee’s direction at Washington College were heavily involved in their harassment."
"After the war, Lee continued to hold attitudes about class and race that were chained to the old order. A few weeks after Appomattox he expounded to a newspaperman on the need to “dispose” of the freedmen. He not only advocated the deportation of African Americans, he backed a plan to replace them with destitute whites from Ireland, who would form a new servant class. He also signed a petition that proposed a political system precluding all blacks, and many poor whites, from voting."
Which is, of course, why it is the height of illogic to take *anyone out of the context of their own time period and to presume to judge them by the standards and mores of our *own time period. That said, of course, as time goes by, the adulation of certain "causes" of the past is just as anachronistic. There comes a time when too many statues of too many characters can just get in the way. That time usually *only comes when we are *finished with what the imagery of, say Nathan Bedford Forrest, or R.E. Lee *means to certain of our *contemporary citizenry.
I'd sooner avoid poking people in the eye by taking down statues. People are going to find solace in the things that they choose. I don't have to approve of everything everyone else does. There's a totalitarian impulse in the statue removal thing, that people don't see it is the problem.
That it would be a "totalitarian" impulse is interpretation. It might also just be a "we have had enough of your lies and your bullshit for, lo, these many years, so now it is *time to stop *visually intimidating and shoving your racism down the throats of your fellow citizens.
My father was a "paternal" racist. Better than a violent and virulent racist, perhaps, but not by much. The South LOST. Do you not see that both the Stars and Bars and the Nazi Swastika are flags of the LOSERS ? And the South claims it is a flag of their heritage ? So LOSING is your heritage ? And you are nostalgic for your heritage of the 1950s ? When most of these statues were put up ? This is more crap like "Remember The Alamo", glorifying one of *the dumbest military blunders in the history of *WARFARE ! That was no "Sun Tzu" operation there, trying to bring slavery into a foreign land with a handful of fools against a standing army of National Troops. That's carrying the childish "One riot, one Ranger" inanity to its logical conclusion, all right.
Why do we have to ban the losers in conflict when say, the Scottish flag is not banned? They lost too, repeatedly. Hell if you want to wave around a USSR flag in modern-day Russia, there's nothing stopping you. They lost too.
Totalitarian means trying to force shit down other people's throats in a totalized society. Ok, don't assume the totalized society, though it seems very obvious to me. It's very ...authoritarian at the very least. The total opposite of liberty and constitutional guarantees. Pretty pathetic when Russia is teaching us lessons on this.
Trying to get your way like that is going to kill a lot of people, ultimately. Over goddamned statues or flags. Totally stupid. When people lose, if you want them to acquiesce to this, you leave them their imagery and commemorations.
Only reason this shit worked in Germany (denaziification) was the millions dead in WWII made people say uncle.
"Ambivalent?" Sort of the way Patton was ambivalent about wqr. Read the General's own words.
"The first thing we can say about Robert E. Lee’s interaction with the institution of slavery is that it is extremely well documented. This may surprise some people."
"Lee’s letters tell us much about his racial attitudes. He seemed to dislike the bondsmen’s presence and generally avoided dealing with them. (“Do not trouble yourself about them, as they are not worth it,” he counseled his wife.) He had a low opinion of blacks as workers and complained continually about their habits. (“It would be accidental to fall in with a good one,” he ultimately concluded.) He found the constant need to provide for the slaves burdensome, and as a result frequently rented them out."
"As late as 1865 he was still asserting that “the relation of master and slave…is the best that can exist between the white & black races.” He had equally dismissive views of other groups who threatened white aspirations, including Mexicans and American Indians, whom he several times described as “hideous” and whom he believed to be culturally inferior. It is important to note that these are not random comments, written on a bad day, but a constant pattern in Lee’s writing."
"And what did the slaves say about Robert E. Lee? One called him “the meanest man I ever saw.” “He was a hard taskmaster,” confided another. “He tried to keep us slaves, when we was as free as he,” was another comment."
None of it primary source or his own words. The typical qualities of bad history, some asshole's commentary. Try again. I dropped a quote in his own words later on in the conversation.
I would say Lee's letters and his own spoken words are about as "primary" as you can get. Why the denial of reality? Why the continued investment in clearly non-performing assets? At some point, you're going to be priced out of the market.
You might find the link below educational. You've effectively denigrated a work of scholarship that won an award named after Jefferson Davis, an even bigger asshole and racist than Lee. You're out-Confederate-ing even the Daughters of the American Revolution. Impressive.
"The Jefferson Davis Award was a cash prize presented to a government and legal studies student excelling in the study of constitutional law. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an association of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, endowed the Jefferson Davis Award in 1972."
Get readin.' "Bad history" history to you must mean anything that conflicts with your self-satisfied revisionism. Could you send me some of your good history? Please?
Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s book Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters won both the Lincoln Prize and the Jefferson Davis Award. Her list of sources for this article is in “Resources,” on P. 71.
To any fundamentalist ideologue, "history" like "facts" are just things to craft and then believe--and then used to justify challenging people who do not believe. And these people tend to have both deep and simple-minded embrasure of symbols, thus no thinking or alternative meanings required (or allowed).
I have never understood either iconolater, or iconoclast. One group imagines history will be harmed if a statue is torn down. The other believes they can change history by destroying a statue.
They deserve each other the way Sunni's and Shi'ite deserve each other.
Fighting over statuary is a universal thing and will probably never go away. The first thing a conquering army or new regime does is tear down statues.
But comparing tearing down Confederate monuments to desecrating ancient art is a bit far.
Many of them were put up as symbols of racial segregation many decades later.
They aren't the ruins of a lost civilization.
They're resistance to "Brown v. The Board of Education".
And this more modern civil rights issue is what's being argued about today. Not the Civil War.
I’m well aware of the popular media assertion that the dates of the statues being erected makes them part of Jim Crow Laws treat her than the aftermath of the civil war or reconstruction. But that kind of revisionist pop history is exactly what I am decrying. If you look at articles from the time you will see that these confederate monuments were ALL put up as an ongoing effect to assuage the losses and anger and to promote healing in our country.
"Popular media assertion." "Revisionist Pop History." "Assuage the losses and anger in our country and promote healing in our country."
Nonsense. Google is your friend---if you're seeking facts, not "revisionist pop history." I hereby decry you revisionist pop history. The confederates were scumbag traitors. Period. Study more verifiable history and you won't be prone to manufacturing your own pop history.
"Most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died, says Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro."
“Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” he says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s."
"The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.”
"By then, the construction of new Confederate monuments had begun to taper off, but the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement was spreading Confederate symbols in other ways: In 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag; and in 1962, South Carolina placed the flag atop its capitol building. In a 2016 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that the country’s more than 700 monuments were part of roughly 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces."
"Confederate monuments may be a part of history, but not the part of history that most people probably associate them with. According to many historians, they were constructed with a very particular political agenda, something that should definitely be taken into account when debating their removal."
Exactly what I am arguing against is revisionist history which decides the motives of the past are not what the people at that time believed they were, but are actually some form of less Woke motive in order to make a point our pop culture media proffers for its own motives.
My undergrad education was in English and history at a state University in the heart of Dixie in the 1980s. So you know I've heard that side of the story.
The racism in the US in the 1860s was virulent and wouldn't be believed by the youth of today. Having grown up in the 1970s, I have an idea. Wasn't that great then either.
My nickname ~18 when I worked outside was Mongo. I think there was a dichotomy thing working there, I was huge (6'7", 250 or so) but wasn't incapable of speech like Mongo.
To be entirely accurate, Lincoln planned to do so, but the amnesty proclamation was issued by Johnson after his assassination. This was the chief one where one had to swear a loyalty oath to gain pardon. It excluded the ringleaders of the rebellion. Lincoln individually pardoned a few people for being involved in the rebellion; less than 200 I believe.
It was bad enough when we had to deal with just humans being True Believers; now we must deal with humans hiding behind algorithms to absolve themselves of all responsibility.
It has always been so. It was god, but god died and efficiency in the name of technology replaced him as the god that must never be questioned.
Whether it's algorithm generated AI telling you what to believe, or a judge in black robes steeped in the religious belief of our times, we always look for totems that can be worshiped beyond reason.
We remain monkeys looking for meaning beyond the rational.
Go ahead and ask - you will be met with an impenetrable corporate veil. You aren't a customer of any social media outlet, you are the product they are selling.
History is, ultimately, reality and dealing with it’s consequences. Politics is the peddling of bs for government power-or the fruits of that power-reparations, regulatory capture, military contracts, public sector union lunacy.
Honestly don't know why anyone is still on social media. I get the benefits of a broader reach, but it's essential that all of one's economic viability eggs not be put in the social media basket. It doesn't take much to get three-strikes-you're-out-ed. Better have a backup plan.
But it's a real conundrum. The network effect leads to there only being a few large platforms. Narurally, those are corporate-run places whose information value is only slightly above in-flight magazines.
I'm reading Snowden's autobio. In it, he reminded me what the Internet used to be when it was just people with their own websites, or visiting public chat rooms. In thinking about how things are now, I appear to read consistently from only a few web users, reading other articles that they refer to. The question for me is whether I could have found them if social media didn't exist. Eventually?
The web is still changing fast and nowhere near equilibrium. For me, Substack and certain news aggregators made a big difference. I think expectations need to shift regarding where to look for reliable information, and the importance of not getting played.
A good book to read after Snowden is "Surveillance Valley" by Yasha Levine (sp?). It takes the story back further and shows how it's been a counterinsurgency project since the beginning and still is.
Snowden answers the question why? with "because they can"
Levine's answer is "because they like keeping tabs on anyone who might cause them problems"
Look to the website you are consuming here - based on subscription. You choose the source, when you are dissatisfied you can express that by stopping that subscription. You can't contact any human at any of the social media companies, because you aren't a customer. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Yes, Substack has been informative but also has the feeling of a free-speech ghetto. It's too bad that market forces don't allow for a forum that's both widely-read and open-minded.
Advertising. I don’t like to generalize, but...ad agents/marketing professionals. I wonder if they sometimes have any guilt. Trying to get people to consume things they don’t need through trickery. Advertising does a lot of psychological harm through nefarious means..at any cost
It puts a big chunk of society in a sort of deficit, always a few notches below what they think they need to be happy. Makes people restive and selfish. That's not good.
Yup, social media is the McDonalds of thought. Still damn tasty, but your mind will be the mental equivalent of someone on My 600lb Life if that’s all you consume.
Ironically I have met Dr. Now. A family member was on one of his other shows, "Skin Tight". As usual with media figures, he's a bit sleazy. Bankruptcies (the whole hospital he was part owner of declared bankruptcy, we got involved trying to avoid destruction of medical records) , discord with his operated on people, etc. We had no complaints, but others did.
The only voices left on social media will be the repugnant ones, oozing their repugnance unchallenged by the likes of us. They will have won by default the battle for the hearts and minds of the undecided or impressionable, which are huge in numbers.
That what the future looks like: censored by algorithms. No historical context, no understanding of any kind of ambiguity, just dumb, woke machines policing dumb, woke people. That is the plan, and so far all is progressing very well.
Yes, and this is the future conservatives want. Since everything is profit-oriented, policing by machines is cheaper than policing by humans, and therefore more prevalent than policing by humans. Let's cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy some more, so they'll amass even more money and power, and become even better at controlling us.
a) Dorsey and Zuckerberg are being enabled and empowered by conservatives. Without the Republican party constantly cutting taxes and regulation, Dorsey and Zuckerberg would never have the amount of power they have now.
b) Dorsey and Zuckerberg might be SOCIALLY liberal, but they're FISCALLY conservative. Since we're talking about profits, hiring, spending, taxes, etc - I believe that the fiscally conservative part is what matters here.
So why not give conservative politicians more money? If the conservative politicians do everything Dorsey and Zuckerberg want then they should be funding them at least at the level they fund Dems. Of course, every corporation is in it to make money. Ask AOC how much money she's made on her anti-capitalist t-shirts and sweatshirts! Goes both ways and Big Tech could give a rat's ass about conservatives!
They do give conservative politicians more money. Here's an article that compares the amount of money that Facebook gave to the congressional committee that questioned Facebook in 2018. To the three Republicans, Facebook gave $35,500. To the three Democrats, Facebook gave $27,000. Which number is higher?
The idea that the tech companies give a lot more money to Democrats comes from the fact that their EMPLOYEES give much more money to Democrats. But the companies themselves and the employees of those companies are two quite different things.
This shows that everyone should abandon Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the rest not just for their own mental equilibrium, but for the good of civilization.
People would rather complain than take their business elsewhere. After all, we've all got guns aimed at our heads by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, and we _must_ watch.
What worth does Twitter hold? Get off of it. It’s not hard. Any news is usually just a link to a link to another link. Any news can be found by other means. Obviously I read comments and sometimes write my own. I see how the back and forth can be exciting, but at some point it probably becomes unhealthy. No one is forcing any of these social media platforms on anyone. Put the crack down. Let the free market decide. If these companies lose enough data (us) and their profits are looking dicey I bet things would change real fast.
Yeah...it’s not rocket surgery..the world has survived for many a long year with no social media. The internet is awesome for so many things, but a 144 characters, “I have a friend who heard such and such” Facebook posts and fish lipped, filtered Instagram posts are none of those things
Could they contribute anywhere besides Twitter YouTube or Facebook? I realize that’s pretty daunting and probably unrealistic at this time, but fortune favors the bold! I feel a little like Julian the Apostate, but maybe we could go back to pamphlets and correspondence 😎 You’re not wrong though
I got a 24 hour suspension from facebook for quoting Mussolini's definition of fascism as the joining of government and corporations, or corporatism... i think they might have taken it personally.
There is an amusing, recursive irony here…shortly after Nazis came to power in 1933, that party passed laws that made it illegal to criticize the nascent Nazi government. This included the now infamous banning and burning books that were deemed unacceptable. So on the 100th anniversary of the Nazi’s most historically significant individual having come to power, Twitter’s reaction is that it’s “algorithms” deem unacceptable the didactic lessons of censorship.
Bonus question: If Twitter had been active during the era of Nazism, would Twitter have been part of the Nazi censorship machine, and if so, to what degree?
They would have been 'coordinated' like all aspects of German society. There was a word for this: Gleichschaltung. So of course they would have supported the regime. Either that or they would have ceased to exist.
LOL! Where do I start? I will give you a macro example that poisons many liberals view of history. They look back generations, centuries, and judge people on our current mores. That horseshit leads to statues being destroyed, just like the Taliban has done in Afghanistan.
If the problem is with liberals, why are liberal monuments being vandalized by conservatives? It's an extremists-on-both-sides problem, and always has been.
You can fire mortar rounds into universities w/o ever hitting a conservative, or even a moderate. Liberals are destroying education, they turned it into an industry, to serve themselves, not their students. They teach them what to think, not how to think. I am 68 and was a liberal in my youth. I'm now a libertarian.
Yes people get older and realize systems don’t usually help...even with the best of intentions...so, we become that get off of my lawn guy...which isn’t all bad
I am unsurprised with the censorship being done by the stupid. The problem with this kind of censorship is that it makes the dumb dumber, by depriving them of context. This lack of context guarantees the events of 100 years ago will be much easier to replicate, perhaps not in identical form, but something that could have been avoided if people understood the past better.
The ultimate failure of people like Hannah Arendt, Wiesenthal, along with many less known figures is to be found in this.
