Helen Frankenthaler, RIP

One of my all-time favorites.

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still searching for an IP reform movement made up of grown ups

Julian Sanchez becomes approximately the 9 millionth Internet denizen to point out that various IP frauds aren't "stealing" in the conventional sense. He's right, there.

If you feel like you've read it before, it's because you have, dozens of times. Unfortunately, you likely haven't learned much. There's just way too much focus on this petty semantic issue. No, downloading something you didn't pay for isn't the same thing as stealing a jacket. But that doesn't mean that it has no negative impact, or that a free society doesn't have a legitimate interest in regulating it. Two things can be different, and yet each can be problematic, wrong, or contrary to the public's interest. I think the focus on the semantic issue has a simple motive: because the "downloading an MP3=stealing a CD" argument is so easily dismissed, it is tempting to keep prosecuting it and acting like one has really achieved something. It's weak manning, something Sanchez knows about.

As for disliking the term "piracy"-- well, tough. That's language. Communities adopt terms, and they don't always make sense, they aren't always fair, and we don't always like them. The very fact that "stealing" is not a term conventionally used to refer to downloading and "pirating" is tells you something about organic etymology.

I would really like it if Sanchez would expand on the point that, yes, copyright fraud is problematic. I think that, rather than telling the same story that has been told over and over again, and always to the same sympathetic audience that accepts the premises in the first place, Sanchez could carve out something new and useful. I am someone who is temperamentally and intellectually predisposed to support reform of copyright and patent laws. I think that there are many problems with copyright, patents, and trademarks. But at times I feel almost physically ejected from solidarity with others who do, because the majority of people who argue against IP online do so in such a willfully immature and unrealistic way. I can't tell you how many people I meet who say that there should be in effect no check on digital copying at all-- that everyone should have unlimited rights to copy all media and distribute it to anyone, for free and without compensation or consequence. You might imagine that I'm exaggerating, but years of experience online tell me otherwise.

When I try to point out that this would swiftly mean the end of much of the media they enjoy, they have no real response; they are stuck in the present world and can't imagine how radical a change that would be. But with perfect digital copying and no impediment to that copying, there's no profit motive to be found in producing these expensive and resource-intensive works.

And, I'm sorry, but dedicated amateurs can't produce Call of Duty; they can't produce Lawrence of Arabia; they can't produce Sgt. Pepper. The dreams of people like Chris Andersen are utopian and false. As Doug Rushkoff has pointed out, they have a lot of schemes for content generators to be paid as public speakers or "personal brand builders," but no compelling mechanism for content generators to be paid as content generators when they give everything away for free. And there's lots of negative consequences from asking every writer or musician to not be a writer of musician but a "brand." Yes, Jay-Z can get by on selling Vitamin Water and t-shirts, but the guy who actually has a new sound and not much else can't survive on free.



Also from Rushkoff: it's never actually free. If you're using Google and your ISP and your power company and your HP laptop to get this content, they're all getting paid. The fact that the costs are so small isn't the same as free, and repeated across millions of users millions of times, that means lots and lots of money... just not for the person who actually created the content you enjoy. You can check out Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, for necessary pessimism on Linux and Wikipedia; for a description of how music piracy has devastated the musical middle class; and for an analysis and a lament about the death of the artist as a profession.

So many of the grand and self-aggrandizing claims of the pro-piracy crowd have fallen away, I can't even recount all of them. I've often heard that people who pirate something and like it will later pay for it, out of a sense of gratitude and obligation. Does that seem like an accurate portrayal of reality to you? How many people, honestly, do this? I was told for years that people who stop pirating music when there were cheap and reliable ways to access music online. Well, there are now literally dozens of ways to get music online, legitimately, in a way that gives at least a little bit of money to the artist who created it, and usually quite cheaply. Hasn't stopped piracy. People insisted that people only pirate from faceless corporate behemoths. Here's someone involved with the creation of the Humble Indie Bundle, an independent game pack produced for charity and available at whatever price the purchaser determines, showing that 25% of the people who downloaded the pack did so by pirating.

You also get hit over the head with studies that show, or purport to show, the limited effects of piracy, but they are either of dubious methodology or are wielded illogically. For example, a notorious study showed that people who pirate also spend more money on music than people who don't. OK, cool. It does not logically follow that the same amount of money is being captured by the music industry to cover what is lost in piracy. Pirates can spend more on music than their non-pirating counterparts and piracy can still be a net loss for the industry. I don't doubt that many interested parties often oversell the dangers or damages of piracy, and as I said, I support some very broad reforms of intellectual property law. But the loudest voices seem to want it both ways; they make a prescriptive claim that it should be legal to take what you want for free, and then do an end run around it by making the descriptive claim, with dubious evidence, that in fact taking everything for free doesn't hurt the profit motive.

More than anything, I'm weary of the historionics and self-aggrandizement of the pro-piracy set. To read about IP online, everyone who ever downloaded "Who Let the Dogs Out?" from Limewire is a truth-telling revolutionary, smashing a decrepit corporate structure and ushering us into a golden age of free culture, where movies and games and albums descend from heaven in a celestial ball of light into the waiting arms of the IP warriors, who send the love out through the tubes to all who desire them. Any notion of a "pirates code," the old scene ideas about rules and codes that you follow in pirating, has not been disseminated to the broader groups that download media now, apart from that specific cultural moment. Here's what I think: lots of people just want the stuff for free, and don't care about the consequences.

Well, I'll come out and say it: I think that's wrong. I think that it's wrong to make a digital copy of a piece of media that someone else has made and has offered up for compensation under the explicit condition that he or she be paid for it. I don't think that this makes me (or Doug Rushkoff or Jaron Lanier or anybody) some retrograde corporate stooge. And the constant effort to wrap this discussion up in revolutionary terms is just a distraction. I also think that the constant extension of copyright lengths is shameful, that DRM is almost always a useless annoyance and waste, that patents and patent trolling are totally out of control, that there has to be considerable reworking of conventions and statutes regarding fair use and appropriation, and so on. And I think that efforts like Steam and Amazon Music offer reasons for hope. I just think if someone works hard to produce intellectual content that other people want to consume, that person is entitled to reasonable compensation for that content. Call me old-fashioned. That attitude is less broadly assumed than you might think.

In the admirably level-headed and fair post I linked above about the Humble Indie Bundle, the blogger points out that they aren't going to slap lots of annoying DRM on the games, which I fully support. But he also says this: "No -- we will just focus on making cool games, having great customer service, and hope for the best. It sure seems to be working right now!" That's great, and I'm glad. But the fact that it is largely working for them doesn't mean that it will always work out for every producer. At some point, there's going to be (and have been) content producers who run the math and find that continuing to produce a given piece of media no longer makes economic sense, due to the erosion of revenues from piracy. Then everybody loses the product that would have come next. What I want to challenge is the pleasant fiction that such a decision could never be reached, or that our broader feelings about intellectual property and piracy don't make a difference in that regard.

I'd love to see Sanchez attack this issue not from a stance of aggravation, but from a devil's advocate or self-examination position. Take the hardest line possible against his own thinking and his own preferences and see how things hold up. It doesn't hurt to kick the tires. The argument about stealing just doesn't need to be made again.

Update: The inevitable whinge, with bonus retweeting by other paid-up members of the DC politico koffee klatsch. I was unaware that saying "I wish this person would write a bit about this other facet of an issue" is beyond the pale, but as time goes on, the DC social circle only gets more dedicated to circling the wagons.

Honestly, at this point, I really consider the DC blogging corp a pathetic environment. They are so enormously sensitive to any criticism (and this wasn't even really criticism!) that doesn't come from members of their own coterie and that doesn't meet preapproved standards of ass-kissing. I genuinely cannot fathom the mind that wants to be a writer but is afraid of argument that doesn't come wrapped in praise. Then again, I'm not living it up in the DC-area fiefdom, secure in the knowledge that social connections to my purported political antagonists will blunt any criticism. The whole edifice is designed to protect its members and quiet dissent; that is its first and last purpose. What a pack of pearl-clutching cowards.

Update: Since this has come up: SOPA is total, unequivocal bullshit.

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the trouble with "progressive" (slight return)

An emailer asks

What's your beef with the term progressive? I prefer liberal myself, too, but I feel like that ship has sailed, and it is only semantics, after all. I feel that, since you're already coming from a marginal place (as you say all the time), it doesn't make much sense to look for fights to pick that don't mean anything. I don't mean to scold but I alternatively love your work and hate your self-marginalizing thing.

