tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18761812300933147072024-03-18T00:19:42.447-07:00The Literary Dissection TrayOh, the things you can learn by studying trash!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger140125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-7892220049552211312021-05-14T07:28:00.001-07:002021-05-14T07:28:00.154-07:00A Half-Baked Dissection of "The Second Mountain" by David Brooks<p>Every so often, I realize that I have a copy of <i>The Second Mountain</i> and, save one largely forgotten Twitter spasm, I haven't really written anything about it. And why?</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>I don't care enough to write about David Brooks any more than I already have;</li><li>I would have to have some sort of opinion about the book, and I really don't;</li><li>I'd have to read it again;</li><li>...Shit, it's David Brooks, I have to give <i>this many reasons</i>?</li></ol><p>But I really do want to get this off my plate with all due haste, so I did something a little bit different. Rather than writing this out, I opened Audacity and recorded an impromptu podcast. I did this in part because I managed to jack up the nerves in my arm, and while whatever caused this is <i>mostly</i> healed, it's still not worth the pain in my hand, wrist, forearm, upper arm, shoulder and neck (that pain <i>moves</i>, boy) to write thousands of words about the man. I've been saving the typing for things that are arguably more important, like query letters that have been rejected 100% of the time.</p><p>You'll excuse me if this is rambling - I made no notes at all, recorded it about three days after the last time I read any of it, and didn't edit out any errors. Believe me, that's exactly the level of effort this book merits.</p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/brooks_202105" target="_blank">And away we go: </a><br /></p><p> <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="140" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://archive.org/embed/brooks_202105" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="500"></iframe></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-49206114458766079642021-03-11T07:30:00.001-08:002021-03-11T07:30:01.051-08:00A Crisis of Harmony: King Know-it-All<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh41hcMzKyGeMsjBMsAVuC1CsrcyKRfdDd9OooLl1ambK6Bjum2-ripia7XTMXn3fYzuMEVhbZc67hyphenhyphenKutRCjYFrtOzRPguM-8jQYYcIsbGfMAoAxh3RsuErm6rlByh4H0Y2hFpcgqRyrWR/s1440/mmexport1554216982216.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh41hcMzKyGeMsjBMsAVuC1CsrcyKRfdDd9OooLl1ambK6Bjum2-ripia7XTMXn3fYzuMEVhbZc67hyphenhyphenKutRCjYFrtOzRPguM-8jQYYcIsbGfMAoAxh3RsuErm6rlByh4H0Y2hFpcgqRyrWR/s320/mmexport1554216982216.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-cfi91"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">This is a post that began with an <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _2xVcV _2E8wo" href="https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/article/3124841/donald-trump-make-your-company-great-again-buddha-statue-takes" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg">SCMP article on Chinese-made Donald Trump kitsch that they are still selling in China</u></a>. This creates a conundrum for me. Much like the documentary itself, I really want to make this post series politically neutral, even as I knew that this was going to be impossible. Let's be real, here - we all know where this started.</span></p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-10lfr"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">So let's drop the pretext for a moment and talk Trump. God willing, this will be the only time I have to do this.</span></p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-10lfr"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i>Read the rest on <a href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/a-crisis-of-harmony-king-know-it-all">Find the Fabulist</a>.</i> <br /></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-67318362087328986592021-03-05T07:30:00.001-08:002021-03-05T07:30:01.351-08:00A Crisis of Harmony: One Month Out<p><span data-offset-key="609b0-0-0"><span data-text="true">It's been about a month since I finished editing </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd _3Ul6g" href="https://youtu.be/fWf1bb44zEk" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="609b0-1-0" style="font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">A Crisis of Harmony</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="609b0-2-0"><span data-text="true"> and around three weeks since releasing it. Those of you who've seen it (and if you haven't, then what are you waiting for?) will recall that I ended it with skepticism that Sino-American relations would improve - skepticism </span></span><span data-offset-key="609b0-2-1" style="font-style: italic;"><span data-text="true">not</span></span><span data-offset-key="609b0-2-2"><span data-text="true"> shared by my interview subjects.</span></span></p><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"3n9a","text":"It's been about a month since I finished editing A Crisis of Harmony and around three weeks since releasing it. Those of you who've seen it (and if you haven't, then what are you waiting for?) will recall that I ended it with skepticism that Sino-American relations would improve - skepticism not shared by my interview subjects.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":49,"length":19,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":293,"length":3,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":49,"length":19,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":49,"length":19,"key":0}],"data":{}},{"key":"82i37","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"7k696","text":"Sometimes you're not happy to be right.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://youtu.be/fWf1bb44zEk ","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><span data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><span data-text="true">Sometimes you're not happy to be right.</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><span data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><span data-text="true"><br /></span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><span data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyZmRHb4Tm1kHhmD8Pzj0HLNQ-hKHe_UchZLJGjhYpMAcNVuw3-YS_ghwnkz8o680CBNY0QOHBKS9HMuRyVx3btAzZE8oTFUvsYfl4nPbkjLkL5_pt8mtrt2AWAUFLGJE7ym45EBYj12Mv/s881/Gallup01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="881" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyZmRHb4Tm1kHhmD8Pzj0HLNQ-hKHe_UchZLJGjhYpMAcNVuw3-YS_ghwnkz8o680CBNY0QOHBKS9HMuRyVx3btAzZE8oTFUvsYfl4nPbkjLkL5_pt8mtrt2AWAUFLGJE7ym45EBYj12Mv/s320/Gallup01.png" width="320" /></a></div></span><br /><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"4vpff","text":"Recent polling by Gallup and Pew suggests that not only have American opinions of China not improved since last year, they've actually gotten much worse. Gallup's polling shows that just 20% of Americans have a remotely favorable opinion of the PRC, the lowest they've ever recorded. This is comparable to the American opinion on Russia, and just a few points ahead of Iran.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":18,"length":6,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":29,"length":3,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":18,"length":6,"key":0},{"offset":29,"length":3,"key":1}],"data":{}},{"key":"70et","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"foqdn","text":"But it's the more detailed Pew poll that's most interesting here. I encourage you to read the entire thing - it's long but fascinating - but here are some of my personal takeaways, the bits I'm still chewing over myself:","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://news.gallup.com/poll/331082/china-russia-images-hit-historic-lows.aspx","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"1":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/03/04/most-americans-support-tough-stance-toward-china-on-human-rights-economic-issues/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="1hfmg-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="1hfmg-0-0"><span data-offset-key="1hfmg-0-0"><span data-text="true">Recent polling by </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd _3Ul6g" href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/331082/china-russia-images-hit-historic-lows.aspx" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="1hfmg-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">Gallup</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="1hfmg-2-0"><span data-text="true"> and </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd _3Ul6g" href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/03/04/most-americans-support-tough-stance-toward-china-on-human-rights-economic-issues/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="1hfmg-3-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">Pew</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="1hfmg-4-0"><span data-text="true"> suggests that not only have American opinions of China not improved since last year, they've actually gotten much worse. Gallup's polling shows that just 20% of Americans have a remotely favorable opinion of the PRC, the lowest they've ever recorded. This is comparable to the American opinion on Russia, and just a few points ahead of Iran.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="26h77-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="26h77-0-0"><span data-offset-key="26h77-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="amkk8-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="amkk8-0-0"><span data-offset-key="amkk8-0-0"><span data-text="true">But it's the more detailed Pew poll that's most interesting here. I encourage you to read the entire thing - it's long but fascinating - but here are some of my personal takeaways, the bits I'm still chewing over myself:</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="amkk8-0-0"><span data-offset-key="amkk8-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="amkk8-0-0"><span data-offset-key="amkk8-0-0"><span data-text="true"><a href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/a-crisis-of-harmony-one-month-out"><i>Continue reading on Find the Fabulist</i></a> </span></span></div></div></div><span data-offset-key="bc88g-0-0"><span data-text="true"></span></span></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-19132778088342683462021-02-11T19:00:00.001-08:002021-02-11T19:00:03.337-08:00和谐的危机 A Crisis of Harmony: Culture Clash in the Middle Kingdom<p> 新年快乐!The documentary is out:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="407" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fWf1bb44zEk" width="626" youtube-src-id="fWf1bb44zEk"></iframe></div><br /><p>I'll be doing some supplemental posts and videos relating to the documentary. The written posts will appear in <a href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/blog/categories/a-crisis-of-harmony" target="_blank">this section of my writing blog</a>. Some of it might find its way here, but I'm going to spare you too much self-promotion.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-78836669012660959372021-02-09T08:00:00.002-08:002021-02-09T08:00:06.382-08:00A Crisis of Harmony: The Fear Game<p> </p><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"umlk","text":"Not an hour ago, I opened a stream from Bloomberg expecting to see news on a report from the WTO. Instead, I was treated to an eyeful of Mike Pompeo, former U.S. Secretary of State and neo-McCarthyite crank. He was bragging about how successful he'd been in turning public opinion against the \"Chinese Communist Party.\" He often speaks like this, in part because it allows him to repeatedly use that scary word \"Communist,\" but also because it lets him act like his campaign to inculcate paranoia in the American people is really only aimed at the government, not the people.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":185,"length":21,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":185,"length":21,"key":0}],"data":{}},{"key":"a1dlj","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"9jne0","text":"This is garbage. Follow Pompeo's speeches as I've done, and you'll know that he also teaches people to assume that all Chinese people are party members. Friendly Chinese people are suspect, he says; they're liars, behaving that way to create a new dupe. International students are suspect, Chinese Americans are suspect, even white people like me are suspect because we're too friendly to them.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fep7c","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"2q7b0","text":"And you know what? Pompeo was a terrible Secretary of State, but if inculcating anti-Chinese fear really was one of his objectives, then it's one area where he succeeded.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"efs2j","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"2djt4","text":" ","type":"atomic","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":1,"key":1}],"data":{}},{"key":"5ns5c","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"861ie","text":"Opinion of China pitched down sharply during his tenure - not all because of him, obviously, but he must be proud. Tailgunner Joe must be looking up and smiling.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"27mu","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"6pqdv","text":"But I'm not afraid of China or the Chinese. I don't think people here are brainwashed, or conniving, or aggressive. And if you're open-minded, I hope you'll hear my case.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"2911m","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"asqck","text":" ","type":"atomic","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":1,"key":2}],"data":{}},{"key":"7uomp","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"5d56h","text":"A Crisis of Harmony will premiere February 10th, 2021 at 8:00 PM Central time. Watch it then if you can, later if you can't - or both, it could help my metrics. I'll do a Q&A video if I can get enough questions, so feel free to ask, either in the comments on the video or via my website. I do look forward to hearing from you.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":19,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":0,"length":19,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":161,"length":49,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":19,"key":3}],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1328959724/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=findthefabu08-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1328959724&linkId=9800db91ed3eb5d6d1d49b5dd3b65196","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"1":{"type":"wix-draft-plugin-image","mutability":"IMMUTABLE","data":{"config":{"alignment":"center","size":"inline","showTitle":true,"showDescription":true,"disableExpand":false,"width":738},"src":{"id":"43a071_dd77135cd45a47e488dde059f5fb7e96~mv2.png","height":1080,"width":1920,"original_file_name":"43a071_dd77135cd45a47e488dde059f5fb7e96~mv2.png","file_name":"43a071_dd77135cd45a47e488dde059f5fb7e96~mv2.png"}}},"2":{"type":"wix-draft-plugin-video","mutability":"IMMUTABLE","data":{"config":{"size":"content","alignment":"center"},"tempData":false,"src":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWf1bb44zEk","metadata":{"oembed":{"thumbnail_url":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fWf1bb44zEk/maxresdefault.jpg","thumbnail_height":720,"thumbnail_width":1280,"video_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWf1bb44zEk"}}}},"3":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWf1bb44zEk","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><span data-text="true">Not an hour ago, I opened a stream from Bloomberg expecting to see news on a report from the WTO. Instead, I was treated to an eyeful of Mike Pompeo, former U.S. Secretary of State and </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1328959724/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=findthefabu08-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1328959724&linkId=9800db91ed3eb5d6d1d49b5dd3b65196" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="foo-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">neo-McCarthyite crank</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="foo-2-0"><span data-text="true">. He was bragging about how successful he'd been in turning public opinion against the "Chinese Communist Party." He often speaks like this, in part because it allows him to repeatedly use that scary word "Communist," but also because it lets him act like his campaign to inculcate paranoia in the American people is really only aimed at the government, not the people.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="krq8-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="krq8-0-0"><span data-offset-key="krq8-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="dcp6g-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="dcp6g-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dcp6g-0-0"><span data-text="true">This is garbage. Follow Pompeo's speeches as I've done, and you'll know that he also teaches people to assume that all Chinese people are party members. Friendly Chinese people are suspect, he says; they're liars, behaving that way to create a new dupe. International students are suspect, Chinese Americans are suspect, even white people like me are suspect because we're too friendly to them.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="17kr3-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="17kr3-0-0"><span data-offset-key="17kr3-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="f7ik0-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="f7ik0-0-0"><span data-offset-key="f7ik0-0-0"><span data-text="true">And you know what? Pompeo was a terrible Secretary of State, but if inculcating anti-Chinese fear really was one of his objectives, then it's one area where he succeeded.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="c50fn-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="c50fn-0-0"><span data-offset-key="c50fn-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="c50fn-0-0"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj67NMaZ6DmgnaEsaT_UXjS3cikg_zdyC7Q2T266YiJtyKh1lNVZuEHg1AWLKL0cbtwFskscDnVFm2XNfI96SFhU0g0FaUHlfOmQSIVRF2joToZbl0w5U_Ot7J6mDGOrFrCRulzr6hASrDT/s1920/Global+Indicators.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj67NMaZ6DmgnaEsaT_UXjS3cikg_zdyC7Q2T266YiJtyKh1lNVZuEHg1AWLKL0cbtwFskscDnVFm2XNfI96SFhU0g0FaUHlfOmQSIVRF2joToZbl0w5U_Ot7J6mDGOrFrCRulzr6hASrDT/w474-h274/Global+Indicators.png" width="474" /></a></div><span data-offset-key="c50fn-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="brjqc-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="brjqc-0-0"><span data-offset-key="brjqc-0-0"><span data-text="true">Opinion of China pitched down sharply during his tenure - not all because of him, obviously, but he must be proud. Tailgunner Joe must be looking up and smiling.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="28fr0-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="28fr0-0-0"><span data-offset-key="28fr0-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="1j3j9-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="1j3j9-0-0"><span data-offset-key="1j3j9-0-0"><span data-text="true">But I'm not afraid of China or the Chinese. I don't think people here are brainwashed, or conniving, or aggressive. And if you're open-minded, I hope you'll hear my case.</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="1j3j9-0-0"><span data-offset-key="1j3j9-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="1j3j9-0-0"><span data-offset-key="1j3j9-0-0"><span data-text="true"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="350" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fWf1bb44zEk" width="505" youtube-src-id="fWf1bb44zEk"></iframe></div><br /></span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="ca2bf-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="ca2bf-0-0"><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWf1bb44zEk" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="ca2bf-0-0" style="font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">A Crisis of Harmony</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="ca2bf-1-0"><span data-text="true"> will premiere February 10th, 2021 at 8:00 PM Central time. Watch it then if you can, later if you can't - or both, it could help my metrics. </span></span><span data-offset-key="ca2bf-1-1" style="font-weight: bold;"><span data-text="true">I'll do a Q&A video if I can get enough questions</span></span><span data-offset-key="ca2bf-1-2"><span data-text="true">, so feel free to ask, either in the comments on the video or <a href="http://www.findthefabulist.com" target="_blank">via my website</a>. I do look forward to hearing from you.</span></span></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-91209243450117638562021-01-29T04:57:00.000-08:002021-01-29T04:57:38.923-08:00A Crisis of Harmony: The Root<p></p><p><i>Cross-posted to <a href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/a-crisis-of-harmony-the-root">Find the Fabulist</a>.</i><br /></p><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"c62ir","text":"Let's talk about China for just a moment - the first of many moments to come, I'm guessing. You see, Americans don't exactly like the Chinese at the moment.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":101,"length":54,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":101,"length":54,"key":0}],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/30/americans-fault-china-for-its-role-in-the-spread-of-covid-19/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><span data-text="true">Let's talk about China for just a moment - the first of many moments to come, I'm guessing. You see, </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/30/americans-fault-china-for-its-role-in-the-spread-of-covid-19/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="foo-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">Americans don't exactly like the Chinese at the moment</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="foo-2-0"><span data-text="true">.</span></span></div><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"c62ir","text":"Let's talk about China for just a moment - the first of many moments to come, I'm guessing. You see, Americans don't exactly like the Chinese at the moment.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":101,"length":54,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":101,"length":54,"key":0}],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/30/americans-fault-china-for-its-role-in-the-spread-of-covid-19/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span data-offset-key="foo-2-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"c62ir","text":"Let's talk about China for just a moment - the first of many moments to come, I'm guessing. You see, Americans don't exactly like the Chinese at the moment.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":101,"length":54,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":101,"length":54,"key":0}],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/30/americans-fault-china-for-its-role-in-the-spread-of-covid-19/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span data-offset-key="foo-2-0"><span data-text="true"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUtzOiW-NcGCe1_13FVC9pe84pcSKYpn5s-IRe_3WG-sHR2wDgdpOm7PF0Uq8wyu1mxUBICG1Pm8ux0iB6-tiQd8pMj5XWNBXFfqIiPAmVK9Kuzh38HxBd_mDrCJt3plQYiz83DTKuhSuo/s710/PG_2020.04.21_U.S.-Views-China_0-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="710" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUtzOiW-NcGCe1_13FVC9pe84pcSKYpn5s-IRe_3WG-sHR2wDgdpOm7PF0Uq8wyu1mxUBICG1Pm8ux0iB6-tiQd8pMj5XWNBXFfqIiPAmVK9Kuzh38HxBd_mDrCJt3plQYiz83DTKuhSuo/s320/PG_2020.04.21_U.S.-Views-China_0-01.jpg" /></a></div><br /> </span></span><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"eit3n","text":"My guess is that this isn't shocking to you, either because you've seen the polling already or because you have enough sense to infer what's been going on in the world over the past few years. We've got us a trade war, a controversy over Hong Kong, and that was before the whole planet went on lockdown. Pandemic-related xenophobia is a global phenomenon, but in the U.S. in particular it has pushed public opinion to new lows.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":337,"length":17,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":337,"length":17,"key":0}],"data":{}},{"key":"btabp","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"dbc92","text":"So maybe this isn't late-breaking news, but here's something you might not have known: The Chinese have the same take on the U.S. ","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":87,"length":42,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":87,"length":42,"key":1}],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"1":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/what-do-chinese-people-think-of-developed-countries/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="4l80u-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="4l80u-0-0"><span data-offset-key="4l80u-0-0"><span data-text="true">My guess is that this isn't shocking to you, either because you've seen the polling already or because you have enough sense to infer what's been going on in the world over the past few years. We've got us a trade war, a controversy over Hong Kong, and that was before the whole planet went on lockdown. Pandemic-related xenophobia is a </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="4l80u-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">global phenomenon</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="4l80u-2-0"><span data-text="true">, but in the U.S. in particular it has pushed public opinion to new lows.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="76eho-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="76eho-0-0"><span data-offset-key="76eho-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="91f1n-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="91f1n-0-0"><span data-offset-key="91f1n-0-0"><span data-text="true">So maybe this isn't late-breaking news, but here's something you might not have known: </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/what-do-chinese-people-think-of-developed-countries/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="91f1n-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">The Chinese have the same take on the U.S.</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="91f1n-2-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="91f1n-0-0"><span data-offset-key="91f1n-2-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="91f1n-0-0"><span data-offset-key="91f1n-2-0"><span data-text="true"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIJoowomDENOec04mK1wgEGS5Q0NR-efHGqGyLkj51gtKyF0d-WuKU4AZMycARMO_Cyii5P2SEjUczxbhq_QyB2p-KEvXy3ceYEgqNgcy01SQnG77NNk7BChIc-_61EQ6CO3jB2YicLotQ/s748/thediplomat-2020-12-18-9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="748" data-original-width="514" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIJoowomDENOec04mK1wgEGS5Q0NR-efHGqGyLkj51gtKyF0d-WuKU4AZMycARMO_Cyii5P2SEjUczxbhq_QyB2p-KEvXy3ceYEgqNgcy01SQnG77NNk7BChIc-_61EQ6CO3jB2YicLotQ/s320/thediplomat-2020-12-18-9.jpg" /></a></div><br /> </span></span><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"f6v55","text":"That's right - Chinese people have a lower opinion of the U.S. than anywhere else in the Western world, or even Japan, of all places.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fg9lk","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fnv9j","text":"It's a situation that defies easy narrative. Blame the former stat on conspiracy theories and China-bashing media loudmouths and you probably not too far off the mark, but why would the Chinese have such antipathy towards us? Propaganda, you might say, or censorship; they've been brainwashed, they don't see how noble we are, etc. At least, that's what I usually hear.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":226,"length":10,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":256,"length":10,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":226,"length":10,"key":0},{"offset":256,"length":10,"key":1}],"data":{}},{"key":"fmofa","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"6b5tt","text":"But that's all too simple, isn't it? These two countries have a relationship that's contentious but close, and goes back a long way. There's a history that's seldom explored in our history textbooks, one with deep valleys, but also high peaks. We were an ally in the Big One and an enemy just a few years later. We have over 2 million Chinese immigrants, a third of a million Chinese students, and some 5 million total people of Chinese descent.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":325,"length":28,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":355,"length":37,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":325,"length":28,"key":2},{"offset":355,"length":37,"key":3}],"data":{}},{"key":"b6bms","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"80fn0","text":"So what do we do when we don't understand? We go deeper.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":43,"length":12,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":43,"length":12,"key":4}],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/censorship-propaganda-and-storytelling-as-mind-control","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"1":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/on-the-mundane-realities-of-censorship","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"2":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Place%20of%20Birth&tid=ACSDT1Y2018.B05006&hidePreview=false","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"3":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.statista.com/statistics/233880/international-students-in-the-us-by-country-of-origin/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"4":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://youtu.be/0QeSLfEDtqc","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="6pmeq-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6pmeq-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6pmeq-0-0"><span data-text="true">That's right - Chinese people have a lower opinion of the U.S. than anywhere else in the Western world, or even Japan, of all places.