"In every country in which there has been a loss of freedom, where does it begin? It begins in news media, in public print, in books, and on the proscenium. That's where they attack you first - right there in the bread basket." Rod Serling
"Now it's computers & more computers. And soon everyone will have computers & everybody will know everything about everybody else long before they meet them. Nobody will want to meet anybody else ever again and everybody will be a recluse like I am now." Charles Bukowski
"When a reporter for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command interviewed Frank Zappa for the Command's news syndicate, the story was held up by a superior who demanded that Zappa - who had been rather hard on the Army - answer one more question: just who does he think will defend the country without the Army.
"Zappa's reply: "From what? The biggest threat to America today is its own federal government...Will the Army protect anybody from the FBI? The IRS? The CIA? The Republican Party? The Democratic Party?...The biggest dangers we face today don't even need to sneak past our billion dollar defense system...they issue the contracts for them."
Gee remember those long lost historical epochs when artists were actually subversive shitkickers instead corporate bootlickers?
Excellent comment. I am sorry younger folks haven't had exposure to Zappa. He was buddies with the Czech dissident and later leader Vaclav Havel. We could use a little Zappa right now.
We could use more Eastern Europeans as well. There's nothing like being murdered by both Nazi's and Communists to place political parties in their proper perspective. Many of our artists during the cold war who were the most outspoken against censorship where the Milos Forman's from places like occupied Czechoslovakia. Few American's who where born here could understand Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" or "The People vs. Larry Flynt" withe power and artistry Foreman did,
Interestingly enough, Forman was not a big fan or Porn. Like Matt, he was able to see the distinction between the right to free expression and the topic itself.
Most of the Eastern Europeans who fled here during the Cold War are now dead. It's a big loss.
My brother was in Bratislava on a university study trip when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. I don't remember what year that was --- '69? My family was very worried what would happen to him, whether he would get back home.
Lucky for young Americans that they have the luxuries of free speech and for many, freedom from want so that they can use their time preaching to all of us, both personally and on their thousand-dollar phones, what a horrid place the U.S. is,
What I really admire about Zappa is the man's integrity. He was a stellar musician who could have gotten quite rich churning out pablum for the masses but instead he chose to make these incredibly complex little symphonies with lyrics that were designed to intentionally twist the gonads of whatever politics, pop culture or mass idiocy was the topic of the day.
Yes, I actually do remember. But first a question - was there a backlash against Zappa, Bukowski and the others when they said what they said? As far as I know, there wasn't. But let's get back to that long ago epoch. That long ago epoch was in 2003 - with the Dixie Chicks protesting against Bush's war in Iraq. The public punished them for it, boycotting their albums and live shows, and their career was ruined. They only made a comeback 17 years later, in 2020. So if the public will punish any artist who gets out of line, that artist and any other artist will think twice before getting out of line.
In Zappa's case the article was just killed. Not backlash, just censorship.
So you're saying that when virtuous folk like the Chickie Dix spoke out against Iraq they were bitch slapped back to lowly Bar Band Land? Seems suspect. Since I had no interest pre protest & exactly zero interest post protest in the Chickie Dix I can neither confirm nor deny your point. They always seemed to churn soccer mom pablum irregardless of their political leanings.
What's more interesting is how shitlibs everywhere quickly forgot about GW's WMD snipe hunt when GW said 4 little words, "I don't like Trump." I was actually surprised the mush brained fuckwit managed to get the words placed in the right order. What was unsurprising was how quickly the shitlib contingent fell all over themselves in their zeal to give Georgie Porgie hand jobs under his easel.
It's also instructive how shitlibs everywhere dropped a massive load in their underoos when Trump drone hit the Iranian general. It was even more instructive to observe their collective amnesia about Saint Barack's 9,000 deep drone strike program that, by the governments own admission, killed primarily innocent bystanders. Don't remember Jimmy Kimmel giving Saint Barack any finger wagging pseudo moralistic admonishments over his bloodthirsty war mongering.
Since I'm gathering from some of your posts that your declaring a war on hypocrisy I hate to burst your self righteous bubble by pointing out that, in American politics, there's more than enough hypocrisy to go around for both parties.
If you want to shit on a long list of people, then you're basically barging into an open door. I totally agree - Bush sucks, Obama sucks, Kimmel sucks, and, yes, shitlibs suck.
And you know who else sucks? Boomers suck. Another thing that I can't help but notice in your list of three subversive shitkickers - they were all born between the 1920s and the early 1940s. For the life of me, I can't think of anyone comparable from the entirety of the boomer generation. Can you?
Don't care. I think you could postulate that, as civilization provided more comforting nipples to suckle, its citizens became soft & whiney. No one proves this point more succinctly than the latest generation of whiney malcontents who wouldn't last 3 days without the civilization they profess to hate so profoundly.
Again champ you seem to have your zealot beanie on today. In my experience, when you scratch off a zealot's thin skin you usually find a flaming hypocrite.
I had no desire to "shit on a long list of people." Maybe you're just reading comprehension challenged. You're the one who seems to be on a hypocrite witch hunt. Just pointing out how pointlessly absurd your little endeavor is to me.
So you basically wrote a long-ish rant about how I'm probably a "flaming" hypocrite, except you don't know what my hypocrisies are, or what subject they're on, or who I am, or what I can theoretically be hypocritical about. Um, cool? Nice to meet you too?
Hmmm...I count one line directly aimed at the bullseye you've stitched to your own head.
So is that what the narcissism/paranoia/zealot combo does to the human brain? Makes it see every sentence as a personal attack?
Makes it see its own big fat melon reflected in everything?
Kind of sad.
And kind of funny too.
Here's the impetus for my initial post. I was bored. And I pay $60 a year to post here. I'll post BOOGA LOOGA FLIM BOP a thousand times if I so desire. I pay for that privilege.
So, in the immortal words of Bob Log III, "I'd like to introduce you to my finger. Do not talk to my finger. My finger is an asshole."
By the way, I here that there are some real annoying hypocrites lurking on the NBA Draft thread. Maybe you'd like to toddle over there for some fresh meat.
Odd, wikipedia seems to show that their very next album in 2006 went gold in its first week of release. And that they won Grammys for song and album of the year.
Were it only that my career would be so ruined. Perhaps I should start shitting where I eat as well. Although it doesn't seem to be working so well for woke athletes...
So you're saying that Serling/Bukowski/Zappa are guilty of shitting where they eat? Well, that attitude can surely explain why artists are now corporate bootlickers.
Also yes - the Dixie Chicks' next album went gold (and eventually 3x platinum). Their previous albums went 11x-13x platinum. So a 75% drop in album sales, and you don't see how the boycott affected them?
Yes - they were subversive shitkickers (h/t Spiderbaby); par for the course.
I didn't claim the boycott didn't affect them. I debated your claim that their career was "ruined", with no comeback for 17 years. They were popular enough for Howard Stern to have on that same decade.
I remember when Americans were shocked that the words ‘Tiananmen Square’ were scrubbed from Chinese internet searches and that the Chinese were largely uninformed regarding the event. It’s crazy that censoring is happening here now. Although our government has always hid the truth and whitewashed events, we now have private entities doing likewise,
Algorithms aren't our problem. The tech giants aren't really our main problem either.
Our big problem is that a large portion of the population no longer believes in free speech, and that portion skews young. And journalists--journalists!!!--are among the worst.
That's what enables the gradual strangulation of free speech.
I'm getting old, but I don't even know how to argue with these people. How can they not see how stupid this is, how it will certainly lead to disaster?
It's like trying to persuade people that oxygen is necessary.
I listened to Matt on Jane Coaston (great podcast) trying to explain to the host and another journalist why they should be bothered by censorship. He finally said is exasperation "yes, and why does that not bother you!" That's always rhetorical, since it's impossible to explain why you are not bothered by something.
If you were born before a certain date, the 1st amendment has a special status that simply doesn't exist today and no amount of telling people they should care will change that. We increasingly incarcerate people for doing things that in a previous generation would have fallen under protected speech. I'm reminded of that Star Trek Episode where a group of people who had a US Constitution now worshiped it as a religious document only the priests could read and even they didn't really understand it. You can create so many carve out and exception to a right that it ends up protecting almost nothing. US history is a 225 year process of doing just that.
I don't know if this helps, but a few thousand years ago Polybius discussed the problem you raise in "The Histories." The further people get from the reason people build a democracy, the more people undervalue, ignore and take for granted it's primary features. This leads to oligarchy, they dictatorship, and if you survive long enough back to democracy, but each fails because the next generation always forgets the reason it was established in the first place.
I listened to it since you mentioned it. An exercise in pseudointellectual bafflegab. The deep Manichan commitment of his two interlocutors to being morally right relative all that are pitiable/deplorable is depressing.
The systems of rewards for moralizing are a worry.
Areslent
just now
I don't know how much this counts, but I listen Jane Coaston's "The Conversation" regularly and it's usually quite good.
For some background, she grew up a minority within a minority within a minority (Catholic, mixed racially and gay) and so brings a unique perspective I don't always share, but enjoy and learn from.
When Matt concludes by suggesting there is perhaps a new consensus of the right and left taking shape, they dismiss him with a laugh as being "overly opportunistic about the future," without realizing there is a long history of opposing groups working together against a shared enemy (ask the religious right and the radical fem left how they both feel about criminalizing and reversing accepted free speech on the topic of porn sometime).
I would not judge the entire podcast by that one episode, but it was disappointing since Jane Coaston is often one the rare people in the room who may not agree, but seems to genuinely understand the perspective of her guest.
I should also admit a personal bias here. It was two women who agree interviewing a man who disagreed being pretty dismissive of his opinion. For good or bad, it's an experience I've experienced in life the way most men have and it makes me uncomfortable the way I assume many women feel when a group of men are dismissive towards their opinion. I will need to think about why the gender makes a difference to me here.
"For good or bad, it's an experience I've experienced in life the way most men have and it makes me uncomfortable the way I assume many women feel when a group of men are dismissive towards their opinion."
...ohhh yeah.
"I will need to think about why the gender makes a difference to me here."
I think it's less about gender per se and more about the in-group/out-group dynamic. You seem like a fair-minded guy and I trust you would have been just as uncomfortable, if not moreso, with two male panelists double-teaming a female guest.
...I know we have unfortunately gotten to this point in the ongoing culture wars, and it's easier said than done, but I think the only antidote is to push back respectfully but firmly when someone presents themselves as a checklist of identities and grievances -- instead of an individual human being -- and expects that in itself to make their argument for them.
The in/out groups were right there, plain as day. Coaston said that she must therefore, according to Taibbi's analysis, be the elite and then ruthlessly mocked the idea. She and Cottle are the elite and their job is to keep the terms of the argument away from those that Taibbi uses and all they had to refute it was ridicule. Weak tea flavored with contempt and dressed up to sound clever. Very NYT.
It's short enough. Might make a good subject for classroom analysis.
I read Taibbi and pay him money because he has balls and spine enough to go after the cozy inbred media crew. I am not from the media biz, but I speculate he could have had it a lot easier by toeing the party line and keeping a cushy name-brand magazine or newspaper gig. Instead he became an independent businessman and cheerfully endures all manner of online calumny. I approve.
I say without false modesty that when I assign the worst motives to myself and the best motives to others, I come closer to the truth than the opposite.
Still, I think you have something here with the In/Out group thing and the gender makes it more pronounced.
I need to give more thought to that last paragraph. I think I understand it and if so, I like it.
I think certain ideas and social memes take on a life or their own. If two men "gang up" on a woman, even if she is totally wrong and off base, it is seen as "just wrong." When the opposite happens it is perceived as "assertive woman" expose the dumbbell for what he is.
This is reflected in media and TV comedies and has been the "go to" cheap laugh by lazy comic writers. Naive Dad is schooled by his kids or his smart wife always solves the problem does not reflect reality yet it has become an underlying theme in many walks of life. May just be an over correction given the decades of dismissive attitudes toward woman by previous generations of male assholes who regardless of intelligence or talent got to run things their way. Maybe the next generation will get it right and be more balanced in their gender relationships -- if gender is in fact a describable condition in 25 years.
As your attorney, I advise you that reading my comments --and especially, responding to them -- is at best a waste of time and at worst may degrade your mental health and possibly put you at risk of performing illegal activities.
"The systems of rewards for moralizing are a worry."
Well said. At the very least, I'd like to see a system where being truthful and accurate is incentivized over being moral, or worse yet, apparently moral. Far too many people fail to recognize that proper moral sensemaking can only happen once the truth is thoroughly understood. We truly are living in a post-truth culture.
It's one thing to BE moral. I don't see a problem there. But to moralize as a business or means to an end is another thing.
If we’re caught up in the churn, then so be it. Our job then is to deal with it as it is - not as we wish it to be.
I’m fine with this. It’ll be a grand adventure.
Someone close to me is in a constant state of "what are we going to do??!!!" despair about the direction of our country and culture. I tell him civilizations have their cycle, and ours is in its down cycle, but that those cycles don't have to define every person living in it, that you can have your own personal up and down cycles despite what your era has dished up for you. There are those who flail even when their culture is on the rise, and those who flourish and find meaning when theirs is in its death spiral. Let's find meaning, purpose and flourish.
There's middle ground between living in a state of constant despair and "whatever happens happens."
Sounds hot. I'm down!
Sounds like your friend has bought into the American Exceptionalism myth. It's an ideology fraught with a propensity for anxiety.
You're absolutely right. I admit to spending too much of my life caught up in an idea of the US that turned out to be an illusion, but in the end, whose fault is that for failing to see the system for what is is?
Bitterness is poison. Time to take what we have learned and embrace the future.
I hear they are serving cookies?
Bitterness is a hell of a drug. It's hard to kick it.
I like your attitude.
It really is, isn't it? Really appreciate Areslent bringing up that word. It's evocative in it's ability to explain the root of so many poor attitudes.
Who's fault is it when belief and trust are shattered and betrayed like that? The deceiver and the deceived both profited from the arrangement. And I think that's part of the bitterness, the understanding of ones own culpability.
But that's also a reason for hope. A much younger and stupider self bought those myths and trusted the elders. That's not really the same person as today and the bitterness is the proof of the difference.
Like Areslent, let's look for cookies.
Every day and in every way I am feeling bitter and bitter.
Indeed.
I was thinking about this a little more this morning as I walked the dogs (lovely day for it). There's a moment in the podcast when Coaston gives the whole game away without noticing.
COASTON: I think Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the greatest laws ever written in the story of collective time. With regard to giving these entities the power to moderate and edit third party as end user content and not get sued for it.
TAIBBI: Why aren’t you concerned about it? If you work in the media, they could say tomorrow, I’m sorry, we’re not going to distribute your material. And what would you be able to do?
COASTON: Yeah, but they could say that to me anyway today. I mean, The Times could do that right now if they wanted to.
Coaston is talking about her NYT job. She is saying that she is already censored, that she knows the boundaries of what she can and cannot say. That's correct. She is a part of one of the most important machines in the consent factory and she'll be disciplined or fired if she doesn't do her job right.
And she's saying that she thinks that's the way it should be for all the rest of us too, i.e. the platforms should edit us.
So she is equating Twitfaceoogle to NYT. She has to uphold a certain orthodoxy and so should everyone else. The enforcement she gets from her employer should come from the platforms for the rest of us.
Jeez Louise!
Transcript: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opinion/power-politics-culture-war.html
Interesting take.
I agree with her on section 230. It's essentially the 1st amendment for online speech and whenever I run into someone who has a problem with section 230 it seems to always turn out that they don't actually have a problem with section 230. They have a problem with free speech.
I would need to go back and listen, but I'm not sure how her support for section 230 tie in with her non-nonchalant attitude about censorship. There is no way we can guess at what's in her heart, but I have been listening to her for some time (other than this one interview she has been great. You can listen to her being interviewed on "The Fifth Element" if you want a better take on her views). What I can say about her is that she is smart. I don't mean book smart, although she is most likely that too, I mean she does not assume anything, she is not reactionary and she is not a joiner. Right off that makes her quite a bit different than most of those I read in the media.
