An ongoing review of politics and culture

New Ventures

A bit of home news: I’ve just signed on as a regular blogger at The American Conservative. My current page is here. I still expect to post here now and again, but that’s going to be the main outlet for most of my blogging, for the time being anyway.

Millman’s Shakesblog is going to continue for a little while longer where it currently lives, and then it’s also going to migrate over to TAC, after they revamp their site, which should be done in about a month. I’m particularly excited about doing more cultural coverage – writing about books, movies and the arts generally, not just about theatre – which is an area where they are keen to expand (so they say now).

I’ve very much enjoyed the comraderie of TAS, but, to be frank, that comraderie has been thin on the ground of late, what with everyone moving on to bigger venues. TAC is a place where – they say – I can think and say what I like. That matters a great deal to me, and it’s surprisingly rare in the opinion journalism space.

It’s a venture I’m quite excited about, and I look forward to hearing from you all there.

In other home news, I’m mapping out my fourth screenplay, as well as doing another round of revisions on my second (working title, “Goshen United”) and a number of other promising developments on that front. Needless to say, if there’s any really exceptional news, I’ll be sure to let folks know here about that as well.

An open letter to Freddie

What happened to us, man?

I remember having vigorous but always good-humored arguments with you on Twitter and in TAS comments. I remember being able to speak to you in good faith.

But now, apparently, arguing for a country to increase its government spending by 10% to provide Keynesian stimulus is evidence of fascistic right-wing extremism.

And now, apparently, it’s impossible for you to disagree without impugning my motives. For the record, no, I don’t make arguments based on whether I think they can get “plaudits from the professional punditocracy.” As evidence of my lack of interest in professional punditry, I would note that I’ve actually stopped being a professional journalist and moved to an industry research role which will have me experience less limelight. I assume conventional wisdom would dictate that if I wanted a show on Fox News that would be the exact opposite of the astute move.

I can understand why you might have missed this: after all, my professional bio is only the first result when you type my name into Google.

(Though, hey, I like money and fame as much as the next venal guy, so I do reserve the right to become a professional pundit again at some point in the future.)

Also, the Roman Catholic Church does not believe what you think it believes about the death penalty.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think you’re a pretty smart guy, a good writer, and I enjoy exchanging ideas or even “sparring” in good faith with smart people who are good writers.

I am not, however, interested in being the subject of mean-spirited attacks, especially considering the fact that it’s not actually my job, and that I write my opinions on the internet mostly because I enjoy doing so and hope that, perhaps, some of my ideas can seem interesting to some people. It’s tedious. It’s just a bummer, man.

What happened? Why can’t we all get along?

Yours truly,

Pascal

Ryan Lizza's Michele Bachmann "Smear"

Sarah Pulliam Bailey has a list of complaints with Ryan Lizza’s buzz-gathering profile of Michele Bachmann in this week’s New Yorker. Overall, the long report is a pretty impressive piece of work that blends colorful campaign diary with a deeper exploration of Bachmann’s political formation and intellectual influences. As usual, there are certain details that strike people who grew up in the evangelical movement as oversimplifications. I concur with a couple of Sarah’s nitpicks, but I’m afraid that in general she has quite seriously mischaracterized Lizza’s reporting, both by reading in implications and criticisms of Bachmann that are not in the piece, and by overlooking how often Bachmann still references many of the thinkers cited as influences. Referring to the piece as a “smear” is particularly unfortunate. Even the New Yorker‘s investigative pieces on subjects to which it is clearly ideologically opposed can never be called smears; its efforts to present the most reliable picture based on facts has earned my full respect, and are as clear in this story as any other.

First, Sarah takes issue with where Lizza places Bachmann’s views on the American political-theological spectrum. Lizza writes that Bachmann, “belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians,“ and that, “Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin.” (Sarah’s emphasis.)

Sarah suggests that Lizza has no basis for these claims, but I find her scorn somewhat inexplicable. True, it can be difficult for people who grew up in the evangelical world to imagine that other Christians have not heard of Francis Schaeffer. But conservative evangelicals are a fraction of American Christians, and not even all of them are very familiar with Schaeffer. I grew up with other home-schooled evangelicals who never read him, and neither had most people who attended my large, conservative Southern Baptist church. And it is indisputable that only a fraction of Christians have heard of R.J. Rushdoony, David Noebel, and John Eidsmoe. Lizza’s claim is precisely correct: Bachmann has been shaped by institutions and leaders with whom even many Christians are unfamiliar. And because her conservative evangelical education—her complete immersion in the alternative universe from the ground up—is so much deeper than that of other candidates who ostensibly share her ideas, it is absolutely fair to say that her beliefs are more extreme than those of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, et al, no matter what unhinged things the others may say.

One of Sarah’s major contentions is that Lizza is maliciously attempting to link Bachmann with the fringe thinkers she has read, recommended and worked for in the past. Sarah calls them “attempts to prove guilt by association,” that Lizza used to “take shots.” Based on what the piece actually says and what Lizza said today on NPR, I have to say I think that’s a false charge. In his interview on NPR yesterday, Lizza repeatedly—I mean, with nearly every other breath—said that it was unfair to assume Bachmann believes everything her former mentions and influences do. He even observed that he had wacky professors he wouldn’t want to be associated with. But he correctly observes that Bachmann still references most of the people he investigated. She still says on the stump that Shaeffer’s How Shall We Then Live? changed her life, and still recommends Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth as a “wonderful book.” She has talked about Eidsmoe, who she worked for at Oral Roberts, on the campaign trail this very year, saying her taught her “foundational” things. She was his researcher while his law school published Rushdoony, and her website recommended a pro-slavery revisionist Civil War history by J. Steven Wilkins while she was running for public office. Except for an in my opinion quite justified spike of alarm at the Wilkins book, Lizza lays all of this out quite neutrally, with scarcely a noticeable judgment. I read the blocks of his prose in question over several times, and the supposed malice and unfair suggestion is just not there.