Well, to the broader point about my self-marginalization, you know, it's complicated, and I have little to say in my own defense. But for the subject at hand, there's two major things.

First, I tend to see the use of progressive as a capitulation. Conservatives notoriously made liberal into a bad word in the 90s. (I know this because I got a Doonesbury collection when I was 12 and read it religiously, despite knowing essentially nothing else about partisan politics at the time.) To run from the term because conservatives tried to stigmatize it is emblematic of all that was wrong with 90s-era liberal politics. I don't say that in some martyring sense, either. I'm not saying that we should have accepted the term liberal and confined ourselves to irrelevance, but rather that the refusal to fight essentially did the work for the conservatives, which again was a running theme of the Clintonite 90s. You triangulate and triangulate and before you know it you've given away the store. I have a theory of political change (which could be right or wrong) that says that people don't get inspired by political movements that don't appear inspired themselves, that people don't sign up for causes when the people espousing that cause seem embarrassed or unwilling to stand up for itself.

Second, I care because language matters. I actually disagree that the difference is entirely semantic, actually; I think that progressive has come to refer to slightly different things than liberal, in both disposition and policy stances, in a way that reflects that legacy of capitulation. And remember the etymology of progressive, with its confused relationship towards the early 20th century Progressive movement, which had some good and a lot of bad. Matt Yglesias put this beautifully in a post from several years ago (inspired by some geek commenter):

while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives.  

"Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy. I think the notion that something like contemporary American liberalism is, in fact, the correct instantiation of the historic liberal project for our times is a proposition that's worth fighting for.

Words to live by.

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there's just no sense in being halfway radical

Over time I've really come to see Kevin Drum as a symbol for modern American liberalism-- he's increasingly despondent and incredibly stuck. Modern American liberalism is filled with people who have righteous moral convictions that they have made totally irrelevant due to their dogged adherence to a broken system.

Take this post. It's called "How 2008 Radicalized Me," and it describes how the truly unbelievable events of 2008 (rightly, reasonably) caused Drum to become more radical. That's as natural a story as one can get; a small group of fantastically well-compensated people drove the entire worldwide economy to the brink of total collapse through their greed and incompetence. To not be radicalized in the face of such events is intellectual death. Of course, despite these events, and despite their being the inevitable consequence of our current macroeconomic policy, most people have not changed, and neither has that policy

The question is what this has actually meant for Kevin Drum in any substantive sense.

To be clear, I'm not at all a "where's the policy angle?" kind of guy. When people dismiss an argument by sniffing about "policy options," it's just about always a way to shrink the realm of the possible and discredit alternative opinion. But you'd like to get a sense of what radicalism means for Drum in context here. His post doesn't offer much to indicate what kind of radical change he'd pursue.

Maybe more executives should have been fired, maybe the Department of Justice should have tossed more Wall Street traders in jail, and maybe a couple of big money center banks should have been placed in temporary receivership.

In  other words, the things that maybe should have been done in response to one of the greatest crises in the history of capitalism-- a systematic failure that resulted in incredible human suffering for those who were least responsible for it-- are exactly the things that wouldn't have created any lasting or fundamental change. A few of the actors would have been punished, but there would have been no systematic change that could have prevented the next crisis. More, there would be no challenge to the fundamental problem: that great economic resources give these corporations and individuals nearly limitless political clout, which prevents any real change or accountability. Just as the 20008 crisis resulted in essentially no reform or accountability of genuine impact.

Drum continues:

But hoo boy, what a contrast with how the rest of us were treated. Things like principal write-downs, second waves of stimulus, aid to states, and mortgage cramdown all got a bit of idle chatter but were then left to die. For some reason, it would have been unfair to hand out money to profligate homeowners, state and local workers, and the millions who have been unemployed for more than a year.

My endless frustration with this position is the notion that we our failure enact all these "regular person" programs is some preventable error, like it just sort of happened that way. I have no objection to the standard Keynesian case made by Drum and Krugman and Yglesias et al, that we could spend some government cash, loosen up our money, drum up aggregate demand, decrease unemployment, and do some limited good for a lot of people out there. I'd vote for such a thing in a heartbeat. But there's this bizarre failure to understand that these measures are not happening for precisely the same reason that no adequate regulatory power has been exercised over the banks, for the same reason that there's been no accountability for those responsible, for the same reason nothing has meaningfully changed: because moneyed interests control our system. To point out that those with vast financial assets control the Congress, the Fed, and our entire economic policy is at once to invite claims of crankery and conspiracy theorizing, and to state the painfully obvious.

Drum gets to the nut of it:

This is how 2008 radicalized me. It's one thing to know that the rich and powerful basically control things. That's the nature of being rich and powerful, after all. But in 2008 and the years since, they've really rubbed our noses in it. It's frankly hard to think of America as much of a true democracy these days.

So here's my question: what do you want to do about it? How do you rescue true democracy in the face of ever-greater capture of our political process by the rich and powerful? I've followed Drum's blog for years, but before or in the month since this post, he's offered little in the way of suggestions. He's got a lot of small-bore, CAP and WaPo-approved triangulating policy shifts, but nothing that can address complaints of this size. To me, all of this-- not just the financial crisis, but the continuing inability of our society to live up to its basic social contract-- suggests that we need actually radical reform. Moving the deck chairs simply is not sufficient anymore. You cannot overstate how close we all came to total economic collapse, yet in the face of that we have adopted terribly weak reforms.

Here's an idea: nationalize the investment banking industry. Eliminate the profit motive, removing the incentive to find ever-more-risky investment vehicles. Stop them from accruing enormous financial assets during boom times, which gives them the political power to ensure that the government will bail them out in bust times. (If you think that we wouldn't bail out BofA or Citi or any of the big ones should they start to fail tomorrow, or that they aren't busily building the next disastrous bubble, you're very naive.) Keep savings banks local, support cooperative credit unions, go the full "Sweden in 1992" on the big banks, but make it permanent. It's a start.

Of course, if Drum wanted to look in this kind of direction for real reform, he'd have to be willing to do what so many of them are unwilling to do: give up a seat at the table. The gatekeepers of liberal political discourse don't permit this kind of radicalism, and Drum would have to make a very direct trade between articulating reforms that can actually counter the problems he sees and being taken seriously by the liberal intelligentsia. (You'll note that this dynamic doesn't hold in the other direction-- Drum could advocate some radical conservative reform, like the gold standard or something, and perfectly mainstream conservatives and libertarians would stroke their chin and talk about what a bold iconoclast he is.) Drum isn't a "cocktail party at Nick Gillespie's house" kind of a blogger, but professional regard and reputation affect everybody. He is also not one of those common politicos who views politics as a kind of game or sport; he's always struck me as genuinely committed. But to be taken seriously, he can't advocate what it would take to create genuine change. So he's stuck.

In this sense he strikes me as emblematic of American liberals, or progressives, if we must use a term of defeat. Drum has articulated a radical's passion, and is hemmed in by decidedly anti-radical peers. Like many liberals, he can poignantly articulate our moral duty but can present no compelling argument for how to accomplish it.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Kevin Drum will continue to do what they all do-- chase merrily after the center as the conservatives drag it further and further to the right. I can't quite blame him. As someone who has never enjoyed influence, it's too easy for me to tell someone who does to abandon it. But over time, the gulf between the principles and goals which animates him, and the ability of establishment reforms to deliver them, will only grow. For people facing that kind of a divide, I'd say that there's three choices. Grow more despondent. Grow more compromised, and make the work of the nominally liberal the work of complaining about regulation, taxes, and impediments to "free markets." Or let your mind get blown.

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misformatted post on Grantland I find bizarrely entertaining

Epic Freddie joke getting FAIL. Redacted for self-preservation.

It's a funny gimmick, though!

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why would the AV Club review a Korn album?

That's what I wondered the minute I saw the review, by Jason Heller. Are there a lot of AV Club readers who are on the fence about buying the new Korn album?