I think you may have misunderstood her comment about "she could be fired for the NYT" and the point she makes here is not crazy. There are a lot of people out there with enormous power like governor Cuomo, or Taylor Lorenz at the NTY who have enormous power, but play the "I've been cancelled" card to defect valid criticism of their actions. I think Coaston places herself in this category as having enough power to survive being cancelled just fine and was simply making the point that in many cases it is being misused, which I agree with.
Where I think she goes wrong is that there are also a lot of people and groups with no institution power who are also either being cancelled, or arrested and incarcerated for speech crimes. That is where Matt was coming from (more the former since he doesn't cover people who are arrested for saying unpopular things) and I think she would have been better off to acknowledge his point along with acknowledging that there are times where "cancel culture" is exploited by those in power. In fairness, Matt when through a period where he was entirely locked out of the media, which I don't think Coastan has never faced and she's not seeing the difference between being fired from the NYT and being undesirable anywhere because you say refuse to go along with the Russiagate scam.
Incarceration over things previously protected by first amendment is becoming increasingly common and is my biggest concern. It's obviously wrong to have your access restricted for holding unpopular views or because some stupid algorithm from Youtube or Twitter can't interpret Hitler criticisms from praise as happened in this article, but it's another thing to send people to prison for unpopular speech. Here are a just a few of many examples that seem to be increasing:
https://reason.com/2016/09/09/the-truth-about-us-sex-trafficking/#part-two
https://reason.com/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-larkin-and-lacey-speak/
https://invidious-us.kavin.rocks/watch?v=FtQKx2iELF4
We also have the case of Julian Assange. The reality is the State is increasingly incarcerating people for speaking out in unpopular ways and because people don't care, judges are signing off on it and don't seem to care either. There is simply no push back against arresting people for saying unpopular things unless it is expressly political, which remains protected.
As I said, I listed to her regularly and she's very good. She was just wrong on this one.
ReplyDelete
I don't want to judge Coaston, I want to understand and judge what she said. The transcript is available. I linked it above. It saves a lot of time.
Well, I want to judge her.
Joking aside, the less I know about a person the more I can't help but judge them like it or not. My human brain needs to fill in the gaps and judgement ends up where knowledge ends for me. I think my advise here about not passing judgement is more a reminder for myself than directed at you.
It may not be worth your time, but I think her Interview on "The Fifth Column" (episode 309) helped me gain a better understanding where she's coming from and it's a different take than the typical criticism of Tahibbi. From what I can tell, many of Matt's critics can't tell the difference between him defending the right of someone to say something and defending the thing they are saying itself, which so dumb it's hard for me not to believe they are simply being disingenuous about their real motives.
Coaston's take is smarter than that. She understands the distinction, but simply doesn't think there is a problem because they people she hears talking about being cancelled are really just normal people being fired for bad behavior that would have gotten them fired anyway. She's not wrong, just only seeing a part of the picture.
So all the anti BDS laws being passed by various state legislatures were passed by people born after a certain date?
The 1st Amendment is certainly under attack, but compared to the 4th, it's very much alive, a low bar to be sure.
The people who run the system were never on board with the Constitution since it limits their power. What changed was the number people outside the system that forgot the Bill of Rights is a group compact and ceases to protect any of us if it does not protect all of us. Otherwise you have "The Lottery" where you only defend your rights as the mob is stoning you to death, which is where we are now.
The 4th amendment was fatally damaged during the war on drugs and all but killed off completely during the war on terror and the rise of the surveillance state. The attacks on the 1st are more recent and only really gained steam in earnest over the past 20 years.
The 1st is simply the last of our rights to be taken down by the State as we create carve outs for everything from the extremely broadly defined hate speech, to commercial speech, to discussing crime you do not act on, to any other speech that can be pushed under the all powerful "protecting the children" exclusion.
By all accounts, the vast majority of people are rooting for the State against the 1st amendment in the final fight.
I mean, who is against the children!
What too many seem to not get is that speech can now be censored because someone hearing what you say is "triggered" and or offended. That is now an excuse on University campuses to act against the person speaking even if it is the truth. Your speech rights are now controlled by the weakest and most easily offended persons who might read or hear what you have said. Currently we really are being muted by the least among us.
Those same flaccid individuals are of little or no use to society when the shit hits the fan. They will be the first ones ejected from any metaphorical lifeboat that will be necessary during a social breakdown or God forbid a war.
The tool of censorship is always to create distinctions with no difference.
Speech is illegal in the work place because it's about a safe work environment, and a safe work environment is protected.
Talking about a crime is not actually speech, it's promoting crime and promoting crime is not protected.
Commercial speech is not actually about speech, but about making money and making money is not protected.
Hate speech is not about speech, it's about hate and hate is not protected.
Each time they do this, they present it as "a narrow carve out" of the first amendment, usually to protect the children.
The thousands cuts add up and soon you have a definition of free speech so narrowly defined that you would miss it if you blinked.
<<Otherwise you have "The Lottery" where you only defend your rights as the mob is stoning you to death, which is where we are now.>>
Shirley Jackson saw all of this shit coming. It's why independent artists are politically important. Also The New Yorker used to actually be good in 1948, but oh well.
You're probably aware how many death threats and requests for her to be fired she received after she wrote that short story. It was seen as deeply subversive, which surprised her. At the time she wrote it, her biggest concern was that no one would read it or care.
In today's climate, she would have been fired from the New Yorker 1 day after the public response started. In 1948, she was able to keep her job long enough to see that hate mail turn into fan mail.
Good read.
https://newrepublic.com/article/163029/wicked-wit-shirley-jackson-letters-book-review
OMG! I just subscribed for a year. What did I just buy?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDe9msExUK8
I'm not sure the propensity to promote censorship Is primarily among the young. Those who reached their 20s and 30s during the beginning of political correctness in the 1990s seem to have no qualms with censorship.
I appreciate the common sentiment that "a large portion of the population no longer believes in free speech," but I think it's far more correct - and the point is not at all just academic - to say that these people never believed in free speech to begin with. They maybe fooled themselves into thinking they did, but this was only because they saw free speech as serving their own interests at the time. The second it stopped serving their interests, the second they stopped supporting it in any meaningful way.
If your free speech beliefs go up in smoke the moment you get the power to censor, your free speech beliefs never existed to begin with.
Interesting point, but I'm not sure I can agree.
I graduated from law school slightly more than 30 years ago. In our class, apart from one Maoist weirdo who literally ended up in an insane asylum, there was zero disagreement over virtually absolute protection for political speech under the First Amendment. Conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and progressives all agreed that the Nazis at Skokie, communists, and everyone in between should be allowed to speak freely, as long as they weren't immediately instigating violence.
There was some disagreement about whether 1A protects pornography, with some feminists and conservative Christians teaming up to argue that it doesn't (an interesting coalition!) But over political speech? Nada. We sang in harmony.
And while I haven't kept up with everyone, I believe they've mostly kept that line, except for those whose jobs may require them to say otherwise for survival.
It's not that some people showed their true colors, or at least not mostly. It's a generational change. These younger folks just don't have the same values.
"...I believe they've mostly kept that [pro-free speech] line."
I'm talking about those who haven't kept the line, and clearly they are many. Yes, many of the pro-censor crowd are young and so cannot really be said to have ever strongly professed pro-free speech credentials, but the reality is this: those who hold most of the power to allow or deny the censorship are old. The soldiers are young, but the generals who set policy most definitely are not.
If most of the 60s-80s generations - most of whom would've sworn on a stack of bibles all through their lives they'd raise all kinds of hell if free speech were attacked - were actually raising that hell *and voting accordingly,* today's censorship wouldn't have nearly the necessary political support to exist now, much less to continue as it appears very set to do.
Instead, it's mostly crickets. If I were wrong about this, then our state, local and federal offices would not be so densely packed with political and moral cowards who refuse to fight this scourge on our freedom to communicate freely with each other.
<<If most of the 60s-80s generations - most of whom would've sworn on a stack of bibles all through their lives they'd raise all kinds of hell if free speech were attacked - were actually raising that hell *and voting accordingly,* today's censorship wouldn't have nearly the necessary political support to exist now, much less to continue as it appears very set to do.>>
As a person of a certain age I find this to be a strange time to be living. The US federal government, at least in elected positions, is almost uniformly a gerontocracy, but it seems that intends to fulfill the demands of the modern-day equivalent of Mao's Red Guards.
Referring to Mao's Red Guards is a reference that is lost on most of the young voters of today. The activities of China's Cultural Revolution appear to be the template being utilized by our gov't and big tech to bring that pernicious method of social change to the US.
The cancel culture is just one step from the forced re-education camps and the executions carried out during that dark period in China's history. "Out with the old and in with the new" when applied by politically driven individuals always results in injustices and serious dislocations within any society. America might rue the day it did not recognize and put a stop to this newest attack on our Republic.
I doubt the government and big tech literally looked to the Cultural Revolution, decided it was the template for implementing their dastardly plan, and applied it.
However, the similarities are striking. But I suspect there are other examples.
In other words, it's A Good Trick, in the Dennett sense. It's going to be discovered by more-or-less natural selection in the memetic evolution of our political economy.
Isn't in instructive that most of the group that designed the system they now work under were young enough to be their children.
@Brad Crawford
You are manifestly NOT WRONG about this, but neither is Skeptic totally off the mark in my perspective. I was born in 1948. I was raised with a *knee jerk response to protecting the First Amendment. It is not the *FIRST Amendment by accident.
I am definitely among those who are shocked to encounter others who wish to be considered "thinkers" who do NOT perceive the importance of the First Amendment to living in a Democracy.
When that First Amendment is gone ...... so is Democracy. All attempts at ancient Athenian Democracy finally fell to the military Monarch, Phillip of Macedonia. Roman attempts at Democracy/Republic finally fell when Romans traded freedom for autocracy in the form of Augustus Ceasar.
Simple lessons from history. Democracies/Republics cannot CO-EXIST with Autocracy in *any form. This, dear reader, IS an "either/or" concept like being "pregnant". We are either a Democracy (which has been a *very shaky proposition for a *long time now) or we are an Oligarchy (or other form of Autocracy), but we are not logically *both.
Perhaps attacking the First Amendment is just an effort to force us to be HONEST with ourselves. Call our present form of Government what it *IS. And given the attack on voting rights, it is beginning to appear that the "ONLY" Amendment in the Bill of Rights that WILL survive, is the presently warped and badly bastardized Second Amendment.
I believe that a large percentage of the population just goes along with what they're told, and, scary as it may be, that comes mainly from the public schools and mass media. Your law school story is a sampling of an elite set of students. Think about all the people who will never have an education beyond what they received in high school. Do they care about the enlightenment? How many can even point out where Washington DC is on a map?
Has it ever been different? When vast segments of any population or in many cases a critical mass that might be less that 20% of a population gets discontented with the statues quo you might get a political revolution either utilizing force and violence or the ballot box.
The tectonic political shifts over the last 100 years have come from election processes. Now that way too many have abandoned the concept of a fair and unbiased election there are few avenues that can be traveled that lead to anything but revolution. Get Trump out at ANY cost has warped our reason and conscience.
Even the DOJ now advancing the idea that normal and reasoned election security is a plot to suppress voting rights. If that is so just point it out, outside the political pigsty, and allow the voters to decide. I know not ONE voterin. this nation who is on board with voter suppression except of course as a wedge issue to divide the nation along racial lines.
In Georgia the accusation of "Jim Crow 2", given the African/American turnout is so obviously bogus that those making it should be voted out of office and exposed as the opportunists they in fact are. Yet the media without a hint of integrity runs with these lies and political hit jobs. Leftists really know no bounds when it comes to grabbing power by any means fair or foul.
Our society has advanced to a degree where normal, teenage HS angst and bs is now considered a mental health crisis and a civil rights imperative. The younger generation(s)-young millenial and Gen Z are clamoring for the SC to be assistant principals, not Constitutional sentinels.
Big pharma is pathologizing everything it can, and it's sick. At my children's school I can't believe how many teachers with absolutely no medical background or training are advocating that parents drug their children. Many adults who have been taking ADHD type drugs since they were children are addicts for life, and will never have any idea of what it's like to feel normal.
It really does not matter what any individual "believes in." Someone might not believe in property rights but unless someone passes a law that abrogates pvt,. property I am free to do what is necessary to protect my property up to and including utilizing force to keep what is mind.
Problem is when vast numbers of individuals don't believe in or follow some law or restriction against the gov't that law ceases to exist; except on paper. Pornography laws were just ignored during the 1980's and soon they just were no more. That is what is happening to many of the restrictions against the government known as the Bill of Rights. These restrictions have not been vigorously enforced by the Courts and Congress so they are fading away like snow on the water. Soon we will be living under a government like the East German one of the 1970's where individuals were subjects of the State and informants were your neighbors and even your children. This COVID hysteria has opened the door for the power addicted control freaks to implement their "solutions" all in the name of;public safety. That has been the oldest and most utilized excuse given by every dictator who ever drew breath. If American society does not push back very hard against these tyrants sooner rather that later the American experiment in self rule will fade away without a whimper.
Agreed. If one abandons their principles just because of a single dude who broke their brains, then they never had those principles to begin with.
If that’s true, then perhaps our job is easier.
We’ll be outlaws. Outlaws are sexy.
Like Gen Z can quote Voltaire…….
So, then, "there are more and more people who don't and never have sincerely believed in freedom of speech" whether they possess the insight to be aware of it or not.
"Pornography laws were just ignored during the 1980's and soon they just were no more. "
I don't know if you 've noticed, but the war on porn has come back into full force over the past 5 years with many of the groups that lost the battle due to free speech in the 1980's making far more headway now that the 1st amendment has been degraded beyond recognition.
https://reason.com/2020/02/06/the-war-on-porn-is-back/
Excellent point, thank you, with broader context and implications than free speech. One way to view the advancement and survival of any civilization is to look how we manage to retain the progress of science, the advancement of human rights, democracy between the generations and, move it forward. In my view it was happening using the pattern that Ken Wilbur called "absorb and transcend ". Young people were able to absorb accumulated knowledge through education, and push the boundaries further bringing new life, and new energy to the process. Older, tired generations would get out of the way by simply.. dying.
At least in the realm of physical sciences this pattern worked very well.
But this pattern is more fragile that we thought. It requires , for example, a level of trust in the student-teacher relationship. It requires that we have shared understanding that although no one owns the truth, but we can agree, at least looking at the same thing, what is the fact, what is not. That is broken. We get to the point when a university in Canada, is working on the project called "Decolonization of light", yes it is real, referring to the photon and electromagnetic wave physics of light as a white, colonial construct. There is no desire to absorb the current state of science, or transcend it, and our "learning" institutions do not see it as important. All effort goes into rejecting it on the basis of social "justice" criteria. This way the very foundation of communication between people, between generations, is being destroyed.
That how we got to the point where convincing a person who, using her iPhone, posts on Twitter that we need to question what is the value of 2+2 in a just society. Good luck with explaining to her what oxygen is.
Black Light Matters
She should voluntarily give up all products with Dihydrogen Monoxide.
I had to look it up to believe it. In case anyone was wondering this is being taught not through the humanities department, but through engineering. Concordia University's global ranking is #670.