The Francis Schaeffer part of the piece will obviously be the most controversial, and here I think Sarah may be more on the right track. First off, Lizza portrays Schaeffer as fringe because he was in fact fringe. By any measure, against the Western philosophical spectrum or the American religious one, Schaeffer cannot accurately be portrayed otherwise. I’m not sure why Sarah objects there. But she may be right that Lizza’s cursory treatment makes him sound more bizarre and extreme than he was. He spent most of his decades writing dense works of theological philosophy that, while they used as intellectual building blocks by many a modern fundamentalist, are not adequately captured by Lizza’s drive-by description of the How Shall We Then Live video series. As I’ve written before, it’s pretty clear Schaeffer became a political crackpot toward the end of his life. But I’m not sure it’s accurate to characterize A Christian Manifesto as promoting “the violent overthrow of the U.S. government,” as Lizza does, rather than recommending more garden-variety civil disobedience. (I can’t really say; I never read the copy my evangelical college gave me as a gift.) But the other Shaeffer quotes Sarah mentions that contest his support for violence, and my general sense of Schaeffer’s beliefs, suggests “violent overthrow” is an exaggeration. Coupled with a few crazy lines from How Shall We Then Live, it far from gives an adequate picture of who Schaeffer was and why Bachmann likely found him attractive.

I’m all for improving the generally overblown quality of mainstream media coverage of evangelicals. But it’s a mistake to take the inevitable condensations that are a part of journalism, or even a few genuine misunderstandings, as malice. The profoundly religious character of Bachmann’s campaigns, past and present, make it unthinkable for journalists not to explore her intellectual formation. I don’t expect them all to suddenly understand decades of evangelical culture and literature, and I respect serious, evenhanded-as-possible attempts to produce information the public needs to know. They can be critiqued, and their errors corrected, without unwarranted attacks on their motives.

My Life As A Blockhead

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” – Samuel Johnson, as quoted in Boswell’s Life

A few quick thoughts about yesterday’s exchange between Jonathan Rauch and Alex Massie on Andrew Sullivan’s blog (see here then here then here):

1. The Great Bloggers (in the sense of having a huge audience) are aggregators. Most of what appears on their blogs isn’t their own writing; it’s stuff that other folks – bloggers, journalists, whatever – have written and that the Great Blogger’s blog has excerpted and linked to. As such, these blogs are performing the “filtering” function that Rauch (correctly) identifies as essential in a world of limited time and attention. In that sense, the blogosphere is much less open than it was – there are now established gates that help people determine what is worth reading and what isn’t, and it’s very, very hard to become one of those gates. But in another sense, it’s just as open – those gates are constantly, actively looking for new voices and new material to promote, so if your stuff is good there’s no reason to think it won’t be found. Apart from the nobody-gets-paid part, I would think this is exactly what Rauch would have hoped would happen.

2. Relatedly, Rauch says: “Life, like swimming pools, is too messy to manage without filters; cognition itself is a filter.” Indeed – but how does cognition work? The “Darwinian” model of how decision-making happens in the brain suggests that at any instant a variety of signals are competing within the brain to be the ones that actually get transmitted, and that what appears to “us” (whatever “us” actually refers to) as syllogistic reasoning leading to action is something far more chaotic once you look under the hood. The same model applies for perceptual systems as well – cognition separates signal from noise, but that “separation” is (in this model) the result of a contest among lots of different inputs competing to be interpreted as signal rather than noise. Whether or not the brain actually works this way, that seems to me to be the way the internet works as a journalistic medium: a vast, chaotic sea of offered information and opinions competing for attention. The question isn’t whether that sea of material is mostly good or mostly bad, or even how the ratio of good to bad writing (or true or false information) compares with any given other medium – the question is whether the existence of the sea results in a better-informed electorate and better decisions by the government (that’s the question for the existence of the political blogosphere, anyway). I’m not sure how you’d measure that, but you definitely wouldn’t measure it by reading a cross-section of blogs and comparing that cross-section with a cross-section of newspaper articles.

3. “I’m not getting paid to be here. I’m here to get incredibly famous (in my case, even more incredibly famous) so that I can get paid somewhere else.” Is that true? Really? Because both fame and fortune seem like very distant prospects in any corner of the journalistic universe – and always, always have been. It seems to me that the motive for doing this sort of writing isn’t to get famous – much less to get rich, which is downright laughable – but to be influential. Which is quite a different thing. Compare, say, Jonathan Rauch with Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian is vastly more famous. But Jonathan Rauch is surely more influential – unless you consider mere multiplication of images of oneself to be a kind of influence (which I suppose it is in a very superficial way). There are, of course, people who write specifically because they can’t figure out any more sensible way to make a living – poor fellows – but most people write because they want their writing to have an effect on people – to influence them in some way, whether we’re talking about an opinion journalist trying to get people to vote a certain way or a screenwriter hoping to make the audience laugh or cry. If that’s the case – if that’s why you write – then you don’t write in order to get paid; you get paid in order to be able to write. Right? In which case, Rauch isn’t guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan’s blog because then maybe Tina Brown will hire him and he’ll get paid – he’s guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan’s blog because that’s a way to reach more people (and more of the right sort of people) and influence them through his writing (and it might also get Tina Brown to hire him, so he can afford to reach even more people, and influence them). Now, maybe Rauch specifically hates blogging as a format so much that he wouldn’t consider doing this gig except for what else it might lead to. But even if this is the equivalent of going on a talk show to promote the book, the reason you do that is because you want people to read the book so it will influence them. That’s why you wrote it. So if the standard isn’t “does the internet help writers get paid” but “does the internet help writers find their audience”, then it’s very clear that the emergence of the internet has been a huge win. If you’re someone who writes and thinks decently well, and has that urge to communicate, to have an influence, but you haven’t set out to make a career as a journalist or essayist, well, what are the odds, pre-internet, that you would ever achieve your dream? Pretty low, right? But in the internet age, you write something for the Huffington Post, they go ahead and publish it, and . . . voila: you’re in the conversation. Maybe someone reads it and is impressed, and forwards it to Andrew Sullivan – and he links to it. Suddenly, thousands of people come and read your piece. You never got paid for it. You may never write anything again that gets noticed. But for that very reason, the internet has made something possible that would have been impossible otherwise: for you to be heard – and by a decent-sized audience if one of the various gates (like Sullivan) think you’re worth hearing.