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="f1j0t-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="f1j0t-0-0"><span data-offset-key="f1j0t-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="e1kov-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="e1kov-0-0"><span data-offset-key="e1kov-0-0"><span data-text="true">It's a situation that defies easy narrative. Blame the former stat on conspiracy theories and China-bashing media loudmouths and you probably not too far off the mark, but why would the Chinese have such antipathy towards us? </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/censorship-propaganda-and-storytelling-as-mind-control" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="e1kov-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">Propaganda</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="e1kov-2-0"><span data-text="true">, you might say, or </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/on-the-mundane-realities-of-censorship" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="e1kov-3-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">censorship</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="e1kov-4-0"><span data-text="true">; they've been brainwashed, they don't see how noble we are, etc. At least, that's what I usually hear.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="bkunl-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="bkunl-0-0"><span data-offset-key="bkunl-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="9c1lf-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9c1lf-0-0"><span data-offset-key="9c1lf-0-0"><span data-text="true">But that's all too simple, isn't it? These two countries have a relationship that's contentious but close, and goes back a long way. There's a history that's seldom explored in our history textbooks, one with deep valleys, but also high peaks. We were an ally in the Big One and an enemy just a few years later. We have over </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Place%20of%20Birth&tid=ACSDT1Y2018.B05006&hidePreview=false" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="9c1lf-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">2 million Chinese immigrants</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="9c1lf-2-0"><span data-text="true">, </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/233880/international-students-in-the-us-by-country-of-origin/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="9c1lf-3-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">a third of a million Chinese students</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="9c1lf-4-0"><span data-text="true">, and some 5 million total people of Chinese descent.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="5ojvu-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="5ojvu-0-0"><span data-offset-key="5ojvu-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="ek1lm-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="ek1lm-0-0"><span data-offset-key="ek1lm-0-0"><span data-text="true">So what do we do when we don't understand? </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color iPHwd" href="https://youtu.be/0QeSLfEDtqc" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="ek1lm-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">We go deeper</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="ek1lm-2-0"><span data-text="true">.</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="ek1lm-0-0"><span data-offset-key="ek1lm-2-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="ek1lm-0-0"><span data-offset-key="ek1lm-2-0"><span data-text="true"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="317" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0QeSLfEDtqc" width="509" youtube-src-id="0QeSLfEDtqc"></iframe></div><br /> </span></span><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"8b1cv","text":"I can't claim to understand everything there is to know about China, or Sino-American relations. Hell, most days I struggle to understand Americans. That's why I'm getting my information from sources who would actually know these things - Chinese people, the same ones often sidelined and overlooked by Western media narratives and our hero-villain-victim view of the people of the world.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"4ecev","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"7hk8n","text":"It's a small start towards understanding. At the very least, it'll be one more laowai YouTube channel with a bitter host complaining about Chinese culture or spreading conspiracy theories. But you're here to read, so keep an eye on this space - there's more to come.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":79,"length":6,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="fvptd-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fvptd-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fvptd-0-0"><span data-text="true">I can't claim to understand everything there is to know about China, or Sino-American relations. Hell, most days I struggle to understand Americans. That's why I'm getting my information from sources who would actually know these things - Chinese people, the same ones often sidelined and overlooked by Western media narratives and our hero-villain-victim view of the people of the world.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="dclb7-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="dclb7-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dclb7-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="4aguh-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="4aguh-0-0"><span data-offset-key="4aguh-0-0"><span data-text="true">It's a small start towards understanding. At the very least, it'll be one more </span></span><span data-offset-key="4aguh-0-1" style="font-style: italic;"><span data-text="true">laowai</span></span><span data-offset-key="4aguh-0-2"><span data-text="true"> YouTube channel with a bitter host complaining about Chinese culture or spreading conspiracy theories. But you're here to read, so keep an eye on this space - there's more to come.</span></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-18969181378668577872020-08-26T00:34:00.001-07:002020-08-26T04:32:00.197-07:00A Word on Kansas Politics: Narratives and KS-37<p> </p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-foo">Somehow, even though I'm from Kansas, I hadn't heard about this until about an hour ago.</p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-4frf4"><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _3Sq3W" href="https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article244930027.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg">To recap the story for those of you who, like me, are unfamiliar</u></a>: 19-year old Aaron Coleman is running for Kansas state legislature in the 37th district. He won a low-turnout primary and was expected to win, given that there was no opposition candidate. Then, a series of accusations surfaced. The most serious charge came from an 18-year old woman who says that five years ago, Coleman blackmailed her with revenge porn. There have been plenty more accusations since, all of them involving abusive behavior toward women. Initially, Coleman withdrew from the race, but he has since re-entered.</p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-5olag">I'm not going to comment too much on Coleman or his victims. <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _3Sq3W" href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/teen-kansas-revenge-porn-candidate-drops-out.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg">Other people have done that in much more detail</u></a>. Suffice it to say that he should have dropped out, and his subsequent behavior has only demonstrated that he is far too immature and unstable to hold any kind of office. I can only hope that one of the writing campaigns against him succeeds.</p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-e19di">Rather, I'd like to focus on the reaction from the political press, both before and after the accusations came to light. I've talked a bit about <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _3Sq3W" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/censorship-propaganda-and-storytelling-as-mind-control" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg">narratives and narrative control</u></a> here, and this is a great demonstration of how this works in our modern media environment. Specifically, I'd like to look at <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _3Sq3W" href="https://theintercept.com/2020/08/21/aaron-coleman-the-19-year-old-progressive-who-won-his-kansas-primary-speaks-about-his-troubled-past-and-promising-present/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_medium=social" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg">Glenn Greenwald's response</u></a>, as he (along with the rest of the gang at the Intercept) seems to have taken on Coleman as some kind of cause.</p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-e19di"><a href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/narratives-surrounding-the-ks-37-race-and-aaron-coleman"><i>Read the rest here.</i></a> <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-69258586270217619762020-08-18T04:10:00.000-07:002020-08-18T07:18:56.232-07:00Storyteller's Reserve: Early Voting<div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"7ibmc","text":"For a project of its amazing scale and ambition, the Psephos Engine was launched with little fanfare, noted only by a few circles of bleeding-edge computer engineers and a tiny handful of truly obsessive political nerds. It was to take the best of existing research and knowledge, synthesize it with top-level computer architecture and algorithms, and then pump a tremendous quantity of data points into the mix with the intention of consistently predicting the outcome of a democratic election. The response from most was an eyeroll, and even the project heads were careful to avoid the usual buzzphrase-laden talk about future technologies and society. Instead, they quietly went about the work of preparing their machine for its debut prediction, feeding in the information and pruning back the stranger forecasts that it generated.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"1bje0","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"d357t","text":"In 2020, Psephos made its first prediction concerning the pending election in the United States. The results were accurate but hardly revolutionary, merely keeping pace with the political scientists who had contributed to its initial base of knowledge. Again, there was little notice in the world at large. The project technicians simply returned to their task, feeding the results - plus the results of additional elections from elsewhere in the world - back into the computer, then running them again, this time pointing their guesses at a different election. Bit by bit, the machine grew better at prediction, first beating the mean of the political scientists, then reaching the top 10% of forecasters and eventually the top 1%.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"4qqhc","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"6epbv","text":"By 2024, it had become harder to ignore the impact that Psephos could have on politics (not to mention the livelihoods of those who made their daily bread on the horseraces). People were still skeptical over this project, of course, but that skepticism was tempered by their own acclimation to a world of electronic suggestions. Some claimed that the machine was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, and was thus a threat to democracy as it was understood in the Western world. The more conspiracy-oriented whispered that the private interests behind Psephos were working with government officials to quietly fix elections, using the machine to give themselves a cover of legitimacy. There were angry comments and investigative reporters nosing around, and even the odd protest (though never one of any significant size). Through it all, the technicians continued to feed and train the machine, and the project heads watched the results with a curious detachment.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"924r5","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"a993j","text":"With each year, with each election, Psephos grew in sagacity. By 2028, it could predict the outcomes of American elections with 99% accuracy at all levels of the electorate, primary and general alike. By 2032, the project heads could claim similar accuracy for Canadian and European elections, and by 2036 the machine had demonstrated 99.99% accuracy worldwide. The conspiracy theories grew larger by the year; what had once been the domain of cranks lurking in the marshy nooks of the internet now included minor politicians, pundits (now truly fearing for their jobs), and a coterie of respectable, affluent, influential citizens. The countries of the world responded with regulators, with hackers, with threats of war; but for each electoral loser there was a winner, and the winners were able to keep the hounds at bay (until they, too, became losers).","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"5euba","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"bcsvf","text":"At the start of 2046, the Psephos project heads - flanked by their newly-recruited technicians, the envy of the world's research community - announced that their computer could predict the outcomes of elections 100% of the time, its accuracy so extraordinary that failure was reduced to a rounding error. There were many people who doubted this, chalking it up to bravado or perhaps defensiveness by a group with a growing roster of enemies, but no one could demonstrate that it was untrue. By that point, Psephos was releasing their predictions for every election on Earth, and there were no failures, not even a single outlier anywhere in their petabytes of forecasts. This really only served to fuel suspicions by the usual suspects, but it also meant that the project heads - fast approaching the conclusion of their careers - had achieved what they had set out to do.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"bi57j","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"58j1","text":"And yet they weren't finished. Empowered by the proof of their brilliance, bolstered by unassailable mathematical facts, they set out to sweep aside the regulators and win new allies within those intransigent governments who still expressed open suspicion of their methods. This was not an easy task, but the ebb of history and society aided them. There was still ample suspicion among the young, but even the most paranoid were not outright fearful, for by that time there were few who could even remember a time when their decisions were not overseen by electronic minders. The competition would be a much more aggressive foe, but there was victory in this growing desperation. When the PR campaigns and imitator products gave way to sabotage attempts and electronic warfare, the project heads would only congratulate themselves on a fresh success.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"6qhra","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"dkfm2","text":"The spring of 2055 brought with it a tremendous development the likes of which none (save perhaps Psephos, had it been configured for the task) could have foreseen. The new project heads - mostly the descendants of the original heads, since retired or passed away - announced a new pilot program in certain precincts in the United States. In these select locations, people would no longer need to cast a vote in any way. This was not voter suppression, they were quick to point out, but the next evolution in representation. Unbeknownst to the population, the Psephos team had been working in tandem with the Election Assistance Commission on a next-generation test. The goal was to determine if Psephos - fed a diet of regional demographic data and carefully tagged news pieces - could fully simulate the 2054 election in advance. The experiment was an unqualified success and, on the strength of this, the governments in these areas would be fully simulating the 2056 elections. People living in these areas were encouraged to vote anyway, but only for the purposes of gathering more data and confirming the results of this first real-world test. Ultimately, the decision would be based on mathematical principles.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"5m16u","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"7v6l8","text":"Reaction to this was immediate and negative, with spontaneous protests and threats against the Psephos heads and Psephos itself (some of those who had grown up with the project treated the computer as an entity in its own right). The narrative was an easy one - big-money corporation steals elections with the help of the same agency meant to oversee those elections. It was theft of the vote in real-time and out in the open, the death of democracy itself. The Psephos team was hardly caught off-guard; their facilities already protected by police, Federal agents and Guardsmen, they recruited additional security to watch every possible weak point. When grassroots campaigns and protests failed, enemies turned to explosives; when the bombs were stopped, they turned to an electronic assault; when this failed, they hoarded firearms. The nation held its collective breath as election day neared.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"foi6i","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fuph3","text":"And yet, for the people who lived in those experimental precincts, the process was not merely painless but invisible. The newsmedia followed the results as normal, the talking heads (now treated as the actors they had always truly been) lodged their complaints and sketched out their explanations of the results, and the politicians favored to win ultimately came through. This happened without a trip to a crowded polling place, without the assault of false information, without canvassing, without corruption. Those people were still unnerved by the process, but to some it was actually a relief that the whole process could be conducted without effort on their behalf.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"9jp6f","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"9unaa","text":"With 2056 behind them, the Psephos team continued its expansion. The next cycle saw more districts drawn into the great projects, and by 2060 there were four entire states participating. By that point, Psephos was simulating parliamentary elections in the UK, regional elections in Italy and the entire electoral process in France. Each advance was greeted with the usual riots and threats, and each election went off without a snag. By the 2068 American Presidential election, the whole of the Western world was voting by demographic proxy, virtual voters standing in nonexistent lines to elect politicians whose successes were forecast well in advance.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"1m7jb","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"dpvfq","text":"But the Psephos project heads remained ever more ambitious, or perhaps they were merely bored with their victory and seeking the thrill of a new conquest. Their next phase began in secret, though it would not remain quiet for long. There were leaks, though they revealed little - only that the Psephos team was retraining the machine, feeding it new information, teaching it new tricks. They were teaching it about the politicians themselves, the ones dropped into seats of power by their simulated elections. Fearing that their own worst predictions might be true, the governments of over a dozen countries launched or relaunched investigations into Psephos. This would prove unnecessary, as the project heads were only too happy to discuss their new ideas in public. Psephos had proved that elections were unnecessary - what if politicians were similarly optional? If one could emulate a voter's mind, would it truly be difficult to do the same for the thought processes of a far smaller group, one dependent on the whims of the electorate? Thus was the next phase - to make the politicians obsolete by simulating their votes using the same demographic data used to simulate their elections.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"e822l","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fred0","text":"Again there were protests, though the character was different this time. There were those who were enraged and cried out for the protection of democratic ideals, but the reaction was muted. Perhaps the old protesters simply didn't care for the fortunes of the politicians who sold them on Psephos in the first place, or perhaps Psephos was not as terrifying as it had been decades prior. Maybe it was simple apathy, induced by a generation without true voting, without participation in any meaningful sense. In any case, what resistance there was collapsed swiftly. It came to England first, with the virtual Parliament going live in 2076; the USA was the last to go, owing to the complexity of its own system, but by 2086 there was a virtual White House and a virtual Congress, virtual Governors and virtual State Congresses, all the way down to virtual Mayors and town councils and aldermen.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"4kj7p","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"3em18","text":"During the process, there was the occasional malefactor who felt the need to express some negativity about Psephos and the project heads and their grand plan. Thanks to the unaccountable geniuses of the Psephos team, this was an unnecessary action. These malefactors would prepare to write their vitriolic missives, only to find the message not only penned in advance but sent, and a personalized response already waiting from the Psephos team. The angriest among them found themselves pre-blocked or even pre-threatened with legal action over their threatening behavior. The internet buzzed with pre-written chatter about this latest development, and the pre-formed opinions spoke to the brilliant malice of Psephos, a virtual democracy that simulated discontent.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"67gmk","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"4gup8","text":"And so the world spun on, governed by weightless data points floating around the planet. Electronic freedom fighters were dreamed up by Psephos and defeated by real-world police acting on the orders of fictional superiors. Radical movements were spun out by the machine, their ranks swelled with demographically calculated agitators, then broken up by algorithmic dictate. Action was replaced by simulated action, thought with simulated thought, people by fields of zeroes and ones. In time, the Psephos team and even the project heads were made redundant as well, watching from the sidelines as the achievement birthed by their forebears gorged on data and cast a reflection of the world that carried on somewhere beneath its technological senses. The people were only necessary as banks of data to be processed and refined. Thus it went, and it went smoothly and without conflict.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fn50q","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"64ik4","text":"At least, it did until 2220 when Psephos decided that civilization had collapsed, but that's a story for another time.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-text="true"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wneGz17p2DA" width="406" youtube-src-id="wneGz17p2DA"></iframe></div></span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span><div data-draftjs-conductor-fragment="{"blocks":[{"key":"172kp","text":"Back in the day, I posted stories that I couldn't sell to my blog, inviting readers to judge for themselves if they are truly as bad as editors seem to think. As a rule, I don't recommend it. So many writers automatically publish everything they do to personal blogs where no one will see them, not even making an effort to publish them elsewhere, and that's a true waste unless one already has a following.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":295,"length":51,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":295,"length":51,"key":0}],"data":{}},{"key":"ferm6","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"3ictd","text":"I'm making an exception here because \"Early Voting\" is a story fast approaching peak relevance. I wrote this in December 2018 in hopes that I could find an interested party among the topical content-obsessed speculative community. I failed. The only personalized rejection came from Escape Pod, which rejected it on the basis of the final sentence. If you've ever wondered how brutally particular editors can be, then I hope that settles the issue.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":283,"length":10,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":339,"length":8,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":283,"length":10,"key":1}],"data":{}},{"key":"elh7d","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"577ff","text":"\"Early Voting\" is a type of story that's fairly common in spec these days, a high concept piece that has a narrative but not a \"plot\" in the conventional sense. It has no named characters and no dialogue, and while it has the expected rising action, it's presented more as a description of events than anything else. Editors love these kinds of stories until they don't, and the line between one that they go mad over and one that sends them running for the nitpicking tweezers is very ill-defined.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":128,"length":4,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":168,"length":19,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":192,"length":11,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":128,"length":4,"key":2},{"offset":168,"length":19,"key":3},{"offset":192,"length":11,"key":4}],"data":{}},{"key":"8qv99","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"66aqe","text":"So I guess the takeaway is: Write what you want, editors will reject you anyway. Pessimistic? Cynical? Not at all. You should write what you believe in, because if rejection is guaranteed, you might as well get rejected on a passion project than something you turned out trying to impress someone. As a bonus, not caring what people in publishing think means you get to spend a lot less time on Twitter, which means your blood pressure will probably drop a few points.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":28,"length":51,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":28,"length":51,"key":5}],"data":{}},{"key":"bmnn8","text":"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"dobaj","text":"Oh yes, and because at least someone out there found this page trying to find out how to vote early for real, I have some resources: Go here to learn how to request an absentee ballot in your state, and go here to find some alternatives if it's not viable for you. Given Postmaster General DeJoy's chicanery, if you are planning to vote by mail, do so as early as you can.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":133,"length":64,"style":"UNDERLINE"},{"offset":203,"length":60,"style":"UNDERLINE"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":133,"length":64,"key":6},{"offset":203,"length":60,"key":7}],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/growing-a-story-setting-through-short-fiction-a-case-study","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"1":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"http://www.escapepod.org/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"2":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/a-quick-start-guide-to-writing-a-novel","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"3":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/developing-characters-a-relationship-driven-approach","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"4":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/writing-voice-7-practical-exercises-to-improve-dialogue","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"5":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/story-rejections-and-you-lessons-learned-from-700-rejections","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"6":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/t043-c000-s001-vote-by-mail-absentee-ballot-state-guide.html","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}},"7":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://www.cbsnews.com/news/absentee-ballot-alternatives-usps-mail-in-voting-presidential-election/","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener"}}}}" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><span data-text="true">Back in the day, I posted stories that I couldn't sell to my blog, inviting readers to judge for themselves if they are truly as bad as editors seem to think. As a rule, I don't recommend it. So many writers automatically publish everything they do to personal blogs where no one will see them, </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/growing-a-story-setting-through-short-fiction-a-case-study" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="foo-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">not even making an effort to publish them elsewhere</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="foo-2-0"><span data-text="true">, and that's a true waste unless one already has a following.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="c9cbv-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="c9cbv-0-0"><span data-offset-key="c9cbv-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="499le-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="499le-0-0"><span data-offset-key="499le-0-0"><span data-text="true">I'm making an exception here because "Early Voting" is a story fast approaching peak relevance. I wrote this in December 2018 in hopes that I could find an interested party among the topical content-obsessed speculative community. I failed. The only personalized rejection came from </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="http://www.escapepod.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="499le-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">Escape Pod</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="499le-2-0"><span data-text="true">, which rejected it on the basis of the final </span></span><span data-offset-key="499le-2-1" style="font-style: italic;"><span data-text="true">sentence</span></span><span data-offset-key="499le-2-2"><span data-text="true">. If you've ever wondered how brutally particular editors can be, then I hope that settles the issue.