a good example

So it seems that last night there was a really good example of how difficult it would be to live by Aaron Bady's principle that we can never be sure what constitutes parody. There was a big Twitter fight between Charles Davis and Paul Carr of NSFWCorp and Mark Ames of Exiled Online, which dragged in a lot of other people and publications, including The New Inquiry and The War Nerd. I really can't piece together what the fight was about initially, and just thinking about assembling all the tweets into a Storify gives me a headache. If you look around the timelines of the various people in the fight, you should get an idea of how it went down.

It's interesting to me because it seems to present a perfect case for Bady's point of view on satire. It seems that The War Nerd tweeted out Davis's satirical piece on drones from TNI, mistaking it for sincere, and later deleted those tweets, presumably when he realized the piece was meant to express the direct opposite of what it stated. What's interesting in particular is that Bady writes for TNI, which Ames and Carr and TWN mocked. If I'm reading Bady correctly, doesn't he have to side with TWN for his (erroneous, in my view) straightforward reading of Davis's piece? Despite all the fun that was had at The War Nerd's expense, if we take Bady's position, we can't privilege Davis's take on the nature of that piece over TWN's original take, or that of anybody else. There is no such thing as clear satire, which has a definition that must always remain in play, in this reading. What's more, we have to identify (and condemn) the rhetorical violence committed by Davis in that piece against Muslims and drone opponents, because we cannot assume that this violence was intended as a joke, in Bady's view.

Now, for myself, I'm quite comfortable saying that Davis's piece was purely satirical, that it expressed the opposite of its surface intent, and that this was clear to everyone who made light of The War Nerd's misreading. Why? Because I follow Davis's work, and because I read everything published in The New Inquiry, and reading the piece sincerely simply cuts too hard against my knowledge of his beliefs and the ethos of that publication. (For the record, I also like The War Nerd's columns and NSFWCorp's journalism.) I utilize adult judgement. I am not invoking certainty, and yet I feel quite confident. Human beings derive conclusions without certainty but with considerable confidence all the time. I'm fairly certain that Bady does, too. Either way: I can't see how he can do anything but defend The War Nerd's original reading. I'll let you know when he publishes something to that effect.

Bady's Twitter is here, by the way. He's calling in the troops. (Lot's of rustled jimmies, out there; I have that effect on people.) What else is politics for, but to get connected people to rally to your side?

Update:  Incidentally, I point this out because, as you'll see, Bady in fact participated in the argument I'm referring to.

Meanwhile, lolololol:

There seriously are not enough lulz.

People ask me why I persist in talking about how social commitments distort our political media, and thus our politics, and I always say: because they keep proving the point. For myself, I have no prominent, established political allies to which I can turn to take part in a little hate-off. It's all me.

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the kind of tip jar I'd like

So a reader gave me, through Amazon, a really generous gift, for which I'm deeply grateful. It makes me feel even worse about how awful of a correspondent I am with people who write to thank or praise me. Those emails mean the world to me. And they do especially because I can be, well, a prickly pear. The trouble is, I have a hard time writing back.... I don't really know why. I have always found it far easier to argue with people I disagree with than to express solidarity with people I agree with. It's a character flaw. Please understand that I value everyone who reads this, even those who hate read it.

The world of media continues to ponder how to keep itself financially solvent. I've thought a lot about all of the different ways that monetization can happen. It really does seem like there's a handful of unattractive options for most bloggers out there. You can festoon your blog with ads, or you can rattle the tip jar fairly constantly. I don't begrudge anyone who does those things; it's just that neither are pleasant and neither seems likely to raise much money for all but the most popular blogs. One of the things I've noticed about the new Andrew Sullivan endeavor (to which I've subscribed) is that even with the paywall, he's having to constantly plead for more subscribers. Still, I'll take that over "sponsored content" any day.

I have the luxury of doing this for fun. I've never had a tip jar, or anything, but I have had people buy me things from my Amazon wish list before. I'm always humbled when they do. But it's a lot to ask people to pony up, at a minimum, $20-$25 for a book. So here's what I wish existed. What I'd like for people to be able to do would be to pitch in however little bit they wanted for a specific book that I need. A lot of these academic books on my list are pretty pricey. But if people could throw in a spare $3 or $5 to a specific book I would be currently highlighting, it wouldn't take much from anybody individually. I know entering your credit card info is always kind of dicey, but maybe this sort of thing could be set up through Amazon. Would be cool if there was that kind of program.