The "F" was about as inevitable as such a thing could be. That's not even my complaint, though. It's just that I can't see any purpose for a Korn review on the AV Club beyond inviting the kind of hooting and condescension that the review and many of its comments contain. (I should point out that a commenter or two makes essentially the same point I'm making.) To me, it points to my recurring suspicion that a lot of our analysis of pop culture exists more to help people position themselves above (what they presume to be) culturally and socially undesirable groups, such as Korn fans. And that is happening with the large majority of the comments, people jockeying to see who can be more clever in declaring their superiority to those who like different media. (I tend to find that's true in any AV Club comment thread, but here it's a little more naked than usual.)

I remember being struck by the fact that Steven Hyden, in a piece explicitly worrying over this dynamic, couldn't resist saying that he "wouldn't know many of the newer bands lodged on Billboard’s top rock songs chart—Cage The Elephant, AWOLNATION, Five Finger Death Punch, Young The Giant—if they walked up to me in an Ed Hardy shirt and white baseball cap and handed me a lukewarm can of Coors." Ha! Ed Hardy! White baseball caps! Coors! And all of that while ostensibly writing about the legitimacy of the popularity of those bands. It's like he can't help himself. I've always been frustrated by the idea of coastal elites who look down their noses at their middle American counterparts, in large measure because I think that phenomenon is vanishingly rare.  In contrast, cultural condescension (which has no convenient geographic or political groupings) is totally real and almost inescapable online.

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sparkle motion

For awhile now I've wanted to divert my online writing energy into different directions. It would be nice to fight less. Generally at this point I have a policy where I only post something critical of someone else if it passes the "can't sleep" test. If I have something critical to say, oftentimes I can't sleep well until I post it. If I'm not moved to that degree lately I just drop it.

I would like to write a blog called Interfaces of the Word, after Father Ong, and make it a blog about writing. I find people are very dismissive of what I do academically until they actually hear what it is beyond the field's name. I would love to talk a bit about the empirical research that is ongoing, both in terms of the large, traditional educational research about broad policies, but also recent scholarship in eye-tracking and brain scans. The exploration of the unique neurocognitive processes that go into the use of specifically written language is, for me, very interesting. More often, I could write about style, and what I perceive in the trends in Internet and blog discourse, highlight writing I like, point out bad writing, do a technical discourse analysis of a specific blogger, etc. There's a lot of research out there that people don't even know exists and I think a lot of it would be of interest to the broad blogging audience.

The question is always in what form and what forum. I don't know, it never seems natural to just take this here blog and change its focus. And starting a new thing seems alternatively invigorating and exhausting. I would like to stop fighting.

Perhaps the ultimate issue is that I just don't know if anybody would be interested. That's funny, because I've never cared much about that in the past; independence tends to trump traffic. But I wouldn't want to invest myself in something new if no one was interested. This blog has always been a service to myself. I would like to change that somewhat. Another issue is that, like a lot of academics, I am fearful of writing about topics related to my research interests online, for a variety of professional and social reasons.

I don't know, we'll see.

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troubling

A beautiful summation of your interactive scholarship of the past few months. I'm glad I was able to sit in and learn from your quest. -- a comment on Ta-Nehisi Coates's latest article for the Atlantic, arguing that the Civil War was not tragic.

For me, it's the same as always: the absolute refusal to consider the difference between sympathy for the South and principled opposition to war and killing makes the conversation useless. The essay is of a piece with everything Coates writes on the subject; again and again, I want to see a stance proffered on moral resistance to the act of intentionally taking human life, and instead it's a constant return to the old refrains against romanticizing the antebellum South. Well: yes, every facet of romanticizing the Confederacy is wrong and offensive. And there are many versions. But the refusal to condone killing out of a conviction that killing is always wrong is an entirely separate issue than supporting the "Lost Cause" or any other ugly trope about the South. Are Quakers allowed to oppose the killing that occurred in the Civil War? Are pacifists? Is there a moral difference between that kind of opposition and the kind that laments the loss of the Confederate way of life? I don't know, even though I've read thousands of words from Coates on the subject.

"But our general sense of the war was that a horrible tragedy somehow had the magical effect of getting us free. Its legacy belonged not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a time when we were property."

And what of those who revel in precisely nothing about it? What of those who find the condition of slavery tragic, and any and all consequences of it necessarily tragic, including the war that ended that condition? What of those who are invested in the Greek meaning of "tragic," the sense in which unhappy events are played out inevitably as a result of a flaw in character? What about those who simply do not confuse a moral conviction about killing with attitudes towards "costume and technology?"

"But we have stories too, ones that do not hinge on erasing other people, or coloring over disrepute." 

This, is so powerful to me. Yeah, I want to be a part of this team.

Coates and his supporters are free to argue on whatever terms they want, but they also have to live within the confines of conventional language. And when they say that he has proven that "the Civil War was not tragic," I have to say, no, he hasn't. He has in fact refused even to consider the question beyond the narrow scope that he has defined, which is common to much of his work. And he and his supporters have shut down any proposed broadening of the discussion while basking in praise for having undertaken it. Whatever success in argument he's achieved has happened with distortion and sleight-of-hand, by insisting that principled opposition to war is the same as regard for the South when it isn't, or saying that tragic means "really sad" when it doesn't, or by acting as if proving one thing is the same as proving another. The more that a question is insisted away, the more pressing it seems.

I wish that I could articulate how this article reverberated in my soul. Better, I wish that you, TNC could feel that reverberation, and I could read how you described it. 

Now there are a whole host of ways that Coates or anybody could attack the pacifist's position. Opposition to violence, after all, is far, far less popular than support for violence, particularly in politics and particularly online. I am perfectly used to mockery, dismissal, and invective for what I think, and anyone antagonistic to my views can rest assured that the vast majority of people out there will belittle my beliefs. (Hey, there's one in the comments now.) But the issue remains separate from antebellum romanticism.

Figuring out how to say what you're saying, without sounding whiney and petulant is a testament to your strong intellect and to your solid commitment to following the truth wherever it leads.  Nice job.

BTW: Just for myself; for my part in any of it; knowingly or otherwise - and not because I think it's what you wanna hear, but for what it's worth, TNC - I'm sorry.

I have said before that I find the cult of personality he's created at the Atlantic a self-congratulatory creep show. If it were merely a case of someone on the Internet residing in a bubble of affection, hey, who cares. That's perfectly common. What disturbs me is that his defenders, largely white, express their support in terms so close to condescension, or offer praise so wild that it can't meaningfully regard the work at all. When I argue about this subject, his coterie inevitable says "for him, this is personal." That, to me, is a slap in the face, the kind of thing you say about someone who you think is incapable of defending himself. And it has everything to do with race, with a set of guilty white readers who are eager to be absolved of that guilt, and so seek really to deny any responsibility for their role in a racist society.

"For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props."

I suspect that a substantial minority of Coates's considerable following is made up of people who do not, actually, think highly of him, though they suppose they do. I suspect that he attracts admiring white people who experience discussion of race as a kind of panic. I suspect that he fulfills for them the role of a racial avatar, someone to hold opinions on race for them, so that they neither have to engage in the hard work of fixing our racial inequalities nor feel indicted by his own observations on race in America. I suspect that for them Coates is not fully human, that he is another in a parade of black symbols who assuage their guilt and massage their egos, that he is a stock character, a prop, but never a human being to be evaluated and thus capable of being truly valued.

The world is a strange place. In the last couple weeks I saw bloggers who Coates will break bread with arguing in support of The Bell Curve, a text which argues (if one bothers to actually check) that the large majority of black people are significantly less intelligent than the large majority of white people. As was inevitable, apologies were offered and friendships maintained, all without the repudiation of the text itself. Historical inquiry is important and I value it, but surely the opinion that black Americans today are inherently inferior is of greater meaning for the future of justice. And yet there is a regard for race science that people can live with, in a way that they can't live with the idea that war is universally tragic. It's no wonder that so many white people find solace in arguments about the Civil War; in them, they find the opportunity to take stands on race that cannot possibly harm them in their day-to-day. They enjoy conviction without consequence, much as they enjoy the promise of the exoticized object, which is to be understood without being judged.

TNC says what he thinks and it is a great pleasure to hear what he says.  This essay ties up loose ends in my understanding of the Civil War like nothing else has.  Not that there is any end to it.  Slavery is the original sin in the New World.  The Civil War was a step in the direction of obviating that sin.  But we are still in process and always will be.  I suspect that TNC has some well thought out views of Abraham Lincoln and look forward to hearing of them.  He embodies all of the conflict and yet is above all of it.