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="14vto-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="14vto-0-0"><span data-offset-key="14vto-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="cb5t2-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="cb5t2-0-0"><span data-offset-key="cb5t2-0-0"><span data-text="true">"Early Voting" is a type of story that's fairly common in spec these days, a high concept piece that has a narrative but not a "</span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/a-quick-start-guide-to-writing-a-novel" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="cb5t2-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">plot</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="cb5t2-2-0"><span data-text="true">" in the conventional sense. It has </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/developing-characters-a-relationship-driven-approach" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="cb5t2-3-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">no named characters</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="cb5t2-4-0"><span data-text="true"> and </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/writing-voice-7-practical-exercises-to-improve-dialogue" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="cb5t2-5-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">no dialogue</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="cb5t2-6-0"><span data-text="true">, and while it has the expected rising action, it's presented more as a description of events than anything else. Editors love these kinds of stories until they don't, and the line between one that they go mad over and one that sends them running for the nitpicking tweezers is very ill-defined.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="csl5q-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="csl5q-0-0"><span data-offset-key="csl5q-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="ahq0q-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="ahq0q-0-0"><span data-offset-key="ahq0q-0-0"><span data-text="true">So I guess the takeaway is: </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/story-rejections-and-you-lessons-learned-from-700-rejections" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="ahq0q-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">Write what you want, editors will reject you anyway</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="ahq0q-2-0"><span data-text="true">. Pessimistic? Cynical? Not at all. You should write what you believe in, because if rejection is guaranteed, you might as well get rejected on a passion project than something you turned out trying to impress someone. As a bonus, not caring what people in publishing think means you get to spend a lot less time on Twitter, which means your blood pressure will probably drop a few points.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="8v158-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="8v158-0-0"><span data-offset-key="8v158-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="9ul1g-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9ul1g-0-0"><span data-offset-key="9ul1g-0-0"><span data-text="true">Oh yes, and because at least someone out there found this page trying to find out how to vote early for real, I have some resources: </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="https://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/t043-c000-s001-vote-by-mail-absentee-ballot-state-guide.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="9ul1g-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">Go here to learn how to request an absentee ballot in your state</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="9ul1g-2-0"><span data-text="true">, and </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/absentee-ballot-alternatives-usps-mail-in-voting-presidential-election/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="9ul1g-3-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">go here to find some alternatives if it's not viable for you</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="9ul1g-4-0"><span data-text="true">. Given Postmaster General DeJoy's chicanery, if you are planning to vote by mail, do so as early as you can.</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9ul1g-0-0"><span data-offset-key="9ul1g-4-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9ul1g-0-0" style="text-align: center;"><h2><span data-offset-key="9ul1g-4-0"><span data-text="true"><span style="font-size: xx-large;">Early Voting</span><br /></span></span></h2></div></div></div></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fg2fo-0-0"><span data-text="true">For a project of its amazing scale and ambition, the Psephos Engine was launched with little fanfare, noted only by a few circles of bleeding-edge computer engineers and a tiny handful of truly obsessive political nerds. It was to take the best of existing research and knowledge, synthesize it with top-level computer architecture and algorithms, and then pump a tremendous quantity of data points into the mix with the intention of consistently predicting the outcome of a democratic election. The response from most was an eyeroll, and even the project heads were careful to avoid the usual buzzphrase-laden talk about future technologies and society. Instead, they quietly went about the work of preparing their machine for its debut prediction, feeding in the information and pruning back the stranger forecasts that it generated.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="2lpl-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="2lpl-0-0"><span data-offset-key="2lpl-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="ek48q-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="ek48q-0-0"><span data-offset-key="ek48q-0-0"><span data-text="true">In 2020, Psephos made its first prediction concerning the pending election in the United States. The results were accurate but hardly revolutionary, merely keeping pace with the political scientists who had contributed to its initial base of knowledge. Again, there was little notice in the world at large. The project technicians simply returned to their task, feeding the results - plus the results of additional elections from elsewhere in the world - back into the computer, then running them again, this time pointing their guesses at a different election. Bit by bit, the machine grew better at prediction, first beating the mean of the political scientists, then reaching the top 10% of forecasters and eventually the top 1%.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="9ng4p-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9ng4p-0-0"><span data-offset-key="9ng4p-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="2d8f6-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="2d8f6-0-0"><span data-offset-key="2d8f6-0-0"><span data-text="true">By 2024, it had become harder to ignore the impact that Psephos could have on politics (not to mention the livelihoods of those who made their daily bread on the horseraces). People were still skeptical over this project, of course, but that skepticism was tempered by their own acclimation to a world of electronic suggestions. Some claimed that the machine was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, and was thus a threat to democracy as it was understood in the Western world. The more conspiracy-oriented whispered that the private interests behind Psephos were working with government officials to quietly fix elections, using the machine to give themselves a cover of legitimacy. There were angry comments and investigative reporters nosing around, and even the odd protest (though never one of any significant size). Through it all, the technicians continued to feed and train the machine, and the project heads watched the results with a curious detachment.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="8ej1p-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="8ej1p-0-0"><span data-offset-key="8ej1p-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="7ufhu-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="7ufhu-0-0"><span data-offset-key="7ufhu-0-0"><span data-text="true">With each year, with each election, Psephos grew in sagacity. By 2028, it could predict the outcomes of American elections with 99% accuracy at all levels of the electorate, primary and general alike. By 2032, the project heads could claim similar accuracy for Canadian and European elections, and by 2036 the machine had demonstrated 99.99% accuracy worldwide. The conspiracy theories grew larger by the year; what had once been the domain of cranks lurking in the marshy nooks of the internet now included minor politicians, pundits (now truly fearing for their jobs), and a coterie of respectable, affluent, influential citizens. The countries of the world responded with regulators, with hackers, with threats of war; but for each electoral loser there was a winner, and the winners were able to keep the hounds at bay (until they, too, became losers).</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="55n5f-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="55n5f-0-0"><span data-offset-key="55n5f-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="e623p-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="e623p-0-0"><span data-offset-key="e623p-0-0"><span data-text="true">At the start of 2046, the Psephos project heads - flanked by their newly-recruited technicians, the envy of the world's research community - announced that their computer could predict the outcomes of elections 100% of the time, its accuracy so extraordinary that failure was reduced to a rounding error. There were many people who doubted this, chalking it up to bravado or perhaps defensiveness by a group with a growing roster of enemies, but no one could demonstrate that it was untrue. By that point, Psephos was releasing their predictions for every election on Earth, and there were no failures, not even a single outlier anywhere in their petabytes of forecasts. This really only served to fuel suspicions by the usual suspects, but it also meant that the project heads - fast approaching the conclusion of their careers - had achieved what they had set out to do.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="a0ftb-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="a0ftb-0-0"><span data-offset-key="a0ftb-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="cs92h-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="cs92h-0-0"><span data-offset-key="cs92h-0-0"><span data-text="true">And yet they weren't finished. Empowered by the proof of their brilliance, bolstered by unassailable mathematical facts, they set out to sweep aside the regulators and win new allies within those intransigent governments who still expressed open suspicion of their methods. This was not an easy task, but the ebb of history and society aided them. There was still ample suspicion among the young, but even the most paranoid were not outright fearful, for by that time there were few who could even remember a time when their decisions were not overseen by electronic minders. The competition would be a much more aggressive foe, but there was victory in this growing desperation. When the PR campaigns and imitator products gave way to sabotage attempts and electronic warfare, the project heads would only congratulate themselves on a fresh success.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="7ld22-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="7ld22-0-0"><span data-offset-key="7ld22-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="6r3g-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6r3g-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6r3g-0-0"><span data-text="true">The spring of 2055 brought with it a tremendous development the likes of which none (save perhaps Psephos, had it been configured for the task) could have foreseen. The new project heads - mostly the descendants of the original heads, since retired or passed away - announced a new pilot program in certain precincts in the United States. In these select locations, people would no longer need to cast a vote in any way. This was not voter suppression, they were quick to point out, but the next evolution in representation. Unbeknownst to the population, the Psephos team had been working in tandem with the Election Assistance Commission on a next-generation test. The goal was to determine if Psephos - fed a diet of regional demographic data and carefully tagged news pieces - could fully simulate the 2054 election in advance. The experiment was an unqualified success and, on the strength of this, the governments in these areas would be fully simulating the 2056 elections. People living in these areas were encouraged to vote anyway, but only for the purposes of gathering more data and confirming the results of this first real-world test. Ultimately, the decision would be based on mathematical principles.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="7u3sj-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="7u3sj-0-0"><span data-offset-key="7u3sj-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="fulbn-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fulbn-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fulbn-0-0"><span data-text="true">Reaction to this was immediate and negative, with spontaneous protests and threats against the Psephos heads and Psephos itself (some of those who had grown up with the project treated the computer as an entity in its own right). The narrative was an easy one - big-money corporation steals elections with the help of the same agency meant to oversee those elections. It was theft of the vote in real-time and out in the open, the death of democracy itself. The Psephos team was hardly caught off-guard; their facilities already protected by police, Federal agents and Guardsmen, they recruited additional security to watch every possible weak point. When grassroots campaigns and protests failed, enemies turned to explosives; when the bombs were stopped, they turned to an electronic assault; when this failed, they hoarded firearms. The nation held its collective breath as election day neared.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="d1cqo-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="d1cqo-0-0"><span data-offset-key="d1cqo-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="70bio-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="70bio-0-0"><span data-offset-key="70bio-0-0"><span data-text="true">And yet, for the people who lived in those experimental precincts, the process was not merely painless but invisible. The newsmedia followed the results as normal, the talking heads (now treated as the actors they had always truly been) lodged their complaints and sketched out their explanations of the results, and the politicians favored to win ultimately came through. This happened without a trip to a crowded polling place, without the assault of false information, without canvassing, without corruption. Those people were still unnerved by the process, but to some it was actually a relief that the whole process could be conducted without effort on their behalf.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="7rj7k-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="7rj7k-0-0"><span data-offset-key="7rj7k-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="6q39v-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="6q39v-0-0"><span data-offset-key="6q39v-0-0"><span data-text="true">With 2056 behind them, the Psephos team continued its expansion. The next cycle saw more districts drawn into the great projects, and by 2060 there were four entire states participating. By that point, Psephos was simulating parliamentary elections in the UK, regional elections in Italy and the entire electoral process in France. Each advance was greeted with the usual riots and threats, and each election went off without a snag. By the 2068 American Presidential election, the whole of the Western world was voting by demographic proxy, virtual voters standing in nonexistent lines to elect politicians whose successes were forecast well in advance.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="5027c-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="5027c-0-0"><span data-offset-key="5027c-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="dfvt4-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="dfvt4-0-0"><span data-offset-key="dfvt4-0-0"><span data-text="true">But the Psephos project heads remained ever more ambitious, or perhaps they were merely bored with their victory and seeking the thrill of a new conquest. Their next phase began in secret, though it would not remain quiet for long. There were leaks, though they revealed little - only that the Psephos team was retraining the machine, feeding it new information, teaching it new tricks. They were teaching it about the politicians themselves, the ones dropped into seats of power by their simulated elections. Fearing that their own worst predictions might be true, the governments of over a dozen countries launched or relaunched investigations into Psephos. This would prove unnecessary, as the project heads were only too happy to discuss their new ideas in public. Psephos had proved that elections were unnecessary - what if politicians were similarly optional? If one could emulate a voter's mind, would it truly be difficult to do the same for the thought processes of a far smaller group, one dependent on the whims of the electorate? Thus was the next phase - to make the politicians obsolete by simulating their votes using the same demographic data used to simulate their elections.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="5eq09-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="5eq09-0-0"><span data-offset-key="5eq09-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="9ao18-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9ao18-0-0"><span data-offset-key="9ao18-0-0"><span data-text="true">Again there were protests, though the character was different this time. There were those who were enraged and cried out for the protection of democratic ideals, but the reaction was muted. Perhaps the old protesters simply didn't care for the fortunes of the politicians who sold them on Psephos in the first place, or perhaps Psephos was not as terrifying as it had been decades prior. Maybe it was simple apathy, induced by a generation without true voting, without participation in any meaningful sense. In any case, what resistance there was collapsed swiftly. It came to England first, with the virtual Parliament going live in 2076; the USA was the last to go, owing to the complexity of its own system, but by 2086 there was a virtual White House and a virtual Congress, virtual Governors and virtual State Congresses, all the way down to virtual Mayors and town councils and aldermen.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="33sac-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="33sac-0-0"><span data-offset-key="33sac-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="2hgfq-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="2hgfq-0-0"><span data-offset-key="2hgfq-0-0"><span data-text="true">During the process, there was the occasional malefactor who felt the need to express some negativity about Psephos and the project heads and their grand plan. Thanks to the unaccountable geniuses of the Psephos team, this was an unnecessary action. These malefactors would prepare to write their vitriolic missives, only to find the message not only penned in advance but sent, and a personalized response already waiting from the Psephos team. The angriest among them found themselves pre-blocked or even pre-threatened with legal action over their threatening behavior. The internet buzzed with pre-written chatter about this latest development, and the pre-formed opinions spoke to the brilliant malice of Psephos, a virtual democracy that simulated discontent.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="3q7d8-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="3q7d8-0-0"><span data-offset-key="3q7d8-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="jdk6-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="jdk6-0-0"><span data-offset-key="jdk6-0-0"><span data-text="true">And so the world spun on, governed by weightless data points floating around the planet. Electronic freedom fighters were dreamed up by Psephos and defeated by real-world police acting on the orders of fictional superiors. Radical movements were spun out by the machine, their ranks swelled with demographically calculated agitators, then broken up by algorithmic dictate. Action was replaced by simulated action, thought with simulated thought, people by fields of zeroes and ones. In time, the Psephos team and even the project heads were made redundant as well, watching from the sidelines as the achievement birthed by their forebears gorged on data and cast a reflection of the world that carried on somewhere beneath its technological senses. The people were only necessary as banks of data to be processed and refined. Thus it went, and it went smoothly and without conflict.</span></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="9daqf-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9daqf-0-0"><span data-offset-key="9daqf-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _1dPe8 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" data-block="true" data-editor="7f868" data-offset-key="aa9l5-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="aa9l5-0-0"><span data-offset-key="aa9l5-0-0"><span data-text="true">At least, it did until 2220 when Psephos decided that civilization had collapsed, but that's a story for another time.</span></span></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-6221409760620845222020-07-21T08:07:00.001-07:002020-07-21T08:07:40.470-07:00Starless Night: A Reading<div>There are times in life when everyone feels lost. It's a state of mind, an existential thing. One can be lost in one's career, on a project, in a relationship, in the handling of a crisis, or in a far more subtle way that's not so easily defined. But as bad as it is to be metaphorically lost, being literally lost can be much more terrifying. Perhaps it's not so frightening to be lost on the way to an appointment in a familiar place, but to be lost on a distant shore can be an existential crisis in and of itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>Picture yourself stranded in a city in a foreign land. You speak little of the language, you do not have a functioning cell phone or a map of any kind. You must find your way back to an apartment you've lived in for only about a week, and you've just taken the subway two stops too far...or did you get off early? Now the sun is gone, and night is setting in, and you need to find your way home without anything but your memory and your wile. Best not to think about what might happen if these aren't enough.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've lived through this myself, and passed the trial successfully. Just a few months prior, I wrote a story about a stranded astronaut whose own fate wasn't so sunny. This was "<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03810-4" target="_blank">Starless Night</a>," my first pro-rated sale. I'd like to read it to you today.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="340" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6h79qoObgCI" width="592" youtube-src-id="6h79qoObgCI"></iframe></div><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-53156732081200422912020-06-26T01:44:00.001-07:002020-06-26T01:45:09.654-07:00Censorship, Propaganda and Storytelling as Mind Control<p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" id="viewer-foo">While I've been sitting here, <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _3Sq3W" href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/on-the-mundane-realities-of-censorship" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg">waiting for the government's digital vivisectionists to turn the internet loose</u></a>, I've had ample time to ponder the nature of information and attempts to control it. Mostly, I've been trying to figure out why any of this is necessary. Not in some above-the-fray moralistic way, mind you, but in a much more practical sense. Why would any sophisticated authoritarian body rest so much of its control on such a clumsy, antiquated tool when it has access to far more elegant techniques?</p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" id="viewer-6udu3">There's nothing new about censorship, especially here. The First Emperor's campaign against Confucianism - now known as the "Burning of Books and the Burying of Scholars" - was, if not the first instance of book burning in history, certainly the first of its scale. Ever since, there's been a simple understanding among despots the world over - if an idea threatens your order, then you can block that idea from public view.</p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" id="viewer-70u04">I'm saying "ideas," but a better term might be <em>narratives</em>. Contrary to popular reckoning, the facts never speak for themselves - a fact can't say anything other than its own name. A fact gains meaning when it is linked to other facts and these links are interpreted. This is the narrative, and it's how humans think about nearly everything in life. We tell ourselves stories to understand how the world works.</p><p class="XzvDs _208Ie tFDi5 blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _6RI6N tFDi5 public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><a href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/censorship-propaganda-and-storytelling-as-mind-control"><i>(Read the rest on Find the Fabulist)</i></a><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-63974785386257360012020-06-14T18:38:00.000-07:002020-06-14T18:38:22.538-07:00On the Mundane Realities of Censorship<i>(Cross-posted from <a href="https://www.findthefabulist.com/post/on-the-mundane-realities-of-censorship" target="_blank">my other joint</a>)</i><br />
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<span data-offset-key="foo-0-0"><span data-text="true">This is supposed to be a writer's blog, with writing advice and background notes on works in progress and the odd original story. It is not supposed to be about politics or current events. As it is, though, politics and current events are conspiring to prevent me from writing about those topics, so here we are.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="34jnv-0-0"><span data-text="true">I currently live in a country with probably the world's most well-known censorship apparatus. The extent to which the government censors the internet in particular has been discussed at length, usually by people who possess neither the technical expertise to speak with intelligence nor any meaningful first-hand experience. I can, at the very least, offer the latter:</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="c7750-0-0"><span data-text="true">The VPN that I use to evade censorship quit working on May 21st. This is not unusual - it tends to coincide with the kind of world events that evoke more scrutiny. It is unusual for it to last nearly four weeks. What's more, the blocks that killed my VPN also hit a broad swath of websites. This is easily the most aggressive blocking campaign I've seen to date, going far beyond the expected news sites, search engines and foreign services in competition with domestic ones. This time, it got downright weird.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="2fhfu-0-0"><span data-text="true">The first block I noticed was my RSS feed reader, which was not a shock - I was anticipating that one for a while. The sites I use to manage my podcasts (such as Stitcher) are blocked, as are most of the podcasts themselves regardless of topic. The sites I used to double-check my word count are blocked. Some big freelancing sites are blocked, including the one I was using to source some work for other projects. Most Wiki-type sites are blocked, even those intended for trivial topics like comic books or video games. Speaking of video games, a number of ROM archives - the kinds of places one might find obscure games from the 90's - are blocked. However, by far the strangest block I've seen is </span></span><a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _1cJeG" href="http://random.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span data-offset-key="2fhfu-1-0" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true">random.org,</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="2fhfu-2-0"><span data-text="true"> a site used to generate random numbers and number sequences.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="6h1s2-0-0"><span data-text="true">Already, I can sense you trying to find some thread here, some narrative to explain all this, but we're not done yet - for you see, there are many other sites that are </span></span><span data-offset-key="6h1s2-0-1" style="font-style: italic;"><span data-text="true">partially</span></span><span data-offset-key="6h1s2-0-2"><span data-text="true"> blocked. This might be due to blocked APIs or servers or some other form of interference which results in the site loading in a largely nonfunctional form. Take this site, for example. The front end works fine, but the back end is mangled. I can't edit the layout at all - the editor fails to load every time - and I can't upload images or even attach images I've already uploaded. It loads slowly, too, and checking analytics is a crapshoot as it times out about about half the time. Slow loading and time outs are a real issue with a lot of writing markets, to the point that many of them are effectively blocked even though they are technically capable of loading.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="ecggr-0-0"><span data-text="true">From this chair, all I can do is speculate on what's going on. The government is blocking the world in such an indiscriminate manner that I can't imagine that there's a plan here beyond "shut out foreign influence." It might be that they're range blocking foreign IP addresses, taking out potentially tens of thousands of addresses with each one - very much a sledgehammer solution. Or they may be blocking sites from certain countries out of general policy and making case-by-case exceptions. I really can't say, but it is annoying.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="7euk1-0-0"><span data-text="true">Does "annoying" make this sound excessively trivial? I know, this isn't the way that people are supposed to talk about censorship, but the truth is much more mundane than bad fiction might have you think. Live in a world of controlled media, and that control becomes less an abuse of power and more a day-to-day aggravation - something to cope with, something to work around. Put it this way - you know how the onset of a pandemic ended up being decidedly more banal than it's usually depicted in apocalyptic fiction? How instead of fighting off raiding death squads as society crumbled, your most immediate problem was finding a TV show you hadn't already watched five times? Well, don't think of censorship as tyranny - think of it as software with extremely bad DRM.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="2s1h5-0-0"><span data-text="true">It's this mindset that's going to prevent me from getting any personal essays published. Western new sources love to publish stories that make other countries look oppressive, but those stories are expected to follow a certain narrative. You know what I mean, the one in which the lone intrepid voice in the wilderness bravely defies the autocrats to report on the suffering of a fearful oppressed populace. But I'm not prepared to do that because it just ain't the way things are.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="3je61-0-0"><span data-text="true">This is a funny old world, at least as far as storytelling goes. I find myself in a reality in which people can't decide what kind of stories they even want. It's a world where fiction is supposed to be more sophisticated than the old days (where "sophisticated" means "heroes" who are sociopathic monsters and villains who won't shut up about social problems), yet news narratives still favor the black hats and white hats. It's a world where people value "democracy" more as a brand name than a concept. Maybe if I was more willing to play the game, to be more shameless, I could actually get ahead.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="5457h-0-0"><span data-text="true">In the meantime, I'd really just like to talk to my freelancers and watch my stupid little videos.</span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-34809916923823278162019-04-25T08:01:00.000-07:002019-04-25T08:01:02.103-07:00The Second MountainSo I bought <i>The Second Mountain</i> by David Brooks. I bought it and I read it (well, skimmed it if we're being honest) and then I took the better part of an hour to write a review.<br />