"Often in Western thought, the concept of light has been accepted as a scientific concept through the work of the likes of Isaac Newton, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. Rarely do we examine how light is viewed culturally, or how light could be viewed from a perspective that isn’t strictly scientific."
https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/three-concordia-researchers-set-out-to-decolonize-contemporary-physics-research
"Journalists" are only creatures of their education in the J Schools. The teaching of "advocacy" journalism has decimated the ranks of independent and intelligent thinkers and replaced them with politically active and bias individuals who don't even know how to do journalism.
They cannot bring themselves to publish anything that harms or exposes their chosen political party. Nancy and Chuck would be great foils for some sarcastic commentary. Hunter Biden would have been fodder for Woodward and Bernstein before they became shills for CNN. An entire career could have been made just running stories on Hunter and his fathers families profiteering on their "big guy" connections. The actual FBI covering-up Hunters computer and their intimidation of Mark Zuckenberg regarding the fake Russian disinformation campaign was the stuff of dreams in the world of actual journalists.
Now the mealy mouthed cowards are full time hacks for their ideologically compatible political "brothers and sisters." Entire networks and cable outlets are dedicated to a particular political parties ideology without an actual investigative journalist on staff. The joke has been on the American public particularly readers of the NYT and other skewered providers of the latest political position of the Administration.
"I'm getting old, but I don't even know how to argue with these people."
It's scary -- like the CHILDREN OF THE CORN movies from the 1980s. There's no way to rationally engage with people whose entire life is lived and curated online 24/7. The "algorithm" is akin to He Who Walks Behind The Rows. https://youtu.be/dClKllEv5MU
Meanwhile, the rest of us humans have to piss, shit, pay bills, do house repairs, and all of the other unpleasant things that go along with having a physical body in the real world.
I'm not a parent; if I were, there is no way in Hell I would allow my children to have access to smartphones or social media.
Not as easy as it sounds
Oh, I'm sure. Authoritarian politics is easy when you can outsource your authoritarianism.
"I'm not a parent; if I were, there is no way in Hell I would allow my children to have access to smartphones or social media."
So you do believe in censorship.
There is no quick solution. In fact, any solution involving a lot of talking is probably not the way.
We’ve got to live with the young, help them along, get to know each other and bridge the gaps between us.
Once that solidarity is built, the deeper conversations can be had and impact made.
Or in other words, show them the value of free speech. Don’t tell them.
Primo, Phisto !
Why collapse this nuanced in timely argument into just a free speech issue? Yes free speech is critical, but the nuance of bringing in algorithmic censorship is totally key for the contemporary zeitgeist.
They couldn't get away with algorithmic censorship or a lot the other restraints you see now if free speech had the same popular support that it did 30 years ago. In the end, civil liberties survive only if a critical mass of the population, including young people, support them with passion and vigor.
One of the greatest defect of any democracy lies in the tendency of a certain segment of the population to cooperate with the agents of oppression.
The Constitution was designed to create a wall between church and state and set limits on what the government could do to the state and through the 14th amendment it's citizens, but there was no wall built between the police state and citizens/company collaborators because they did not have police, let alone a police state to contend with.
The Constitution with all its Rights offers little protection if a sizeable portion of the population in the form of individuals and companies are willing to openly collaborate in helping their oppressors circumnavigate the limits the Constitution put in place.
It always surprises me when a poster here writes almost with glee "well they are a private company and can do whatever they want!" It's like they are celebrating a virus that was able to slip past the human immune system.
Yes, they found an exploit in the Constitution and are now taking advantage of that. Why are you so overjoyed, rather than horrified by that?
But if the censorship were performed by trained armies of CM specialists, what difference would that make? The problem is not the technology that implements the policy, the problem is the policy.
They were indoctrinated this way. Our teachers are captured.
The main lesson of history is that we don’t learn from history?
think the political challenge is that those who are drawn to power tend to prefer that power to open debate. From Erdoğan to Hitler to those in all governments, free speech in a democracy is an access point to power, but state violence against your enemies is a better way to maintain that power. Why leave the door open to those behind you who want to follow that same path to replace you?
The temporary solution was the Bill of Rights and to their credit it lasted longer than I think even they expected. The idea of a set of inalienable rights that cannot be taken away through a vote of otherwise ensured the door would remain open to peaceful access by new challengers. It's what ensures liberty within the democracy by placing a inalienable limit on what can be done to those who attempt to gain power and change the system. The challenge is that despite calling it a Bill of Rights and inalienable, meaning it was literally beyond the law to change, there was nothing to stop those in power from attacking it by simply changing the vocabulary to ensure the words did not directly violate or Rights even as the laws behind those words drained the Rights of all their protections.
Many people will disagree with me, but I think that's much of what led to both the protests last Summer inspired by George Floyd and the attack on the Capital. Both were made up of people who have little in common politically, but believe the system no longer offers them the inalienable rights needed to challenge incumbents and change the system. Both groups faced enormous entrenched bureaucracies that reserves Constitutional rights for themselves, but limit those rights to anyone outside the bureaucracies.
I can't disagree with them on that, even if I don't always agree with their tactics.
The answer is yes, depending on who gets to set "community standards" Censorship of history is a goal of all tyrants.
Even though this instance can be blamed on an algorithm, what of the recent destruction and defacement of hundreds of historical statues and monuments by (corporate sponsored) radical activists? How about the "1619 Project" invading our classrooms and replacing history with racist propaganda? How about the widespread alteration of thousands of entries in Wikipedia and other digital reference works? How about the disappearance of videos and research articles which disagree with a mainstream narrative from platforms and search engines? These are examples of the ongoing effort to control information. Sadly for most of us, "community standards" is a vague enough term to rationalize an Orwellian level conformity.
Napoleon's quote, "History is a set of lies mutually agreed upon" seems apropos.
So true…. Bonapartes actual quote, as near as my research will allow, is…
“The truth of history, so much in request, to which every body eagerly appeals, is too often but a word. At the time of the events, during the heat of conflicting passions, it cannot exist; and if, at a later period, all parties are agreed respecting it, it is because those persons who were interested in the events, those who might be able to contradict what is asserted, are no more. What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon. As it has been very ingeniously remarked, there are, in these matters, two essential points, very distinct from each other: the positive facts, and the moral intentions.”
Heh. It appears he lifted the spirit of it from Voltaire as well. But the succinct version is a lot more effective.
Mostly. There’s a half dozen variations, all with levels of interpretation. Great quote, though.
It occurred to me to mention a quote from my favorite book of all time, Chandler's "The Campaigns of Napoleon"
"Never to the end of his life did Bonaparte master the intricacies of the French language"
He was Corsican, his first tongue was the Italian spoken there. The island was only acquired by France in the year before Napoleon was born. A lot of Napoleon's quotes (aside from being misattributed) are probably savaged in translation and don't necessarily reflect his initial intent.
I am sure the quote I provided was tarted up with gravitas and reflection that did not exist in his original words. If one digs into quotes, it's amazing how many are misattributed, or entirely made up. If someone told me the quote I provided was fallacious, I wouldn't doubt it.
There is nothing big government/progressives-on the right and left by traditional standards-want to do more than regulate moral intentions.
Yes to that.
Yup-and mass produced history textbooks are the compilation. They might not be “wrong” but are so horribly written, organized, and put together than no one will get anything “correct” out of them. As someone with degrees in education and history, I have literally told students they were absolutely correct when they told me “Help me-this question is literally impossible to answer from the textbook!!”.
You must be asking excellent questions.
Great questions are a gift.
So true!
Rather broad generalization. Good text books and bad textbooks, like any other subject, category, discipline or genre.
Danno has said everything I would but a couple of things.
The victors write the history, and professional historians rarely declare as fact that for which there is no record and that is still young. A great tragedy is that Social Media have displaced historians, who no longer have a role to play in the U.S. So, Social Media plays handmaiden to an ideology that claims there are many truths, but rejects all save its own.
I don't have enough time left on earth or enough energy to do the job right, but someone needs to read Solomon Asch's work on conformity, explain it and the science behind it, and then examine Social Media and Legacy Media through an informed lens.
Social media is particularly vulnerable to groupthink, with 'likes' being the currency of the realm.
I liked this comment.
...and hope the work escapes our current digital dark age intact.
The regrets of future generations about what we are doing now will be legion.
Or, as I have often remarked to my peers, future generations shall damn and curse this generation--and that of our parents.
I have never heard of Asch, and so thank you for making me look him up. I did find this link which explains his conformity experiments. There's probably a lot more to his work, but it's a good place to start.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
I could make the argument that all history taught in schools is indoctrination toward a particular set of facts desired by those in power. Objective history is about as true as objective journalism. While the 1619 project is a travesty, the history I was taught in school back in the 70s and 80s was also tripe.
I thought about that after I wrote it. While the objectivity of various historical accounts and history textbooks may be debatable, a debate among diverse viewpoints allows a subject to come into focus, and a reader or student can make up his or her own mind. If educators wish to advance Critical Race Theory, they need to tolerate opposing viewpoints, criticism, and, in their case, mockery.
This is particularly poignant to me after having listened to (I find it much easier to get time in the car to consume long books) Sjursen's "A True History of the United States". Despite agreeing with 60% of what Sjursen has to say, I still think it's a bunch of biased tripe.
One thing I noted about his account and that the 1619 project as well as my history textbooks from the 80s have in common is that they never talk about paths not trodden. In other words, the actors of every era had choices they could have taken but did not. The Confederates could have accepted the Crittenden compromise. Madison or Adams could have avoided war (or quasi-war in the latter case). McKinley could have disavowed conquest; Tilden could have demanded the Presidency he pretty clearly won. Wilson could have avoided declaring war. Kennedy could have pulled out the advisors from South Vietnam. The list goes on. But the history books never talk about this, acting as if history was preordained on a rail, and making you imagine for yourself the alternatives that the actors faced in their time, if it occurs to you to. Sjursen's book is very bad in this respect, criticizing the US for not taking choices that weren't even on the menu at particular points in history, instead of dealing in the reality of what was possible at the time. For instance, calling Washington a war criminal when the entire edifice of war crimes wouldn't exist for another 150 years or so.
That is, in fact, what a "Progressive" view of history believes. That we are gradually climbing upward out of superstition and unreason into the glorious light of... well, depending on who you ask, anything from Communism to a Neoliberal Democracy to the Star Trek Federation. The only thing they all agree on is that God^H^H^H history is on their side
Yeah I know, this dude Sjursen is just like Zinn in that regard. It's a bunch of crap and has no resemblance to balanced history.
@HBI
Just philosophically, tho, how much "balanced history" is even within the grasp of human capability ?
In real time, five human beings can witness a bar fight, and you can get FIVE different accounts of what "really happened". During about the last 45 years, scientists have proven the almost *worthless rate of reliability with eye witness accounts.
Eye witness accounts for historical millennia have been the "coin of the realm" in courts ancient and modern.
Setting up experiments for eye witness accounts shows that the only observer getting the story *right, is the unemotional, unbiased by pre-conceptions and unconscious expectations, *camera.
I think that only historical evidence provided from *elimination, is about the best we can hope to accomplish with history. By elimination, I mean Character X is said to have done ABC in DEF.
So, if I can find documentary evidence showing that Character X was not *in DEF at the time in question, I can eliminate that accusation. Or that, by the time of the accusation, Character X was *dead for 12 years, you know, another example of proving by elimination.
If Character X *was in DEF at the time mentioned, I may have no way to *disprove the accusation against him. This is the way that *much of history is created.
Character X stood on his head and gargled peanut butter during the battle of San Juan Hill.
"Oh, Yeah? Prove that he gargled peanut butter."
"You prove that he did NOT".
That argument is only settled, lacking corroborating documentation to one side or the other, by what eventually
is placed into the History Book, on the basis of what *might have
happened. This is why History has *never fallen under the category of the "exact sciences".
History is (supposedly) the story of the choices that WERE made ... paths not trodden are fodder for "What if ruminations ...
How are you supposed to understand what happened if you don't understand the choices they made _and_ the alternatives thereof?
There was a book called "North Dallas Forty", written, I think Dan Jenkins, in which the star of the Cowboys is told after they lost the Super Bowl in a fluky way, that they would have won if a ball hadn't bounced a certain way, and he replied, "The only thing that could have happened, did."
Our history is pretty well established; we are expansionary and militaristic, our military engaged in some sort of action somewhere for some or all of more than 90% of our years. How many other countries, over such a long period of time, who weren't outright admitted empires, can say that?
Right now, with bad boy Trump out of power, Biden has asked for a Pentagon budget larger than any Trump requested, and that figure has already been upped another $25 billion by a Congressional committee. Had Trump been re elected, and withdrawn our troops from Afghanistan, which would be followed by an eventual Taliban takeover or domination of that country, the Dems would have played the he lost Afghanistan card just as surely as the Repubs will do when that happens under Biden. This is nothing but a continuation of the game played during the Cold War., that saw claims, mostly by Repubs, that someone had lost some country to the Communists, and is why both Kennedy and Johnson did what they did.
It's who we are, and always have been, and with an all volunteer military, coupled with a propensity to give ax cuts in the midst of wars, a trend that is only accelerating.
The "what ifs" are the coolest part. I learn a lot by discussing alternatives.
I'm sure you're correct. I graduated high school in 1966 in a segregated school system, but had moved to my final school from an integrated rural system. I knew about Tulsa, Rosewood, Juneteenth and a whole lot of other things that were only discoverable by research. Research? Without an internet? Yes.
I spent hours every weekend going through old magazines and newspapers, old books, and was able to find out stuff. I talked to old people (I'm one myself these days) and listened. I was lucky enough to live in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, and could visit the Archives and Library of Congress where I could examine the Congressional Record first-hand. I soon learned that the proceedings of Congress were irrelevant; the real work and decisions took place in committees and sub-committees. The Congressional Record is subject to members' whims. For example, Hale Boggs gave a speech in Congress the day after he died. A miracle!
"Hale Boggs gave a speech in Congress the day after he died. A miracle!"
I bet Kokie Roberts was involved.
The concept of 'inserting something into the Congressional Record' always gave me a chuckle.
@HBI
"I have never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education."
~ Mark Twain
Mr. Clemens and Mr. Mencken would be welcome to pop back in anytime.
It’s depressing to now understand that I received a 5th rate education.
I'm sure your mathematics and English were just fine. History or "Social Studies" have always been a political football.
This was a harsh realization for me as well. If I ever have kids I'm going to make sure they get a decent classical education, even if it bankrupts me.
to all three of you:
That's it? What are you going to do about it for your own education?
My college diploma (circa late 70s, state's "flag-ship" university, later called one of the "public" (state university) "Ivies") was a joke. (To spare their feelings, I didn't say that in clear and unambiguous terms to my parents--who'd paid for all the tuition and were proud of having put three kids through university). But I refused to leave it at that. I decided I was going to embark on a remedial program of self-directed education and started reading--at first, to "fill in the gaps" (political history, sociology, French, U.S. history, history of Constitutional law) in my college curriculum's course-work and, later, I launched into areas of study I'd never undertaken in a college course: molecular biology and bio-chemistry, earth sciences, basic physics and cosmology, evolutionary biology, statistics and statistical methods and interpretation, European history from 500 A.D. to the present, literary criticism, anthropology, ethics, ethnology, religious history, Latin and Greek (still largely failures but better than I'd had), American literature from the 18th to 21st century, education theory and practice, Elizabethan poetry and drama (esp. "Shakespeare"). Things developed organically with the current reading always directing and informing that which followed. But there were many surprising twists and turns. I'd read anything which I stumbled upon (browsing bookstore tables and found interesting whether I had any prior knowledge of it or not. In that way, I took up genetics and molecular biology and read, going from one text to its cited works.