4. Of course, nothing comes from nothing, and there does need to be some way of sustaining journalism/writing/blogging/whatever if you want it to continue. The difference between the internet and other media is that the payment mechanism on the internet is decoupled from content creation. But this is an accident of history, not a necessary feature. With a physical newspaper, the production and much of the distribution is vertically integrated with the producers of content. The same company pays the writers and editors and photographers and layout people, and pays for paper pulp and ink and printing presses, and pays for trucks to deliver the papers so you can read them. With broadcast media, there’s less vertical integration – Disney doesn’t make television sets, for example. But there’s still a considerable amount. With the internet, there’s virtually none. The cable and phone companies that provide internet access do not produce content. The primary filters – search engines – that enable you to find content do not produce content. The internet access providers capture all the value of access, and downstream none of it to filters or content producers; the biggest chunk of change in advertising revenue is captured by the filters (Google being the largest) and virtually none of this is downstreamed to content producers. And there’s no good mechanism for most content producers to impose a toll at the gate for access to their content. But the regulatory “fix” for this is trivial. Broadcast television has to run news programming as a condition of their licenses, which come from the government. That’s why there is broadcast news. You could trivially mandate Comcast and TimeWarner to spend 2% of revenue on news and educational “content.” Then they’d go out and buy the New York Times and the Washington Post and journalism would be saved. And the blogosphere would still be a roiling, seething mass of mostly uncompensated . . . stuff. Fighting to be heard. And we could debate whether as a whole that mass was improving discourse or not without getting sidetracked into discussions of revenue models, as if the emergence of blogs had anything at all to do with the financial troubles of legacy journalistic enterprises (which they didn’t).

5. Finally, why are we comparing internet-based news dissemination with print-based news dissemination? After all, newspapers started getting into trouble decades before the arrival of the internet: because of competition from radio and television. And there’s just no question in my mind that if you get your information from the internet you should be vastly better informed than if you get your information from television. That goes for straight news – but it goes double for any kind of “discourse” format. You think the internet selects for noisiness and insult-hurling and short attention spans? Have you seen what passes for debate on television? Bloggers are, of course, thrilled whenever they get the opportunity to go on one of those shows, but I dare you to find one who thinks an appearance as a talking head on television is a better way of communicating with his or her audience than writing on a blog. So before we blame the internet for ruining everything, remember that “everything” includes a lot more than just the New York Review of Books.

I am an extremely atypical blogger. Look at how infrequently I write; look at the length of my typical post. But I am thrilled that the medium exists, because I can’t imagine how else I’d be able to do . . . this. Whatever it is I’m doing. And I think I do it reasonably well. And, in my on and off way, I intend to continue doing it. Hopefully, I’ll continue to have at least a modest audience, so I’m not just talking to myself.

Give Us Freedom, Then Tell Us Your Truths

It’s protest season in China. Seriously, either for historical precedent or rising humidity, spontaneous social unrest in China tends to flourish in early summer. Evan Osnos, one of the China-writers I respect most, recounts an incident in Zengchen, a town outside of Guangzhou, where security personnel allegedly beat down a pregnant street vendor, who – like many of her competitors – probably didn’t have permits for her mobile cart of deliciousness.

“Word spread that police had injured the expectant mother and killed her husband, and by the middle of the night a crowd was pelting police with stones and bricks. By Saturday morning, the Party chief Xu Zhibiao had visited Wang at the hospital, and ‘brought a basket of fruit,’ the state media pointed out. ‘Wang and her fetus remained intact,’ the mayor declared.”

As Osnos points out, China is awash with these sorts of rumors. [You can follow a gruesome tally here]. He cites two others: the first, a student who committed suicide after a teacher barred him from taking the all-important ‘gaokao’ exam – imagine the SAT X10 – because he arrived 15 minutes tardy; the second, Henan government officials chucking babies off the rooftops as a means of forcing evictions. Incidentally, both have turned out to be false – well, sort of.

In this environment of fear and social distrust, the government responds to all potential discord by castrating communication channels and preventing free and open discussion. Popular web portals block sensitive keywords and the muckrakers are kept under lock and key, in the name of social stability. This pisses me off as much as I assume it does Osnos, but I think for slightly different reasons that may or may not be all that significant. Osnos laments an attack on truth:

“But recognizing the true source of the illness—the consistent, deliberate misuse of truth for political purposes—is out of the question, for the moment. So authorities will continue racing around in an attempt to shore up the existing system, in which “lies will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie.”