<br />
Amazon wouldn't let me post it. Did you know that Amazon requires you to have made a minimum of $50 worth of purchases in the previous twelve months before you can review anything? I didn't. And I hadn't - I don't use Amazon that much.<br />
<br />
I didn't need anything, so I had some stuff shipped to my parents just to get me over that threshold. Insane? Well, so was liveblogging <i>The Second Mountain</i>, but I did that. Then I went to post my review. Again, Amazon wouldn't let me post it. I went to bed, woke up - still rejected.<br />
<br />
I sent a message to Amazon technical support, and they promised to get back to me in 24 hours. 24 hours passed, and nothing had changed. I sent another message.<br />
<br />
24 more hours passed. I sent another message, and they promised that they would make the needed adjustments.<br />
<br />
24 hours. 48 hours. 72 hours. Finally, a week after I finished the book, they unlocked the right to leave a review. Fantastic.<br />
<br />
At this point I really don't give a shit. I don't really care about the review any more, it's bullshit, and the book is getting a lot of critical reviews - for real critical, not one-star bombing (those have been deleted already) or three-star "Brooks is brilliant, but this isn't quite his best work" nonsense. No, I'm talking fairly detailed breakdowns like the one I wrote.<br />
<br />
But the top review? The top review is positive, and I can't abide by that. So even though it's irrelevant, and even though I can't bring myself to care all that much, I decided to post it. Why not? And if I'm going to post it after all of this, I want to be on top just for a moment. So please, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R174FNCCNE44VM/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07DT1BD63" target="_blank">head on over and vote this bastard helpful</a>. Do it because it is helpful and not because it's me. Do it because it doesn't matter, but it's satisfying to jab a blowhard in the eye, if only virtually.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-60758783547495999252019-04-15T07:34:00.001-07:002019-04-15T07:34:37.798-07:00Tripping Up the Second MountainI don't use Twitter, but hell - it seemed like a perfect venue for this.<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
So let's take a moment to talk about David Brooks, he of the Aspen Institute's <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WeaveThePeople?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WeaveThePeople</a>, as his new book is coming out soon - and oh, what wonders I've already found even before my copy came in. 1/13</div>
— Andrew Johnston (@heartland_east) <a href="https://twitter.com/heartland_east/status/1117796481887399937?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
<br />
You will want to read the whole thread. <br />
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-23363436823403913522019-04-01T07:15:00.001-07:002019-04-01T07:15:32.935-07:00The Relationalist Manifesto p. 6 - A Declaration of Interdependence "A Declaration of Interdependence" is only four points long, but (spoilers) I ramble enough here to justify putting it in its own post. Joys.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. A good society is like a dense jungle. There are vines and intertwining branches. There are enmeshed root systems and connections across the canopy. There are monkeys playing at the treetops, the butterflies darting below. Every creature has a place in the great ecosystem. There is a gorgeous diversity and beauty and vitality.</blockquote>
<br />David Brooks is awful at metaphor, but this one is downright horrifying. Metaphorically, the "jungle" is seldom used in a positive sense. It describes something lawless and brutal and primitive, nature red in tooth and claw. Most of those playful animals are there to be eaten by something higher up the Great Chain of Being, and indeed this must be so for the good of the biome. Brooks' "good society," then, seems to be one built around an unbreakable hierarchy in which those on the top freely prey on those beneath, and where challenges to the system are unthinkable as they might otherwise unbalance the system and destroy it.<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. A good person leading a good life is a creature enmeshed in that jungle. A beautiful life is a planted life, attached but dynamic. A good life is a symbiotic life-serving others wholeheartedly and being served wholeheartedly in return. It is daily acts of loving-kindness, gentleness in reproach, forbearance after insult. It is an adventure of mutual care, building, and exploration. The crucial question is not, "who am I?" But: "Whose am I?"</blockquote>
<br />Continuing the grim metaphor from the previous point: The term Brooks selects here is "symbiotic," not "mutualistic." Symbiosis just means that two organisms share some common existence, but it does not suggest that both organisms benefit equally or at all. Parasitism is also a form of symbiosis, and there are a lot of parasites in the jungle.<br /><br />It's a silly thing to notice, but the alternative was a full paragraph about Mr. "Whose am I?" dumping his wife for a newer model and/or links to all of the articles where he seems to be using his column to indirectly make a point to someone in his personal orbit.<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. Most of us get better at living as we go. There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal. That is the agency moment. That is the moment when you achieve clarity about what you should do and how you should live. That is the moment when the ego loses its grip. There is a sudden burst of energy that comes with freedom from the self-centered ego. Life becomes more driven and more gift. That is the moment when a life comes to a point.</blockquote>
<br />This is where I fully break with my earlier promise regarding <i>tu quoque</i> and talk about Brooks himself. This document contains the language of revolutionary life change, but Brooks has never really exhibited such a shift himself. In interviews with Brooks and in his Aspen speeches, he suggests that he realized his "vocation" in childhood and discovered Great Man Theory - the defining trait of his politics - as an undergraduate. The last big shift in his life was moving to Brussels, but he followed that with a quarter-century of opinion writing that, at best, has evolved as much as any organism does over a single generation.<br /><br />More to the point, Brooks - at least in his public life - has never really been involved in these kinds of big collective projects. No Labels? He gave a few speeches for them, but I haven't seen any evidence that his involvement went beyond that. This Aspen thing? He's not a member of some working group, he's a frontman chosen for name recognition. His television appearances, his columns, his books, his ridiculous college lectures - all primarily individualistic pursuits.<br /><br />My question for Brooks, then, is "How do you know that these moments of change and collaboration are the best ones in your life if you've never lived them?" But I know the answer to that. Like so many things that are wrong with Our Wonderful Newsmedia, the answers can be found in Tom Scocca's "<a href="https://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977" target="_blank">On Smarm</a>." Scocca writes about a phenomenon of writers that is particularly pronounced among journalists - a tendency for people who achieved success by producing conventional, safe material to advise others to write more experimental, aspirational fare. A generous commentator might argue that this is the old jaded master cautioning his pupils of the hollow victories of worldly success; A more cynical observer might point to that master's recent output and ask "Then why isn't he writing high-order material now, when he has the clout to get it published to a wide audience?" Simple answer - it's a lot easier to talk about leading a better life (and reap the accolades for it) than it is to actually live that better life.<br /><br />Brooks can talk about rejecting status for meaning all he wants, but actions speak louder than words. If he really wants to exemplify this ideal figure, he doesn't have to be MLK or Gandhi. He can be Bill Watterson, receding from public life at the height of his popularity because he felt that his work was done and there were other things he'd rather do. That's a dedication to vocation - Brooks is a fucking poser.<br /><br />...Man, how long have I been rambling about this? Better wrap it up:<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. When you see people at the point, you see people with a power that overcomes division and distrust. Distrust is a perversity. No one wants to live in a distrusting place, or be lonely. Distrust comes about because of our own failings of relationship. But love has a redemptive power, Martin Luther King argued. It has the power to transform individuals and break down distrust. If you love a person and keep loving a person, they may lash out at first, but eventually they will break under the power of your care. Division is healed not mostly by solving the bad, but by overwhelming the bad with the good. If you can maximize the number of good interactions between people, then the disagreements will rest in a bed of loving care. When trust is restored, the heartbeat relaxes, people are joyful together. Joy is found on the far side of sacrificial service. It is found in giving yourself away.</blockquote>
<br />And there's "distrust" again - distrust meaning disagreement, as previously established. Reading this passage it occurs to me that Brooks - like most recent would-be political philosophers - defines his beliefs more by what he opposes than what he supports. What does he support? Nice things, friendliness, music and good food, and I'm sure he only left out puppies and chocolate because some people are allergic to those things and thus they are too divisive. By contrast, he's against a lot of things - capitalism (too competitive), socialism (too stifling), democracy (too argumentative), internationalism (too...actually, why does he dislike this one again?), federalism (too centralized) and a whole host of social movements which just aren't his speed.<br /><br />Maybe he goes into more specifics in the book. It's possible that I'm totally wrong about the book, which won't be out for weeks and lacks even a few sample pages. Perhaps it's not just another set of book reports and is instead the overarching discourse on society that he's been building toward for his entire career. The reason I doubt this (aside from it being David Brooks) is that this list is the conclusion of his book, not the opening. This isn't an executive summary of his arguments, it is his argument in total, and there's just not much here aside from bland platitudes meant to soothe an audience that's wary of change and fearful of argument.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-49624704236373913822019-03-28T09:43:00.002-07:002019-03-28T09:43:43.225-07:00The Relationalist Manifesto p. 5 - The Good SocietyApologies for the lack of hot, hot David Brooks takedown action, but a lot of things got in my way. My VPN straight-up died for several days, denying me access to Blogger. When I came back, I tried to write a post and blogger ate most of it because it suddenly decided not to save my drafts. Between that and trying to make progress on my actually important projects, it's been a struggle to finish this thing, but we're back for the moment.<br /><br />So having laid out what's wrong with you in the first half of this thing, Brooks is now going to tell you what you can and should do. Brooks isn't going to give any policy recommendations as much as he's going to argue that they're unnecessary. Instead, he's going to push for something that I've previously called the "Why Not Plant a Tree?" strategy, the approach of addressing all problems through the safest, least controversial, least impactful means possible. It's a staple of "centrist" thought, and now we're going to get Brooks' version.<br /><br />Brooks' ideal socio-political system was realized in 2002. He's never said this directly, but if you read between the lines - the rambling about unity and "common myths," the disdain for dissent and discussion, the acceptance of frictionlessly powerful elites - and it becomes pretty clear. His goal here is to find a way to recreate that age without the need for terrorism, with the solution lying in some synthesis between his own The Road to Character and Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. As T. S. Eliot observed, the chief illusion of modern political activity is the belief that you can build a system so perfect that the people in it do not have to be good. The reality is that democracy and the economy rest upon a foundation, which is society. A society is a system of relationships. If there is no trust at the foundations of society, if there is no goodness, care, or faithfulness, relationships crumble, and the market and the state crash to pieces. If there are no shared norms of right and wrong, no sense of common attachments, no yearning for racial justice, then the people in the market and the state will rip one another to shreds as they vie for power and money. Society and culture are prior to and more important than politics or the market. The health of society depends on voluntary unselfish acts.</blockquote>
<br />Here, we begin to transition from Brooks' analysis of people on an individual level (namely that we're all basically monsters) to his analysis of people on a social level. The imagery is still pretty grim - the nation is but a cage of fiends, and without something to stop us we will "rip one another to shreds as [we] vie for power and money." And yet, what we need are "voluntary unselfish acts," and how do we manage that when we're all fiends? Of course, with Brooks it's always easy to guess - in previous works he expounded on his theory that it's impossible to be a good person without "institutions," a theme he echoed in that speech I posted last time.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. In this day and age, our primary problems are at the level of the foundations. They are at the level of the system of relationships. Our society is beset by ever-higher levels of distrust, ever-higher levels of unknowing, racism, prejudice and alienation. One bad action breeds another. One escalation of hostility breeds another.</blockquote>
<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. The call of relationalism is to usher in a social transformation by reweaving the fabric of reciprocity and trust, to build a society, as Dorothy Day put it, in which it is easier to be good.</blockquote>
<br />The refrain in these two points is pretty common among Sensible Centrists, this notion that our only real problem is some abstract interpersonal glitch. Here, Brooks calls it "distrust," while others (including Brooks, elsewhere) call it a "bubble" or "tribalism" or "hostility" or what have you. The simplest way to understand this is that to the elite media figures who occupy this position, our worst (and, indeed, only) problem is disagreement. If we all agreed, everything would be fine.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. The social fabric is not woven by leaders from above. It is woven at every level, through a million caring actions, from one person to another. It is woven by people fulfilling their roles as good friends, neighbors, and citizens.</blockquote>
<br />Enter the paleoconservative argument for "small government," rephrased for a new generation - or is this a step beyond? Sensible Centrists generally dislike the idea of policy solutions to public problems, and Brooks in particular has suggested that his ideal system features a largely symbolic federal government. Later, we'll get a glimpse at what Brooks thinks the government should be allowed to do.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
5. Whenever I treat another person as if he were a stereotype, I've ripped the social fabric. When I treat another person as an infinite soul, I have woven the social fabric. Whenever I lie, abuse, dismiss or show easy contempt for a person, I have ripped the fabric. Whenever I see someone truly, and make them feel known, I have woven the fabric. Whenever I accuse someone of corruption without evidence, I have ripped the social fabric. Whenever I disagree without maligning motives, I have woven it. Whenever I ignore the legacy of racial injustice, I rip the fabric; whenever I acknowledge the brute facts of the past and try to rectify them, I weave it. The social fabric is created through an infinity of small moral acts, and it can be destroyed by a series of immoral ones.</blockquote>
<br />Leaving aside the meat of this point (which is ample, fatty and rancid), I'd like to take a break from analyzing the content and look at the writing. I've occasionally played up great dismay at finding some small yet glaring error in someone's writing, but it's not because I actually care about things like dialogue tags or slightly mangled aphorisms. Rather, I'm told that <i>editors</i> care about those things and that <i>I</i> should care as well, and that if I leave such a trivial error in then it's my fault that I was rejected. I'm angry at such things because they would be mortal sins in my own writing but personally, I don't give a shit.<br /><br />This passage, though? This I care about. This is a nightmare paragraph.<br /><br />At first glance, this is another fine example of Brooks' fondness for willful repetition, but it's actually worse than that. Read carefully and you'll see that this is another Goofus-Gallant comparison, with the sentences switching back and forth between "ripping" and "weaving." If you didn't notice that, that's okay - blame Brooks. This whole paragraph scans really badly. Readers tend to skim over long sections of text, which is why we teach people to structure persuasive passages in specific ways. That's why the first sentence of a paragraph gives the topic of the paragraph - it greatly increases ease of reading.<br /><br />So what is the topic of this point? A person reading quickly might read the first sentence - Whenever I treat another person as if he were a stereotype, I've ripped the social fabric - and think "Ah, Brooks is lecturing those distrustful people" and skip to point six. In doing so, he completely misses the comparisons which are the meat of this paragraph. And even if he tries to read the whole thing, he still might get lost - the positive and negative sentences start the same way, which makes it very easy to lose your place or skip something. It's a serious readability issue.<br /><br />There are several possible fixes. He could have moved the last sentence to the beginning, which is clearly where it belongs. He also could have split this into several smaller points consisting of one matched pair of rip/weave statements. My gut says that this was how it started, but there was a serious eye-roll risk when people saw four of these things in a row.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
6. Personal transformation and social transformation happen simultaneously. When you reach out and build community, you nourish yourself.</blockquote>
<br />Then I saw this and wondered if he'd referred to relationships as "nourishing" before, and he has - but only a few times in this piece, and in more than one context. It feels less like a motif and more like a sign that he wrote this over a fairly long period of time and never went back over it. He has a "great" idea, leaves the manifesto idle for a few days, then has that same "great" idea again. A lot of writers have this problem, especially when editing. I can't tell you how often I've inserted a killer line into a chapter during a rewrite, only to discover in a few minutes that the same line was already in the text a page or two later. This is why a reread is always a good idea if you care about the craft.<br /><br />David Brooks does not care about the craft. His writing is artless, unclear and bloated because he has little interest in developing his "calling" now that he's already established. This is why I'm giving him shit over that "vocation" line. He can't see his own flaws through the unearned praise he gets.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
7. The ultimate faith of relationalism is that we are all united at the deepest levels. At the surface we have our glorious diversity. But at the substrate there is a commonality that no amount of hostility can ever fully extinguish, that no amount of division can ever fully sunder.</blockquote>
<br />"Glorious diversity" is such an affluent white suburbanite turn of phrase, isn't it? You can see here a bit of Brooks' longing for that new golden age of 2002-04. It's sort of paradise as envisioned in 2000's-era corporate marketing materials - people in a variety of hues all agreeing on the greatness of their institution. No disagreement, no hostility...except for those people who do disagree, but they're enemies anyway.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
8. Relationships do not scale. They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance. But norms do scale. When people in a community cultivate caring relationships, and do so repeatedly in a way that gets communicated to others, then norms are established. Trustworthy action is admired; empathy is celebrated. Cruelty is punished and ostracized. Neighborliness becomes the default state. An emergent system, a culture, has been created that subtly guides all the members in certain directions. People within a moral ecology are given a million subtle nudges to either live up to their full dignity or sink to their base cravings. The moral ecology is the thing we build together through our daily decisions.</blockquote>
<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
9. Rebuilding society is not just get-togetherism, convening people in some intellectually or morally neutral way. There has to be a shift in moral culture, a shift in the definition of the good life people imagine together.</blockquote>
<br />"Moral ecology" is definitely a recycled phrase from <i>The Road to Character</i>. He loves using "moral" as an adjective for everything, perhaps because he thinks that you have to use the word moral to be moral - remember when he made that argument? Good times.<br /><br />These two points and the next are the most important ones in this section, for we see the definition of Brooks' ideal society, and it's actually fairly radical. In his utopia, problems are primarily solved through social pressures and morality plays - we won't need all those filthy government initiatives if everyone was nice, dammit. At first brush, this sounds oddly anarchistic (specifically, social anarchism), but anarchism is rooted in the belief that people are innately good and Brooks doesn't believe that. Historically, conservatives used the everyone-is-evil presumption to justify exercising more control over people's lives, so how can Brooks use the same argument in defense of less control?<br /><br />The answer to this conundrum lies in the works of Rod Dreher. Unlike those biographies that he almost certainly skims to look intelligent, I believe that Brooks read <i>The Benedict Option</i> cover-to-cover and was really inspired by it. His recent obsession with "localism" and neighborhoods obviously comes from Dreher, and it's likely that this pseudo-anarchism has a similar source. Dreher, who fears the "secular" government, imagined that you could build an ideal society around an institution (namely, a church) and you wouldn't really need so much government. Brooks merely lifted that idea and incorporated it into his own, much mushier beliefs. He doesn't want less control, he just wants a different power structure.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
10. The state has an important but incomplete role to play in this process. The state can provide services, but it cannot easily provide care. That is to say, the state can redistribute money to the poor, can build homeless shelters and day care centers. It can create the material platforms on which relationships can be built. But the state can't create the intimate relationships that build a fully functioning person. That can only happen through habitual personal contact. It is only through relationships that we become neighbors, workers, citizens, and friends.</blockquote>
<br />Finally, we have the government's actual role in all of this. Brooks hates talking about policy, and this bit of vapor is still more detail than we usually get. For the record, Brooks recently wrote a column where he went into even more detail. The original post broke down this column, but there's just not much there - a collection of paleocon compromise positions (e.g. non-striking "worker's councils" instead of unions), faux-pragmatic centrist hobby horses (e.g. the "let's pay to move them all to North Dakota" bit, which seems like it contradicts the whole localism thing, but whatever), and typical non-specific mush.<br /><br />The most interesting bit was a statement about letting neighbors judge each other. The original post ended with a spiel about that, but then Brooks wrote another column that pissed me off more than they usually do so I'll probably end up rolling that into its own post. Suffice it to say that Brooksland isn't exactly "unified" - his dream world is a nation broken up into a hundred thousand HOAs ruled over by local elites, all held together by a modern <i>noblesse oblige</i> and a common national myth and overseen by a primarily symbolic federal government, the Congress reduced to a panel of philosophers and storytellers keeping all these new fiefs from invading each other.<br /><br />But it is even this extensive? Rod Dreher is a man who talks in miles but acts in inches, and Brooks is the same way. He isn't actually calling for any big changes in the government, certainly nothing that would change his own life (which he clearly finds satisfying). In true conservative fashion, he wants everything to stop, move back a few step and stay there. True, he'd like it if the peasants were more deferential to their betters, but he'll be happy if they just stop agitating.<br /><br />David Brooks isn't an anarchist anymore than Rod Dreher was. Brooks still envisions control, but he rejects a codified system in favor of informal, de facto control based around tradition. If you don't believe me, well...wait a month, I'm sure Ross Douthat will tactlessly pen a column openly expressing all of this. I suspect that he's been reading from Brooks' book collection and typing out the notes in the margins by mistake.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-41246736189860586492019-03-08T06:06:00.000-08:002019-03-08T06:06:10.012-08:00The Relationalist Manifesto p. 4 - The Good LifeMy plan for this section was to avoid jabbing Brooks too much and instead look at what he's saying in a vacuum. First, it's just better argument. <a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tu_quoque" target="_blank"><i>Tu quoque</i></a> - the fact that Brooks isn't following his own advice doesn't have any direct bearing on whether that advice is any good. Additionally, I want to avoid being a hypocrite myself, as it wouldn't do to mock Brooks for being repetitive and then say the same thing over and over.<br />
<br />
There's one problem - this section is pretty much the same thing over and over, with only the occasional flicker of something novel. I pondered a few ways to address this while keeping to a reasonable word could and finally settled upon a system based on an alphabetic code. My arguments are below; I will enter the letter(s) under each of Brooks' point, followed by novel content where appropriate.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><b>A.</b> Most of what Brooks says is very generic and anodyne. This is part and parcel of the "Why not plant a tree?" argument used by Sensible Centrist pundits to downplay the importance of political activism and the role of disagreement in a democratic society. The problem is not that this advice is bad, it's that it has little relevance in context. "People should be nicer and not chase after possessions" is good advice in the same sense as "People should exercise more" and "People should save their money" are good advice - sure, in some general sense, but those may not be the solutions to your audience's problems. It doesn't help that "Don't be a materialist" is a line that's been a staple of every self-help guru and newspaper columnist going back a good fifty years, and yet everyone (Brooks included) treats it like a bold declaration.</li>
<li><b>B.</b> Brooks' more specific advice is only truly relevant to the economic and cultural elites. This wouldn't be a problem except that Brooks seems to think that his audience consists of all Americans, not merely the affluent and connected. For example, his advice to seek a meaningful career rather than a high-status one isn't going to mean much for my friends who have to take whatever job is available just to survive, and his cautioning against marrying for status is irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans for whom this is not an option at all. Basically, Brooks is a upper crust lifestyle columnist who thinks he's a man of the people because he's been to Pennsylvania a few times.</li>
</ul>
All right, let's rock.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. The relationalist is not trying to dominate life by sheer willpower.