I wonder about Coates. When he reads this endless commentary from white people trying to outdo each other in praising him, as the reach deeper and deeper for hyperbole, as they stretch their vocabularies to bless him with their benevolent white approval-- does he get embarrassed, at all? Does it become unseemly to him? Does he question where this all comes from? I imagine he must. Something is off, here. No one needs to have any sympathy for my convictions to say so. I find no value in universal assent, and beyond the poor optics of a bunch of people agreeing, I fear that it's exactly in those times-- in the deadening warmth of proud unanimity-- that something corrosive slips in the back door.

Update: I'm appending a link to this post by Tedra Osell, with bonus condescension from Belle Waring.

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giveth, taketh away, etc

This essay, from a Dr. Zachary Ernst of the University of Missouri, has been making the rounds, or a certain kind of the rounds. I have some things to say about it, and you should read it. Start, though, from this: this is someone using the protection of tenure to whine about tenure. It is the argument of someone who is criticizing the way in which institutional protection is distributed while clad in that protection, without any consideration that this tension is worth exploring, or that it perhaps undermines his position. Coming from my position as an impoverished graduate student, without the benefit of tenure or institutional protection or permanent employment or the middle class income it brings, this strikes me as a special kind of cowardice, a preening, proud kind. Take that, first, for context.

Dr. Ernst has complaints. They are, in my estimation, not quite minimally convincing, but then there's little indication that convincing others is the purpose of this kind of argument. Dr. Ernst's relationship to tenure is complicated; he pays lip service to its intellectual benefits, but he seems deeply antagonistic to the elementary notions that undergird the institution. He mutters darkly about the "worst politics" that one encounters in the university, apparently among those who feel that left-wing politics should be permissible in exactly no professions. (I have never yet met a conservative or libertarian who complained about bias in academia who wasn't, in the end, equating bias with "you aren't flattering my preconceptions.") He additionally has nothing but showy contempt for the fact that his peers have different ideas about what should be valued in scholarship, not seeming to care or understand that differences of opinion in what is best for the pursuit of human knowledge are precisely the reason for tenure. He is endlessly proud of his pugnacity but decries the "bullying" of others. In every respect he appears to be a man who loves to swing but not to be hit.

Indeed, you can search the piece all you want, but you won't find anything resembling self-criticism, or the notion that, when considering why his career is perhaps not what or where he intended, he should first ask whether there is something lacking in his body of work. The notion that in fact the beginning of responsible inquiry of this kind should require an examination of the self, waged as publicly and unsentimentally as the essay in question, has apparently not been considered. In any event, Dr. Ernst is unhappy with the systems of professional advancement within the university. He feels that the disciplinary promiscuity of his work is not valued in the university and that this is self-evidently antithetical to the academy's purpose. (That he sailed through his tenure review, by his own admission, somewhat blunts this criticism.) As is typical of polemicists, Dr. Ernst believes that as he is, so is the world. Coming from outside his field, the notion that across the university writ large is not friendly to interdisciplinarity appears unlikely, but I'm qualified to say. As someone with wide-ranging interests myself, I am inclined to value interdisciplinarity, but I also know that the fadishness and grand claims of working across departments often produces poor research. It is perfectly possible, after all, that interdisciplinarity is not properly valued in his field and that this has little or nothing to do with what is making him unhappy.

As for his unhappiness with the professional academic life... take a number. Here is what it means to be an adult: you have to eat shit. Repeatedly. You do things you don't want to do. You are forced to endure indignities. Your rewards have very little to do with your talents or effort. People who are less deserving are promoted while people who are more deserving are ignored. Life isn't fair, not in the academy or anywhere else. Yet Dr. Ernst is deeply unhappy with the way that professional laurels are distributed within the university (understandable) and also of the conviction that his unhappiness matters (absurd). Let me ask: in what professional field is there a perfect system of reward? What job is not riven with petty corruptions of "meritocracy"? Which jobs, I'd like to know, promise and deliver a fair system of review and promotion, free of politics and patronage and fashion?


I can tell you this: the vast majority of professions offer not even the minimally transparent or fair system of advancement that the university affords. And what almost no professions offer is the ability to openly and publicly complain about their systems of advancement. If Dr. Ernst were to undertake his criticisms in almost any other field, he would be on the unemployment line. Like all of his many privileges-- privileges that stem from the same institutions he deplores-- this goes unexamined. Dr. Ernst is a good example of a dynamic I have observed again and again in academics: he flagrantly romanticizes the university, and then tears down the university for failing to live up to that romantic vision.

Dr. Ernst says repeatedly that his argument stems from a simple assumption: that the university is resistant to change. I don't know that, in fact, his arguments follow. I'm no philosopher. But in any event, I reject it. Yes, I know; the Internet is rife with complaints about higher education, a few legitimate, most not. But I find the idea that university has not evolved and grown in great measure given enormous change to simply not be credible. I can only offer anecdote in response to his own. I will say this: there are 80 human institutions that have existed in the same form for at least 500 years. 65 of them are universities. Those human institutions that do not evolve wither and die. I do not believe that the university writ large would still exist if it were of the character that Dr. Ernst has described. You won't find this a popular position.

Here is not an assumption but merely an observation. The university has always been the target of a particular kind of resentment, from both within and without. It is the resentment of those who believe themselves to be unappreciated geniuses. I became aware very early on that the Internet is filled with people who resent and distrust the university because they became convinced, at an early age, that they were gifted, and that the failure of higher education to recognize the full flower of their genius was a great crime. So convinced of their own brilliance, they can't fathom any reason that they might go unrecognized other than the systematic failure of the institution of scholarship. When Dr. Ernst speaks about how philosophers believe "that entrenched belief systems may be overthrown by a single person," I hear the curdling exasperation of so many who felt that they were that single person, and that the university was obliged.

I'm not saying that Dr. Ernst is such a person; I don't know the man. But I know that they litter the Internet like flotsam. And I often encounter, in the world of academics, a group of people (both women and men) who walk around in a kind of daze, unable to understand why their work isn't being celebrated. They seem to believe that they were entitled to recognition before they arrived. Dr. Ernst is not in the position of these people; he is employed and tenured at a major university, in a field where the brutal competition for jobs ensures that anyone so employed and so tenured has been greeted with profound success again and again. His publishing history is the type most of us can only envy. (You would be amazed at how complaints about which research is valued evaporate, when one is defending one's own published, recognized work.) Looking at his CV, I can only hope to achieve what he has achieved, is achieving. Yet despite his considerable reason to give thanks, his essay is soggy with entitlement. That's ultimately what's at issue here. I don't question Dr. Ernst's right to complain about his department, the field of philosophy, or the many pathologies of academia. But what he says is riven with entitlement and defined by a strange incuriosity. Neither is conducive to the pursuit of human inquiry.

Dr. Ernst's essay concludes with a complaint about the difficulty his wife has encountered in obtaining tenure in his department. I don't have the evidence to evaluate his case, but I know enough about the world and sexism to not doubt for a second that a a self-confident women would have faced hardship in employment and promotion, regardless of her profession. It seems beyond probable to me that his wife has face these hurdles, and I'm very sorry for them. The fact that her university has disassembled its system of internal review is a major failure, and if Dr. Ernst is faithfully and accurately reporting the way that his wife has been treated, the conduct of those responsible is deplorable. I am just crude enough to point out that it is precisely the people with the "worst politics" who have insisted for decades that this kind of corrosive sexism has to be opposed.

It seems clear to me: Dr. Ernst should resign. He feels, after all, that the system of professional advancement and recognition in his department is deeply broken, that the wrong types of work are being recognized, that he is not receiving high enough raises, and that his wife has been wronged and insulted. Clearly, he should terminate his own employment there. Of course, that would involve material hardship for him and his family. But that's the thing about principles. They come at a cost or are worth nothing.

Whether he actually quits will tell you everything you need to know.

Update: My commenters are deeply critical of this post, and rather convincingly so.

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if you want credit for endorsing something unpopular you better actually endorse what it says

I'll take Ta-Nehisi Coates's lead and bring my thoughts on race and IQ to a close. I'll do it with a simple observation.