The ‘misappropriation of truth’ cuts both ways. The story of the suicidal student, however false, is still true for many across China. It strikes a real chord and represents deep-seeded emotions that deserve representation. In many minds, there are strict, unforgiving teachers who do not recognize individuality. In many minds, there are students who see their educational responsibilities as a matter of life and death. In many minds, there are parents who do not respect their children before or beyond academic achievement. Even if it’s locally or demonstrably false to those who know the actors, it’s nationally and ideologically true, for those who know the emotions. The rumors will be retold even among those who questions its origins, because it provides a persuasive outlet for real, under-represented emotions that are very much ‘based on a true story.’ For that matter, what isn’t?

Appealing to the truth and its eternal preservation is a poor tactic – and often antithetical – for advocating change. Dogmatic language does give a perspective an air of confidence and authority that can be persuasive. However, we should be weary of those who claim unique access to the truth. Evoking the truth is a tactic most often employed – and effectively, too – by the insecure few who seek to maintain consolidated power and by those who most-fear discussion and dissent. There’s no better way to end conversation, save violence.

The CCP is a staunch advocate of ‘telling the truth,’ so full of passionate intensity, whether about living conditions in Tibet, the Jasmine Revolution, or the Olympics in Beijing. However hypocritical, they do have a point. Western journalists (and I’m still not sure that’s a thing) and China-observers do have agendas and sacrifice truth ‘so thoroughly on the alter of politics,’ to use Osnos’ language. We all do, myself and the New York Times included, and we shouldn’t be ashamed by subjectivity. Our agendas are not necessarily deliberate or malicious, but are informed by contingent and limited experiences that often exclude other perspectives. It’s a good thing, too. If we all shared the same perspective there would be no source for change or progress.

The quest for objectivity is a search for consensus by trying to use descriptions that would receive approval from all members of a given audience. If a given audience maintains biases – compared either to a foreign, past or future audience – then it would be curious if the truths they agreed upon did not. To say, “They’re not telling the truth!” is just to say that they don’t share a particular consensus. That’s OK, so long as we can be open, honest and humble, and forfeit claims that truth exists beyond perspective. If we agree that everything is up for debate – from the shape of the earth to the behaviors of foreign governments – then we can focus our energy on making sure that everyone has the opportunity to be understood. And then figure out which perspectives are most useful for achieving certain objectives.

The source of illness is not the substitution of lies for truth, but the destruction of free discussion that’s critical to figuring out what perspectives are useful for various purposes. The main problem in China is that there’s too much Truth and too little is up for debate. [Furthermore, there are ineffective mechanisms for making policy reflect consensus – but one thing at a time.] Truth should be the product of never-ending dialogue and experimentation – what comes out on the other side of open debate. Restrictions on free speech are much more harmful than sanctioned lies, because they enable the only environment that permits sanctioned lies to survive unscathed. They facilitate false consensus that are codified by power as Truth.

I’m confident Osnos would agree about the importance of preserving free and open discussion. But I also think it’s important to stop talking about truth – to stop playing the game that gives authoritative priority to some ideas over others. And we should be particularly skeptical of those who appeal to truth in argument. In so far as Western journalists have more credibility as being more truthful, it’s because their ideas and perspectives must stand more on their own merits against unfettered public scrutiny. Perspectives should never be given a free pass just because of their source, rather, sources must earn our trust. Remove the environment of debate and you destroy the means for determining credibility. In other words, to borrow a phrase – among other ideas and arguments presented here – from the late Richard Rorty: take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself.

It’s dangerous to believe that truth lives eternally outside the influence of human perspective and storytelling – or that some know it better than others. Because then you might relax under the pretense that no matter what happens, truth will always prevail. Some truths will, but yours might not. People and ideas do not always survive oppression – and, sadly, we never remember when they don’t.

The Best of Journalism 2010

I’ve curated a list of nearly 100 exceptional newspaper, magazine and radio pieces published last year.

I hope you’ll enjoy it – and spread it around.

I’ll leave you with a photograph of a Lutheran church in Texas.

Do you know what I’d do if I ran a Lutheran church? Install a metal door, just in case.

These American Head-Bloggers

Conor and myself, that is. Here we are talking about how to help the poor by making America less of a meritocracy . . . except for the 2012 race. Enjoy!

A (Very Qualified) Defense of Some Corporate Jargon

There is a cottage industry of writers moaning about the stupidity of corporate jargon, and there certainly are some egregious examples of it to be found. But most paint with far too broad a brush (to use some jargon).

Andrew Sullivan excerpts a New Yorker article about a “Corporate-Jargon-to-English Dictionary”:

You type in a particularly odious word or phrase—“incentivize,” say—and “Unsuck It” spits out the plain-English equivalent, along with a sentence for context. (“Incentivize” means “encourage” or “persuade,” as in “In order to meet our phase 1 deliverable, we must incentivize the workforce with monetary rewards.”) One feels a certain cathartic glee as well-worn meeting-room clichés are dismantled one by one: an “action item” is a “goal”; “on the same page” means “in agreement”; to “circle the wagons” is to “defend an idea or decision as a group”.

At least two of these three examples are misleading translations.

“Action item” is much more specific than ”goal.” It is much closer to “a specific task that will be assigned to one person or one identified organizational unit before the conclusion of the meeting”. “Incentivize” also has a much more specific meaning than “encourage” or “persuade”. As per the contextual sentence, it normally refers to setting up comp schedules, feedback forms, promotion guidelines and the other economically-linked HR details that are required to, well, incentivize people. If you substitute “persuade” for “incentivize” in a meeting, you will lose this meaning.

Plain speaking is in short supply everywhere, but too often, people who don’t seem to have ever had the experience of trying to accomplish a series of tasks at scale in a large for-profit corporation expose their inexperience in making these kinds of criticisms. Jargon develops inside organizations, in part, to help coordinate activities efficiently. It should lead the author of the criticisms to question her premises when at least some of these terms are widely used not only in unsuccessful, but also highly successful, corporations.