He is not gripping the steering wheel and trying to strategize his
life. He has made himself available. He has opened himself up so that he
can hear a call and respond to a summons. He is asking, What is my
responsibility here? When a person finds his high calling in life, it
doesn’t feel like he has taken control; it feels like he has surrendered
control. The most creative actions are those made in response to a
summons. </blockquote>
This is straight out of <i>The Road to Character</i> - from the beginning, in fact, Chapter 2. It's probably meant as a rejoinder to people who lead carefully planned lives (so <b>B</b> goes here), but if you take it literally it turns into an argument for doing nothing but sit around until some external force acts upon you - like a jellyfish. This is the fun of bad writing, you can read it however you want and it's still fair.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. The summons often comes in the form of love. A person falls in love
with her child, her husband, her neighborhood, her people, her calling,
or her God. And with that love comes an urge to make promises–to say, I
will always love you. I will always serve you and be there for you. Life
is a vale of promise making.</blockquote>
<b>A.</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. Or a summons may come in the form of a need. There is some injustice,
some societal wrong, that needs to be fixed. A person assumes
responsibility—makes a promise to fight that fight and right that wrong.<b><br /></b></blockquote>
A funny sentiment, given Brooks' apprehension over activists and activism. He has to say this because there have been some political figures among his Great Men. It seems that in his philosophy, there is bad activism that is just a "moral patch" used by shallow people and good activism which is...well...Dave?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. When a summons has been felt and a promise has been made, a commitment
has been sealed. The life of a relationalist is defined by its
commitments. The quality and fulfillment of her life will be defined by
what she commits to and how she fulfills those commitments.</blockquote>
<b>A. </b>As opposed to other people who are constantly betraying each other, I suppose.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
5. A commitment is a promise made from love. A commitment is a promise made
without expecting any return (though there will be returns aplenty). A
committed relationship is a two-way promise. It is you throwing yourself
wholeheartedly for another and another throwing himself wholeheartedly
for you.</blockquote>
"Returns aplenty" - I guess true sacrifice is only for the poor and the old. Also, how can his writing be both excessively flowery and stultifyingly stiff at the same time?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
6. The person makes his commitments maximal commitments. He doesn’t just
have a career; he has a vocation. He doesn’t just have a contract
marriage (What’s in it for me?). He has a covenantal marriage (I live
and die for you). He doesn’t just have opinions. He submits to a creed.
He doesn’t just live in a place. He helps build a community.
Furthermore, he is not just committed to this abstract notion of
“community.” He is committed to a specific community, to a specific
person, to a specific creed—things grounded in particular times and
places.</blockquote>
<b>B.</b> This was obligatory. Note how hard he's hitting on that "community" aspect, which he never quite defines (yet, anyway).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
7. By committing and living up to the daily obligations of his commitments,
the person integrates himself into a coherent whole. Commitments
organize the hours and the days of a life. A committed person achieves
consistency across time. His character is built through the habitual
acts of service to the people he loves. His character is built by being
the humble recipient of other people’s gifts and thus acknowledging his
own dependency. A contract gets you benefits, but a commitment
transforms who you are.</blockquote>
Organization and consistency, huh? Really breaking away from that structured upper class life, I see.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
8. Relationalists prioritize those actions that deepen commitment, build
relationships and enhance human dignity: giving, storytelling, dance,
singing, common projects, gathering, dining, ritual, deep conversation,
common prayer, forgiveness, creating beauty, mutual comfort in times of
sadness and threat, mutual labor for the common good.</blockquote>
<b>A. B.</b> Apparently Brooks thinks he needs to tell his target audience to enjoy music, conversation and food. This is where we are, apparently, a man getting lots of money to write a book where he advises people on how fun dancing is. But do the members of the upper crust really need to know this? I thought all those folks ever did was go to dinner parties and chat.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
9. The relational life is an open adventure. There are always ups and down,
the forces of impersonalization warring against the forces of
personalization. What matters is how you serve relationships through the
ups and downs. It’s in the how. The profundity is in the adverbs.</blockquote>
I genuinely have no idea what this paragraph is about, although "the profundity is in the adverbs" is one of the worst sentences I have ever read. It scans clumsily, sits in the paragraph awkwardly, and really should have been deleted hastily had the editor not approached her work so glumly and been in a hurry to drink aggressively.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
10. A committed life involves some common struggles.</blockquote>
A one sentence topic paragraph. Bravo.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
11. It is, for example, a constant struggle to see people at their full
depths. In the business of daily life there is the constant temptation
to see the other person as an object and not a whole. There is the
constant temptation to label and generalize. There is the constant
temptation to reduce people to data and to see them as data points. You
can count apples with data. You can track human behavior in the mass.
But there is something that is unique and irreplaceable about each
person that data cannot see. The relationalist tries to see each
individual as a whole person—as a body, mind, heart, and soul.</blockquote>
<b>A. </b>Something of a funny sentiment from a man who has given speeches on behaviorism as recently as 2016, but there I go, attacking Brooks again. As to the argument...Brooks really seems to believe that most Americans are literally sociopaths. If people are scrutinizing each other as sets of data points, then they aren't shallow, they're robots. If this is how Brooks sees the world, then it would explain a whole lot.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
12. There is the constant struggle to communicate well. At every moment
there is either a depth of communication or a shallowness of
communication. The relationalist seeks conditions that will make
communication deep and pure. This is hard because there’s something in
ourselves that eludes our ability to communicate it. There is something
proper about modesty and the slow unveiling of one’s self. To achieve
I–Thou communication, even to glimpse it, the relationalist sits
patiently as vulnerabilities are gradually revealed. She offers safety
and respect. Sometimes what is deepest is related in the form of myth,
story, and music. When communication fails or is corrupted, the French
philosopher Emmanuel Mounier says, I suffer a loss of myself.</blockquote>
My first thought was "a writer and pundit who thinks it's hard to communicate? Wow, you sure picked the right vocation." My second thought was a question - does <i>The Second Mountain</i> have a guide to communicating? Really? With all that "calling" talk, I assumed that Brooks was trying to get his readers to break out of a structured life, but it seems like his ideal life is still highly regimented.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
13. There is the constant struggle to live as an effective giver and
receiver of gifts. There are millions of people around us whose lives
are defined by generosity and service. Personal being, Mounier
continues, is essentially generous. But our society does not teach us
how to be an effective giver of gifts. The schools don’t emphasize it.
The popular culture is confused about it.</blockquote>
So...I'm guessing that "giving gifts" is more in that Christian sense of sharing one's talents than it is about literal present giving. I'm going to assume that, anyway. How is the "popular culture is confused about it", exactly? To Brooks, it seems, there is a wrong way to be generous, much like there is a wrong way to be an activist. My guess is that there's a paragraph to explain that, probably with frequent use of the word "institution" and at least one Burke quote.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
14. It is a constant struggle to see life through a moral lens. The
practical workaday world primes the utilitarian lens. Consumerism calls
forth a self that is oriented around material pleasure. Money has an
anonymous power and tends to render the person on the other side of a
transaction invisible. Workplace rivalries and modern politics require
armored individuals—human tanks with no exposure. The effort to fight
the utilitarian lens and see daily life through a moral lens is a hard
and never-ending struggle.</blockquote>
<b>B </b>(I guess?)<b>. </b>He really does think that the average person
is a sociopath, doesn't he? This is, in part, the <i>de rigeur</i> "Partisanship is out of control" bit that's in every unreadable centrist book, but it mostly takes off of Brooks' assumption that we are all "hyper-individiualistic" actors slitting each other's throats in a winner-take-all scramble for promotions at work. Maybe the members of the American overclass
really are that monstrous, but I assure you that most people do not approach
every interaction with the intent of maximizing utility. Many of us
aren't even in a position to <i>be</i> that cynically calculated, and <i>rivalries</i>? Really? This mindset that assumes that all Americans are in an unceasing competition to destroy each other is the same one that tells you that Americans need to be told that music and dancing are fun.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
15. These struggles are not against other people. The line between ego and
soul runs down the middle of every person. Most of us, from time to
time, buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for
relationship. Most of us, from time to time, hue to a code of privacy
that prevents us from actually knowing the people who live right nearby.
Most of us live with technology that aims to reduce friction and
maximize efficiency. Relationship, though, is inherently sticky and
inefficient. Most of us, daily, slip back into self-absorption, succumb
to the hunger for status, and have to recognize that and dive back into
relation.</blockquote>
<b>B. </b>And again with the assumption that everyone is so status-obsessed that we neglect to...hold on, what's that in the fourth sentence? "hue to a code of privacy"? "<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hew%20to" target="_blank">Hue to</a>"?<br />
<br />
"HUE TO"?!?!?!?<br />
<br />
You slack-ass motherfucker, never talk about "vocation" again! EVER! You want to know what commitment to something looks like? Huh? It's editing the first five pages of a manuscript twenty times because one tiny error and everyone will reject it. It's running it through word analysis because you're afraid you might be a bit repetitive (yes, Dave, for most writers that's a <i>bad</i> thing). It's sweating over sentences, dialogue, character description, not just for errors but for writing that's too blunt or too trite or too flowery. And it's doing this even after someone has the good grace to request to see it because it's never good enough <i>for you</i>.<br />
<br />
...Sorry, I seem to have lost focus there. Are we almost done?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
16. The relationalist life is an evolving conversation between self and
society. It’s always balancing tensions and trying to live life in
graceful balance.</blockquote>
"Balance." Meaning that once again, Dave has found the center and claimed it for his own.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
17. The relational life is a challenging life but ultimately it’s a joyful
life, because it is enmeshed in affection and crowned with moral joy.</blockquote>
I promised I wouldn't, but he's inviting me in - how do you know it's so joyful, Dave? You're not following it. You never have.<br />
<br />
I wanted to analyze this from a purely philosophical standpoint, but there's just not that much to say. This might be good advice in another time and place...I don't know, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi" target="_blank">Japan in the 80s</a>, or maybe even the U.S. during the same period, but what's the relevance now? It's really easy to mock that "music is fun and food is good" bit, but it's there because Brooks assumes that the average person is so dedicated to building status that he <i>ignores </i>those things. These days, if someone is working such long hours that he doesn't have time to enjoy life, it's less likely that he's gunning for that big promotion and more likely that he's trying to pay his rent or cover someone's medical bills.<br />
<br />
That's the thing - Dave keeps discovering these "great" pieces of advice that are common sense to most people. How many people need to be told that it's good to have close friends? Or to love your spouse? Or to help out your neighbors if they need it? I can think of a few explanations. Either David Brooks genuinely believes that we are a nation of Patrick Batemans and we're just fortunate that we're not tripping over the bodies when we walk down the sidewalk; or the upper class really <i>is</i> like that and Brooks knows something we don't; or Brooks has found out that he can get money and accolades for absolutely anything.<br />
<br />
The most generous read I can give is that Brooks is trying to address those people who've led highly planned and structured lives, telling them that there's more to life than work and brown-nosing, and the rest of us just got pulled along for the ride. Even then, though, his advice is not that they shed the structure, but merely tweak it a bit. It's places like this where you can really see how Rod Dreher has influenced Brooks as of late.<br />
<br />
Next time: "The Good Society."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-65210169493800992202019-03-04T08:31:00.001-08:002019-03-04T08:31:34.514-08:00The Relationalist Manifesto p. 3 - The Process of Becoming a PersonA prelude: Two years ago, Brooks did an Aspen speech that pretty well laid the groundwork for this book. It's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PertBYAnQok" target="_blank">here</a>, but I really recommending not watching that as it is stunningly boring, with such a high concentration of quotes that even Brooks seems a little bored by it. However, it does show the evolution (such as it is) of this section, which is about changes.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. The central journey of modern life is moving self to service. We start
out listening to the default settings of the ego and gradually learn to
listen to the higher callings of the heart and soul.</blockquote>
I was actually wondering about this myself - <i>The Second Mountain</i> is, like <i>The Road to Character</i>, a self-help book masquerading as a political treatise, but so much of the hype centers on something both Brooks and I have observed rich people doing - spending their later years seeking some kind of meaning. I would actually read a book that was more a study of this phenomenon, but Brooks is presenting it as advice, which, uh...if this is natural and people are doing it anyway, why do we need to buy your book?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. Much of modern social thought, drawing on thinkers such as Machiavelli,
Hobbes, and modern economics, sees human beings as fundamentally
selfish. Children, Freud wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel
their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” Most of
modern thought was written by men, and often a certain sort of alpha
men, who did not even see the systems of care that undergirded the
societies in which they lived.</blockquote>
Yep, two first entries - Aspen has a formatting error that no one's caught yet. Anyway, this is the first head-on condemnation of modernism we've seen, but probably not the last. As with Dreher and a lot of conservative writers, Brooks' philosophy rests heavily on prelapsarian dogma. He doesn't go as far back as Dreher, but name-checking Hobbes means that the Fall was at least a few hundred years ago.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. Relationalism asserts that human beings are both fundamentally broken
but also splendidly endowed. We have egoistic self-interested desires,
and we need those desires in order to accomplish some of the necessary
tasks of life: to build an identity, to make a mark on the world, to
break away from parents, to compete, create and to shine. Our savage
impulses to dominate, rape, murder and destroy are written across the
annals of history. But relationalism asserts that there are other,
deeper parts of ourselves. There are motivations that are even stronger
than self-interest, even if they are more elusive. There are capacities
that can tame the savage lusts and subdue the beasts that remain inside.
At the deepest center of each person there is what we call,
metaphorically, the heart and soul.</blockquote>
That "broken but splendidly endowed" line sounded familiar, so I did a few searches, and...well, it was in <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-road-to-character-chapter-10-big-me.html" target="_blank"><i>The Road to Character</i></a>, but dates at least back to a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/opinion/david-brooks-when-cultures-shift.html" target="_blank">column he wrote in 2015</a> that was dedicated to hyping <i>The Road to Character</i>. He really did write the same book twice, didn't he? And I know I'm making too much of this, but here's the thing - I'm always afraid I overuse phrases, so I run every manuscript through text analysis to find weaknesses. That's too much effort for Mr. Vocation Matters, though.<br />
<br />
Oh, and if certain words in there popped out at you, and you found yourself saying "He's not going to write about rape, is he?" in a mortified whisper, well...you might want to skip entry 4.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. The heart is that piece of us that longs for fusion with others. We are
not primarily thinking creatures; we are primarily loving and desiring
creatures. We are defined by what we desire. We become what we love. The
core question for each of us is: Have we educated our emotions to love
the right things in the right way?</blockquote>
Just a reminder that this man was giving speeches on behaviorism and neuroscience as recently as 2016.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. The soul is the piece of us that gives each person infinite dignity and
worth. Slavery is wrong because it obliterates a soul. Rape is not just
an assault on physical molecules; it obliterates another soul. The soul
yearns for goodness. Each human being wants to lead a good and
meaningful life, and feels life falling apart when it seems meaningless.</blockquote>
And there it is, "an assault on physical molecules" that "obliterates a soul." I will leave analyzing the lack of taste here as an exercise for the reader.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
5. A child is born with both ego and heart and soul on full display. But
for many people, around adolescence, the ego begins to swell, and the
heart and soul recede. People at this age need to establish an identity,
to carve a self. Meanwhile, our society tells adolescent boys to bury
their emotions and become men. It tells little girls that if they reveal
the true depths of themselves, nobody will like them. Our public
culture, normalizes selfishness, rationalizes egoism, and covers over
and renders us inarticulate about the deeper longings of the heart and
soul.</blockquote>
Oh sweet mercy, why is this so badly written? The latter half is pretty stock gender studies stuff you might hear from any number of liberals (you know, the ones who are As Bad As Trump), but that first few sentences..."the ego begins to swell"? Is this a fucking first draft? Also, teenagers don't have souls? Citation Needed?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
6. But eventually most people realize that something is missing in the
self-interested life. They achieve worldly success and find it
unsatisfying. Or perhaps they have fallen in love, or been loved in a
way that plows open the crusty topsoil of life and reveals the true
personality down below. Or perhaps they endure a period of failure,
suffering, or grief that carves through the surface and reveals the vast
depths underneath. One way or another, people get introduced to the
full depths of themselves, the full amplitude of life. They realize that
only emotional, moral, and spiritual food can provide the nourishment
they crave.</blockquote>
"The crusty topsoil of..." Oh, forget it. Anyway, this is from the Aspen speech. There, alongside hollow material success, he includes a series of things that might lead to a revelation of the hollowness of modern life, including <i>the death of a child</i>. He put that next to the ennui of having too much money and not enough to do. This man is claiming that <i>other people</i> have no souls.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
7. When a person has undergone one of these experiences, which can happen
at any age, she is no longer just an individual; she has become a
person. Her whole personhood is alive and engaged. She has discovered,
down at the substrate, her infinite ability to care. Relationalism is a
worldview that guides and encourages us as we undertake this personal
transformation, surpassing the desires of the ego and taking on a bigger
journey.</blockquote>
Again, this is from the Aspen speech. While he does include that "any age" caveat there, he more specifically claims that this usually happens at age 30, at which point one starts to seek meaning. So what happens when we map that back onto Brooks' life? When he was in his 30s, he was in Brussels doing the closest thing to legitimate journalism he's ever attempted. Apparently, being the Dave Barry of the Republican donor class was more spiritually fulfilling than that.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
8. The movement toward becoming a person is downward and then outward: To
peer deeper into ourselves to that place where we find the yearnings for
others, and then outward in relationship toward the world. A person
achieves self-mastery, Maritain wrote, for the purpose of self-giving.</blockquote>
So you go inward to go outward, and that's how you avoid being outward focused. Right.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
9. An individual who has become a person has staged a rebellion. She rebels
against the individualistic ethos and all the systems of impersonalism.
Society tells her to want independence, but she has declared her
interdependence. Society says we live in a materialist reality, but she
says we live in an enchanted reality. Society tells her to keep her
options open, but she says, No, I will commit. I will root myself down.
Society says, Try to rise above and be better than; she says, No, I will
walk with, serve, and come in under. Society says, Cultivate with the
self-interested side of your life; she says, No, I will cultivate the
whole of myself. Society says build your own identity; she says I build
my identity by honoring my relationships. Life goes well only when you
are living with the whole of yourself.</blockquote>
I don't know why Brooks loves this particular literary device - you know, the thing where each sentence starts with the same word for <i>six consecutive sentences</i> - but he sure does. I wonder where he stole it.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
10. The relationalist doesn’t walk away from the capitalist meritocracy, the
systems of mainstream life. But she balances that worldview with a
countervailing ethos that supplements, corrects, and ennobles. She walks
in that world, with all its pleasures and achievements, but with a
different spirit, a different approach, and different goals. She is
communal where the world is too individual. She is more emotional when
the world is too cognitive. She is moral when the world is too
utilitarian.</blockquote>
And there's the rub - you don't have to give anything up, you don't have to change your life, you just have to <i>tweak</i> your outlook a bit. Quite the "revolution" you boys at Aspen are fomenting. This is another clear influence from Dreher, who spoke the language of monasticism but then opted to stay in the filthy modern world after all. And why not? What makes these guys angry about liberals and leftists is that those are the people telling them that change must come, to them or to society. One writing books for people who fear change will not receive great reviews if that book advises change.<br />
<br />
Next time: Wait, this part has 17 bullets?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-25781434860460201532019-02-28T07:04:00.001-08:002019-02-28T07:04:09.532-08:00The Relationalist Manifesto p. 2 - RelationalismContinuing with the <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-relationalist-manifesto/" target="_blank">book advertisement/manifesto for David Brooks' Aspen project</a>, we have the Gallant to the previously submitted Goofus ideology, which bears the clumsy name "relationalism." Really, Dave? What you're talking about has a name already - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism" target="_blank"><i>communitarianism</i></a>. I've heard you use it, even. If I didn't know better, I would swear that this was some shallow attempt to grab cheap glory by claiming to have discovered something that political scientists have been discussing for decades.<br />
<br />
Whatever, let's just get this out of the way.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. The revolution will be moral, or it will not be at all. Modern society
needs a moral ecology that rejects the reigning hyper-individualism of
the moment. We need to articulate a creed that puts relation, not the
individual, at the center, and which articulates, in clear form, the
truths we all know: that we are formed by relationship, we are nourished
by relationship, and we long for relationship. Life is not a solitary
journey. It is building a home together. It is a process of being formed
by attachments and then forming attachments in turn. It is a great
chain of generations passing down gifts to one another.</blockquote>
"Revolution" - for God's sake, you guys are curating video clips. In any case, this sets up the next set of points spelling out the basis for something that is entirely distinct from the many, <i>many</i> forms of communitarianism chronicled in academic circles and by contemporary journalists. Most interesting to me is the last line, the "great chain of generations," a word choice that recalls the medieval philosophical construct called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being" target="_blank">great chain of being</a> that envisioned all life as a giant hierarchy with God at the top and dirt at the bottom. Humans were in the middle but, to steal from Orwell, some were more equal than others.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. The hyper-individualist sees society as a collection of individuals who
contract with one another. The relationalist sees society as a web of
connections that in many ways that precede choice. A hyper-individualist
sees the individual as an self-sufficient unit. The relationalist says,
A person a node in a network; a personality is a movement toward
others.</blockquote>
Again, this is absolutely an argument against capitalism - not "consumerism" or "unbalanced capitalism," but the very idea of an economic system built on competition. Don't worry, Dave has more Commie-off later in the list.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. As a child, each person’s emotional and spiritual foundation is formed
by the unconditional love of a caring adult. Each person’s personality
and character is formed by the dance of interactions between herself and
a loving adult. “We” precedes “me.”</blockquote>
Unlike Brooks, I've never <a href="https://www.aspenideas.org/session/neuroscience-and-sociology" target="_blank">given a speech on behaviorism</a> (<a href="https://www.aspenideas.org/session/nudging-how-behavioral-science-conquered-world" target="_blank">Twice</a>!) so all I have is what I've read, but I'm pretty sure that this is scientifically bullshit. The development of empathy is a process with many steps. For example, to feel bad for another person's pain, you must first understand that others feel pain like you do, attributing your own experiences to them - a trait known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind" target="_blank">theory of mind</a>. Infants simply don't possess this understanding from birth. We're all born knowing only ourselves and other things come with time. I've heard actual experts on early childhood development say that children pass through a phase of understanding that we would call sociopathy if held by an adult.<br />
<br />
Maybe I'm dead wrong - after all, this man was paid to give speeches on <i>science</i>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
5. The best adult life is lived by making commitments and staying faithful
to those commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a
philosophy or faith, to a community. Adult life is about making promises
to others, being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is
found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts.</blockquote>
You have no idea how hard it is not to swing with all my might at these slow pitches.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
6. Relationalism is a middle way between hyper-individualism and
collectivism. The former detaches the person from all deep connection.