Perhaps what aggravates me the most about the position of Andrew Sullivan is how he, and others who endorse the Bell Curve argument, express that endorsement by essentially lying about what the argument says. To read Sullivan, or the myriad people who have popped up in my comments, one might think that these arguments offer minor distinctions between the intelligence of the black population and the intelligence of the white population, that we're talking nickels and dimes here. This is flatly untrue.   Both the Bell Curve and the larger suite of arguments about race and IQ that Sullivan and others are endorsing say that the black population is significantly less intelligent than the white population. The Bell Curve argues that the average white person has an IQ that is more than a standard deviation higher than the average black person. Since the publication of that book, Charles Murray and those like him have endorsed the view that sub-Saharan Africans have an average IQ better than two standard deviations lower than the average white American. (See, for example, the notorious Rushton-Jensen article, co-authored by the president of the explicitly racist and eugenicist Pioneer Society.) In other words, they believe that the difference in intelligence between the average white American and the average sub-Saharan African is the same as or larger than the difference in intelligence between the average sub-Saharan African and someone who suffers from Down Syndrome. These are not fine distinctions.

Sullivan wrote "No one is arguing that 'that black people are dumber than white,' just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations." If you take nothing else away from me, ever, take this: this is wrong. To say that a standard deviation of difference represents a "slight" difference is simply untrue. To say that the two full standard deviations separating sub-Saharan Africans from white Americans, asserted by the race science crowd, is merely a slightly different distribution is to engage in some truly mendacious wordplay, or to betray a lack of even elementary statistical education.

Does accepting these premises equate with arguing that black people are dumber than white people? I would suggest that it does. As I said in a previous post, I don't doubt that people are accurately reporting IQ data for different populations. What I doubt is that intelligence is a quantifiable phenomenon; that IQ is a meaningful proxy for it; that IQ tests are free of systematic bias and data corruption; and that these differences can be responsibly asserted to be the product of heredity and not environmental and other factors. But if you do accept these premises, I can't see how there is any meaningful way you can deny that statement. After all, the Bell Curve's central argument is precisely that intelligence is real, measurable, accurately quantified with IQ and IQ testing, largely heritable, and that black people have low IQs.

(How long ago did Sullivan read the Bell Curve? I have it sitting in front of me. The data is right there. I can't understand how Sullivan can believe that he's arguing the same thing as the book and yet still call these slight differences in distribution.)

This divide, between the pride with which people assert their independence and honesty on this issue, and the way in which they relate the arguments of race science in the most anodyne and minimized way-- that's what bothers me the most. It's the hypocrisy in patting yourself on the back for facing "harsh truths" and then failing to accurately reflect what those "truths" you're endorsing actually say.

In the post I linked to above, Coates talks about his community.

I have lived in the black community virtually my entire life. I went to black public schools. I went to a black university. I have spent a third of my life with a black woman. When I wake up in the morning, black people are the first thing I see. My black mother and father hurled books at me. My black Howard professors shot down my dumb theories. My black book editor parses through my long unwieldy thoughts. My black wife reads my first drafts. In very literal terms, what you read here everyday is representation of the collective brain-power of a black community.

If I know the rhythms of blogging, this episode will soon draw to a close and everyone will part as friends. I must insist on pointing this out: if the argument of the Bell Curve and attendant views is correct, the majority of the people Coates has described here are likely of significantly below average intelligence. That's what the argument says, that a significant majority of black people have below average IQs and that these IQs accurately reflect their intelligence. Sure, some race science types might say that Coates is likely to run with an above-average crowd. But if you expand the ranks of people far enough, and statistics are true, and the Bell Curve is true, we're talking about a group of people-- the people this man loves and admires-- who are largely made up of the unintelligent. That's what the book says. And you, reading at home, the black people you know and work with and socialize with? The Bell Curve says that you can expect a significant majority of them to be significantly below average intelligence. That's the text of the book. It's right there, in black and white.

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no, I'm not an IQ guy myself

Since some have asked, in response to my recent post on IQ and race-- no, I'm not a booster of IQ. You can read far smarter and more qualified people than I describing why a measure like IQ (or g) is deeply insufficient to approximate intelligence, or indeed why even "intelligence" as a static, comprehensive, or meaningful term is deeply problematic. (Although there are of course those who will insist that these perspectives are merely the product of well-intentioned sentimentality.)

Additionally, "race" and "black" have never been defined to my satisfaction in these discussions. Again, this is the kind of stance that is commonly dismissed as politically correct or romantic, but I find it simply a sensible consideration of the facts. When we're talking about ancestry and heredity we're talking about complex genealogical lines that are particularly tangled when you're talking about black Americans. Using terms like "of African ancestry" is deeply problematic when talking about black Americans, who represent a totally unique group and who have a genetic heritage loaded with the influence of other groups such as white Americans and Native Americans. It seems to me, from a common sense (read: inexpert) position, that "black" can't mean much if it includes both a first-generation Somalian who now lives in Los Angeles and can trace his lineage to the same town going back hundreds of years, and also someone whose family in Cleveland came by way of Alabama via Haiti via being captured as a slave from what is now Liberia, and whose lineage includes a Greek grandfather and a Cherokee great-grandmother and the slaveholders who raped their way into his background. I'm willing to be educated on why the term is still useful despite this lack of common background, but I keep not hearing that argument.

I engage on this issue using those terms and those assumptions because I want to critique the arguments that flow from their assumptions. And even accepting their assumptions that intelligence is one quantity that can be distilled down to individual numerical scores, and that broad designations of race and ethnicity are meaningful categories for making informed assumptions, their arguments strike me as a comprehensive failure. Again, show me the actual mechanism at work here. Point to the genes, the chromosomes, the alleles, demonstrate how those affect gestation, and prove that they lead to the phenotypical outcomes of lower IQ.

I'll show my cards and say that I don't think that will happen, because I don't believe intelligence, whatever that means, is like having lobed ears or blue eyes. Even if it were, I don't think it can be boiled down to a measure like g. But even if I did, I'd need to see the mechanism. Call me a stickler.

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narrative is distorting/the mechanism is what matters

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, I see that Andrew Sullivan is lamenting a purported blackout of research regarding the race-IQ connection. This is not new territory for Andrew; he helped bring the issue into the public consciousness back during his tenure as editor at The New Republic.

Now: the first issue here is the claim that such a blackout exists. As Coates points out, the evidence for such a blackout that is presented amounts to the complaint of a single researcher, Dennis Garlick. The researcher is someone who could reasonably claim expertise on the issue, and he appears from my limited vantage to have an impressive resume. His claim, though, seems disturbingly unsupported. Whether or not research into IQ and heredity is being squashed is an empirical question. Coates links to a blogger who attempts to answer that question empirically, and while we couldn't call it scientific, I find it a sober and constructive attempt to find out the truth. The results seem to speak for themselves, but I can't know what goes on behind the scenes. I'm unqualified to say if Garlick is right, but as a consumer of research I also don't find his case compelling.

The fact that empirical inquiry cuts against the grain of what Sullivan and Garlick are claiming is resonant in the context of the race-IQ question. The "race realist" movement has always pushed a narrative where politics corrupts empiricism, but the movement's failures have primarily been empirical failures. When you strip away the endless paranoid conspiracy theorizing and the relentless flogging of the narrative, you get down to a robust set of data demonstrating differences in performance on IQ tests, then some fairly wild speculation about genetic causes. Over and over again, assertions about the genetic undesirability of black people involve making massive leaps from an observed phenomenon to a particular mechanism to explain that phenomenon, with dubious or nonexistent evidence to support those leaps.

It's true: a broad swath of research demonstrates that black Americans tend to perform less well on standardized tests of intelligence. This racial achievement gap is not adequately explained merely by controlling for socioeconomic status, as is commonly assumed, although adjusting for poverty does shrink it. There's no need to hide from that data, as those positing genetic determinism constantly accuse others of doing. If a connection between heredity and IQ can be discovered, it should be. (Measure what is measurable, etc.) But what empiricism requires-- not political correctness, not bleeding heart compassion, not even basic human decorum and civility, but cold-blooded rational inquiry-- is far more than the racial determinists have show us. The narrative they present is seductive, which is precisely why their insistence on narrative over the complicated and limited claims of science is disturbing. From my perspective, most people who assert racial genetic deficiencies seem remarkably disinterested in identifying specific mechanisms for the observed phenomenon. They instead seem primarily interested in flogging crude and reductive visions of our society and what ails it.