(Cross-posted at The Corner)

What Heads Have Blogged

Specifically, mine and Matt Yglesias’, and the answer is: education reform (where we are pretty well in concord) and monetary policy (where we are more at odds).

Check it out.

What Would My Mother Say?

I don’t think it’s on-line, but I’ve got a review of Irving Kristol’s posthumous collection of selected essays, The Neoconservative Persuasion in the latest print issue of The American Conservative.

Other takes on the man and his work: by Damon Linker on the occasion of his passing, and by Paul Berman reviewing the same collection I reviewed.

I was rather disappointed by the book. After reading it, I found myself less interested in Kristol than I was before. Which wasn’t at all what I expected.

Anyway, go kill some trees if you have an interest.

Poking Malcolm Gladwell on social media in Egypt

Relevant for this audience: I have a post in The Wire, Business Insider’s media vertical, responding to a pretty silly post Malcolm Gladwell wrote on social media and Egypt.

Speaking Precisely About the Religious Right

Michelle Goldberg has noticed the way the Egypt uprising is splitting the American right. On one side, the consistent side in her view, you have the neocons who have always argued that the overthrowing Arab dictators, whether by U.S. military force or the unrest of their subjects, is a good thing. On the other side you have people like Mike Huckabee, who fretted on Fox News about “how quickly the Obama administration abandoned a 30-year ally and a longstanding friend to peace.” And then there’s Glenn Beck, who knit together a cabal of every progressive villian he’s ever heard of—Code Pink, Van Jones—and blamed it for the “rioters” in Cairo.

I want to nitpick a little about the way Goldberg pegs this nutty, anti-democratic view to the religious right:

Beck, hero of the Tea Party, has become the hysterical tribune of the anti-democracy forces, linking the uprising in Egypt to a bizarre alliance of all of his bête noirs. “This is Saul Alinsky. This is STORM from Van Jones,” he warned on Monday, continuing, “The former Soviet Union, everybody, radical Islam, every—this is the story of everyone who has ever plotted to or wanted to fundamentally change or destroy the Western way of life. This isn’t about Egypt. Everything is up on the table.” It would all end, he warned, with the restoration of a “Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe,” along with an expanded China and Russian control of the entire Soviet Union “plus maybe the Netherlands.”

It sounds nuts, of course, but such fears are now rampant on the religious right, which has long seen American involvement in the Middle East in millennarian terms. In the apocalyptic view of politics that dominates the Christian right, Muslim nations are closely connected to the rise of the Antichrist, while the restoration of the Jews to the entire biblical land of Israel is key to the Second Coming. The end of days will be marked by the emergence of a one-world government and a great world war in the Middle East, culminating in a battle at Megiddo, or Armageddon, an actual place in Israel. (Beck is a Mormon, but he’s always incorporated elements of American evangelicalism into his ideology.) To side with the protesters in Egypt, at the expense of Israeli security, is to back Satan’s team in the coming biblical showdown. Thus John Hagee, the chiliastic preacher who founded Christians United for Israel, took to his website to praise Hosni Mubarak as “an American ally and closet friend to Israel,” writing, “Israel will soon be surrounded by enemies screaming for their blood. Will America support them? Our president certainly has not been supportive of Israel to this point in his administration; why would he change now?”

This sounds to me like the analysis of someone who knows their facts well but doesn’t know many evangelicals or members of the religious right. Thus, she can write a couple of paragraphs that are technically true but manage to be quite misleading about what average conservative evangelicals actually think.

First, Glenn Beck’s crazed notion that the Egyptian revolution is really a progressive plot to overthrow America is not “rampant on the religious right” just because John Hagee, a fringe pro-Israel preacher, is saying outrageous things again. When I have written presumptuously about the religious right’s political views, they have been quick to assure me that they don’t necessarily watch or agree with Glenn Beck (though other anecdotal evidence suggests some of them do). But again, the only people referenced here are Hagee and Mike Huckabee, neither of whom really speak for the rank-and-file of the religious right in any way significant enough to label their opinions “rampant.”

Goldberg is correct that a lot of evangelicals have attached apocalyptic theology to the Middle East. But unless you’re talking about Tim LaHaye or others who have made fortunes conjuring fearsome tales of the last days, most evangelicals seem to have moved on from their obsessive interest in the “end times” and realized that applying the Book of Revelation to current events is a pretty specious endeavor. Outside of the most fringe, most fundamentalist, or most isolated congregations, I promise there are not many conservative Christians wondering if the protests in Cairo are the beginning of the end.

I bring this up because I think it’s paramount that reporters who cover religious groups not make major assumptions about the way those people think. It’s incredibly easy for people socially and geographically isolated from the religious right to read a few crazy statements from high-profile evangelical figures and presume they’re expressing the general view. And it’s always a temptation for liberal journalists, myself included, to report the most extreme things they’ve heard from a conservative group without determining how significant or pervasive that view really is. I admire the work Goldberg and others have done to educate themselves about the religious right. But to really inform your readers about religious groups takes more work and less generalization.

The Numeracy The Journalistic Class

For some reason, I happened upon this old WSJ piece on John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who profited most from the financial crisis.

Explaining how Paulson and his portfolio manager Paolo Pellegrini crafted the “best trade ever”, we have this gem:

Late at night, in his cubicle, Mr. Pellegrini tracked home prices across the country since 1975. Interest rates seemed to have no bearing on real estate. Grasping for new ideas, Mr. Pellegrini added a “trend line” that clearly illustrated how much prices had surged lately. He then performed a “regression analysis” to smooth the ups and downs.