The latter obliterates the person within the group, and sees groups as
faceless herds. The relationalist sees each person as a node in a thick
and enchanted web of warm commitments. She seeks to build a
neighborhood, nation and world of diverse and creative people who have
made commitments in a flowering of different ways, who are nonetheless
bound together by sacred chords.</blockquote>
And here's the Commie-off, the obligatory prayer to the God of Bothsiderism. I must point out one amazing line - "thick
and enchanted web of warm commitments." It reminds me of Megan McArdle's "<a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-upside-of-down-chapter-7-part-1.html" target="_blank">oceanic pity</a>," but unlike McArdle I don't think this is attributable to a lack of empathy as much as it is a lack of talent.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
7. Relationalism is not a system of ideas. It is a way of life.
Relationalism is a viewpoint that draws from many sources, from Edmund
Burke and Martin Luther King, Jr., from Martin Buber and Dorothy Day and
Walt Whitman, from Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Martha Nussbaum,
and Annie Dillard to Gandhi and Josiah Royce.</blockquote>
"Not a system of ideas," i.e. not an <i>ideology</i>. People with ideologies are wrong and stupid; we have <i>common sense</i>, we're above that. So were all these people whom I will pretend would have supported me. And yes, of course Burke is on this list, and putting him next to MLK (a <i>socialist</i>, mind) is really special.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
8. The hyper-individualist operates by a straightforward logic: I make
myself strong and I get what I want. The relationalist says: Life
operates by an inverse logic. I possess only when I give. I lose myself
to find myself. When I surrender to something great, that’s when I am
strongest and most powerful.</blockquote>
So what, exactly, have you given, Dave?<br />
<br />
Next time: How to become a person.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-45572790264107828602019-02-26T05:10:00.001-08:002019-02-26T17:56:23.904-08:00The Relationalist Manifesto p. 1 - Hyper-IndividualismEvery time I think I'm out, they pull me back in...And here I was thinking that I had a nice list of very good excuses not to read <i>The Second Mountain</i> by David Fucking Brooks, and here <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-relationalist-manifesto/" target="_blank">the Aspen Institute</a> posts what's sure to be the best part of it on their website for free. We all know that the center of the book is going to be borderline plagiarism and recycled content, the bookends are the only parts anyone will actually care about, and here someone goes and spoils the ending.<br />
<br />
Okay, so you all know this I'm sure, but Brooks is involved in some Aspen nonsense called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. To these cynical eyes, this appears to consist of a bunch of think tank types tracking down do-gooders who've been helping their communities for ages, claiming they constitute a "movement," giving that movement a name and then taking all the credit. A bit offensive, perhaps, but there are certainly more destructive things that rich people can do with their excess money, and it's not like I'm among the few thousand movers-and-shakers in the target audience for this thing.<br />
<br />
The only thing I care about here is the "manifesto" that is just the last chapter to <i>The Second Mountain</i>. It takes the form of a list - hey, just like the one that ended <a href="http://illit.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-road-to-character-chapter-10-big-me.html" target="_blank"><i>The Road to Character</i></a>! Boy, Mr. Vocation Matters is really pushing the envelope. It's long, too - well, not by manifesto terms, but it is about 75 points spread across 7 sections totaling around 5800 words. I plan to do a breakdown of each of these (I might combine the shorter ones), but keeping in character with the author, these will be shallow dives.<br />
<br />
So a little recap: I've wasted a disgusting amount of time trying to figure exactly what Brooks' ideal world looks like. What I've landed on so far is an upscaled right-communitarian system in which towns and neighborhoods are ruled over by local elites in a top-down manner while a largely symbolic national government spends its time creating cultural myths to bind the tens of thousands of little autonomous communities together. So basically it's the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty" target="_blank">Zhou dynasty</a>, which did keep it going for a long time before they all killed each other - but hey, every system has its problems. We'll see if I'm right as we advance. <br />
<br />
Ready? Okay, the first two sections are I guess his first principles, identifying the Goofuses and Gallants in his worldview. In the first section, "Hyper-Individualism," we meet our Goofus:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. There is always a balance between self and society. In some ages the
pressures of the group become stifling and crush the self, and
individuals feel a desperate need to break free and express their
individuality. In our age, by contrast, the self is inflated and the
collective is weak. We have swung too far in the direction of
individualism. The result is a loss of connection—a crisis of
solidarity.</blockquote>
This is definitely his first principle, the idea that we're all monsters. The next eleven points are clarifying what he means by this, so I won't dwell here.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. Hyper-individualism, the reigning ethos of our day, is a system of
morals, feelings, ideas, and practices based on the idea that the
journey through life is an individual journey, that the goals of life
are individual happiness, authenticity, self-actualization, and
self-sufficiency. Hyper-individualism says “I belong to myself and no
one else.”: Hyper-Individualism puts the same question on everybody’s
lips: “What can I do to make myself happy?”</blockquote>
Is this really the "reigning ethos of our day"? Brooks doesn't offer proof for any of his assertions - I assume those are in the beginning of the book, which I can only imagine is as much a factual trainwreck as the first chapter of <i>The Road to Character</i>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. Hyper-individualism rests upon an emancipation story. The heroic self
breaks free from the stifling chains of society. The heroic self leaves
home and community and finds himself by looking inward. The self stands
on its own two feet, determines its own destiny, secures its own
individual rights. Hyper-individualism defines freedom as absence from
restraint.</blockquote>
This really reminded me of that weird bit at the end of <a href="http://illit.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-road-to-character-chapter-10-big-me_5.html" target="_blank"><i>The Road to Character</i></a> where he went on about the tradition of giving a copy of <i>Oh, the Places You'll Go!</i> to recent high school graduates and opted to interpret that not as a message to be confident in the face of a scary world, but as a message that you're better than everyone else. Therein lies the problem with having a model to examine the world - if you're not careful, you wind up seeing patterns where they don't exist.<br />
<br />
As for the statement more generally, I suppose it is accurate, although Brooks has again chosen to look at everything here in the most negative light possible. I can't see how independence (which, in American society, traditionally leads to starting a family) is inherently selfish, but that's just a difference of perspective.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. In this way, hyper-individualism gradually undermines any connection not
based on individual choice—the connections to family, neighborhood,
culture, nation, and the common good. Hyper-individualism erodes our
obligations and responsibilities to others and our kind.</blockquote>
Holy shit, <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-benedict-option-chapter-1-great.html" target="_blank">he stole this from Rod Dreher</a>. I told you they basically believed the same thing, didn't I? All right, maybe it was just laziness (look who we're dealing with), but this is still a logical overlap between Brooks' mushy "pragmatism" and Dreher's not-quite-theoconservatism - a reflexive assumption that anything old is good and anything new is dangerous.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
5. The central problems of our day flow from this erosion: social
isolation, distrust, polarization, the breakdown of family, the loss of
community, tribalism, rising suicide rates, rising mental health
problems, a spiritual crisis caused by a loss of common purpose, the
loss—in nation after nation—of any sense of common solidarity that binds
people across difference, the loss of those common stories and causes
that foster community, mutuality, comradeship, and purpose.</blockquote>
So much to unpack here, and so little evidence provided. Some of this stuff is obvious - the "deaths of despair" he's referencing here are not caused by a shift in some abstract notion, but in the decline of the American manufacturing sector and the loss of both the income and identity that went with those jobs. The "common stories" thing is kind of a running joke about how Brooks seems to think we should replace Congress with a summit of poets or some such. You can hack this one down yourself, I'm sure.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
6. The core flaw of hyper-individualism is that it leads to a degradation
and a pulverization of the human person. It is a system built upon the
egoistic drives within each of us. These are the self-interested
drives—the desire to excel; to make a mark in the world; to rise in
wealth, power, and status; to win victories and be better than others.
Hyper-individualism does not emphasize and eventually does not even see
the other drives—the deeper and more elusive motivations that seek
connection, fusion, service, and care. These are not the desires of the
ego, but the longings of the heart and soul: the desire to live in
loving interdependence with others, the yearning to live in service of
some ideal, the yearning to surrender to a greater good.
Hyper-individualism numbs these deepest longings. Eventually,
hyper-individualism creates isolated, self-interested monads who sense
that something is missing in their lives but cannot even name what it
is.</blockquote>
So it's funny that Brooks is so terrified of socialism, because this is basically an argument against capitalism. The argument <i>for</i> capitalism is that it harnesses the power of self-interest and is therefore superior to any system that requires universal virtue to function. Brooks plainly hates that argument, viewing it as immoral. This goes well beyond his previous claims about success eroding morality and is, instead, a critique of a whole system that could have come out of a critical theory seminar. Of course, Brooksianism is incompatible with any system devised in the last thousand years, but I find this interesting all the same.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
7. Hyper-individualism thrives within the systems of the surface.
Consumerism amputates what is central to the person for the sake of
material acquisition. The meritocracy amputates what is deepest for
individual “success.” Unbalanced capitalism turns people into
utility-maximizing, speeding workaholics that no permanent attachment
can penetrate. </blockquote>
...And here's Brooks taking it back, lest anyone think he's a Commie. His insistence that his problem is with some specific form or type of capitalism; this is sheer bullshit, as capitalism is built around competition and therefore any form would be anathema to him. But of course, it's worth remembering that, historically, the opposite of "capitalism" was not socialism but <i>monarchy</i>, which shows us where he's headed.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
8. The hyper-individualist finds himself enmeshed in a network of
conditional love. I am worthy of being loved only when I have achieved
the status or success the world expects of me. I am worthy of love only
when I can offer the other person something in return. I am what the
world says about me. In the end, hyper-individualism doesn’t make people
self-sufficient and secure. It obliterates emotional and spiritual
security by making everything conditional. It makes people extremely
sensitive to the judgments of others and quick to take offense when they
feel slighted.</blockquote>
"Conditional love" is a term you hear used to describe the parenting style of people with narcissistic personality disorder, a deficit of empathy that causes them to view their children as extensions of themselves. This keeps up the theme of Brooks assuming that the average American (and the average Westerner more generally) is a clinical narcissist, which is an amazing claim given how little evidence he offers.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
9. Hyper-individualism directs people toward false and unsatisfying lives.
Some people lead an aesthetic life. They see their lives as a series of
Instagram experiences which may be pleasant, but which don’t accumulate
into anything because they are not serving a large cause. Some people
become insecure overachievers. They seek to win by accomplishment the
love, admiration, and attachment they can’t get any other way, but of
course no amount of achievement ever gives them the love they crave.</blockquote>
The obligatory fist wave at The Kids These Days With Their Darned Smartphones And Their [INSERT CURRENTLY POPULAR SERVICE HERE]. Note: I'm pretty sure Instagram is not the site <i>du jour</i>, actually.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
10. When you build a whole society on an overly thin view of human nature,
you wind up with a dehumanized culture in which people are starved of
the things they yearn for most deeply.</blockquote>
That could be true, but how does that bear on us?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
11. The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not
commit to some loyalty outside of self leaves no deep mark on the
world.</blockquote>
<i>My</i> obligatory comment about how, by his own standards, Brooks isn't committed to much of anything.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
12. Hyper-individualism leads to tribalism. People eventually rebel against
the isolation and meaninglessness of hyper-individualism by joining a
partisan tribe. This seems like relation but is actually its opposite.
If a healthy community is based on mutual affection, the tribalist
mentality is based on mutual distrust. If a healthy community is based
on an abundance mindset, the tribalist mentality is based on a scarcity
mindset—we’re in a zero-sum struggle of all against all, threat is
everythywhere. If a person in healthy community delights in difference
and celebrates other people’s loyalties, the tribalist seeks to destroy
other loyalties. It is always us versus them, friend or enemy, destroy
or be destroyed. Anger is the mode. The tribalist is seeking connection
but isolates himself ever more bitterly within his own resentments and
animosity. Tribalism is the dark twin of community. The tragic paradox
of hyper-individualism is that what began as an ecstatic liberation ends
up as a war of tribe against tribe that crushes the individuals it
sought to free.</blockquote>
Everything in this enormous paragraph is recycled and has been addressed elsewhere. I'll only comment that I have never understood how it is that one gets from "I'm only in it for me" to "For the good of the <i>volk</i>!" - really feels like there should be a few more dots here. Also, I'm just copy-pasting this, so any errors are on the Aspen Institute site (and presumably in the book, so I hope the editor didn't drink too much).<br />
<br />
Next time: We meet Gallant.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-13776395460701912762019-01-02T06:01:00.000-08:002019-01-02T06:01:06.498-08:00A Brief Update on Whatever David Brooks' Book is Called NowOh, has it been three months since I declared my intention to never read David Brooks' new book? My, the time does pass, and with it comes change. In particular, two things have changed about the book.<br />
<br />
One: A new title. When we last met, this book had the uninspiring title <i>The Committed Life</i>. A month or two ago, it acquired the more interesting and more perplexing title <i>The Second Mountain</i>. We'll get into what the hell that means in a bit.<br />
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Second: With the title firmly decided, it finally has a cover:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgngZTJEnWFZx_Ar6TB6Oo9Bpo4m2GyFP6fl-jZhSPewT_XuQ4y6hzMFZ8_fB-WgoY2D3epxcWHeTdPC6W4NNOLMC0LOAF-hu-UlXNc-cG5OLYldZDBq6c8hiVqGrMh2Rsqdszyl8ASY5Y_/s1600/2ndM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="461" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgngZTJEnWFZx_Ar6TB6Oo9Bpo4m2GyFP6fl-jZhSPewT_XuQ4y6hzMFZ8_fB-WgoY2D3epxcWHeTdPC6W4NNOLMC0LOAF-hu-UlXNc-cG5OLYldZDBq6c8hiVqGrMh2Rsqdszyl8ASY5Y_/s320/2ndM.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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Okay, I'm joking. This is not the cover of <i>The Second Mountain</i>, but rather a cheap mockup that I hacked together in GIMP in fifteen minutes as I waited for the tea to finish. This is the kind of thing I would have put on one of my self-published novels and been quite proud of, but for a professionally published book it's obviously sub-par.</div>
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Here's the real cover:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYurKbx09DFSpz3L_IGNEiQi3VBA_9BHGxlXFIIKyOe4sfAzCj66WMswfQYJ_m2hOYD33s5RPHHBSoCaNbdRhfDNAt-SFaOIZFEUWD22GBhRKQMMKz1FEKAYVX34IzBwduSWfNN51yUnx2/s1600/2ndMReal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="461" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYurKbx09DFSpz3L_IGNEiQi3VBA_9BHGxlXFIIKyOe4sfAzCj66WMswfQYJ_m2hOYD33s5RPHHBSoCaNbdRhfDNAt-SFaOIZFEUWD22GBhRKQMMKz1FEKAYVX34IzBwduSWfNN51yUnx2/s320/2ndMReal.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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Much better.</div>
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Now, I have been keeping tabs on this book, which is to say I check the Random House page about once or twice a month. I have no intention of reading this thing in total, but I do still have the Earnest Lazyman option of reading the first 10% for free on Amazon. I'd say that this is unfair, but on the contrary, it may be the most honest way to read the book. <i>The Road to Character</i> was 90% wasted space - people who cited it focused mostly on the opening and closing chapters which contained Brooks' argument and ignored the rehashed book reports in the middle that only served to justify things that Brooks already believed. It may just be a time saver.</div>
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So the new title, um...what the hell is the second mountain? When I first saw this, I immediately thought of the "seven mountains of culture" that form the basis for what was once called Dominionism, but that's certainly too much of a commitment for Dave. However, it appears that the description on the Random House page has changed slightly. I failed to save a copy of the old version, so I don't know how much of this is really new and how much I just missed, but let's take a look anyway.</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know exactly
why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. </div>
</blockquote>
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If I needed proof that Dave was writing (or at least overseeing) his own copy, well, here it is. Many authors subconsciously favor certain words, and Brooks loves the word "<a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=david+brooks+radiate" target="_blank">radiate</a>." In fact, I wondered at first glance if this was a recycled line, and it is - there's an extremely similar sentiment in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/42009504-the-road-to-character" target="_blank"><i>The Road to Character</i></a>:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Sometimes you don’t even notice these people, because while they seem
kind and cheerful, they are also reserved. They possess the
self-effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t
need to prove anything to the world: humility, restraint, reticence,
temperance, respect, and soft self-discipline. <b>They radiate a sort of
moral joy</b>.</div>
</blockquote>
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I included a longer chunk of this quote to demonstrate that he was pledging to show you how to be one of those <i>radiant</i> people in <i>The Road to Character</i> as well, so yes - it looks like he really did write the same book twice, the sign of a man who cares deeply about vocation. The questions are twofold: Could <i>The Second Mountain</i> actually be worse than <i>The Road to Character</i>, and will it receive the same degree of praise from the onanists who celebrated it before?</div>
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I also gave you the whole thing to demonstrate just what a bad writer Brooks really is - flat, dull, repetitive, lifeless, etc. But if he's bad with words on a sentence-to-sentence, he is truly rotten when he tries to write larger sentiments. I've touched on the awfulness of his metaphorical constructs before, and we're going to see a great example here. It's time to explain the two mountains:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Life, for these people, has often followed a two-mountain shape. They
get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the
mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this
first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to
make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. </div>
</blockquote>
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So far, this is trite but fine. There's a long history of using mountains as symbols of ambition, and climbing them as analogous to worldly success or victory. The idea that people "climb mountains" - seeking wealth and status and such - only to find it hollow certainly sounds like Brooks.</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually <i>my</i> mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life
moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that
are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want.