The rush to find genetic origins for any and all human phenomena has become so popular, particularly with the press, that the standards of evidence have eroded everywhere. Genetic or evolutionary speculation has become an obsession of our media, frequently undertaken without a shred of scientific credibility, and defined by faddishness and imprecision. Take homosexuality and genetics. I find it remarkable the number of educated people who I meet who assume, quite confidently, the homosexuality (in both men and women) is purely and straightforwardly the product of genetic predisposition. This is a politically palatable idea-- one might call it PC-- but it can't yet be proven, even conditionally. There are complications, such as the (controversial) older brothers hypothesis, which is important because it posits a mechanism that is non-genetic and yet nonetheless physiological in origin (and thus not "chosen"), as well as other evidence contrary to the assumed genetic origins of homosexuality.

But as it became politically important for people to insist that homosexuality is genetic, that insistence became more and more prevalent. Never mind that the dichotomy between "homosexuality is purely genetic" and "homosexuality is a choice" is flagrantly false, or that "they can't help it" is not a stirring cry for equality. Politics made the genetic origin necessary, so people believed in it. Indeed, it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where politics has more directly corrupted popular understandings of empirical questions than the widespread belief that we know for a fact that homosexuality is genetic. Yet curiously, I don't find Andrew railing against that assumption, or insisting on the supremacy of disinterested research, or leading the battle for more open-mindedness in the attempt to explain the origins of homosexuality. Perhaps we will identify specific alleles that determine sexual orientation; I wouldn't be remotely surprised. But jumping from observed phenomenon to the assumption of genetic origins of that phenomenon with limited direct evidence of a specific mechanism is unhelpful.

Compare these speculative genetic causes of low IQ or homosexuality to, say, genetics and sickle cell anemia. We don't have the presence of a human condition and vague talk such as "it's genetic." We have identified the particular gene, in a particular chromosome, that causes the condition. We know how the mutation changes protein structure, which leads directly to specific consequences in gestation that cause the negative health effects we see in people with sickle cell anemia. We identified the alleles responsible for specific phenotypic traits and demonstrated the connection scientifically. At every step, we have gone beyond "it's genetic," in regards to sickle cell anemia, specifically and constructively. We have identified the mechanism which causes the condition. That's the job of those who are dedicated to racial determinism: find the mechanism. Do your work. Show me the data. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you when you fail to prove your assertions.

My question for Andrew and others is whether my dissatisfaction with the assumption of genetic origins for the racial achievement gap is necessarily "PC," particularly when placed in context with our knowledge about genetic phenomena like sickle cell. Is the narrative so powerful that we couldn't merely be unpersuaded by the evidence?

Speaking as someone who is involved, for 14+ hours out of a typical day, in reading, researching, and learning about education and pedagogy, let me engage in understatement and point out that education and intelligence are remarkably mulitivariate phenomena. My continuing frustration with the ed reform crowd is how relentlessly reductive they are in discussing the origins of poor educational performance. Saying "it's those damned unions!" and accusing any dissenters of obstruction isn't just politically unfair. It's an incredible failure to soberly assess the depth of our problems and the complexities of their origins. Trying to isolate specific variables in education and intelligence research is incredibly hard. That's not politics. It's reality. To ascribe genetic origins without greater explanation of mechanism or the exploration of environmental factors which shape IQ is to engage in wild-ass speculation.

My own wild-ass speculation? The question of race and IQ will be answered in a way that is complex, rather dull, and totally useless for providing headline fodder for sensationalist publications like The New Republic or Slate. I wouldn't be surprised if a whole slew of factors, including poverty, exposure to lead, poor diets, parent educational background, the idiom tests are written in, neonatal health care, learning disorders, dyslexia and dyscalculia, lack of exposure to educational toys and games, low childhood reading loads, the persistence of syntactic immaturity due to parental modeling (my own academic obsession), and other environmental factors played a role. That doesn't even begin to untangle the web of what "black" means in terms of specific linear heritage, particularly since we are talking about a truly unique genetic history that has been conditioned by the rape and forced breeding programs that are common to chattel slavery. If I'm right and the origins of the racial achievement gap are revealed to be a stew of competing factors, it will make our job of closing the gap harder, but it will also hopefully blunt the words of those who ascribe vast social problems to the supposed inherent inferiority of our most oppressed group.

I chose the example of sickle cell anemia purposefully, of course. It's a condition that is generally found in those with sub-Saharan African lineage. What does that mean for American blackness? Is sickle cell anemia "inherent" in black people? Is there something essential about the disorder in black people? They're absurd questions. Yet they are of exactly the same character as claims routinely made about black people and intelligence. As I said, my unsupported speculation is that a large number of factors contribute to the racial achievement gap. It's possible that one of them is a genetic predisposition. If so, we'll need to know what genes are actually producing this trait, and how. Then what? If we find such a predisposition, does that make low intelligence "inherent" to blackness? Does it mean we send black people off on a barge? Is this somehow an insurmountable challenge to liberalism, or to our social policies?

Racial determinists say that they want rationality and then engage in hysteria. The first step in assessing these issues is getting to the truth of the matter, and their dogged insistence about what we know exceeds their evidence and thus hinders that pursuit of truth. They then dig deeper, insisting on a slew of negative social conditions that stem from these supposed genetic deficiencies. It isn't surprising where the conversation next turns, although those who embrace these ideas continue to feign shock when they find racists involved in race science. (I want to loathe Stephen Metcalf, but his prudence, intelligence, and fairness in this piece makes it impossible, I'm afraid. Seriously, read it.)

I find the case for racial determinism currently unpersuasive. I find the notion of a research blackout unsupported. I find the discussion of racial lineage and genetic diversity reductive. I find the description of a specific genetic mechanism nonexistent. I find the idea of essentialized blackness offensive. I find the suggested consequences unsupportable and the supposed policy responses laughable. And I find the case for egalitarianism, equal protection before the law, and the assumption of equivalent human dignity totally unchallenged, whatever the reality about the racial achievement gap.

Of course, I'm not without considerable biases, and I couldn't tell you that I have inhabited a space of pure rationality when confronting this question. But this narrative of a refusal to learn the truth due to political correctness, so self-aggrandizing to those who push it, is not credible and does not serve the cause of empiricism. The pursuit of the controversial for its own ends is as distorting as the avoidance of it, and nowhere is that more true than here. Many people have attempted to marshal the evidence for the race-IQ connection for quite some time. Rather than evidence, they keep bringing us the narrative. Remember that.

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the racialized subject

One thing that I really wish more people understood (to be more direct, what I wish more white people understood) is that for racial minorities, the sense of being racialized is nearly constant, and often uncomfortable even when it isn't direct, explicit, or expressed in behavior.

Here's what I mean.

I think most anyone who has gone through any level of higher education has had a particular day of class when race was discussed in a way that was uncomfortable for at least some in the classroom. A particular form of this discomfort often comes when white students feel that they are being personally indicted by discussions of white racism, whether contemporary or historical. It's a phenomenon I've observed over and over again, and I'm always discouraged by it. For a lot of people, any discussion of race appears to be close to a personal accusation; palpable tension fills the air. The more the conversation turns away from a historical perspective, where the distance of history provides a buffer, and towards contemporary racism, the more charged the atmosphere becomes. And god forbid someone actually say that someone is being racially insensitive. Then things get really unhappy.

I am not insensitive to the feelings of white students in this situation, nor can I claim that I have never felt this way myself. The righteous notion that racial issues are of deep meaning and great consequence naturally makes these issues charged for everyone. And as accusations of racism are something of a nuclear bomb in discourse, being sensitive to them is inevitable. But that discomfort, I think, is also pedagogically invaluable. Being challenged in this way is precisely what higher education should be about. It's also yet another example of why protections like tenure and seniority are so important. As the university plunges along towards a service model, we need to preserve the ability of instructors to challenge their students in ways those students don't like-- often precisely because the students don't like it. Being made to feel like a racialized subject happens to white people very rarely and should be cultivated in college, comfortable or not.

What I would like for more white people to understand is that this feeling that they feel in those moments-- that they have been racialized, made to feel like an avatar for their entire broadly-defined ethnic or racial group-- is a feeling that many non-white people feel all the time.

To be clear, I don't contend that this feeling is always uncomfortable. I'm sure that many wear it with pride. There are of course times when members of racial minority groups seek out this stance, as a matter of pride, community, and the declaration of principles. But it is important to point out that it is often unchosen, and that being racially signified in that way is something that my fellow white people and I can't fully understand.