In any event: thanks for the gift, and thanks again to all of you. It makes me happy to know that I bring something to the table for you guys.

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you can turn off the internet

A couple people sent me this Ezra Klein lament about Twitter, thinking that it would be right up my alley. I actually am much less of a Twitter hater than people think; Twitter can be a useful placeholder for broader ideas about the blogosphere, the digital conversation, etc. Twitter's just a medium. I do, actually, recognize the root of the complaint he's making. But if the constant jokiness is more apparent on Twitter (and I think it is), it's still prevalent elsewhere. He's right to say that the constancy of the stream probably contributes to the phenomenon, but it exists elsewhere.

You've got to be careful because complaining about the jokes can lead to a real joylessness. I guess for me the problem is some of getting tired of the tired recourse to jokes and a lot the fact that few people are funny. Stand up comedians, actors, sitcom writers, and others employed in the professional comedy world get paid a lot, at the top, because being funny on command is a very rare skill. Most of us just aren't that funny most of the time. So the constant drip can be annoying in and of itself, but really, it's that most people aren't going to say very clever things most of the time. Still, I think this is on balance a small problem, although if I had to professionally consume the internet the way Klein does, I'm sure I would find it more annoying.

The antidote, for most of us, is pretty simple: turn it off. That, again, is probably not a luxury that Klein has, given his job. But for most of us, it's a very viable and easy solution. And I think one that more people should avail themselves of more often. For internet obsessives, it's very easy to forget that this big machine that can produce unhappiness at times doesn't have to be accessed. It's also important to remember that the small, individual worlds of blogs and sites and communities can seem like the whole world, but with a little bit of perspective, are tiny little places most people have never heard of. (Some, like this blog, smaller than others!)

I get emails all the time from (sympathetic) people who point out that some so-and-so has been talking trash and ask me how I can stand it. I appreciate their concern. I just tell them, you know... I close the web browser. I go outside. When Gawker teased me, it stung for a moment, but then I got over it. Because, first, I thought their criticisms were fair, but also because I recognize that most people in the world have never heard of Gawker. And I say that as someone who recognizes their popularity online and who thinks that they publish some of the most incisive and important stuff out there today. It's not just that I wouldn't be willing to weigh in if I wasn't willing to get criticized. It's also just that I've learned over time to leave what's in the web browser where it belongs. I've fought with a lot of people, some of whom I've learned things from. Then you move on.

I suppose that's all incidental to Klein's tiring of forced jokiness and garbage. My point is just that you don't merely control the stream that comes in; you control your attitude towards it, and the weight you assign it. Doing this stuff has brought me some happiness, and has given me an outlet when I can't sleep or sit still over some issue. I value that, and I value all the people I interact with (good and bad). But I try not to let this affect my sense of self, in ways petty or grand. It's a fun, important part of my life, but it's a small part of it. I don't mistake it for something bigger than it is, anymore. I had to learn that, and I had to work at it, and I'm happier for it.

That said, they'll have to pry fail videos from my cold, dead hands.

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funny thing about principle

Aaron Bady has reopened the Great Hate Tweet of 2013 Wars again, by making an argument that was very prevalent at the time: effect is what matters, not intent.

appeals to what a speech-act clearly is not only rely on some standard for empirically judging what’s there and what isn’t, but it’s impossible to actually find or define that standard, outside of ever-increasingly authoritative assertions that it is so. People have claimed that the stupid Onion tweet was clearly satire, but there is no evidence you can point to in making that claim; you end up, instead, relying on assertions of authority: the joke-teller might claim that it was satire, or a reader might try to explain to you that it was obviously satire. But what they really mean, simply, is that it was satire to them, and that, on that basis, it should be to you as well.

Now, the whole post, in its entirety, is essentially the "intent doesn't matter, effects do" argument with a little Roland Barthes sprinkled on top. Which, fine. If you've got a good horse, you might as well ride. Bady is no more guilty here than any of the other people who selectively endorsed this argument a month ago. I will merely echo every other student in a sophomore English seminar in asking whether Bady is not himself making assertions based on authority, and avoiding self-judgment merely by the convenience of his perception of himself as not that kind of guy.