Why, yes, we need scare quotes to describe dark, arcane wizardry like “trend lines” and “regression.” Clearly, these guys are rocket scientists!

Le sigh.

In Which I Dare The Corner To Publish Quotes From Popular Conservatives

Arguments that the liberal community is less prone to reckless speech, or has far less tolerance for those within it who use violent imagery and language than does the Right, are unconvincing. I don’t remember a Krugman column or a Sen. Patrick Leahy speech on the toxic Nicholson Baker novel, the Gabriel Range Bush assassination docudrama, the Chris Matthews CO2-pellet-in-the-face/blowing-up-of-the-“blimp” comments about Rush Limbaugh, the “I hate George Bush” embarrassment at The New Republic, Michael Moore’s preference for a red-state target on 9/11, or the Hitlerian/brownshirt accusations voiced by the likes of Al Gore, John Glenn, Robert Byrd, George Soros, and so on. So why the disconnect? Politics for sure, but I think also the double standard has something to do with style, venue, and perceived class.

If a progressive imagines killing George Bush in a tony Knopf novel or a Toronto film festival documentary, or rambles on about why he finds his president an object of hatred in a New Republic essay, or muses in the Guardian (cf. Charles Brooker: “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”), then we must certainly contextualize that hatred in a way that we do not in the crasser genres of commercial-laden talk radio, or an open-air demonstration placard. The novelist, the film-maker, the high-brow columnist, the professor can all dabble in haute couture calumny (cf. Garrison Keeler’s “brownshirts in pinstripes”); the degree-less, up-from-the-bootstraps Beck, Hannity, or Limbaugh behind a mike cannot. What is at the most atypical, out of character, or in slightly bad taste for the former must be a window into the dark soul of the latter.

— Victor Davis Hanson

There is something to this – many of the people VDH name-checks have uttered indefensible remarks, and maybe the veneer of respectability has helped some of them to obscure how flawed their words were. But I wonder if he would wager with me in the interest of testing his larger claim about who is more prone to rhetorical excess, the mainstream right or the mainstream left.

Rush Limbaugh began broadcasting to a large national audience in the early 1990s. So let’s go back 20 years to 1991 for the sake of simplicity. In the bet, Victor Davis Hanson can draw on every word spoken or written by all the people above that he mentions unfavorably: Paul Krugman, Nicholas Baker, Chris Matthews, Michael Moore, Al Gore, John Glenn, Garrison Keeler, Robert Byrd, Jonathan Chait and George Soros. In return, I will draw only on the words of Rush Limbaugh, the most popular conservative entertainer in America for much of the last two decades, recent national phenom Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin, the bestselling author, popular radio host, and sometimes colleague of VDH at National Review. (Even I can’t bear listening to Sean Hannity. Sorry.)

That’s ten people for him and three people for me – and mine are all very popular among the rank-and-file of movement conservatism. We’ll try to match one another, example of rhetorical excess for example of rhetorical excess. And the loser – the one who runs out of examples first – can donate $500 to the charity of the winner’s choice.

(Does anyone think I would lose?)

I’ll explain to you why this bet appeals to me, and why VDH will never agree to it. In truth, I don’t care whether the right or the left is more culpable on this issue: the point is that the guilty parties on both sides of the ideological divide should stop it, unilaterally if need be, even if the other side is worse. And as I explained in my last post, I wish everyone would start focusing on substance more than tone. But I can’t possibly lose this bet, even if VDH improbably finds more examples, because I have no problem acknowledging indefensible rhetoric on the left when I see it, or asserting that Paul Krugman (or his wife?) is sometimes a blowhard who makes claims un-befitting a person of intelligence, or affirming that Michael Moore’s documentary work is riddled with mean-spirited errors, etc.

Whereas Victor Davis Hanson has never forthrightly acknowledged the rhetorical excesses and inaccuracies of Limbaugh, Beck, or Levin. And if by some miracle he fully confronted what they’ve said over the years –– or even affirmed the disgusting words they’ve uttered by publishing a blog post at The Corner filled with nothing but direct quotations of their words! –– it would be a powerful moment on the right, because no one of his stature has ever so much as acknowledged the full extent of what is said on the conservative movement’s most popular talk radio programs.

So do we have a bet, VDH? I’m game. And if you’re not –– if you’re pressed for time, or if you’ve an objection to dealing with me for some reason –– here’s an alternative idea. Folks on the right think leftists don’t confront the indefensible speech uttered by their side. And vice-versa.

So why don’t the folks at The Corner enter into a bargain with a prominent blogger on the left. What do you say, Matt Yglesias or Kevin Drum or Jonathan Chait? Here’s how it would work. Every day for a week, Monday through Friday, The Corner’s designated blogger could draft one post for publication on the left-leaning blog. The catch? They’d be limited to offering five direct quotations per day of lefties engaged in indefensible rhetoric, however they define it (in context, of course).

In return, the liberal interlocutor could publish the equivalent post at The Corner. And every day for a week, the participants would have to read one another’s five examples for that day, and decide whether to acknowledge that they’re indefensible and assert that the source should apologize if he or she hasn’t done so… or else defend the remark(s).

Maybe I’m wrong. But I suspect that Yglesias, Drum, and Chait would all be game for this sort of exchange. And that it wouldn’t be approved at The Corner in a million years.

Why do you think that is?

(Or am I wrong?)

WikiPocrisy

The WikiLeaks fiasco took a most interesting turn Sunday, when it became known that prosecutors sought a ‘secret subpoena’ for the Twitter accounts of those connected to the estranged anti-secrecy organization. In response, WikiLeaks wisely suggested that Google and Facebook might similarly be accomplices – or at least valuable tools – in their mischievous plot to make classified security clearance less valuable than a lifetime membership to the Mickey Mouse club.