By now, I have a really good idea of how poor was my education straight out of undergraduate studies. I'd first considered going to graduate school and visited a campus far from my home area. But meeting and talking with several grad students about their (typical of other fields, too) lives and work in the field I was considering left me depressed and alienated. All of them were focused on a narrow topic and had to satisfy demands from an advisor's supervision and direction. I quickly decided that this was the last thing I needed or wanted--another "siloed" approach to learning and education.
I intend to educate myself as best I can, but the fact of the matter is that the best time to learn is in your youth when you're fully supported by your family and you have huge amounts of time to devote to the task. Speaking for myself, the realization that a massive and irrecoverable chunk of my life was stolen from me was the painful part of waking up to how terribly I was educated.
I think it may be wrong to think some were getting a much better education. The history of college educated idiots goes back pretty far. In many ways these schools are defenders of class structures much more than impartial centers of state of the art information, science, etc. In many ways they are businesses disguised as non profit collegial learning centers. I know people who went to "top" schools who rarely read anything of quality or challenge. Real learning is a life long appetite which you have pursued.
If so, that's even more depressing, isn't it?!!
I know that some were getting or once had gotten very good educations because a number of my own profs were brilliant scholars and excellent teachers--just not enough of them; nor were the best of these also the most appreciated by my fellow classmates, by all indications.
But I think there's a good deal to your observation. Whether typical or not I have no idea but only a couple of times have I met and got to talk informally to young graduates of any of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge University--and this goes back several decades now, In no case was I very favorably impressed by their intelllect, their curiosity or their knowledge or awareness.
Are you familiar with the old U.S. television game show, "College Bowl"? It was a Q & A contest between panels of college students. There's a long-standing U.K. version (which may be the original, with "CB" the copy) and that's called "University Challenge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Challenge) with host Jeremy Paxman.
Of course, the teams, chosen carefully and competitively in advance by processes of practice and elimination in advance at the various campuses, cram furiously in preparation for the meets--which you know if you're familiar with the program.
What they can stuff into their memories and recall is quite as amazing as the stuff which stumps them. There's usually at least one quiz question which I imagined "everybody knows" which leaves them all scratching their heads. But, more often than not, they impress me greatly for their knowledge of the right answers.
Of course, they can't speak or write their own language (English) worth a damn--except for those visiting students from a Scandinavian country (not all the panelists are U.K. born and raised.)
What and where did you study, Joseph?, if you don't mind my asking.
I graduated the the same time from the same kind of university. I do not think my education was "second rate". It might have been, because I'm naturally lazy and easily distracted, but I was inspired by some dedicated professors, and began to seriously explore a lot of history and literature. Higher education is what YOU make of it.
@Danno
Absolutely SO ! Getting an education is not a "passive" experience. One thinks of the University as an opportunity to educate *yourself ! They have the Labs, you choose which to use. They have the instructors, you choose whom you want to hear. They have the libraries, they have the resources, you decide the questions that you need to have answered.
University teaching, at the undergrad level, is simply a *GIANT menu from which you choose. You cannot direct your own education, if you don't even know what is on the MENU !
So you do a *lot of X Class 101 to find your area of interest.
Once found, you chase your area of interest like a wolf pack chases the elk, and soon you are ready for Grad School, or you are ready to go directly into your field of endeavor. From Grade One to Grade 12, you went to school because the law said that you *had to. In college, you are *paying to be there, and if you *fail to get an education, it is on no one but yourself. You *make them teach you. You do not profitably *wait to be taught. That is what you are paying for.
Stalin had to airbrush the hell out of portraits of his liquidated commissars. Silicon woke Valley does it automatically.
Yep. We don't even have to ask, "WWSD?" (What would Stalin Do?") We just have to look around at community standards" practices on " 'social'-media sites".
Scapegoating the algorithm as nonhuman is a fallacy. Obviously, a human has to write the algorithm.
Oh, look. That didn't take long at all. Remember how just a few years (possibly months) ago, leftists were treated as paranoid and crazy for arguing that algorithms can be racist and sexist? The counter-argument back then was: of course they can't, algorithms are value-neutral, they're always fair and impartial. And the moment algorithms came for people and content non-leftists care about - lo and behold, suddenly everyone agrees that algorithms aren't fair and impartial anymore, and that humans create them in their own image.
t's a brilliant observation. No better proof of just how outcome oriented we all truly are.
If you go back to the 60's when large scale computers were first coming into use on a large scale, it's amazing to read just how much trust they placed in their ability to organize human behavior. They treated their output like the Oracle of Delphi because to them it was, even if to us that computer is the equivalent of a modern pocket calculator.
It will be interesting to see what those 40 years from think of our current faith in letting "cutting edge" computers use algorithms to guide our behavior and decision making.
No. I don’t remember that at all. Do you have a story or two you could link to?
Remember the Algorithmic Accountability Act? It was introduced in 2019 by three Democrats and zero Republicans. Republicans proceeded to fight it tooth and nail, and it went nowhere in the (at the time) Republican-controlled Senate. As of February 2021 it's supposed to be reintroduced in the current Senate session. Expect the Republicans to invent a new excuse to oppose it.
https://www.meritalk.com/articles/sen-wyden-to-reintroduce-ai-bias-bill-in-coming-months/
HAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAHAAAAA
This is pure gold! “AI bias”
HAAAAAAAHAAAAAAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
How familiar are you with today's learned AI techniques? An algorithm can be learned that I cannot explain or make human readable.
Don't doubt what you are saying, but, So What! Are the machines in charge of what is acceptable human behavior? Are they the gatekeepers about what we are entitled to know about human history, human knowledge? What do the machines know about empathy, or why we like puppies and kittens. This willingness to cede our lives to the machines makes me ill.
If you are saying that the algorithms are writing themselves then I am not aware of that. Is that what you are saying?
Kinda-sorta. Someone had to write the initial learning code, but after that the algorithms literally write themselves based upon the data they are exposed to, and the algorithm itself cannot be broken apart to figure out what the hell they are doing. The only way to do that is to run them on a corpus of data and view the results.
So the algorithms are supposed to be learning it seems. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what is happening.
Well you can choose to have them learn or you can let them learn and then treat them statically. Microsoft found this out with their Tay bot, which started spewing Nazi crap because people were feeding it trash from the net. So most do not choose to let their live projects learn. They do that in the background and control the inputs.
Naive AI is what it is. It'll never replicate human intelligence, but what it does is create the equivalent of an expert system without having to code the rules.
I know you do work in this area, specifically in AI whose workings are humanly understandable. I was avoiding that topic for simplification.
The only problem, where history becomes "propaganda", is when it is taught as the only truth.
I haven't read the 1619 Project, but what I hear is that it's got some things "wrong" but is mostly well documented. (I don't care enough to know because I don't think it's very widely read anyway.)
The problem people have is not its accuracy but the story they think it tells and what it says about us today.
There is good (well-researched and documented) history out there about colonialism and slavery and industrialization and war, etc. that if presented plainly would make people squirm. The patriotism crowd would want a chance to explain and rebut. And there is just as good history out there to support them.
The solution is rebuttal and addition and most important, humility. Being upfront in saying "this is what we've found, but we, nor anyone else, can draw definitive conclusions about abstract ideas."
This need for humility is a running theme in Matt's work here.
A couple of responses to your points: first, "The 1619 Project" is massively wrong as to matters of fact as well as interpretation, beginning in the very first paragraph when it claims that slavery began in Virginia in 1619 when the first slaves arrived from a captured Spanish slaver. Wrong. When those slaves were brought ashore, they assumed the status of indentured servants, and some later went on to gain their freedom. Race-based slavery in Virginia did not take hold until later in the 17th century, at least in part due to the desire to keep white and black indentured servants from joining forces to resist the planter elite. This fact has been well documented by scholars across the ideological spectrum. But it did not fit the "1619" narrative, so it was ignored.
Second: the authors of "The 1619 Project" claim that the American Revolution was motivated by a fear that Great Britain planned to abolish slavery. Wrong. There is virtually no evidence for that claim, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, etc. have been forced to back off from it. But that tells you the level you the level of sheer ignorance/malice that drives "The 1619 Project."
There is much more along these lines. I urge you to check out "The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History," put out by the World Socialist Website people. Despite their Trotskyite orientation, they have produced a volume that contains informed critiques from noted scholars from across the political spectrum. Maybe examine that text and then see what you think about all of this.
To me, "The 1619 Project's" view of history most closely resembles that of The Nation of Islam's "White Devil Theory of History," as described in "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." In other words, undiluted hate. We should not give in to it.
Where ignorance predominates, malice is necessarily absent.
The 1619 project got the most fundamental thing of all totally wrong, which undermines most of the claims it makes:
Slavery in North America was not started by European settlers in 1619. It was widespread for hundreds of years before that, indeed common in many of the prominent American Indian tribes.
A "1019 Project" would have been closer to reality.
I am probably from the “patriotism crowd” (whatever that means) . My objection to the 1619 project is the claim that it is foundational to our history vice a part of our history. What I appreciated about the 1619 project was a focus and elucidation of our pre-Revolution history which is substantial and important and under valued
And very interesting.
Saying that anything is "foundational" is the kind of abstraction I'm talking about.
It's a value judgment.
And yeah, any time you choose to present one set of facts rather than another, there's inherent editorializing, but again, the answer is to make it clear that any history is incomplete.
And I don't worry about the various "alternative" histories being presented (even if their authors have a polemic intent) because the "standard" version of history, the heroic version, is so deeply engrained in our education and culture and society, it's pretty safe.
"And I don't worry about the various "alternative" histories being presented (even if their authors have a polemic intent) because the "standard" version of history, the heroic version, is so deeply engrained in our education and culture and society, it's pretty safe."
Flipshod, this is a widely held view regarding the "standard" version of US History--that it is so "deeply engrained" that it certainly can withstand some criticism from polemicists. And years ago, I might have agreed. But in 2021, what is "deeply engrained" in our educational and cultural establishments is a Leftist perspective that aims to tear that "standard" version down, one book, one movie, and one statue at a time. And they are succeeding. The widespread embrace of such a shoddy piece of scholarship as "The 1619 Project" (put out by that great cultural influencer, the NYT) is strong evidence of that. As is the Biden Administration's support for it as an educational curriculum in the public schools. So, whatever your position might be on this, it is wrong to assume that the "standard" version of US History is "pretty safe" from going away completely. In fact, it's about half-gone already.
In fairness, there was a time when "Birth of a Nation" was considered a bedrock historical interpretation of the post civil war American South.
I have not read the 1619 project because I don't believe it's worth my time, but we have a long history of getting entire portions of our own history wrong. I think back to my own High School history book from 40 years ago and wince.
To me, the real danger is less about historical innacuracy and more the reactionary approach to dealing with it. We are good at identifying something wrong, then wildly over correcting for it. I suspect in 50 years no one will remember the 1619 Project as anything but noise, but they may very well remember how we reacted to it.
Thanks for you comment. A couple of responses: first, there is a world of difference between the US historical profession of 40 years ago and that of today. Recall that Howard Zinn's revisionist People's History of the US (1980) is among the most renowned and best-selling US history text of the last 40 years. Professional historians have long since corrected for the shortcomings of the traditional patriotic narrative, in fact they may have over-corrected, as evidenced by The 1619 Project.
Second, to make specific and factual criticisms of The 1619 Project is not "reactionary." The work is wrong in matters of fact as well as interpretation, and there is absolutely nothing wrong or reactionary for scholars from a wide range of perspectives to say so (if you doubt that last point, check out Bob Woodson's 1776 Unites project). This sort of critical discussion has long been at the core of the process of producing anything remotely resembling an accurate history. I strongly believe that the race and gender of an author should play no role in the response to their work. We must focus on the ideas expressed, not the identities of the author(s). But I'm old fashioned in that way.
The reactionary element in this controversy has been the tendency of defenders of The 1619 Project to frame every objection to its shortcomings as racist and to cynically claim that any criticisms of it is an attempt to entirely avoid the unsavory elements of our past, notwithstanding the literally thousands of examples of scholarship that in recent decades have examined that unsavory side from multiple (gender, race, class etc) perspectives. But they are figuring most people are not aware of that fact, I guess.
Who knows how all of this will be remembered fifty years from now?...I suppose that mainly depends on who's doing the remembering. All one can do today is to speak and to act according to what our conscience and our intellect tells us is right.
2-3 years tops. We're in America, remember?
That "patriots" hate this attempt at the 1619 presentation of the history of racism and race relations and can provide only such feeble quibbles such as are generally welcome in discussions of history shows that there is more to their rage than a devotion to historical accuracy. The cruelty and distortions and theft and warfare justified by racial theories and the pursuit of land in American History would turn anyone's stomach who wants to believe we are a product of high ideals, christian virtues or anything all that admirable. I too dislike the NY Times and look to other sources. But the essence of the story remains deeply disturbing, and this reckoning with our history is long overdue.
It is wrong to suggest that only "patriots" object to the 1619 Project...the fact of the matter is, historians across the political spectrum object to the wholesale falsification of the past evident in The 1619 Project, but many are reluctant to say so publicly for fear of being called a racist or otherwise "cancelled." The people at the World Socialist Web Site are a notable exception to this trend.
Don't fall victim to the belief, widely trumpeted by defenders of The 1619 Project, that the only alternative to its bleak vision is a "patriotic" version of the American past. That is just not true.
Do fundamentalist mobs count as tyrants?
This was the point Ray Bradbury understood that Orwell missed.
I revere Orwell, but think 1984 is both misunderstood and overrated. Orwell imagined a ruling class making rules for everyone else.
I think Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451" captured what tyranny in a democracy truly looks like. It's not the elites handing down "diktats." It's the mob calling for censorship of anything they don't approve of and the powerful exploiting their request to their own ends. It's the mob fighting for control of State violence to punish people they don't approve of.
"Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did.
…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator."
Fahrenheit 451
"I think Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451" captured what tyranny in a democracy truly looks like. It's not the elites handing down "diktats." It's the mob calling for censorship of anything they don't approve of and the powerful exploiting their request to their own ends. It's the mob fighting for control of State violence to punish people they don't approve of."
It is also -- importantly, in my opinion -- the mob watching TV all day every day. Bradbury prefigured the idea of constant media immersion in F451 well before the commercial Internet.
I love F451 because it is the most hopeful of dystopian novels (1984 is the least hopeful of dystopian novels; Zamyatin's мы is a contender, I guess). It has a happy ending. Moral is: when you work as an enforcer for a corrupt, dysfunctional system, quit your damned job and join the guerrilla forces.
"You'll stink like a bobcat for a few days, but it'll be all right."
While I certainly admire the work of Ray Bradbury, today the threat of censorship does not come from the "masses," it mostly comes from elites in high tech, academia, and social media. Most "normal" people that I know don't want to censor things they don't approve of, they just ignore them. Again that is in 2021, not say, 1950. I don't hear of "the mob" fighting to punish people they don't approve of, unless it is a Twitter "mob," which from what I can tell is usually a relative handful of people talking loudly to get their way. The "censored" people we "meet" in Matt's interviews are not being censored by the "mob," they are being censored by elites, i.e. Facebook., et al., right?
I ask without sarcasm based on your racial comment about that quote from book below, have you read "Fahrenheit 451?"
I think this is an area where we will agree to disagree. I think Bradbury had this one right.
As Glenn Greenwald was written, for much of their history the Facebooks, Twitters, Instagrams and Youtubes had no interest in what people posted on their sites. None at all. Do you remember any debates around this topic 10 years ago?
Then right wing religious groups and rad fems decided to relaunch their failed grassroots war on sex from the 1980's and this time they found success. Suddenly, Cogress was passing laws like SESTA/FOSTA that took direct aim at online speech. They were pressuring credit card companies to stop payments for anything relating to sex and doing a dozen other things that would have caused an outcry 30 years prior.