The problem for both Bady and the broader world of social-justice-140-characters-at-a-time is that history exists, and on the Internet, a record exists. The notion that effect is what matters when it comes to The Onion is problematic considering that conservative Christians have been mad at The Onion dozens of times and nobody gives a shit. Google around for 15 seconds and you'll find plenty of outraged, offended Christians who were mad at The Onion. The effect of their work, whatever the intent, was to hurt people. Not one of the people who worked themselves into a self-congratulatory lather over the Quvenzhane Wallis tweet ever took to Twitter to demonstrate their profound moral revulsion at the hurt The Onion had caused. The principle that has been applied to this situation was generated solely for it and immediately discarded. Nobody got outraged about the opinions of people who got offended by The Onion before because the people who did are exactly the people most upwardly-mobile liberals want to separate themselves from.

Now, were it the case that any of these people had actually followed the thinking being applied here to different moments when The Onion had caused offense-- the times when doing so wouldn't have had any positive effect on their status within their social cohort-- I would believe they actually were operating on principle. I would even have been impressed. But they never did, so I don't, and I'm not. In my experience, most self-professed leftists are usually about a beer away from the pure, hateful classism of "white trash," even the boutique Marxists.

Again, the reality is that for many of its loudest proponents, this kind of liberalism is essentially a social affectation. And one of a particular kind: social liberalism, for many, is a class marker. Over time I've come to see most of the cultural attachments of the cash-poor but social-capital-rich white artistic striver types as ways to assure the world that their financial similarity to lower class white people is purely coincidental. In that context, social liberalism becomes a particularly outsized way to demonstrate that you are better than the people with whom you share an income quintile.

Myself, I would argue that, contra Bady, adults can't rely on either pure intent or pure effect, but must muddle through in a world of conflicting ideals and limited information. This stance prohibits me from making any claims of perfect righteousness, but it does give me the flexibility to state my interpretation (MY HEGEMONIC INTERPRETATION THAT I AM APPLYING TO THE WORLD LIKE A FASCIST) that the whole point of The Onion's tweet was, in fact, that we are allowed in our culture to treat actresses like shit, an opinion voiced by many of the people who went after them, and that The Onion was no more "calling Quvenzhane Wallis a cunt" than they actually were claiming that Obama called for reparations the day before the election or whatever else. That's a belief, I think, that other people share, but are afraid to voice. But there I go again! In holding an opinion, I am doing violence to the world of possibility. Call Dr. Bourdieu.

(Incidentally, if history is any guide, you can expect Mike Konczal to have a twitter freakout because I dared to criticize Bady, which he treats as something akin to trafficking in child pornography. I dunno why. Consider yourself warned.)

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structural change requires new structures

As I've said, it's hard to think of any academics or scholars I know who are opposed in principle to open access of scholarly research. And the degree of this commitment is, in my experience, quite generational; my peers in graduate school speak passionately about moving to an assumption of open access for all, almost without exception. Despite the popularity of this change, I'm not assuming that it is certain or will be easy. What we're talking about is a structural change, and it will take a lot of major work to make it happen. One of the most important of these changes is our perceptions of the relative prestige of open access and online journals, and particularly where those perceptions have teeth: in hiring committees and tenure reviews. There, I think the strong commitment among younger scholars to open access will (eventually) have a clear impact. I also think that eventually, the older journals are going to feel more and more pressure to move to open access as well. Where the money comes from to continue operations will be the big question, and probably the big battle.

To make this move, people need tools, which is why I find Scalar so interesting. Check out the video at the link (now embedded), as it explains the platform much better than I could. Seeing these kinds of tools makes me quite excited about the future of sharing knowledge and scholarship with anyone who cares to read it.

The resistance will come, most likely, not from not-for-profit institutions like JSTOR, which I could see surviving under a different funding scheme, but from the for-profit publishers like SAGE and Elsevier. I don't know future there is for them, although they are powerful interests, and like all organizations they will fight to survive. My assumption is that the transition to open access will be far easier in fields like my own than in STEM fields, and they are the ones with money and influence. Whatever the case, we've got to be prepared to fight for this. It's worth fighting for.

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prerequisite questions

Nicholas Beaudrot of Donkelicious has some good points about a typically biased piece on education evaluation from the Times, written by Jenny Anderson, but I also think he's missing the forest for the trees. He says:

The evaluation systems seem to place an extremely high number in the highest-two rating categories, and only identifying a handful of teachers--2-3% seems to be a common number--as ineffective. The reformers seem to have this hazy, not-very-well-thought-out view that perhaps 10, 20, or 50% of teachers (no one is willing to put a number on this) are inadequate to the task of teaching, which would be astonishing for any large enterprise. The 2% figure lines up roughly with the number of LAPD cops who averaged at least one excessive force complaint per year during the late '80s (keep in mind this covers allegations, not proven cases or even disciplinary actions). Over that same timeframe, 0.5% of officers averaged about 1.5 complaints per year, and a handful of cops were truly disastrous. Even if America's public schools were to have double or triple the number of bad apples as the LAPD, that would still mean the overwhelming majority of teachers are at least doing their jobs adequately.