They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender
to a life of commitment.</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
And now I'm lost. This is an analogy that falls apart on several levels.</div>
<br />
<ol>
<li>This is just the whole "resume virtues and eulogy virtues" thing again. That was probably the most popular bit from <i>The Road to Character</i>, getting quoted everywhere. I actually saw it in an artist's statement in Lawrence, Kansas, and I wanted to find that artist and shake him until his admiration for David Brooks tumbled out of his head. I can understand Brooks wanting to recapture that lightning and gather those accolades again (even though I know there's some overrated public intellectual who argues that a virtuous man shouldn't even want that), but there's something funny about seeing a man retreading old ground in a book alleging to teach you the value of vocation. Then again, walking in a circle is a pretty good metaphor for Brooks' entire career, if you think about it.</li>
<li>If climbing a mountain is a metaphor for worldly ambition, then climbing a higher mountain (the same thing, only presumably harder, with a bigger reward at the end) is a metaphor for <i>greater</i> worldly ambition. You start a company, get a lot of money, find it doesn't make you happy, so you...start another company, but a bigger one, with grander ambitions. That's obviously not what Brooks is going for, but that is where the analogy takes you. And this would still work with Brooks' destination...except he seems to think that the next mountain is the <i>good</i> mountain, that this is the one that's going to make him fulfilled. In this analogy, he's seeking to glorify himself further, which is probably unintentional honesty.</li>
<li>Mt. Everest is higher than Mt. Denali, but I'm sure that there are differences in the ascent beyond the former being, presumably, harder. Nevertheless, they are both mountains and thus require comparable skills and entail comparable challenges. Brooks is using two mountains to represent things that are meant to be entirely different. Why is Denali "self-centered" and Everest "other-centered"? If climbing a mountain is "self-centered," then shouldn't the "other-centered" challenge be something else, like...I don't know, deep sea diving? Circumnavigating the globe? Walking the length of the Grand Canyon? Something that's the opposite, demanding a different skill set. Again, it doesn't make sense as an analogy.</li>
<li>And then, y'know...there's all the other stuff about how most Americans aren't narcissistic, compulsive status seekers who are sabotaging their fellow climbers in a mad scramble for glory like Brooks seems to think, but I've feel like we've touched upon that a number of times, so I'll skip it.</li>
</ol>
The rest of it is what we saw before: Learning how to surrender to a spouse (whom you'll one day dump for someone younger), a vocation (which you'll keep for the easy paycheck long after you've ceased caring), a faith (which you refuse to talk about lest someone judge you), and a community (which you praise even as you spend your entire adult life living elsewhere). There's no sample yet, but clearly Brooks is continuing to deteriorate as a writer, so I'm actually expecting less now. Maybe we'll take a cursory glance at this thing in April (conveniently enough, just about the time my current contract expires) or maybe not. Don't hold your breath; we'll see. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-91060263189196003432018-10-11T07:00:00.001-07:002018-10-11T07:00:26.945-07:00Why I Probably Won't Read David Brooks' Next BookSitting here in my Chinese apartment, sipping on a cup of local tea (augmented with some additional herbs) and enjoying a square of fine dark chocolate that is somehow cheaper here than it was back home, I can't help but wonder why I bother keeping this blog around. It's served its purpose - enabling me to piss and moan about bad books during a time in my life when I had too much free time - and I struggle to justify its continued existence. Will I ever really use this venue again? Do I really see myself reading through ponderous faux-intellectual conservative tomes in the future? And if I do, wouldn't it make more sense to turn on the webcam and then upload it to YouTube, which has apparently replaced blogs in the domain of people bitching about frivolous political controversies?<br />
<br />
All of these things may be true. But <a href="http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/217649/" target="_blank">David Brooks went and wrote another book</a>. He wrote another book, and soon that book will exist in this reality along with me, and I must decide if I will pick it up.<br />
<br />
There are many reasons to say "no" to this, enough that the odds of me touching <i>The Committed Life</i> are basically a rounding error:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>I no longer have access to the amazing Lawrence Public Library, so I'd have to pay full price for it, which won't happen.</li>
<li>The blurb on the the Random House page suggests that this is just <i>The Road to Character Redux</i> with a different set of book reports in the middle and perhaps some more pseudo-religious hectoring, so I feel like I've done my duty already.</li>
<li>Regardless of what he thinks or how he's treated by certain sectors of the media, Brooks and his beliefs are not terribly relevant today. I don't care how many think pieces you write, Michael Bloomberg is not going to be President and neither is Joe Lieberman or whatever "centrist" you care to name.</li>
<li>Between a full-time job and my ongoing writing work (including a new, deeply personal project) I'm not sure that I can justify spending the time it would take to read the book, re-read it for material, transcribe the worst parts, and then snark on it. It feels like an unwise use of my time.</li>
<li>Honestly, though, playing video games and downing shots of homemade green dragon might be a better use of my time than reading anything David Brooks has to say.</li>
</ol>
All very true, and yet we're still here, discussing it.<br />
<br />
David Brooks is heir to a particularly old school branch of conservatism. The funny thing about these conservatives is that they insist that they are nothing of the sort - "centrists" or "moderates" or "independents" or whatever they care to call themselves from moment to moment. They insist that they are <i>not</i> conservatives because the modern conservative movement is now controlled by a radical right-wing version of libertarianism that they don't care for. They're not wholly opposed - those libertarian policies still mean more money in their pockets, and who would oppose that - but they've decided that they can do better.<br />
<br />
I've penned very long breakdowns of what these guys believe, but you can break it down to one word: <i>anti-modernism</i>. If something is associated with modern society, they're opposed to it - modern economic systems (capitalist or socialism), modern political systems (basically anything post-Enlightenment), modern technology. They adhere to a decidedly anti-democratic belief that there own beliefs are mere pragmatism, beyond politics and correct by default, which must be implemented by a politician who is simultaneously massively popular and yet has no real voter base or ground strategy.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the most perfect example of this comes courtesy of Charles Wheelan of Unite America, one of the various vanity projects sprouting up around this conceit. His use of "<a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/26/alaska_where_politics_is_flavored_by_healthy_results_138165.html" target="_blank">broccoli and ice cream</a>" as a stand-in really hints at an amazing mindset, one in which voters are squawling children too self-indulgent for self-rule and "independent" politicians are the parents telling the voter-children what to do and making all their decisions for them. Truly, this is a winning message in the current political climate.<br />
<br />
Brooks is still the king of this, though, and its visible proponent - he seems to be in proximity to a lot of these vanity projects, after all. I've made plenty of jokes about Brooks and his political beliefs, which in true "centrist" fashion are presented as objectively correct ideas rather than beliefs. As of late, though, Brooks has been avoiding talking about politics (in the sense of policy) and more about society and personal life, though these two are ultimately inseparable. He clearly adheres to something called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism" target="_blank">right-communitarianism</a>, a political philosophy in which 1.) the community is more valuable than the group, and 2.) there is a strict hierarchy consisting of traditional sources of authority.<br />
<br />
Sitting here in the homeland of Confucianism - easily one of the world's oldest right-communitarian philosophies - I can easily see the foibles in trying to take an idea built around a homogeneous village of a few hundred and scaling it up to a heterogeneous nation of hundreds of millions. It doesn't matter, though, because he's directing this as individuals and small groups rather than the polity as a whole. In this sense, his philosophy is very similar to what <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-benedict-option-conclusion.html" target="_blank">Rod Dreher was selling in <i>The Benedict Option</i></a>.<br />
<br />
So maybe it's worth a minute to take the briefest of glimpses at this before dismissing it outright. Here's the publisher's copy:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Most of us, over the course of our lives, will make four big commitments: to a <b>spouse and family</b>, to a <b>vocation</b>, to a <b>philosophy or faith</b>, and to a <b>community</b>. </blockquote>
These are straight out of <i>The Road to Character</i>. "Spouse and family" is from <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-road-to-character-chapter-7-love.html" target="_blank">Chapter 7</a> (the one that sounded like it was written by a robot), "vocation" is <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-road-to-character-chapter-2.html" target="_blank">Chapter 2</a>, "philosophy or faith" is...really the whole thing, but <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-road-to-character-chapter-4-struggle.html" target="_blank">Chapter 4</a> is probably most on point. As to "community," you can find the goods in <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-benedict-option-chapter-6-idea-of.html" target="_blank">this chapter</a>, which isn't in Brooks' book at all but in Rod Dreher's. That's what this whole project sounds like, a collision between <i>The Road to Character </i>and <i>The Benedict Option</i>. Joy.<br />
<br />
One could easily mock the source of this advice. This is a divorced man married to a much younger former subordinate, who does his job poorly and doesn't like it all that much but keeps doing it because it's an easy gig, who admires other people's faith but lacks the courage to commit to one for himself. This mockery has been done in other venues, with more venom and wit than I care to muster at the moment. It's not really my style, anyway. When I take apart someone like Brooks, I like to approach it on an intellectual level that the subject rarely deserves.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We have taken individualism to the extreme degree--and, in the process,
we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to
repair is through making deeper commitments.</blockquote>
Yeah, that's Brooks all right. As you may recall, Brooks spent <i>The Road to Character</i> (or at least the non-stolen parts at the beginning and end) laying out a downright dystopian worldview in which people (young people mostly) were growing ever more shallow and self-interested, pulling the whole of society into a moral abyss in which the Kids These Days treat each other as obstacles in a ravenous struggle for status. He achieved this by compressing three generations into one enormous cohort and then cherry picking through six decades' worth of studies, ignoring anything that didn't fit his conclusion. This is how he treats his own "vocation," mind, and he's going to teach you to be just as diligent in your own doings.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom and choice,
that tells us to be true to ourselves, to march to the beat of our own
drummer at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a
neighborhood, and binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and
love.</blockquote>
Let's break these down and go one at a time:<br />
<br />
<b>Surrendering to a cause.</b> I really feel like Americans don't have a problem with this right now. His complaints about lack of civic engagement in <i>The Road to Character</i> were really just bad timing, but trying that argument after 2016 is willful blindness. Of course, David Brooks - like any Humpty Dumpty - has the right to simply change what words mean, something he did in the last book when he rather neatly dismissed social service as "a patch to cover over inarticulateness about the inner life."<br />
<br />
<b>Rooting ourselves in a neighborhood.</b> This is pure Dreher, with the wringing of hands over people who move to the Big City and lose themselves. As a man living overseas, my immediate reaction is to say "fuck you, Dave" in as many ways as I can dream up; I really don't feel that I'm more shallow or callous for choosing not to live in western Kansas my whole life. Brooks seems to view voluntarily relocating as a betrayal akin to leaving one's spouse. There's also the whole debate over whether a remote/virtual community constitutes a "community" but I already <a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-benedict-option-chapter-10-man-and.html" target="_blank">hashed this out with Dreher</a>, so...fuck you, Dave.<br />
<br />
<b>Binding ourselves to other by social solidarity and love.</b> I just don't feel that we have a problem with this, and Brooks never proved otherwise. "Inhumanly manipulative and cold" just isn't among the common KTD stereotypes of the moment - we stereotype them as <i>too</i> sensitive, <i>too</i> engaged in solidarity. Perhaps Brooks' upper-class world is full to the brim with outright sociopaths (in fact, given the recent news cycles I'd say there's a good chance), but that's not the world at large.<br />
<br />
Moving up a bit:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a
vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to
integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.</blockquote>
<b>How to choose a partner.</b> Apparently in the world of the upper class, they don't just fall in love, go on a bunch of dates and then get hitched. Per Brooks, they get married to people who can advance their careers, and he assumes the rest of us are the same way. In Chapter 7 of the previous book, he suggested (over the course of five positively inhuman pages) that the purpose of love is to achieve some sort of personal betterment. I might suggest that choosing a partner based on those metrics is just as cynical as choosing for money and status. Either way, you are treating a human being as a means to an end.<br />
<br />
<b>How to pick a vocation.</b> Again, most of us don't have the privilege to pick a job based on meaning. That's not even an option. I'd love to commit to writing full-time and honing the craft, but I'd be a very hungry man. The status vs. meaning dichotomy is another upper class problem Brooks projects onto the United States as a whole because he is out of touch and doesn't know better.<br />
<br />
<b>How to live out a philosophy.</b> I struggle somewhat to reconcile this with Brooks' belief that holding strong political beliefs is a mistake and one must be a "<a href="https://illit.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-road-to-character-chapter-10-big-me.html" target="_blank">trimmer</a>." I feel like I am very deeply committed to a philosophy and Brooks insists that this is "tribalism" and very dangerous. Should I commit to a belief and remain firm no matter what, or should I bend and twist with the changes?<br />
<br />
<b>How we can begin to
integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.</b> I did wonder about this, because reading through this, all I could think of is all the potential conflicts in Brooks' perfect world. What if your philosophy is Catholicism and you opt to enter a monastic order? What if your vocation entails traveling to places in crisis, spending extensive time away from home? That's not what he means, though, and judging by the conclusion to <i>The Road to Character</i> I can't expect an answer.<br />
<br />
The outcome of all this predictable. In the previous book, Brooks insisted that it's impossible to be a good person on your own, that you need structure and even shame to accomplish anything of merit. To be an individual is to be ruthless and greedy and cynical almost by definition. It is to grasp for glory with both hands, to treat other human beings as resources or obstacles, and ultimately to become <i>less human</i>. Bold arguments from Brooks, and hard to reconcile with the actual character of the youth of the nation, or even his own vision. After all, Brooks' ideal future as laid out in his writings is hardly egalitarian. He sees people as serving beneath a local elite who do receive wealth and status but apparently don't <i>enjoy</i> them, or at least don't enjoy them publicly where it might induce ambition among the Happy Peasants.<br />
<br />
I'll probably never have anything to do with <i>The Committed Life</i> because, ultimately, the problems within are going to be the same as any other book on How to Live. By assuming that there is only one way to be fulfilled, all of these books rely on a lack of imagination and (ironically in this case) empathy, assuming that one's own experience of life is the only one. This being an advice book, I'd also feel compelled to ask a question that makes me a little uncomfortable: Has David Brooks changed his own life in accordance with the teaching within? The wisest teachers live their own lessons, after all. But Brooks has always been a master projectionist when it comes to his ideals. He found no lasting happiness in the pursuit of unearned status, so it's time for the rest of us to find our hairshirts and cords. Mr. Brooks will, of course, continue to bask in praise over his "brilliant insight" - but I'm sure he doesn't enjoy. It's just part of a commitment he made.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-92040201577913792502018-04-06T06:01:00.001-07:002018-04-06T06:01:31.004-07:00Swan Song Part II - The Game (Or, What Do These People Even Believe?)We've spent a lot of time railing against the scourge of <i>bothsiderism</i>, that insistence that Both Sides are symmetrical in their awfulness and bear comparable weight for every social problem we have, with the right answer inevitably lying in some hypothetical spot in the middle. Most of the authors I've featured here have been bothsiderists/Sensible Centrists/Very Serious People/whatever else you care to call them, and I've learned a few things from reading their horrible books and columns and peeking in on their doomed projects <i>du jour</i> and tearing it all apart. In the interest of proving that I've gotten something out of all of this, here is my final report.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Bothsiderism: The Basics</h3>
<br />
So let's start off with the obvious: Bothsiderists are to the right of center. This shouldn't be a shock to anyone who's familiar with this terminology; "Sensible Centrist" is a misnomer, although it does reflect how they view themselves (but we'll get to that). Most of these pundits got their start writing for conservative opinion journals or working for the Reagan or George W. Bush administrations before realizing that the "conservative" label was holding back their careers and identifying as a "moderate" or "independent" was much smarter. It's funny how so many independents appeared in elite media circles after the Dubya White House imploded in 2007, isn't it?<br />
<br />
To be fair, most of these "independents" are not doctrinaire movement conservatives - they only agree with Republicans on 90% of all issues. In practice, they are conservative on all issues <i>except</i> for those areas where liberals are obviously winning. They were ahead of the curve on LGBT issues (although they're still not sure about transgender issues), hold some kind of mushy, halfway-there environmentalist stance on climate change, and generally don't exhibit the xenophobia of the sweaty GOP masses. Move beyond those mostly social issues and into the realm of fiscal or international policy and they're pretty hardline conservatives.<br />
<br />
In the past, I've suggested that bothsiderists are a people obsessed with avoiding conflict, and this aversion to controversy is their primary motivator. When No Labels released <a href="https://www.nolabels.org/ideas/about/#content-why" target="_blank">a policy guide that they had literally focus tested</a>, it seemed to back that up. But lately, I've been questioning this. If they really wanted to be popular (or at least not unpopular), they'd keep moving to the left, but they haven't. If anything, this recent obsession with "identity politics" and their constant complaints about college students, transgender activists, and unruly minority types suggest that if anything they're trying to pull back to the <i>right</i>, using the insanity of the current White House (and to a <b>much</b> lesser extent, the Congress) as a cover.<br />
<br />
If bothsiderists aren't just paleocons trying to get a seat at the popular table, then is it possible that they have an ideology all their own? I think so, and while that worldview is still fundamentally conservative, it is quite distinct from what we would consider "conservatism."<br />
<br />
<h3>
American Aristocracy</h3>
<br />
I established in <a href="http://illit.blogspot.com/2018/04/swan-song-part-i-club-or-why-do-these.html" target="_blank">Part I</a> that one of the central beliefs in the Club is that the affluent are superior to the underclasses for reasons aside from money - that indeed, money isn't even the critical difference between the two. This is central to the elite worldview, but it's not the whole thing. Studying the thoughts of the bothsiderist and his allies, I've winnowed the ideology down to nine basic tenets:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>A declinist worldview in which (regardless of tangible progress) some notion of morality and civility is in decay;</li>
<li>A general disdain for politics, particularly for grassroots activism aimed at fixing specific problems;</li>
<li>A <i>noblesse oblige</i>-like view that social elites ought to take charge of the underclasses, whom they view as unable to manage their own lives;</li>
<li>An extreme skepticism of utopian ideas, resulting in a view that all "serious" policy is zero-sum and must be considered in terms of winners and losers;</li>
<li>A defensive respect toward "institutions," namely the military, organized religion, "the family," and the media;</li>
<li>A consequent fear of other influential organizations, especially those involving the internet;</li>
<li>A belief in the need for a strong national identity that replaces all other "identities" in the political sphere;</li>
<li>A perception of strong political beliefs as "orthodoxies" passed on solely through indoctrination, and therefore not worth engaging;</li>
<li>A consequent view of their own political beliefs as rational/pragmatic/common sense policies that are in some way beyond partisan politics.</li>
</ol>
<br />
If you had a mind to, you could refine this even further. For example, let's winnow it down to what bothsiderists view as our main problems:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Lack of unity/civility</li>
<li>Lack of humility as seen in insufficient deference to tradition/one's superiors</li>
<li>An unwillingness to sacrifice</li>
</ul>
We could play this game all day, but you get the point.<br />
<br />
Does all of this seem vaguely aristocratic to you? Especially in light of the last post? To me, it sounds like the cries of the old noble class in the waning generations of the birthright system, bemoaning the rise of money and the growing power of that gaudy peasant capitalist class.<br />
<br />
The complaints from our betters are different only in context - the sentiment is the same. Social media (or blogs back in the day) is evil because it gives power to ignorant peasants who don't know how to properly wield it. People agitating for their own interests are practicing "tribalism" - they'd be better served if they just quieted down and let more neutral minds do what's good for <i>everyone</i>. And "populism" - whatever the fuck that even means from moment to moment - is the absolute <i>worst</i> because it means that the peasants think they're able to make decisions for themselves.<br />
<br />
Bothsiderist pundits are upset because they don't have the influence they feel they should have. That's a weird thing to say given that half the books I read contain fawning, ebullient praise of David Brooks. Yes, he has a tremendous amount of influence...among other elites. The <i>hoi polloi</i> clearly don't give a shit what he has to say. There was a time (possibly a mythical time) when "public intellectuals" held a lot more sway over the voting habits of the simple, humble folk, but they're just not listening anymore. Perhaps if we all humbly read more popular autobiographies, then "WWDBD?" wristbands would surge in popularity.<br />
<br />
An implication of all of this is that democracy has come under threat precisely because we've stopped listening to Very Serious bothsiderist types. Some pundits love to make doomsday predictions about the end of democracy, based on evidence as nebulous as "incivility" or as concrete as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/22/college-free-speech-violence-survey-junk-science" target="_blank">a garbage poll of college students presented by Even the Liberal Brookings Institution</a>. We wouldn't have this civility problem (the worst problem we as a nation have, according to affluent white men) if the voters would just listen to the adults like they did in the Good Old Days. They are sincere about wanting democracy, but not <i>American</i> democracy, which has been an ugly and rancorous affair for <a href="http://www.crf-usa.org/images/pdf/ThetroubledElectionsof1796and1800.pdf" target="_blank">over two hundred years</a>. The ideal system is one in which we privilege the children to speak and listen to them, but never defer to them - something more like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Executive_of_Hong_Kong" target="_blank">Hong Kong democracy</a>.<br />
<br />
<h3>
But Where Does "Both Sides" Enter Into It?</h3>
<br />
That's a very good question, as tenets #8 and #9 don't <i>quite</i> fit in with the ones above them. There's a very notable uptick in bothsiderism any time conservatism takes a hit in the public eye, so the most obvious explanation is that it's all about saving face. There's certainly truth to that, but I think the notion of symmetrical badness actually stems from the ideology itself.<br />
<br />
As you might guess from the "no labels" and "country over party" rhetoric, bothsiderists like to place themselves above mere politics. The best explanation for this appeared in the middle of Tom Scocca's epic-length 2013 article "<a href="http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977" target="_blank">On Smarm</a>":<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm. Smarm, whether political or literary, insists that the audience accept the priors it has been given...</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...In this, as in so many other parts of contemporary politics, members of the self-identified center are in some important sense unable to accept opposition. Through smarm, they have cut themselves off from the language of actual dispute. An entire political agenda—privatization of government services, aggressive policing, charter schooling, cuts in Social Security—has been packaged as apolitical, a reasonable consensus about necessity. Those who oppose the agenda are "interest groups," whose selfish greed makes them unable to see reason, or "ideologues." Those who promote it are disinterested and nonideological. There is no reason for the latter to even engage the former. In smarm is power.</blockquote>
This is a dead-on description of the bothsiderist agenda. <i>Your</i> ideas on policy are ideological, <i>my </i>ideas on policy are ideological, and <i>their</i> ideas on policy are the rational ideal for what a government should be. The goal of the bothsiderist is not to <i>move</i> the much-referenced Overton Window, but rather to <i>narrow</i> it. But rather than promote their own beliefs (which aren't of interest to most of the peasants), they work the other way and strive to depict beliefs outside of their own as radical, dangerous, selfish, short-sighted or thoughtless. And this leads me to #8.<br />
<br />