Now, were there politicians and elites in tech along with the criminal industrial complex willing to use this new anti sex movement for their own gains in term of the right to censor? Yes, but they never would have had that power to impose online speech restrictions without the mob calling for censorship of the most marginalized members of society starting around 2010.
It's crucial to understand the new censorship war on sex because that is always the gateway drug to in America to greater censorship. Tech, the Government and the criminal system always start censoring the most marginalized groups where they will face the least push back, especially if they sell the entire thing as "fighting sex trafficking" rather than "censoring free speech."
From there, the censorship expanded until it took on a political roll in 2016 using all the same tools and arguments they used to fight free speech relating to sex 6 years earlier online, but now the tools were used against political opponents leading up to censoring even scientific discussions of things like invermectin. The president is deplatformed from Twitter in 2020. Guess what group was being deplatformed without protest or 1st amendment pushback years prior to that while people said nothing?
This is not a situation where everyone wants the first amendment and the elites are denying it to them. It's a situation where people want to censor their enemies and the elites are exploiting that for their own aims. That's not George Orwell Elites, that's the Ray Bradbury mob.
Yes, I have read Fahrenheit 451, but I had a tough time following your argument in the paragraph above.
I'll consider Bradbury part of my new anti-bitterness campaign.
It's such a great point you make. Bradbury would have totally gotten people on their cell phones constantly and walking everywhere with earbuds on. Much more than Orwell would have. Orwell had different strengths.
I know I have a tendency to go on far too long in my posts, so try to be ruthless in my editing. Thanks you adding the quiet part I secretly wanted to add myself.
"White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin." Well, maybe some white people didn't/don't like it, but millions of others did/do--Uncle Tom's Cabin was perhaps the biggest publishing success in 19th century America (and Europe). It was later adapted to the stage in both the US and in Europe, and performed for decades.
Along the same lines, the eight part TV mini-series "Roots" (1977) pulled few punches about the horrors of slavery, yet it became one of the most successful mini-series of all time in a country that was a good deal whiter than it is today...the finale remains one of the most-watched TV programs of all time....guess the KKK must have promoted it amongst its members.
Funny how few times counterpoints such as UTC and Roots are remembered in these discussions. But I know, these two examples contradict the "all white people are evil racists" narrative, so they must be ignored/forgotten.
Maybe it would be best to just stay away from all forms of racialist generalizations. They just confuse us, even more than we already are.
Did you read the entire quote?
Do you think the point Ray Bradbury is making in Fahrenheit 451, written in 1953, was a commentary on racism?
Yes they do. So do ghetto mobs or antifa mobs or Nazi mobs in the 1930s or the original mob in Paris 1789 onward….
Good points. This is part of a larger problem
Who is the 'tyrant' behind pulling down statues of the leaders of a bloody rebellion to keep slavery? Why is it tyrannical for citizens who have been for centuries targeted murdered and enslaved by white supremacists to engage in a symbolic renunciation of the heroizing of slaveholders and their wars to retain slavery.History is not statues. Historywas not censored by their removal. I support the right of a state to withdraw from the US, but the Civil war was not a pursuit of freedom; it was a defense of slavery.
Give me a substantive example of "racist propaganda" from the 1619 project and your statement might have some validity.
Yes I agree that we have a constitutional right to free speech but I also think public forums have some responsibility to prevent threats of violence.
You asked for it.
First of all, Jones isn't even pretending to be writing history. It's a journalism project and primarily opinion based. So let's say that at the outset.
The assertion that George III was an existential threat to American slavery and therefore the Revolution was a pro-slavery exercise. Bullshit prima facie. Britain had bigger fish to fry with slavery than the American colonies - the sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean were some of the richest colonies in the world and all slave-worked. Britain didn't get around to emancipating all its slaves until 1833, long after (arguably insane) George III had died.
There's your one example. If I were interested in wasting my time, I could find a lot more.
Show me a quote from the materials of the 1619 project where this assertion about the revolution is made. Also if it is a journalism project and has questionable opinions as journalists sometimes do, whats the big deal? As to the revolution and slavery it is quite bad enough having a revolution proposing to end the cruelty of economic and political colonialism while engaging massively in slavery. One could debate the nature of the American revolution and history for days and pile up facts to the tree tops but nothing can erase the cruel foundations of slavery and racism against native peoples. I too have many problems with the direction of identity politics, but I think common sense and respectful dialog can resolve the issues. For me the glory of America is very dubious. At this moment in human history we are faced with an eco disaster that we can come together to address or we can insist on defending our comfort and denial finding anything else but this shared common ground for needed action.
OK
The original article is paywalled at NYT, but someone reposted the essay on her blog:
"Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy."
https://dianeravitch.net/2021/06/06/the-1619-project-essay-by-nikole-hannah-jones/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152/
(rebuttal by Wilentz, who I trust more than the sum total of people involved in 1619)
Game, set, match. Accept you are wrong, because you are.
England also wanted to limit westward expansion.
If you want to talk about bad stuff that gets whitewashed in our mainstream history, broaden the scope to include all European colonialism. Check out Spanish silver mining. Or go beyond the Western Hemisphere and just start with Vasco de Gama (who first made long-distance ocean voyage feasible.) See India and Africa.
I was responding to a particular item from the 1619 project. No disagreement with your points.
The history of the US is full of bad stuff, with some ok stuff thrown in sometimes. Historical inquiry requires us to not push an agenda but to try to incorporate as much of this spotty history in our own views as possible.
(and forget about things like 1619 and the rah-rah patriotic crap I was taught back in the 80s)
Cases in point:
here,
www.librarything.com/talk
or here,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy#extended
If the problem is defacement of monuments by left-wingers, why do right-wingers constantly deface monuments as well? The George Floyd monument in Houston was vandalized multiple times, so was the George Floyd monument in Philadelphia, and so were many others. Sounds like an extremists-on-both-sides problem to me.
Sounds more to me like the left wingers started something they want to wind down but can't. Conflict is like that. Atrocity and counter-atrocity until someone yells uncle.
It would have been wise to think of that before the first statue came down.
Yeah, it would have been. But ideological zealots are not known for their foresight or wisdom.
Sorry, I don't follow your logic. Right-wingers vandalizing monuments *while at the same time claiming that vandalizing monuments is wrong*... is the left-wingers' fault? I'm sorry, but if you think that a thing is wrong, then you shouldn't be doing that thing. And if you continue doing the thing, then it's no one's fault but your own. It's funny how the right's obsession with personal responsibility immediately collapses the moment that they're the ones having to accept personal responsibility for their own actions.
I'm pointing out something about human nature.
If you're pointing out something about human nature, then you're obviously proving my point - both sides are human and therefore both sides are at fault here.
I'm not overly concerned about fault - once the atrocities and counter-atrocities start, it's pretty hard to assess who is at fault anyway. The only real human agency is stopping the conflict in the first place. This is why we talk and protest but don't do damage or kill.
Will it ever be possible to get away from this "sides" bullshit? I'm guessing the answer is "no." I'm unfortunately in a state of despair and learned helplessness from people treating politics like professional sports.
The Democrats literally bent the knee.
That George Floyd mural is so ugly that if poor ole George were still alive he would paint it over himself.
People on drugs have different color sense than others. The guy who owned my house before me had one wall in his kitchen that was semi-gloss black on the bottom and pink on the top above a chair rail, old dude who fancied himself an artist, he was taking opiates for pain amongst other things. The house had something like 14 different colors in it. The bedroom was painted like a bumblebee, with yellow and black stripes.
I considered it a reasonable house discount. Was going to repaint anyway.
This is the funniest comment I have read on this thread. It's like something out of Charles Portis. Thank you.
Ooo! I love Portis! I only ever read Norwood and True Grit, but I've been meaning to read his other books for ages. Any recommendations?
Umm, his other three novels, THE DOG OF THE SOUTH, MASTERS OF ATLANTIS, and GRINGOS. There is also a compilation of his early newspaper and magazine work, ESCAPE VELOCITY, which contains one of my favorite essays "Motel Life, Lower Reaches."
https://main.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/239-motel-life-lower-reaches
So monuments can be vandalized if they're ugly and (as argued elsewhere in the thread) free speech can be restricted if you disagree with what's being said. This just gets better and better.
We all hate monsters. The only disagreement is over who the monsters are.
I think Nietzsche wrote something about gazing into an abyss something something.
Monuments to noted people of accomplishment and leadership versus a criminal evoke different reactions
That's a distinction without a difference. Monuments to both kinds of people are an embodiment of history. If you destroy a monument, you destroy history - no matter whom the monument commemorates. Also - noted people of accomplishment? Confederacy figures are noted people of accomplishment? What's their accomplishment? Unsuccessful treason?
Or Nazi-like as it were.
Great article. Historically illiterate "Woke" imbeciles believe history is supposed to conform to our current prevailing popular cultural ideology. History is to inform us in many ways, not confined to how people once were and that people were a lot like us and that we have changed a lot since then. It's a set of static jumping off points that launch us into the free-form of life.
But what is more distressing is the idea that something long since gone can trigger people who are alive now so much that it must be whitewashed. And yes, I use that term with appropriate and intentional irony. The two most offensive no longer in existence historical targets which cause knee-jerk blacklisting, persecution, canceling and deplatforming are the Holocaust and the Civil War. The Holocaust and anything connected to it is simultaneously unspeakable and ironically one of the most important teaching tools we have.
The Civil War flag and statuary are both very intriguing. The flag has long been a symbol of racism, but also a symbol of "F off" and it's not always clear in what way it was used. So I find it difficult to assign it automatically as racism when it's on somebody's motorcycle. It can obviously be both.
The statuary is even more interesting. It was a war between Americans. Brothers fought on both sides of that war. Blacks fought on either side. And after that bloody disaster, which was absolutely necessary for our progress as a people, ended, there were massive hard feelings on both sides. Part of the healing was that the south was welcomed back as our American brethren again. And that meant celebrating their heroes and honoring their dead. That was the wise and profound bargain to bring healing to a great nations. To say, that statue celebrates slavery is just idiotic. Sorry. It's even more idiotic when applied to the founding father or whomever. But specifically if you look at the southern people who buried their dead after the war and needed to heal in order to rejoin the union, you can understand why those statues are extremely meaningful to some. Do they trigger you? Does a Roman Emperor statue trigger you?
In every other part of the world, if people desecrate art and symbols of culture, we say they are committing crimes against humanity. But when it comes to our culture and history, we want to take a steamroller to it. This may be because we don't know we have a culture. But whatever the source of the ignorance, it's still wrong.
Wait 'til they find out that humans once thought that the sun revolved around the earth! Cancel Ptolemy!
Carl Sagan warned us all that there would likely be a return to the Dark Ages.
People in the US are abandoning all sense of reason.
Not just Carl Sagan...
“Sanity and Reason become things of the past. Madness reigns!” Inspector Dreyfus, The Pink Panther
The Demon Haunted World indeed.
I think the same is happening in other places too. For example, Russia passed a law that would land Yuri Gagarin in jail for what he said (he didn't find a god while in space).
Really? So they’re down with God now?
Heck yes. The Russian Orthodox Church is Putin’s propaganda tool.
How lovely!
Must be nice to back in power’s graces.
yes, big time. every rocket launch is blessed by a cleric. disgusting. remember the whole Pussy Riot saga?
lol @ cleric blessing rocket launches
ANYWAY.
Yes, I do recall! Out of the loop lately, I guess.
Yeah, Carl…. He saw things clearly.
…but wasn’t Ptolemy simply following the science? (OK, so maybe he was the science)
Epicycles FTW!
I remember when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddha statues and this action was-legitimately-cited as evidence of the depravity of their mindset. Statues of George Washington and Frederick Douglass in the summer of ‘20? CNN say you go pan-whatever, tear that statue down-at least tacitly.
Yes but... the January 6th Insurrection!!!
INSURRECTION, I say!!!
To be fair, anyone that’s got a statute of themselves was some kind of bastard.
I remember when Tennessee decided to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state capital building and...
Everyone cheered!
Thank you for this significant commentary. Your points make good sense to me. We need to ensure that history does not disappear. The people who are most active in doing the disappearing do not seem to understand the true meaning of what they are destroying or censoring, which is I think one of your key points.
Yes from my lived experience the Dixie Cross aka rebel flag was always a symbol of rebellion, an FU to the status quo. Not a token of racism. I spent formative years (67-72) in TN and NC and since '73 in CA. I think folks that believe it's a symbol of racism either did not grow up in the South and/or got brainwashed in school much later than I.
Thank you for raising the issue of the Confederate statues. Their removal -- and the joyful media circus surrounding their removal -- was the shot over the bow with censorship. Slavery was an abomination and had to be ended (that we can all agree on). The fact that the majority of Southerners did not own slaves but fought to leave the Union for other reasons was treated as blasphemy and a cover for racism and this is true even today.
There were drafts laws on both sides. Maybe different names--enrollment acts, conscription acts. NY city draft riots
My big complaint is the "leaders" they chose to commemorate.
Bragg, Benning!? These are the people they choose to commemorate? It reads like a Special Olympics for military leadership. They should be grateful they had so many excellent junior officers who did not get statutes.
Excellent junior officers have an unfortunate tendency to get killed during the performance of their duties. I posit that this is why they are little remembered or celebrated.
The names were a marketing ploy. Washington needed Southerns to fight in WWI.
Nonsense.
Was there some marketing requirement that they choose the least competent confederate generals to win the south over for WWI?
To be fair, those locations - presuming you are talking about the Army installations in question - were created in response to the First World War. People were still alive that remembered these people as leaders. No one wants to think of their general that they served under as a bad general. Evidence: people who would hold up Omar Bradley or Mark Clark as some kind of competent general in the generation that just (mostly) died off.
This is the best explanation I have heard since history has not been kind to either of the generals.
Unfortunately, most of their best generals (Nathan Bedford Forrest) were also raging racists even by the standards of the time.
Luckily I don't think we have a Ft. Forrest. At least none I have been to.
That said, Forrest is one of the rare figures in history to be a known diabetic. May explain some of his bad behavior, but not all.
I didn't say a word about the generals I have served under. Most of them were semi-competent. Some were nonentities. Most of the time their O-6 ops people and such were the ones really pulling the strings. I know a few smart colonels...who mostly get dumb when they get promoted.
Are you looking for a story? I get a lot of up close and personal time with everything up to O-8 because of what I do. I did serve in a unit commanded by Petraeus, but he was echelons above me and never got up close and personal.
Bringing up tariffs is verboten. Remember that.
"Historically illiterate "Woke" imbeciles believe history is supposed to conform to our current prevailing popular cultural ideology." -- This has been true for long before anyone thought of "Woke". For example, throughout much of the 20th century certain parties bought expensive bits of prominent downtown real estate in order to erect statues of Robert E. Lee, treating him as a noble personage for all to gaze upon, when in fact the was a person who believed and fought for the abominations of racism and slavery. That was their way of rewriting history so it would conform to popular culture. Few objected to this until recently, when the descendants of his victims began to -- quite justly -- tear them down. Then a great moaning arose. That's popular culture for you.
Lee himself was ambivalent about slavery. Just about everyone in the US was a horrific racist by today's standards in 1860.
According to what I read Lee was an explicit racist and believed thoroughly in slavery, as did the leadership class of the Southern states according to the documents they themselves wrote.
So I have to ask what is being memorialized when a statue of this man is placed in front of us. Surely not his inner, ambiguous, unexpressed dissatisfaction with the slavery for which he fought.