So imagine that you're the only black person at an otherwise all-white party, a fairly common occurrence, particularly at college. Somebody says something racially insensitive. It doesn't have to be out-and-out racism, and it likely isn't intended to cause offense. It's just stupid, and indicative of quietly ugly attitudes, and the kind of statement that is expressed so banally that it seeks to implicate others in its assumptions. The stupid statement is made and there's a brief window to respond to it or not.

So: what do you do? Maybe you don't know the people you're with very well. Maybe you're not willing to deal with the social consequences of objecting, particularly because those consequences are likely to occur behind your back. Maybe you're just tired and don't want to deal with this shit. And as I can tell you from personal experience, the chance for an actual productive exchange is low. But then again, racism should be challenged. People usually take silence as assent. Worse, if you're black and someone says something stupid and you don't challenge it, there's a tendency for the speaker to take that as evidence that what he or she said couldn't possibly be racist or unacceptable. "Hey, I said that around this black guy, and even he thought it was funny!" All of this goes right back to W.E.B. Du Bois; black people in America have always been forced to exist as a kind of double, the particular and the general black subject.

I couldn't possibly tell you what the right thing to do here would be. I'm not black, I've never had to navigate this particular minefield, and I never will. My point is only to say that if you're a racial minority, you have to make a choice, even if that choice is inaction. Having to face that choice is in and of itself a way of being racialized that white people don't face. Sure, we've all been in positions where we have to decide whether to engage with racism or not. But as I said above, there is an implied responsibility when you are a member of the insulted group that doesn't exist for white people. And there is no not choosing, as choosing to do nothing is making a choice, and a socially loaded one at that. It's like the guy who passes you on the street and tips his hat to you. You have no choice but to respond. You can choose to do nothing, but doing nothing is itself a choice, and in context one that sends one of the loudest social messages. Now take that and multiply the importance by a thousand times.

I have myself felt some of the discomfort that I describe above in classes where we discuss race. Then I leave the class and I'm just some dude. Meanwhile a black student leaves class and operates in an environment where many white people will take him or her to be emblematic of all black people. That's a necessary context to understand race in America, and it points to the poverty of terms like "playing the race card." The race card got played a long, long time ago. You can try to ignore it but you can't put it back in the deck.

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the presumption of innocence

You know, I just feel compelled to point out-- this Jerry Sandusky situation at Penn State is precisely the kind of situation where the rubber meets the road for a belief in the presumption of innocence.

You've had a lot of liberals lamenting the collapse of the rule of law the last decade. This would appear to be a situation where the rule of law and rights of the accused are most important. It's precisely when the media and the people have already decided the guilt of the accused (and are competing to describe his evil in the most lurid hyperbole) that these principles are the most important. And yet I find silence on that presumption of innocence from most liberal commentators, or the outright abandonment of it, when it comes to this particular case.

This particular case involves disturbing admitted attitudes and behaviors and a great deal of incriminating testimony. But the presumption of innocence is the bedrock principle of our legal system, and it applies until the legal process has run its course. And it has nothing to do with belief that the accused will eventually be found not guilty, or sympathy for the accused. I can generate no such sympathy for Jerry Sandusky. But I have to point out that precisely the same liberals who beat their breast about the terrible collapse of the rule of law are now trying to outdo each other in the expression of their outrage, directly against the presumption of innocence. I don't expect any different from conservatives, who by and large believe that any accusation is true if it is voiced-- unless it's sexual harassment, rape, or police misconduct, that is. But liberals who have staked many claims on the rule of law and the principles which undergird it suddenly find that commitment unpalatable, when it has become so unpopular.

I doubt you'll find many expressing that perspective, though.

Update: mistermix made some astute points here. This is what I said in comments.

I recognize the distinction. I just think that trial by media is a poor idea, as Richard Jewel could have told you when he was alive. And while I recognize that the legal right to a fair trial is distinct from the opinions on guilt of the public, I also think that it becomes functionally impossible to get that fair trial when the public is convinced there's no chance the accused is innocent.

It's a fair point about the institution, but recognize that the same criticism holds: they are accused of crimes and deserve the presumption of innocence.

It seems likely to me that Sandusky is guilty, and thank god we don't have a legal system predicated on the opinions of those minimally informed by the media. If he is guilty, he should spend the rest of his life in jail. Just like those in Guantanamo Bay should receive appropriate punishments, if they have been proven to have committed crimes in court.

Finally, on the outrage thing-- for me, "child rapist" is enough. I don't need to dig any further into my vocabulary to find appropriately angry terms. "Child rapist" says more than any purple prose ever could. It's just like with bin Laden. Why is "terrorist responsible for 3,000 people killed on 9/11" not sufficient? When people dig so deeply into their bag of outrage, at some point it ceases to be about the victim and instead becomes about them.

Update II: The consensus is that I'm full of shit here. (Although you know how little I value consensus!)

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history lesson

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check it out

Interestingly, one of the posts that shows up in the sidebar on The New Inquiry contains a pretty forceful rebuttal of a lot of the things that I've been writing about.

Thus, to vilify or defend the Internet, or Blogs, or Facebook, or Twitter, etc., as responsible in and of themselves for the noisy meaninglessness of our cultural discourse, for the polarization of our politics, or for the history-eschewing 24-hour news-cycle, is to lose the game before you start. It would be foolish to deny the role of social media in the current Arab uprisings, for example, but it is even more foolish to ascribe responsibility or agency to the sites or media platforms themselves. 

Yet we make this latter mistake all the time.

Read the whole thing.

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what Twitter is for

One of the unappreciated benefits of the Internet is the way that bloggers and commenters are constantly proving your points. If I critique an argument, and one commenter pops up to say "nobody argues that," another commenter will inevitably show up and prove, quite loudly, that people do in fact argue that. It's helpful and clarifying.

Nowhere is this more perfectly realized than in my complaints about Twitter. Whenever I make my standard critique of Twitter, someone goes on Twitter, says I'm wrong, and basks in the glow of the self-selected echo chamber which reaffirms every thought. It's as regular as clockwork and as self-defeating as possible.

So: they republished a revised version of my essay on the resentment machine in the New Inquiry, for which I'm quite grateful. Ryan Avent, economics guru and reliably "reasonable" correspondent, was apparently stung by it. Unfortunately, he didn't think to articulate an argument. He merely took to Twitter.

Now, I actually think this might be the platonic Tweet. It disparages without content. It dismisses without effort. It denounces without understanding. Its totally artificial length constraints shield it from having to actually express an argument. It is broadcast in an ostensibly public way, but its creator only receives and replies to those who he chooses, and he will only choose those who flatter and support him. And it produced exactly what Twitter is meant to produce, some random figure that emerges only to gently stroke the ego of the user.

I am angry, because Avent didn't just dismiss my essay without argument. He instead decided to attack my field. I'm not interested in defending it; the scholars who are producing knowledge in my discipline, and their work, can stand on their own. I will merely say that Avent has no idea what my field is, couldn't name three people working within it, doesn't have a clue what kind of research comes from it, doesn't even have a context for understanding what he is offhandedly dismissing. He has no idea, and he has the arrogance that can only come from ignorance and a medium that privileges it. This is what Twitter is for, and this is indicative of the entire operation of prominent bloggers: socially and professionally connected people who defend each other no matter what, excluding and marginalizing dissent, ignoring unpalatable arguments that they can't answer, and in every way undermining as illegitimate criticisms that don't operate from a position of privilege and social authority. You know why our media sucks? Why blogging sucks? This is why. Because bad behavior will never be corrected, thanks to the endless corruption of professional patronage.

This, above all else: I'm right here. Everyone who wants to rebut me has only to take to a blog and rebut me, or come into my comments section to argue with me, or send me an email. I fight a lot. I win some. I lose many. But I am willing to fight, and to lose, as long as my critics are willing to fight. But they never do. They take their whinges behind closed doors, or they back channel grief to me through mutual social circles, or they utilize the fake public forum of Twitter to dismiss in 140 characters what they couldn't rebut in 1,000 words. They do everything but have it out. So here is Ryan Avent, without an argument, without any knowledge whatsoever of the field he's critiquing, with nothing but the reliable certainty that some follower would soothe his ego, flatter his pretensions, and indicate assent. This is what Twitter is for: for those too weak to engage in actual antagonistic discourse. And did Avent retweet his useful pal? Oh, of course.