Beaudrot is correct to point out that the constant assertion of ed reformers that we have a teacher quality crisis in this country is not supported by evidence. However, I will persist in saying that there are some prerequisite questions which underlie all of these other questions. The most important, to me, is simple: what portion of the observed variance in perceived educational outcomes among different students is attributable to teacher effects, and what portion attributable to other factors? Also, is that attribution static, or does it change with age and circumstance? And is the portion equal between students, or is it too conditioned by demographic factors? To ask these questions is both to engage in elementary social science and to ask for basic fairness and efficacy from education reformers, yet as the Times piece demonstrates, the question essentially does not exist in our educational debate.

I have been tinkering for a long time with a long-form piece on these questions, where I look at extant empirical research and try to assess the question of how much impact teachers can have on the worst-performing students and their educational outcomes. I hope to publish it elsewhere. First, though, I have to make it through this month and finish my coursework. Until then, you'll have to take the conjectural, asserted version: any summation of the broad swath of educational research suggests that in fact demographic, parental, and environmental factors vastly outweigh teacher inputs in conditioning student outcomes. What's more, the students who perform least well are those who are likely the least subject to instructional effects as expressed in their student outcomes. Selection bias is not a factor in perceived educational outputs; it is the factor. But I'll have to make that case, and you can feel free to disregard my opinion until then.

If nothing else, these questions are empirical. The notion that teacher quality leads straightforwardly to student outcomes is one that would have to be empirically assessed, has not been proven to any minimal satisfaction, and yet is endlessly asserted by school reformers. As is typical, educational reformers' interest in empiricism is directly proportional to the degree to which empiricism confirms their preexisting assumptions. Again and again and again, uselessly emotive statements about how we must rescue every child drown out carefully considered questions about what, actually, could do the most good.

I've said this before: let's have an academic decathlon. You choose a team based on whatever pedagogical criteria you want. You can choose students from public school or private, unionized teachers or not, parochial or secular, from charter or magnet, from Montessori or KIPP or whatever else you want. However, I choose the demographics of the students on your team. For my team, the situation is reversed: you choose the pedagogical factors for my students, but I choose the demographics. You stock your team kids from whatever educational backgrounds you think work, and mine with whatever educational systems you think don't work. Meanwhile, I give you all children from the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden inner city and impoverished rural districts where we see the most failure. I stock mine with upper-class children of privilege. I would bet the house on my team, and I bet if you're being honest, you would too. Yet to accept that is to deny the basic assumption of the education reform movement, which is that student outcomes are a direct result of teacher quality. 

If you think that take is harsh, remember that I am a socialist, and if I had my druthers, there would be no more poverty and no more entrenched disadvantage to set these kids back so far before they even enter school.

Now here's what's really funny. The ed reformers assume that these current evaluation systems are flawed because too many teachers are being rated as effective. 

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said variations in teacher quality had been proven to affect student academic growth. If an evaluation system is not finding a wider distribution of effectiveness, “it is flawed,” he said. 

“It would be an unusual profession that at least 5 percent are not deemed ineffective,” he added.

In other words, Whitehurst assumes that there is a natural distribution of quality in any field, where some significant percentage of people are always going to be below a necessary level of ability. That's an interesting case to be made in this context, the context of No Child Left Behind and the typical assumption of education reform, which ludicrously asserts that all children are capable of meeting certain arbitrary quality standards. But perhaps that's the inevitable consequence of a movement in which the person whose voice is heard is the person who shouts the loudest, rather than the person who pays most attention to what is constructive, to what is achievable, and what is true. In that context, it becomes a crime to state the simple reality that in a system of massive entrenched inequality, we will always have educational failure.

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nota bene

So people are once again having difficulties with comments. I'm very impatient with Blogger's deficiencies, in this regard. Some people are reporting disappearing comments. I'm not deleting any, except for those that are duplicates, which seems to be happening a lot. Removing the anonymous comments option has largely stopped all the spam, but has apparently created this problem. I'm considering switching to a Disqus or Facebook system, but of course those have problems of their own. I likely won't have much time to think about it until the end of April.

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