Let’s rewind to November 2007. Yahoo had just complied with the Chinese government’s request for the IP information and e-mail records of Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao, two Chinese dissidents who China accused of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities.” Michael Callahan, the Yahoo’s executive VP and general counsel, was in Congress getting reamed by the late Tom Lantos (D-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, for the company’s gross moral failure: “Yahoo claims that this is just one big misunderstanding. Let me be clear—this was no misunderstanding. This was inexcusably negligent behavior at best, and deliberately deceptive behavior at worst.”

Yahoo’s response: “Like other global organizations we must abide by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which we operate.”

“Why do you insist on using the phrase, ‘lawful orders?’” Lantos challenged. “These are the demands of a police state.”

Lantos even brought Shi Tao’s mother to the hearing, seated her in the front of the room, and told Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang: “I would urge you to beg the forgiveness of the mother whose son is languishing behind bars thanks to Yahoo’s actions.”

How the tables have turned.

I have not seen any witch trial for the Bank of America executives who refuse to process secure financial payments for the WikiLeaks organization. How is their decision any different from Yahoo, say, refusing to process secure information transactions for Chinese dissidents? Do we expect business organizations to assess and heed the moral legitimacy of only certain states? Someone please try making that list. According to Bank of America, the decision was “based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

I don’t like the idea of banks deciding who gets to participate in our financial system. Can any public organization choose to blackball any organization they please? Has WikiLeaks committed a crime? If so, in which state? I suspect that Bank of America, like other financial organizations, has received a great deal of pressure from the U.S. government to sever ties with such unpatriotic characters. But as Clay Shirky rightly condemns, “When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law.” A secret subpoena sounds like a tool that, I dont know, a police state would use.

As much as I regret the potential security risks associated with WikiLeaks and am unclear as to how much valuable insight the American public has gained, I don’t think that frustration should be channeled by attacking organizations that encourage open information sharing. I’m glad that Twitter, Google, and Facebook are now involved. As sleazy as Assange may or may not be, I don’t see how WikiLeaks is providing a service substantively different than what Google makes to be its mission. I hope that Google is equally infuriated by any heavy-handed U.S. government control/breach of information sharing/privacy and as they were by Chinese government control/breach of information privacy/sharing. Maybe they’ll even stomp their feet and pull out of the U.S. market!

The U.S. government is completely within their rights and duty to lawfully prosecute Pfc Bradley Manning, if in fact he disregarded his oath and obligations to keep information confidential. And the military should take measures to improve information security and prevent similar events from reoccurring. But leave WikiLeaks alone – unless you’re prepared to first apologize to Yahoo for the hypocrisy and then compromise Google, Facebook, and Twitter all in the name of national security.

The Advertising Platform To Save Content Providers?

Okay, I’m probably missing something. But here ‘goes.

The great challenge for content-generators (writers, particularly) in an age of free digital reproduction is: how does anybody get paid?

The answer, typically, is: by attracting eyeballs that can be delivered advertising content along with the desired content.

This gives all power to the content aggregators – small fry like Andrew Sullivan, who have an audience that they feed content that is mostly produced by others (and mostly not paid for), but much more so great white sharks like Google’s search engine, which is the mother of all aggregators.

Content-generation becomes organized around feeding these aggregators, in the hopes of attracting eyeballs. But unless a regular stream of eyeballs is attracted this way, there’s still no way to generate income for the downstream content generator.

What you need is a micropayment mechanism, whereby downstream content generators get a tiny amount of money per eyeball for the eyeballs directed their way, in recognition of the fact that their content was the plankton, if you will, on which the great white sharks at the top of the food chain ultimately depend. But even if you had such a mechanism, why would the great white sharks agree? How do the downstream content generators get the leverage to force some kind of sharing agreement?

One sometimes-suggested solution would be to create an advertising platform that is content-independent. Ads would be delivered based on personal profile information that would be augmented by knowledge of browsing and search history. But there are two problems with this: first, how many people would consent to create such a profile (what’s in it for them?); second, how does this browser-based ad platform give any greater leverage to downstream content providers? Wouldn’t it, in fact, reduce their leverage?

Well, here’s one thought. Advertisers don’t like to compete with each other. A browser-based, profile-based ad platform would be more successful if it were an exclusive platform – if it made arrangements with websites to share revenue in exchange for disabling any other ad-delivery mechanisms that they had going when their “viewers” tuned in.

Instead of serving up whatever ad content Hulu or Salon or whatever want to serve up, the browser-based ad platform would take over and serve up something more tailored to your specific profile. And, in exchange for no longer competing with these other ad platforms, the browser-based ad platform would share revenue with the content site.

That creates an incentive for people to sign up with the platform – yes, you’re getting ads when sometimes in other circumstances you wouldn’t – but you’re also obliterating ads that, in other circumstances, you’d be stuck getting. And, all things being equal, you’re getting “better” ads – ads that fit your profile better.

Sure, lots of people still won’t sign up for privacy reasons. But probably most people won’t be deterred by privacy concerns. They rarely are when there is actually something in it for them. Which, in this case, there is. (You could even imagine a revenue-share of some kind for the recipient of the ads – something dependent on click-through purchases, presumably, but whatever.)

The heavy negotiation would be between content-providers with substantial ad revenue and the browser-based ad platform. But once that structure was in place, it would be logically extensible to content-providers generally. Not necessarily on identical terms, but the browser-based ad platform would have a reason to sign a contract with even marginal content-providers: they would need access to their code to assure their ads were disabled when browser-based-ad-platform-subscribers visited. Which would give even marginal content providers some marginal leverage to get the bargain-basement contract for downstreaming revenue.