And what reaction might we expect from the descendants of his victims, who are also targets to this very day of the same ideas which animated him and his colleagues? What would you all suggest?
Elihu Yale should not have a statue either.
Elihu Yale does not represent anything to most people. He donated some books to some college somewhere once upon a time and got them to paste his name over the door. Robert E. Lee is an explicit symbol of a living ideology. It makes a statement.
Yale University is named for slave-trader and merchant Elihu Yale. According to historian Craig Steven Wilder, Yale also "inherited a small slave plantation in Rhode Island that it used to fund its first graduate programs and its first scholarships... [the university] aggressively sought out opportunities to benefit from the slave economies of New England and the broader Atlantic world."[91]
"I was much pleased the with President's message. His views of the systematic and progressive efforts of certain people at the North to interfere with and change the domestic institutions of the South are truthfully and faithfully expressed. The consequences of their plans and purposes are also clearly set forth. These people must be aware that their object is both unlawful and foreign to them and to their duty, and that this institution, for which they are irresponsible and non-accountable, can only be changed by them through the agency of a civil and servile war. There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day. Although the abolitionist must know this, must know that he has neither the right not the power of operating, except by moral means; that to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master; that, although he may not approve the mode by which Providence accomplishes its purpose, the results will be the same; and that the reason he gives for interference in matters he has no concern with, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbor, -still, I fear he will persevere in his evil course. . . . Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom have always proved the most intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?" - RE Lee 1856
He manumitted the slaves that passed to him in 1857 via a will. It took him forever to do so (something like 5 years) but debt and war had something to do with that.
It might surprise you that U.S. Grant also was a slaveowner once upon a time.
He personally didn't fight for slavery, he made that clear on several occasions. He would have preferred to remain with the Union, but when his state seceded, he was compelled by honor to serve it. The view of people in the antebellum US was that it was "these United States" rather than "the United States". In many cases primary loyalty was to your state, particularly in the South.
Is tearing down that statue going to remove Jim Crow, which Lee had nothing to do with? It's futile and stupid. Besides which, Lee had a point about his appeal to Christianity rather than war. Sure, the war ended slavery de jure, but de facto it remained for at least 100 years more. Lee's solution may well have bent that curve without 700k people dying. He understood that the _white_ southerners had to be brought along for the ride to get rid of slavery for good.
Anyway, instead of slagging the guy without knowledge, you should find out more about him. He's not universally admirable but there was more to him than some slavery monster.
Rather than contest anything above, I suggest people simply do the reading. Grasp what slavery meant, what Robert E. Lee thought of it and did about it, what heroizing the Confederacy means today. It's all out there are not hard to find.
So, ignore the facts, read craptastic propaganda, either left wing non-relativist bullshit applying modern values to people from the 1860s or patriotic rah-rah crap claiming the Union was for the end of slavery. Got it.
Reading history is too difficult. And not nearly as much fun as making it up on the fly, for purposes....?
Lee’s “code of honor” is the same upper class dick waving that started the Crimean War, and every other Euro war though WWI.
When war was declared Lee was in Texas with the U.S.Army. His service prior to that included work in the engineering corps, and supt at West Point. O don't get me started on Crimea. Right you are.
Which there should have been more of, might have spared us the cataclysm of WWI that brought us Hitler.
"Anyway, instead of slagging the guy without knowledge, you should find out more about him..." Talking to yourself in the shower?
Lee: "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things...."
Get readin.'
"His public pronouncements were sometimes at odds with his private actions. Despite the fact that Lee told the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that everyone wished the former slaves well, for example, the records of the Freedman’s Bureau show that students under Lee’s direction at Washington College were heavily involved in their harassment."
"After the war, Lee continued to hold attitudes about class and race that were chained to the old order. A few weeks after Appomattox he expounded to a newspaperman on the need to “dispose” of the freedmen. He not only advocated the deportation of African Americans, he backed a plan to replace them with destitute whites from Ireland, who would form a new servant class. He also signed a petition that proposed a political system precluding all blacks, and many poor whites, from voting."
https://www.historynet.com/robert-e-lee-slavery.htm
Let's pull down all the statues in Rome. Every one of those figures was almost assuredly a slaveholder.
There are airports named after Ronald Reagan who was surely a genocidal maniac.
Genocidal in what sense?
@HBI
Which is, of course, why it is the height of illogic to take *anyone out of the context of their own time period and to presume to judge them by the standards and mores of our *own time period. That said, of course, as time goes by, the adulation of certain "causes" of the past is just as anachronistic. There comes a time when too many statues of too many characters can just get in the way. That time usually *only comes when we are *finished with what the imagery of, say Nathan Bedford Forrest, or R.E. Lee *means to certain of our *contemporary citizenry.
I'd sooner avoid poking people in the eye by taking down statues. People are going to find solace in the things that they choose. I don't have to approve of everything everyone else does. There's a totalitarian impulse in the statue removal thing, that people don't see it is the problem.
@HBI
That it would be a "totalitarian" impulse is interpretation. It might also just be a "we have had enough of your lies and your bullshit for, lo, these many years, so now it is *time to stop *visually intimidating and shoving your racism down the throats of your fellow citizens.
My father was a "paternal" racist. Better than a violent and virulent racist, perhaps, but not by much. The South LOST. Do you not see that both the Stars and Bars and the Nazi Swastika are flags of the LOSERS ? And the South claims it is a flag of their heritage ? So LOSING is your heritage ? And you are nostalgic for your heritage of the 1950s ? When most of these statues were put up ? This is more crap like "Remember The Alamo", glorifying one of *the dumbest military blunders in the history of *WARFARE ! That was no "Sun Tzu" operation there, trying to bring slavery into a foreign land with a handful of fools against a standing army of National Troops. That's carrying the childish "One riot, one Ranger" inanity to its logical conclusion, all right.
Why do we have to ban the losers in conflict when say, the Scottish flag is not banned? They lost too, repeatedly. Hell if you want to wave around a USSR flag in modern-day Russia, there's nothing stopping you. They lost too.
Totalitarian means trying to force shit down other people's throats in a totalized society. Ok, don't assume the totalized society, though it seems very obvious to me. It's very ...authoritarian at the very least. The total opposite of liberty and constitutional guarantees. Pretty pathetic when Russia is teaching us lessons on this.
Trying to get your way like that is going to kill a lot of people, ultimately. Over goddamned statues or flags. Totally stupid. When people lose, if you want them to acquiesce to this, you leave them their imagery and commemorations.
Only reason this shit worked in Germany (denaziification) was the millions dead in WWII made people say uncle.
"Ambivalent?" Sort of the way Patton was ambivalent about wqr. Read the General's own words.
"The first thing we can say about Robert E. Lee’s interaction with the institution of slavery is that it is extremely well documented. This may surprise some people."
"Lee’s letters tell us much about his racial attitudes. He seemed to dislike the bondsmen’s presence and generally avoided dealing with them. (“Do not trouble yourself about them, as they are not worth it,” he counseled his wife.) He had a low opinion of blacks as workers and complained continually about their habits. (“It would be accidental to fall in with a good one,” he ultimately concluded.) He found the constant need to provide for the slaves burdensome, and as a result frequently rented them out."
"As late as 1865 he was still asserting that “the relation of master and slave…is the best that can exist between the white & black races.” He had equally dismissive views of other groups who threatened white aspirations, including Mexicans and American Indians, whom he several times described as “hideous” and whom he believed to be culturally inferior. It is important to note that these are not random comments, written on a bad day, but a constant pattern in Lee’s writing."
"And what did the slaves say about Robert E. Lee? One called him “the meanest man I ever saw.” “He was a hard taskmaster,” confided another. “He tried to keep us slaves, when we was as free as he,” was another comment."
https://www.historynet.com/robert-e-lee-slavery.htm
None of it primary source or his own words. The typical qualities of bad history, some asshole's commentary. Try again. I dropped a quote in his own words later on in the conversation.
I would say Lee's letters and his own spoken words are about as "primary" as you can get. Why the denial of reality? Why the continued investment in clearly non-performing assets? At some point, you're going to be priced out of the market.
You might find the link below educational. You've effectively denigrated a work of scholarship that won an award named after Jefferson Davis, an even bigger asshole and racist than Lee. You're out-Confederate-ing even the Daughters of the American Revolution. Impressive.
"The Jefferson Davis Award was a cash prize presented to a government and legal studies student excelling in the study of constitutional law. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an association of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, endowed the Jefferson Davis Award in 1972."
https://bowdoinorient.com/bonus/article/10551
Get readin.' "Bad history" history to you must mean anything that conflicts with your self-satisfied revisionism. Could you send me some of your good history? Please?
Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s book Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters won both the Lincoln Prize and the Jefferson Davis Award. Her list of sources for this article is in “Resources,” on P. 71.
To any fundamentalist ideologue, "history" like "facts" are just things to craft and then believe--and then used to justify challenging people who do not believe. And these people tend to have both deep and simple-minded embrasure of symbols, thus no thinking or alternative meanings required (or allowed).
I think this is about right.
I have never understood either iconolater, or iconoclast. One group imagines history will be harmed if a statue is torn down. The other believes they can change history by destroying a statue.
They deserve each other the way Sunni's and Shi'ite deserve each other.
The real fun mental exercise is to try to think of what the future will judge US for having done. Eating meat?
Go a million years and archeologists will find nothing but chicken bones, plastic, and nuclear fallout.
Cannot wait to see what they conclude happened.
Archaeologists of the future will find my desiccated corpse buried with coffee-table books of the 1970s and 1980s.
https://wearethemutants.com/2017/12/06/david-macauleys-motel-of-the-mysteries-1979/
Fighting over statuary is a universal thing and will probably never go away. The first thing a conquering army or new regime does is tear down statues.
But comparing tearing down Confederate monuments to desecrating ancient art is a bit far.
Many of them were put up as symbols of racial segregation many decades later.
They aren't the ruins of a lost civilization.
They're resistance to "Brown v. The Board of Education".
And this more modern civil rights issue is what's being argued about today. Not the Civil War.
@flipshod
Well and accurately stated, yes.
I’m well aware of the popular media assertion that the dates of the statues being erected makes them part of Jim Crow Laws treat her than the aftermath of the civil war or reconstruction. But that kind of revisionist pop history is exactly what I am decrying. If you look at articles from the time you will see that these confederate monuments were ALL put up as an ongoing effect to assuage the losses and anger and to promote healing in our country.
"Popular media assertion." "Revisionist Pop History." "Assuage the losses and anger in our country and promote healing in our country."
Nonsense. Google is your friend---if you're seeking facts, not "revisionist pop history." I hereby decry you revisionist pop history. The confederates were scumbag traitors. Period. Study more verifiable history and you won't be prone to manufacturing your own pop history.
"Most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died, says Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro."
“Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” he says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s."
"The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.”
"By then, the construction of new Confederate monuments had begun to taper off, but the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement was spreading Confederate symbols in other ways: In 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag; and in 1962, South Carolina placed the flag atop its capitol building. In a 2016 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that the country’s more than 700 monuments were part of roughly 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces."
"Confederate monuments may be a part of history, but not the part of history that most people probably associate them with. According to many historians, they were constructed with a very particular political agenda, something that should definitely be taken into account when debating their removal."
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments
https://www.bustle.com/p/why-were-confederate-monuments-erected-in-the-first-place-they-sent-a-sinister-message-77416
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-real-story-of-all-those-confederate-statues/
People who put up statues always have good reasons. It's not "pop revisionist" history to look at the context.
And today's context seems to be that *taking down* the statues is an effort to assuage losses and anger and promote healing.
The argument is over who has the more pressing claim to needing to be assuaged.
Again it's an argument about current civil rights, and the two sides are split about that.
Exactly what I am arguing against is revisionist history which decides the motives of the past are not what the people at that time believed they were, but are actually some form of less Woke motive in order to make a point our pop culture media proffers for its own motives.
More "revisionist" nonsense.
Do you believe your own bullshit?
My undergrad education was in English and history at a state University in the heart of Dixie in the 1980s. So you know I've heard that side of the story.
I wonder if any student today is told that Lincoln pardoned all Confederate soldiers?
And that The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves that were still in Confederate held areas during the war? History is no longer taught.
And that much of the Union fought slavery because they hated black people and didn't want slave owners bringing slaves into their state.
Both Washington and Oregon were strongly Union and also wrote into their State Constitution that no black people were allowed into their State.
So much for the fiction that everyone fighting for the Union was a Fredrick Douglas fan.
The racism in the US in the 1860s was virulent and wouldn't be believed by the youth of today. Having grown up in the 1970s, I have an idea. Wasn't that great then either.
Sure, but at least it gave us Blazing Saddles.
My nickname ~18 when I worked outside was Mongo. I think there was a dichotomy thing working there, I was huge (6'7", 250 or so) but wasn't incapable of speech like Mongo.
Shhhh! Nobody is supposed to know that!
To be entirely accurate, Lincoln planned to do so, but the amnesty proclamation was issued by Johnson after his assassination. This was the chief one where one had to swear a loyalty oath to gain pardon. It excluded the ringleaders of the rebellion. Lincoln individually pardoned a few people for being involved in the rebellion; less than 200 I believe.
It's certainly available in the various pop histories online.
It was bad enough when we had to deal with just humans being True Believers; now we must deal with humans hiding behind algorithms to absolve themselves of all responsibility.
I am starting to understand the Butlerian Jihad.
Is there a way to 100x like a comment? I am going to start Mentat University. Online.
Nice!
It has always been so. It was god, but god died and efficiency in the name of technology replaced him as the god that must never be questioned.
Whether it's algorithm generated AI telling you what to believe, or a judge in black robes steeped in the religious belief of our times, we always look for totems that can be worshiped beyond reason.
We remain monkeys looking for meaning beyond the rational.
And we run away from thinking for ourselves and trusting our own thoughts. I guess we truly are monkeys.
As if, “Who wrote the algorithm?” is an inconceivable question.
Go ahead and ask - you will be met with an impenetrable corporate veil. You aren't a customer of any social media outlet, you are the product they are selling.
So what you're saying is... if you stare into the abyss, it cancels you?
At least know that you are staring into an abyss maybe? The weird thing is we have worldwide communications driven by tribal/clan behavior.
I like the abyss. It's snuggly.
But yes, you're right! It's pretty interesting in that uniquely terrifying way humans tend to manage.
…not so much, “who wrote the algorithm”, as, “who authorized the algorithm”?
Ah - but the humans re the ones responsible for the algorithms ....
History is politically incorrect
History is, ultimately, reality and dealing with it’s consequences. Politics is the peddling of bs for government power-or the fruits of that power-reparations, regulatory capture, military contracts, public sector union lunacy.
Honestly don't know why anyone is still on social media. I get the benefits of a broader reach, but it's essential that all of one's economic viability eggs not be put in the social media basket. It doesn't take much to get three-strikes-you're-out-ed. Better have a backup plan.
The even greater irony is that social media is just a means to advertise. You are there to serve corporate interests.
It strikes me that cancel culture basically just means social media has reached the equivalent of a self cleaning oven.
But it's a real conundrum. The network effect leads to there only being a few large platforms. Narurally, those are corporate-run places whose information value is only slightly above in-flight magazines.
I'm reading Snowden's autobio. In it, he reminded me what the Internet used to be when it was just people with their own websites, or visiting public chat rooms. In thinking about how things are now, I appear to read consistently from only a few web users, reading other articles that they refer to. The question for me is whether I could have found them if social media didn't exist. Eventually?
The web is still changing fast and nowhere near equilibrium. For me, Substack and certain news aggregators made a big difference. I think expectations need to shift regarding where to look for reliable information, and the importance of not getting played.