Unlike Avent, I lack the protections of working for establishment media, or institutional authority, or the pleasant cocoon of neoliberal mutual admiration. I don't have a host of paid-up members of the establishment blogosphere using their levers of control to defend me. It's just me, on this free blogging platform, and nobody else. Not a think tank, not a big media magazine, not a foundation or a set of fellow travelers. I have no institution and I ask for no supporters. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Ryan Avent can continue to hide in a coward's medium. I, meanwhile, will remain here, ready to fight. It's a small grace for a poor and tired grad student, one lacking all the amenities that Avent has accumulated in the world of privilege that establishment media represents, but in comparison to people who spend their whole lives hiding in a bubble of pleasant assent, I feel like a king.

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resentment machine watch

No, the way you mix your old-fashioned cannot reveal the depths of your character. The drink you choose says nothing of meaningful substance about you.

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Google Reader to Google+: central planning even I don't like

(I'm just kidding. There's lots of central planning I don't like.)

With this switch from Google Reader's social features to integration into Google+, forced from above, it's almost as if the Goog is trying to prove the point of the engineer who recently complained about Google's culture and its failures. Google Reader began life as a simple RSS feeder. Simple and powerful: a program that pushes the content you subscribe to and aggregates it in one place. Google, being a bunch of chronic tinkerers (sometimes to the good, often not), continued to develop Reader and added social features. Rather than using this set of social features in a limited way, a small but passionate group of users adopted Reader as their default social network. (For context, I'm not one of them.)

Designers and those who use designs are always meeting in the middle. Designers make certain plans for functionality and use, and users organically define actual use. Actual use can often subvert the intentions of designers in such a way that it undermines their motives-- most obviously their profit motive-- and as such are designed away. That's neither fair nor unfair in and of itself. The only question is whether designing away organic use makes the product more or less attractive to its user base, and whether or not that in turn undermines the primary motives of the designer. Think about Napster. I am dimly aware that Napster continued to exist following its initial use as a clearinghouse for unpaid for music. It may even exist now, but if it does, it's no Amazon or iTunes. They abandoned the use which its user base actually was attached to, thanks to legal coercion, and the user base vanished. That's an extreme example, but it highlights the delicate balance that designers have to strike in pushing users towards certain official uses without losing the functionality that made the product attractive in the first place.

What makes the Google Reader situation frustrating is that they are facing no coercion except the internal edict to integrate their services into Google+. Part of the early brilliance of Google was the way in which it understood that the profit motive could be an impediment to attracting a user base for new products. They didn't allow immediate profitability to get in the way of developing useful products. (This is like the now-overquoted but still clarifying part in the Social Network where Sean Parker points out that you don't put ads on Facebook because ads aren't cool.) Obviously, it helps when you have a central service, search, that is a cash cow and dominant player to subsidize experiments and new ventures. What's distressing is that Google now seems to be allowing integration to affect its products in a way that it never allowed profitability to.

One of the hardest parts about the kind of expansion Google is continuing to embark on is finding needs to fill. This was the problem with Google Wave, and the reason why Wave failed: it's see a need, fill a need, not design a product, find a need for it to fill. One of the saddest parts about that failure is that people wanted to use Wave. Remember that? People got excited ahead of themselves. Then they didn't end up using it, despite initial enthusiasm, because they didn't find a use. Contrast that with Reader as social feature: a user base that found an organic use for a product and have become attached to it without a coordinated effort on Google's part. Reader's social features are the anti-Wave. I can't understand how a company that is so smart in so many ways is being so stupid in failing to understand its own recent past.

Google is trying to build a mall where it owns all the stores. The problem is that part of what makes a mall work is that its individual franchise owners and operators are invested in their individual stores and not in some centrally-planned definition of the health of the mall. Cinnabon might have to live by certain rules, but it's going to advocate for its own good and not for that of the other stores in the mall. By using its central authority to force Reader to suffer for the good of Google+, Google is threatening an established product and user base for the potential good of an unestablished one that might never take off.

If I was on the Reader team, I'd be screaming now.

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the security, prosperity, and peace of the Libyan people have not been secured

Spencer Ackerman has declared that Libya is over. 

First: if you believe that the manipulation of Libya by the United States and other western powers is over, you are ignorant of the history of Libya, Northern Africa, the 20th century, and the United States. Our country has been manipulating the course of events in foreign countries, and in particular in oil-rich countries, for the entirety of our modern history. We use coercion, violence, espionage, and diplomatic malfeasance to undermine the self-determination of sovereign countries. This is not conspiracy. It is a reflection of history, revealed in declassified military and espionage documentation that is freely available to anyone. We manipulated Libya when we backed Qaddafi as he ruthlessly murdered his people; we will do it in Libya by backing whatever new military junta ossifies in the coming months. It would take a special combination of ignorance and obtuseness to believe we have no operatives in that country now. We have interests in Libya and so we are manipulating Libya, and we will trod on person, property, and democracy to do so if it suits our ends.

Second: what actually matters-- what has moral valence-- is the material condition of the lives of the Libyan people. Nothing there is finished. Nothing is settled. To call it a democracy now would be an absurd act of projection. Many corrupt men are now freely operating in Libya, armed to the teeth and with a feeling of entitlement. Some of them want to execute homosexuals, oppress women, and adopt Islamic theocracy. Some want to ensure the ascension of their tribe or clan. Some just want to get their piece of the pie. But that's the reality. There is neither security nor stability yet, and anyone who actually cares for the future of the Libyan people would admit that.

But, of course, one of the most important aspects of being a professional pundit and advancing your career is demonstrating "even handedness," even for parlor radicals. So it comes as no surprise that Andrew Sullivan and his pro-Obama propaganda shop have blessed Ackerman with one of their patented Yglesias awards, which is (as I understand it) an award given to people who make stabs at being "reasonable" in a way that defies principle, reason, wisdom, ethics, or sobriety.

People respond to incentives. Behaviors that are rewarded are repeated. And in professional punditry, all of the incentives point away from truth.

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dogged adherence to the Enlightenment is illiberal

It's fair to say that I'm not a fan of the term "classical liberal." This is a term of self-aggrandizement adopted by people who claim to be the real inheritors of Enlightenment values and the tradition of Smith, Locke, and Jefferson. Calling yourself a classical liberal tends to beg the question; the legacy of that era is contested, with leftists like me insisting that the egalitarianism espoused by those thinkers necessarily includes reasonable equity in fact and not just in theory. Even the legacy of specific thinkers, like Adam Smith, are contested. He's generally taken as the patron saint of laissez faire capitalism, but he endorsed progressive taxation, and some read his work as an endorsement of markets specifically because he believed they would deliver egalitarian outcomes.

But even this discussion strikes me as being somewhat besides the point. One of the most obvious elements of the Enlightenment was the rejection of tradition, and particularly the idea that tradition should preserved simply because it is tradition. Embracing reason means embracing change, as what is dictated by reason will shape and be shaped by a changing world. I take the best of liberalism to be its refusal to declare an end to any inquiry. Like the scientific method, liberalism is not a list of truth statements about the world but a way of knowing. It is a process through which useful knowledge can be developed, but the self-critique within it suggests that this knowledge can never be considered the final word.

For this reason, I find constant reference to the ideals of the Enlightenment, like constant invocation of the framers of the Constitution, to be uniquely self-denying. To treat the words of the Enlightenment thinkers as inflexible authority is to reject those thinkers in the most real and distorting way. The world has changed and liberalism must change with it or be discarded.

(Incidentally, I am trying to write shorter posts, as I have been teased about it. I am apparently not entirely incorrigible, my showy assertions of independence notwithstanding.)

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nobody knows anything about the movie business

That's what screenwriter William Goldman once said, anyway.

Here's a little evidence. The A.V. Club declares Puss in Boots and its $34 million dollar weekend take a disappointment. The article also describes Justin Timberlake as "reliably bankable." Meanwhile, New York Magazine's Vulture blog describes Puss in Boots and the self-same $34 million dollar opening weekend  as a winner that shows commercial "gusto." The post agrees with the A.V. Club that Timberlake's In Time was a failure, but identifies the main culprit as being... Timberlake and his lack of drawing power.

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