The main people who would appear to be threatened, if such a mechanism really got off the ground, would be the content-aggregators themselves, particularly the search engines, who would for that reason be unlikely to sign any agreement with the browser-based ad platform. But Google ads are (a) relatively unobtrusive; (b) not designed to “distract” from content – rather, they are intended to be a form of content, to be relevant “answers” to search queries. As such, they aren’t really a competing platform. People don’t “hang out” at search engines distracted by the ads. So it’s not actually obvious that there’s any competition there. The competition would be with platforms that sell ads directly on websites. But what the existence of such a platform would do is free content-providers from their dependence on search engines for audience. They would be free to pursue an audience by more traditional means – directly, and via aggregators who are “taste-makers” (like Andrew Sullivan) rather than automated search functions – and would now have some basis for generating revenue from such activities. I suspect such revenue would continue to be very, very small for nearly all websites. But there is an enormous difference between small and zero. Add a lot of small numbers together and you just might get something. Zero never adds up to anything.

Ultimately, nobody gets paid unless somebody visits, to view or read. Content has to attract eyeballs, or there’s nothing to monetize. The question is first, how to capture whatever value is associated with that viewing/reading time, and, second, how to create a mechanism that would justify downstreaming some of that value-capture to the actual content provider. I think the mechanism I’ve outlined could do both things.

Anybody out there know if this idea is even technically feasible?

The New York Times' Phony Balance on Death Panels, Or When Can We Stop Quoting Wingnuts?

On December 26, the New York Times reported that the end-of-life consultations stripped from the health care law (and infamously dubbed “death panels“ by everyone’s favorite Alaskan reality-TV star) are being pushed forward through Medicare regulations:

When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.

The story goes on to explain the regulation and Medicare’s justifications thereof, which draw on research from the British Medical Journal and the University of Colorado School of Medicine. As I understand, the goal of end-of-life consultations has always been to give aging people control over their future health care. Since many would rather not have their life prolonged by expensive medical treatment, particularly if they are in poor health, they can say so in advance and save the colossal medical costs that such life-prolonging procedures incur. The Medicare officials, according to the Times‘ reporting, are operating on the consensus of health care experts, who believe such consultations enhance the humanity of end-of-life care. (They also spare grieving family members the wrenching decision of when to “pull the plug.”)

So far so good. Then this:

Elizabeth D. Wickham, executive director of LifeTree, which describes itself as “a pro-life Christian educational ministry,” said she was concerned that end-of-life counseling would encourage patients to forgo or curtail care, thus hastening death.

“The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking,” Ms. Wickham said. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life.”

Here is another unfortunate instance of the Times throwing in a social conservative to maintain “balance.” Look through the paper’s archives and you’re sure to find dozens of iterations of this formula, on issues ranging from abortion to women’s health to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. After the story lays out the expert or scientific consensus and the generally agreed-upon facts, a random social conservative—often one without any credentials on the issue or with a trail of insane statements to their name—will be trotted out to dispute them. (A prime example is Elaine Donnelly, who has been quoted prominently in several Times stories on DADT. Donnelly operates the right-wing Center for Military Readiness and argued that repealing would DADT would lead to “forcible sodomy“ and the spread of HIV in the military.)

Who is Elizabeth D. Wickham, anyway? A quick Google reveals she has a Ph.D. in…mathematical economics and international trade theory! She and her husband co-founded LifeTree, a local anti-abortion group in North Carolina. Its website is full of conspiratorial language like “culture of death,” and attributes said culture of death to things like “the concept of hospice” and “bioethics centers.” Even in her longer, written opposition to Section 1233, the “death panels” portion of the original health care bill, Wickham has simply smeared end-of-life consultations by associating them with assisted-suicide advocate Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). She has not attempted to explain how this measure will lead to the apocalyptic circumstances she constantly conjures.

This is enough, in my opinion, to cast significant doubt on her ability to give an opinion on this issue that serious readers should heed. She has no academic credentials in health care or bioethics and is disputing reputable experts without providing any facts or research. From a purely political standpoint, she is not a leader of religious conservatives, and has not, that we are told, been deployed by the provision’s political opposition. So how does quoting Ms. Wickham help Times readers understand this issue?

Even worse, it’s fairly simple to determine that Ms. Wickham is wrong about end-of-life consultations. Based on everything I read during the health care debate and since, these consultations are a humane and necessary part of health care reform, and the “death panels” logic is damnably false. Contra Ms. Wickham, there is no reason to believe voluntary consultations will result in patients “losing the ability to control treatments,” or that the legislators who supported the measure want to impose euthanasia and rationing on the country. So in effect, the country’s newspaper of record has given a no-name religious activist space to lie about a matter of public policy in which she has no apparent expertise. The Times has met its requirement to break the issue down into binary “sides,” but we’ve been subjected to the misleading spin of an ideologue.

My point here is not, of course, that dissenting or conservative viewpoints should be banned from the New York Times. In fact, this sort of drive-by citation of ideologues does a disservice both to conservatives when they actually have legitimate points and to readers who want to consider alternate perspectives. Wickham’s quote was transparently included just to establish “balance,” and readers are left without any clear idea of whether there is reason to doubt the consensus view. If there is serious disagreement, the reporter should find a credible source and thoroughly explain his or her position. If a prominent Republican or conservative leader vowed to fight the measure, then make note of it. But if there is no serious opposition, or if the serious opposition is dealing in paranoid cant, then I’d love to read a newspaper with the balls to say so.