Unlikely. I still do not believe that’s a justification for supporting these platforms.
A good book to read after Snowden is "Surveillance Valley" by Yasha Levine (sp?). It takes the story back further and shows how it's been a counterinsurgency project since the beginning and still is.
Snowden answers the question why? with "because they can"
Levine's answer is "because they like keeping tabs on anyone who might cause them problems"
Look to the website you are consuming here - based on subscription. You choose the source, when you are dissatisfied you can express that by stopping that subscription. You can't contact any human at any of the social media companies, because you aren't a customer. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Yes, Substack has been informative but also has the feeling of a free-speech ghetto. It's too bad that market forces don't allow for a forum that's both widely-read and open-minded.
What market force is inhibiting people from reading Substack?
We tend to forget that the media was subscription based until the era of Pulitzer.
How many subscribers does MT have? Probably several 10k. That's a drop in the bucket compared to popular "influencers" with millions of followers.
"less than... in-flight magazines" FTFY
Advertising. I don’t like to generalize, but...ad agents/marketing professionals. I wonder if they sometimes have any guilt. Trying to get people to consume things they don’t need through trickery. Advertising does a lot of psychological harm through nefarious means..at any cost
It puts a big chunk of society in a sort of deficit, always a few notches below what they think they need to be happy. Makes people restive and selfish. That's not good.
Yup, social media is the McDonalds of thought. Still damn tasty, but your mind will be the mental equivalent of someone on My 600lb Life if that’s all you consume.
Ironically I have met Dr. Now. A family member was on one of his other shows, "Skin Tight". As usual with media figures, he's a bit sleazy. Bankruptcies (the whole hospital he was part owner of declared bankruptcy, we got involved trying to avoid destruction of medical records) , discord with his operated on people, etc. We had no complaints, but others did.
If you opt out, you cede the space (and the massive audience) to the people who don't opt out.
That makes it worse.
How do you mean?
The only voices left on social media will be the repugnant ones, oozing their repugnance unchallenged by the likes of us. They will have won by default the battle for the hearts and minds of the undecided or impressionable, which are huge in numbers.
No big loss.
I’d take ten of us over a million of them.
Amen to that.
But if we want thenworld to look how we want it, we need large numbers. We can talk amongst ourselves, but we need allies.
A million morons following me is just as bad as those same million following literally anyone else.
That what the future looks like: censored by algorithms. No historical context, no understanding of any kind of ambiguity, just dumb, woke machines policing dumb, woke people. That is the plan, and so far all is progressing very well.
Yes, and this is the future conservatives want. Since everything is profit-oriented, policing by machines is cheaper than policing by humans, and therefore more prevalent than policing by humans. Let's cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy some more, so they'll amass even more money and power, and become even better at controlling us.
Jack Dorsey and Mark Zucherberg are conservative? You've lost your mind!
a) Dorsey and Zuckerberg are being enabled and empowered by conservatives. Without the Republican party constantly cutting taxes and regulation, Dorsey and Zuckerberg would never have the amount of power they have now.
b) Dorsey and Zuckerberg might be SOCIALLY liberal, but they're FISCALLY conservative. Since we're talking about profits, hiring, spending, taxes, etc - I believe that the fiscally conservative part is what matters here.
So why not give conservative politicians more money? If the conservative politicians do everything Dorsey and Zuckerberg want then they should be funding them at least at the level they fund Dems. Of course, every corporation is in it to make money. Ask AOC how much money she's made on her anti-capitalist t-shirts and sweatshirts! Goes both ways and Big Tech could give a rat's ass about conservatives!
They do give conservative politicians more money. Here's an article that compares the amount of money that Facebook gave to the congressional committee that questioned Facebook in 2018. To the three Republicans, Facebook gave $35,500. To the three Democrats, Facebook gave $27,000. Which number is higher?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17219930/facebook-campaign-contributions-mark-zuckerberg-congress-donations
The idea that the tech companies give a lot more money to Democrats comes from the fact that their EMPLOYEES give much more money to Democrats. But the companies themselves and the employees of those companies are two quite different things.
Top execs: https://www.protocol.com/tech-political-donors-2020-amazon-apple-facebook-google-microsoft
By conservative, I think he means corporate, as opposed to politically conservative
You really do not understand do you?
I don't? Which part did I get wrong?
This shows that everyone should abandon Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the rest not just for their own mental equilibrium, but for the good of civilization.
People would rather complain than take their business elsewhere. After all, we've all got guns aimed at our heads by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, and we _must_ watch.
What worth does Twitter hold? Get off of it. It’s not hard. Any news is usually just a link to a link to another link. Any news can be found by other means. Obviously I read comments and sometimes write my own. I see how the back and forth can be exciting, but at some point it probably becomes unhealthy. No one is forcing any of these social media platforms on anyone. Put the crack down. Let the free market decide. If these companies lose enough data (us) and their profits are looking dicey I bet things would change real fast.
You beat me to it, by a few minutes - I'm a slow typist :D
Yeah...it’s not rocket surgery..the world has survived for many a long year with no social media. The internet is awesome for so many things, but a 144 characters, “I have a friend who heard such and such” Facebook posts and fish lipped, filtered Instagram posts are none of those things
I didn't see your post before going off on my rant. Obviously we're on the same page about this.
What worth?
Literally the guy featured in this article. He’s not the only valuable contributor.
Could they contribute anywhere besides Twitter YouTube or Facebook? I realize that’s pretty daunting and probably unrealistic at this time, but fortune favors the bold! I feel a little like Julian the Apostate, but maybe we could go back to pamphlets and correspondence 😎 You’re not wrong though
Maybe Parler could host him.
But no, you’re not wrong either. The signal to noise ratio is absolutely shit. Some real gems though.
Ever read Nein Quarterly? Wicked funny.
No I have not. I’ll check it out
I didn’t have clue about Parler until Twitter etc controversies
Example of the 'Streisand Effect'.
I got a 24 hour suspension from facebook for quoting Mussolini's definition of fascism as the joining of government and corporations, or corporatism... i think they might have taken it personally.
If the word Mussolini was involved, that was probably enough to invoke the algorithm.
Try quoting Goebbels on Propaganda...I did so once accompanied by a pic of Julie Andrews, just to tease the sentry bots.
Perfect! The powers behind the algorithms don't really mind the concept - it's all about the WHO of who said it.
Confuse foundational assumptions w/ dramatic contradiction in popular media...confusion being its own reward...AI ruminates on contradiction.
AI ruminates on contraction.
AI presumes Monty Python is the way forward.
??????
Profit.
Sly.
There is an amusing, recursive irony here…shortly after Nazis came to power in 1933, that party passed laws that made it illegal to criticize the nascent Nazi government. This included the now infamous banning and burning books that were deemed unacceptable. So on the 100th anniversary of the Nazi’s most historically significant individual having come to power, Twitter’s reaction is that it’s “algorithms” deem unacceptable the didactic lessons of censorship.
Bonus question: If Twitter had been active during the era of Nazism, would Twitter have been part of the Nazi censorship machine, and if so, to what degree?
Reign of Terror did the same.
They would have been 'coordinated' like all aspects of German society. There was a word for this: Gleichschaltung. So of course they would have supported the regime. Either that or they would have ceased to exist.
As a former history teacher, the goal of the Education Industry has been for several decades to scrub history like a Taliban mullah.
For instance?
LOL! Where do I start? I will give you a macro example that poisons many liberals view of history. They look back generations, centuries, and judge people on our current mores. That horseshit leads to statues being destroyed, just like the Taliban has done in Afghanistan.
If the problem is with liberals, why are liberal monuments being vandalized by conservatives? It's an extremists-on-both-sides problem, and always has been.
What is the Education Industry? Do you think there are any conservatives that have the same problem as liberals-being poisoned?
You can fire mortar rounds into universities w/o ever hitting a conservative, or even a moderate. Liberals are destroying education, they turned it into an industry, to serve themselves, not their students. They teach them what to think, not how to think. I am 68 and was a liberal in my youth. I'm now a libertarian.
Yes people get older and realize systems don’t usually help...even with the best of intentions...so, we become that get off of my lawn guy...which isn’t all bad
I am unsurprised with the censorship being done by the stupid. The problem with this kind of censorship is that it makes the dumb dumber, by depriving them of context. This lack of context guarantees the events of 100 years ago will be much easier to replicate, perhaps not in identical form, but something that could have been avoided if people understood the past better.
The ultimate failure of people like Hannah Arendt, Wiesenthal, along with many less known figures is to be found in this.
Here's some history:
"In every country in which there has been a loss of freedom, where does it begin? It begins in news media, in public print, in books, and on the proscenium. That's where they attack you first - right there in the bread basket." Rod Serling
"Now it's computers & more computers. And soon everyone will have computers & everybody will know everything about everybody else long before they meet them. Nobody will want to meet anybody else ever again and everybody will be a recluse like I am now." Charles Bukowski
"When a reporter for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command interviewed Frank Zappa for the Command's news syndicate, the story was held up by a superior who demanded that Zappa - who had been rather hard on the Army - answer one more question: just who does he think will defend the country without the Army.
"Zappa's reply: "From what? The biggest threat to America today is its own federal government...Will the Army protect anybody from the FBI? The IRS? The CIA? The Republican Party? The Democratic Party?...The biggest dangers we face today don't even need to sneak past our billion dollar defense system...they issue the contracts for them."
Gee remember those long lost historical epochs when artists were actually subversive shitkickers instead corporate bootlickers?
Excellent comment. I am sorry younger folks haven't had exposure to Zappa. He was buddies with the Czech dissident and later leader Vaclav Havel. We could use a little Zappa right now.
We could use more Eastern Europeans as well. There's nothing like being murdered by both Nazi's and Communists to place political parties in their proper perspective. Many of our artists during the cold war who were the most outspoken against censorship where the Milos Forman's from places like occupied Czechoslovakia. Few American's who where born here could understand Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" or "The People vs. Larry Flynt" withe power and artistry Foreman did,
Interestingly enough, Forman was not a big fan or Porn. Like Matt, he was able to see the distinction between the right to free expression and the topic itself.
Most of the Eastern Europeans who fled here during the Cold War are now dead. It's a big loss.
My brother was in Bratislava on a university study trip when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. I don't remember what year that was --- '69? My family was very worried what would happen to him, whether he would get back home.
Lucky for young Americans that they have the luxuries of free speech and for many, freedom from want so that they can use their time preaching to all of us, both personally and on their thousand-dollar phones, what a horrid place the U.S. is,
What I really admire about Zappa is the man's integrity. He was a stellar musician who could have gotten quite rich churning out pablum for the masses but instead he chose to make these incredibly complex little symphonies with lyrics that were designed to intentionally twist the gonads of whatever politics, pop culture or mass idiocy was the topic of the day.
Yes, I actually do remember. But first a question - was there a backlash against Zappa, Bukowski and the others when they said what they said? As far as I know, there wasn't. But let's get back to that long ago epoch. That long ago epoch was in 2003 - with the Dixie Chicks protesting against Bush's war in Iraq. The public punished them for it, boycotting their albums and live shows, and their career was ruined. They only made a comeback 17 years later, in 2020. So if the public will punish any artist who gets out of line, that artist and any other artist will think twice before getting out of line.
In Zappa's case the article was just killed. Not backlash, just censorship.
So you're saying that when virtuous folk like the Chickie Dix spoke out against Iraq they were bitch slapped back to lowly Bar Band Land? Seems suspect. Since I had no interest pre protest & exactly zero interest post protest in the Chickie Dix I can neither confirm nor deny your point. They always seemed to churn soccer mom pablum irregardless of their political leanings.
What's more interesting is how shitlibs everywhere quickly forgot about GW's WMD snipe hunt when GW said 4 little words, "I don't like Trump." I was actually surprised the mush brained fuckwit managed to get the words placed in the right order. What was unsurprising was how quickly the shitlib contingent fell all over themselves in their zeal to give Georgie Porgie hand jobs under his easel.
It's also instructive how shitlibs everywhere dropped a massive load in their underoos when Trump drone hit the Iranian general. It was even more instructive to observe their collective amnesia about Saint Barack's 9,000 deep drone strike program that, by the governments own admission, killed primarily innocent bystanders. Don't remember Jimmy Kimmel giving Saint Barack any finger wagging pseudo moralistic admonishments over his bloodthirsty war mongering.
Since I'm gathering from some of your posts that your declaring a war on hypocrisy I hate to burst your self righteous bubble by pointing out that, in American politics, there's more than enough hypocrisy to go around for both parties.
If you want to shit on a long list of people, then you're basically barging into an open door. I totally agree - Bush sucks, Obama sucks, Kimmel sucks, and, yes, shitlibs suck.
And you know who else sucks? Boomers suck. Another thing that I can't help but notice in your list of three subversive shitkickers - they were all born between the 1920s and the early 1940s. For the life of me, I can't think of anyone comparable from the entirety of the boomer generation. Can you?
Don't care. I think you could postulate that, as civilization provided more comforting nipples to suckle, its citizens became soft & whiney. No one proves this point more succinctly than the latest generation of whiney malcontents who wouldn't last 3 days without the civilization they profess to hate so profoundly.
Again champ you seem to have your zealot beanie on today. In my experience, when you scratch off a zealot's thin skin you usually find a flaming hypocrite.
I had no desire to "shit on a long list of people." Maybe you're just reading comprehension challenged. You're the one who seems to be on a hypocrite witch hunt. Just pointing out how pointlessly absurd your little endeavor is to me.
You, of course, are free to carry on carrying on.
So you basically wrote a long-ish rant about how I'm probably a "flaming" hypocrite, except you don't know what my hypocrisies are, or what subject they're on, or who I am, or what I can theoretically be hypocritical about. Um, cool? Nice to meet you too?
Hmmm...I count one line directly aimed at the bullseye you've stitched to your own head.
So is that what the narcissism/paranoia/zealot combo does to the human brain? Makes it see every sentence as a personal attack?
Makes it see its own big fat melon reflected in everything?
Kind of sad.
And kind of funny too.
Here's the impetus for my initial post. I was bored. And I pay $60 a year to post here. I'll post BOOGA LOOGA FLIM BOP a thousand times if I so desire. I pay for that privilege.
So, in the immortal words of Bob Log III, "I'd like to introduce you to my finger. Do not talk to my finger. My finger is an asshole."
By the way, I here that there are some real annoying hypocrites lurking on the NBA Draft thread. Maybe you'd like to toddle over there for some fresh meat.
Toodles.
Odd, wikipedia seems to show that their very next album in 2006 went gold in its first week of release. And that they won Grammys for song and album of the year.
Were it only that my career would be so ruined. Perhaps I should start shitting where I eat as well. Although it doesn't seem to be working so well for woke athletes...
So you're saying that Serling/Bukowski/Zappa are guilty of shitting where they eat? Well, that attitude can surely explain why artists are now corporate bootlickers.
Also yes - the Dixie Chicks' next album went gold (and eventually 3x platinum). Their previous albums went 11x-13x platinum. So a 75% drop in album sales, and you don't see how the boycott affected them?
Yes - they were subversive shitkickers (h/t Spiderbaby); par for the course.
I didn't claim the boycott didn't affect them. I debated your claim that their career was "ruined", with no comeback for 17 years. They were popular enough for Howard Stern to have on that same decade.
I remember when Americans were shocked that the words ‘Tiananmen Square’ were scrubbed from Chinese internet searches and that the Chinese were largely uninformed regarding the event. It’s crazy that censoring is happening here now. Although our government has always hid the truth and whitewashed events, we now have private entities doing likewise,