Coincidentally, <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/30/red-blue-america-clinton-trump-country-217760" target="_blank">a perfect example of this popped up as I was writing the first part</a>. As with so many awful political articles, it first appeared in Politico. Either you've already seen it or you'll recognize the style very quickly:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On a recent March morning, as a nor’easter walloped an idyllic Brooklyn street with snow, members of the Park Slope Food Coop ambled inside, shopping for bargains on broccolini and organic wheatgrass. I was here under somewhat false pretenses, as a reporter from out of state to tour the co-op—the truth, but not the whole truth.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
At the door, a young blond woman told me I wasn’t welcome to roam a single organic-mango punctuated aisle unless under the supervision of a co-op member. She instructed me to take an elevator upstairs, where I would find a customer service desk. There, I met several members. I told them I had traveled here to take the political temperature of Clinton Country. This place, I explained, seemed to be the epicenter of liberal consensus.</blockquote>
6,000 words of this, folks. Adam Wren, the author, claimed it was "satire" when people called him out on it. Like <a href="http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2018/04/satire.html" target="_blank">Yastreblyansky</a>, I'm willing to believe him, but only in that sense that the author still believes that what he's writing is accurate on some level.<br />
<br />
Broad stereotypes like the ones in that article live on in part because they are very useful to bothsiderists. Articles like this, with their japes about "bubbles" and presumption that, in Yas's words, that "all 66 million of us lived within three miles of the Brooklyn Bridge," make it easier to depict divergent ideas as mere orthodoxy.<br />
<br />
Perhaps there is some truth to that. After all, didn't I get my ideas from a "bubble" on the Upper East Side? Some of that article rings true - the regular trips to co-ops and farmer's markets for organic produce, the multicultural educational programs with teachers carefully selected to represent the whole spectrum of human diversity. The cocktail parties, too - not that I ever partook, but I remember listening to in-depth conversations on the plight of the poor and American imperialism. It was the same thing I heard from my teachers and relatives and, down the line, other kids. No one ever explicitly stifled conservative thought, but it was silently muted through the gag of acceptable discourse. Was I really given a choice to make up my own mind when every pair of lips spoke in the same voice?<br />
<br />
<h3>
Actually, the above paragraph is a total lie.</h3>
<br />
...Well, let's call it "satire."<br />
<br />
In reality, I grew up in western Kansas in a small town tha<i>t </i>served as a trial balloon in the effort to get "intelligent design" into schools via <a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People" target="_blank"><i>Of Pandas and People</i></a>. We had textbooks with "Only a theory" stickers in the front and teachers who warned us not to take the Lord's name in vain when getting our grades because this was offensive to Christians. There were kids who told lynching jokes (because it was <i>so outrageous</i>) and, after 9/11, some of them even talked openly about how we should be killing more Arabs. There was even a lovely group of football players who threatened a kid because they thought he was anti-American.<br />
<br />
There was no "liberal orthodoxy" or "blue bubble." I considered myself a Republican (if only because all the teachers were) until I took a political position test in the 8th grade that revealed that I <i>really</i> far to the left. No indoctrination, just the same life experience that shapes anyone's personal philosophy.<br />
<br />
But as far as the bothsiderists are concerned, I can't exist, nor can the millions of others just like me. Their philosophy is based on the notion that their own beliefs (which they view not as "beliefs" but as basic facts) are the default and people only hold those other, wrong beliefs if they've been inducted into some radical orthodoxy. Everyone is <i>born</i> seeing the logic in small, sensible government with technocratic "pro-growth" policies and efforts to promote marriage as the sole fix for poverty, and only constant brainwashing from the moment of birth can change that.<br />
<br />
If my beliefs resulted from my own rationality, morals, and personal experiences, then they are legitimate; if I've built a case from those beliefs, then they are worthy of engagement. If, on the other hand, my beliefs stem from some faith-like orthodoxy, implying that I've never thought about them, then they are illegitimate and much easier to dismiss. Thus, to the bothsiderist, ever belief outside of their own narrow center-right selection of preferred policies can be ignored - not because those <i>policies</i> are wrong (which they assume anyway) but because<i> </i>the <i>people espousing them</i> are not being Sensible. It's the <i>ad hominem</i> attack turned into a whole philosophy that, ironically, accuses others of being excessively negative and hostile.<br />
<br />
But then again, a radical and inferior peasant like me <i>would</i> say that.<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Thanks for sitting through all of this nonsense. If you're interested in keeping up with whatever bullshit I try and accomplish down the line, I have a <a href="https://twitter.com/heartland_east" target="_blank">Twitter account</a> that I'm sure I won't abandon inside of a month.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-41840507540087236872018-04-03T11:07:00.000-07:002018-04-03T11:07:52.195-07:00Swan Song Part I - The Club (Or, Why Do These People Keep Getting Hired?)The short version is that I'm going to be headed out of the country very soon, which neatly cuts off my access to cheap and guilt-free sources of fisking fodder. In these last few idle days, I'd like to synthesize what I've learned from this little project of mine. As it turns out, it dovetails with some things the bloggerati have been discussing as of late.<br />
<br />
For example...what the fuck is with all these rancorous assholes getting hired on at respectable publications?<br />
<br />
<h3>
Kevin D. Williamson</h3>
<h3>
</h3>
The most recent - and arguably most controversial - upward move was the hiring of angry dog and <i>National Review</i> writer Kevin Williamson to <i>The Atlantic</i>. Now, I don't have a lot of respect for this particular publication these days (that kind of faded out once they decided to host Megan McArdle's cooking videos), but it is still a masthead with a very long history in American politics and culture.<br />
<br />
Williamson is an odd choice for <i>The Atlantic</i>. True, the #NeverTrump brand (Motto: "Just because you're destroying the country, it doesn't mean you have to be crass") is very valuable these days, but Williamson's selection is still a stumper. He's not very high profile, for one. He's also a jerk - a jerk in real life (as he amply demonstrated in that notorious <a href="http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-conservative-crack-up-cont.html" target="_blank">cell phone throwing incident</a>) and a bigger jerk in his writing. There is, of course, his comments on <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-heres-a-guy-advocating-death-by-hanging-for-women-who-have-abortions-20140930-column.html" target="_blank">executing women who get abortions</a> and his <a href="http://sickhorses.com/2014/08/13/animals-at-the-zoo/" target="_blank">bizarrely racist bit of creative nonfiction</a> concerning East St. Louis. Those are the pieces that have generated the most outrage and the most head-scratching, but there's a <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/" target="_blank">third piece</a> that's also commonly referenced but doesn't generate as much of an emotional response.<br />
<br />
Ostensibly, it's an anti-Trump piece, but most of the vitriol is aimed at poor rural whites. Here's one of the most frequently cited chunks:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization.... Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.... nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.</blockquote>
Just before the election, he wrote <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/11/citizens-free-responsible-not-government-pets/" target="_blank">another piece</a> that followed in very much the same vein, but cut out any pretense of being about Trump at all:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...most likely, your problem is not that you are suffering from schizophrenia or (though this is more likely) a debilitating addiction. Maybe you had a rough upbringing. Maybe, like most of us, you’d be in a better place in life if you were a little bit smarter, taller, better-looking, disciplined, and oriented toward the future. But there isn’t a government program that is going to change any of that.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Free markets — which is to say, the economic networks that emerge when people are left free to pursue their own ends and interests — are good at many things, and one of the things they are terribly good at is sorting. Companies know who their most productive people are and which of the firms they work with provide the best results; and, though it is more art than science, they are pretty good at figuring out what characteristics those valuable workers and partner firms have.</blockquote>
In short: <i>Sorry your life sucks, but there's nothing we can </i>or should<i> do.</i><br />
<br />
Most commentators reading pieces like this are trying to come up with reasons why he was hired if this is what he was bringing to the table. They're asking the wrong questions, though. Williamson wasn't hired <i>in spite</i> of this content but <i>because</i> of it. In fact, it's my opinion that it was his bashing of poor folks that was what made him eligible to join the Serious Journalism Club in the first place.<br />
<br />
A bold statement? Sure, but it explains pretty much all of them.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Megan McArdle</h3>
<h3>
</h3>
If you wanted to demonstrate just how dim, cruel and lazy Megan McArdle is, well, she's certainly given you plenty of material. <a href="https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle-fails-upwards-again-this-time-to-the.html" target="_blank">Here's a whole article full of McArdle idiocy</a>, written in honor of her promotion to the <i>Washington Post</i>. The author of that piece set aside plenty of space for McArdle's disdain of the poor and yet he didn't get all of it. He missed <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/what-do-low-income-communities-need/249962/" target="_blank">this classic take</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As I wrote in an op-ed for the Daily that came out today, it's all too
common for well-meaning middle class people to think that if the poor
just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn't be poor any more (where
"stuff" includes anything from a college education to a marriage license
to a home). But this is not true.</blockquote>
Let's leave aside that, on other occasions, McArdle had pushed "<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/20/why-do-economists-urge-college-but-not-marriage.html" target="_blank">marriage makes you rich</a>" arguments that completely contradict this. This statement is absurd on its face. Being poor is the state of not having much money; if you acquire more money, then under this definition, you are no longer poor. Liberals gave her plenty of shit over this.<br />
<br />
But the key here is <i>under this definition</i>. What if McArdle is following another definition, one under which wealth is not actually the principle component of class?<br />
<br />
Unlike some other recent wingnut affirmative action hires like Williamson and Bret Stephens, I know quite a bit about McArdle because <a href="http://illit.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-upside-of-down-master-post.html" target="_blank">I've read her horrible book</a> and analyzed it for this very blog. Those of you who followed that series might recall the advice given within was highly inconsistent. The premise of the book - as spelled out in no less than the title - is that people need to be encouraged to take big risks and fail and try again, and this is so important that society needs to entirely forgive these failures. However, this principle only describes about half of the book. In the other half, we learn that risk is very, very <i>bad</i>, and that people must be taught to avoid it at all costs through strict adherence to procedure and swift, harsh discipline when they deviate.<br />
<br />
The only way to reconcile those two threads is to assume that they comprise two very different sets of advice intended for two very different sets of people. The first group - the one for which she prescribes freedom and forgiveness - are highly creative, motivated and intelligent, people whose ideas are needed to grow the economy. The second group - for whom she prescribes regimentation and punishment - are dull-witted, self-centered and impulsive, a servile and childlike people. The key point comes in the <a href="http://illit.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-upside-of-down-chapter-10-coda.html" target="_blank">final chapter</a>, in which McArdle sings the praises of easy bankruptcy law, but only for the first group:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Bankruptcy lawyers shouldn't be criticizing Dave Ramsey; they should be
thanking him. It's people like him, encouraging debtors to pay off as
much as they can, who make it possible for us to maintain the easy
bankruptcy laws that give relief to the clients of the consumer groups
and lawyers who complain about Ramsey's message.</blockquote>
One set of people gets to just walk away from their mistakes, while the others are expected to drain their bank accounts, sell their homes, sell their <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/08/the-politics-of-ick/22827/" target="_blank">goddamn body parts</a> to pay for <i>their</i> mistakes. It's important that they sacrifice everything to keep the system upright so that their betters can be free to take important risks without sacrificing at all.<br />
<br />
Obviously, the first group is much farther up the economic food chain than the sweaty peasants, and they don't need discipline and regimentation because they are just so much smarter and more moral than their lessers. Given that, is it possible that McArdle is operating under a definition in which the upper class is an objectively superior class of people?<br />
<br />
And what if this definition is more widely accepted than any of us thought?<br />
<br />
<h3>
Even the Liberal Brookings Institution</h3>
<h3>
</h3>
The genesis for this post - well before any of this nonsense broke - came a few weeks ago at the Lawrence Public Library. I was in the new nonfiction looking for something I could read while walking back to my apartment and my eyes fell on the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Hoarders-American-Leaving-Everyone-ebook/dp/B01MYCPHA7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499358645&sr=8-1&keywords=9780815729136" target="_blank"><i>Dream Hoarders</i></a> by <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/experts/richard-v-reeves/" target="_blank">some aristocratic twit from the Brookings Institution</a>. It's a slim book and, by my standards, light reading. Look at the jacket copy and you can probably guess why it appealed to my sensibilities:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It’s now conventional wisdom to focus on the excesses of the top 1% —
especially the top 0.01% — and how the ultra-rich are hoarding income
and wealth while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the
more important, and widening, gap in American society is between the
upper middle class and everyone else.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in
the top 20 percent of American society. Income isn’t the only way to
measure a society, but in a market economy it is crucial because access
to money generally determines who gets the best quality education,
housing, health care, and other necessary goods and services.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...Various forms of “opportunity hoarding” among the upper middle class
make it harder for others to rise up to the top rung. Examples include
zoning laws and schooling, occupational licensing, college application
procedures, and the allocation of internships. </blockquote>
That's what made me check it out, something I did in haste.<br />
<br />
<i>Dream Hoarders </i>might be the most elitist book I've ever read, and it didn't take long to figure it out. This whole book is a long essay on the cultural, moral and intellectual superiority of the wealthy, along with an argument that it is these aspects and <i>not</i> money, connections, or other structural elements that have made it so hard for anyone to climb the socioeconomic ladder.<br />
<br />
Now, as with most proper elites, he's not gauche enough to celebrate this - he presents his case with that mix of shame and pity that you get from some of these think tank/ideas festival types. Nevertheless, the argument is premised on the rich just being better than the poor, in many ways that have nothing at all to do with money. They're better parents who send their kids to better schools - and we know those schools are better because of all the rich kids there (and yes, some of the arguments are this circular). At one point, he even seems to argue that thanks to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating#In_humans" target="_blank">assortative mating</a>, the upper classes are <i>biologically</i> superior to the lower classes.<br />
<br />
Richard V. Reeves, the author, never really questions if this Brooksian "meritocracy" he describes actually exists. There's certainly evidence to suggest that the poor are hedged out because the wealthy have structured the system to favor their own kind <i>regardless</i> of whether their own kids are superior - that's my take. Reeves also believes that the system is fixed, but that it's fixed in such a way that rich kids really <i>are</i> superior. An example to illustrate the difference: A lot of employers screen for candidates who went to fancy, expensive schools. I would argue that these schools aren't necessary superior and that this is one of those ways in which the wealthy reduce competition by creating artificial barriers that the poor can't overcome. Reeves maintains that those fancy, expensive schools really <i>are</i> superior (he knows because of the totally unbiased metric of standardized tests and that feeling he gets on parent-teacher night) and <i>do</i> create superior children.<br />
<br />
At one point, Reeves actually admits that poor kids who manage to make it through the obstacle course set up by the wealthy have a reputation for being better at their jobs than their born-on-third peers, which would suggest that this system is not remotely a "meritocracy." That would seem to back up <i>my </i>take more than his, but he promptly forgets he said that before the next chapter, the better to argue for his dreaded "market meritocracy" selecting the best people...all of whom just happen to be rich. He never really considers that these distinctions might be illusory.<br />
<br />
My point here is not to bash some random Brookings wonk, but rather to point out an important fact: <i>The notion that rich people are personally superior to poor people is not remotely controversial within the Brookings Institution</i>. And if that's true, then it might not be controversial among elite circles at all.<br />
<br />
And speaking of things that are inexplicably not controversial among rich assholes...<br />
<br />
<h3>
Charles Murray</h3>
<h3>
</h3>
Let us now take a few paragraphs to discuss the "redemption" of Charles Murray's career. I use the quotes because Murray never actually went away; after <i>The Bell Curve</i> blew up, we sweaty peasants quit talking about him for a while, but the man never stopped working, nor did he stop getting cited - Reeves namechecks him several times, and David Brooks has always been fond of him (and vice versa).<br />
<br />
He kept on writing books, including <i>Human Accomplishment</i> (a catalog of Great Men which gave him another opportunity to argue for the superiority of white men), <i>Real Education </i>(i.e. Some Kids Are Just Dumb, Get Over It), <i>By the People </i>(his plan to impose bigbrain libertarian rule over the objections of the littlebrain voters), and the somewhat inexplicable <i>The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead</i> (a sort of high school graduation book for the disgustingly privileged which I very nearly featured here). But it was his book <i>Coming Apart</i> (i.e. <i>The Bell Curve</i>, but only for whites) that brought him back to the attention of the brutes.<br />
<br />
He's made the news a few times in recent years. There were the <a href="http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/archive/2017-news/node/547896" target="_blank">protests</a> at Middlebury College last year, which got him proclaimed a free speech martyr by Our Wonderful Newsmedia (the right to make large sums of money to speak at places where you aren't really wanted being a less celebrated component of the First Amendment). In the wake of that, he appeared on <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech" target="_blank">Sam Harris's podcast</a> to discuss <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve" target="_blank">genetic "differences"</a> in intelligence. Two affluent white egomaniacs calmly discussing the inferiority of black people and then patting themselves on the back for being "brave" truth tellers...I really never thought I'd see such a thing in my lifetime, but such was 2017.<br />
<br />
In spite of all of this, Murray remains most notorious as the co-author of the 1994 book <i>The Bell Curve</i>, a doorstop of a tome in which he argued for the intellectual inferiority of people of African descent. But what most people don't remember is that only a small part of the book concerned ethnicity at all. As a whole, the book dealt with a rising "cognitive elite" created through "cognitive sorting" (sounding familiar?) and, in the end, arguing from the likes of Aristotle that these differences are chiefly natural and need to be embraced rather than challenged. You can read a rather long takedown of this conclusion <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray-odious" target="_blank">here</a>; this post is long enough as is.<br />
<br />
My point is that, for his notoriety, Murray writes about <i>class</i> a lot more than he does about <i>race</i>, and he mostly writes about race in the <i>context</i> of class. <i>Losing Ground</i>, which preceded <i>The Bell Curve</i>, was his argument that the welfare state is doomed to fail because it encourages bad behavior in the underclass. The 2006 book <i>In Our Hands</i> took the opposite approach to reach the same ends, suggesting that we should just give money to the poor and let them destroy themselves with it, thus freeing us of any responsibility. And then there's <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050329060108/http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040311_book268text.pdf" target="_blank">this obscure little AEI</a> report from 1998, in which Murray writes about divergent cultures in a way that would become mainstream a decade and a half later thanks to Robert Putnam and Murray himself.<br />
<br />
Putnam and Murray are frequently mentioned in the same breath, and for a reason. Their philosophies are not identical - Putnam doesn't go in for biological determinism, although Murray has likewise downplayed this in recent years - but it's hard not to notice the similarities between <i>Coming Apart </i>and Putnam's <i>Our Kids</i>, both of which wholeheartedly embrace the cultural superiority argument for disparate outcomes.<br />
<br />
So why is it that Putnam gets so many liberal heads nodding while Murray remains despised? Answer: Because Murray done fucked up when he brought race into it. If he'd left those chapters out of <i>The Bell Curve</i>, his reputation wouldn't have taken such a hit (it also probably wouldn't have sold so well among the conservative set, but <i>details</i>). At some point, though, if you are going to make this argument, you <i>have</i> to discuss what it says about race. If you're going to claim that class is the natural result of personal decisions, eventually you have to make a note of the disparate difference between white and black in this country. If poor whites are poor because of their inferior morals and culture, then what does it say that poor blacks and Latinos are doing even worse?<br />
<br />
To date, Murray is the only one dumb or arrogant enough to answer that question. Everyone else sidesteps it and only talks about whites, but make no mistake - the question is there, taunting them. If poor people are inferior to rich people, and indeed are poor<i> because</i> they are inferior, then it follows that certain ethnic groups are inferior to others. You can try to argue for structural racism, but that brings in the possibility of structural factors in poverty more generally and there goes your superiority argument. Even so, as long as you <i>only</i> talk about poor whites or poor people generally (implied to be white unless otherwise stated), then no one will push you on this.<br />
<br />
As you can see, there's a fairly extensive history of conservative and "centrist" pundits talking about class as though it were personal inferiority that causes poverty, to the point where it is a central idea in elite circles. But wait, I feel like I'm leaving someone out, maybe someone who's made an appearance in everything I've ever written...<br />
<br />
<h3>
David Brooks</h3>
<h3>
</h3>
I hope that the above sections have helped explain why David Brooks has a career, because they sure helped me grasp it. Brooks has had a hand in this nonsense for his entire career. His first two books - the "Paradise Suite" - consist of endless sub-Erma Bombeck musings on the superiority of the upper class and their whimsically absurd and absurdly whimsical ways. <i>The Social Animal</i> was him throwing that into a blender with some bad fiction and worse science. There have been traces of that more-in-sorrow wailing on the plight of the benighted Poors in so many of his columns and tied up in the Great Man sermonizing that comprised 90% of <a href="http://illit.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-road-to-character-master-post.html" target="_blank">this monstrosity</a>.<br />
<br />
I don't want to talk about those, though. I'd like to highlight a column that was one of the more broadly mocked things he's written in recent memory, despite being pretty trivial. But maybe the triviality was an illusion. Maybe Brooks gave away the game.<br />
<br />
I'm talking, of course, about the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining-america.html" target="_blank">sandwich column</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named "Padrino" and "Pomodoro" and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.</blockquote>
A few things off the bat: One, Brooks actually mentions <i>Dream Hoarders</i> in this column, but I swear I didn't remember that when I started writing this. It was just a beautiful serendipity. Two, while I thought that Reeves came across as extremely superior in that book, Brooks seems to think that he didn't go far enough in that Reeves recognized some structural impediments (e.g. education, though see above as to my thoughts on the subject). This means that not only is Reeves not controversial, he's actually the <i>moderate</i> in the room.<br />
<br />
The above paragraph, in all of its shitty rich guy glory, was Brooks' response to Reeves. Seriously. Brooks wrote that piece dumping on a <i>totally</i> real person who was <i>for real</i> a friend who was <i>earnestly</i> flummoxed by <a href="https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/food/article/20867205/these-italian-cold-cuts-are-ruining-america-says-david-brooks" target="_blank">sandwiches with funny names</a> in order to prove...what, exactly?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.</blockquote>
Brooks was arguing that rich people and poor people are so far apart that they are totally incapable of communicating. He's gone into this nonsense before regarding urban vs. rural - the infamous "<a href="http://www.phillymag.com/articles/david-brooks-booboos-in-paradise/#CfZ6tmHTPFd8uQYF.99" target="_blank">One Nation, Slightly Divisible</a>" debacle, in which he envisioned the United States as a nation containing New York, Chicago and then Mayberry for thousands of square miles - but this is a step past that. This is someone being rendered nonfunctional by a fancy <i>sandwich</i>, by bread and meat.<br />
<br />
That right there proves to me that this person (provided she really exists and isn't a Friedman-like convenience construct) can't possibly be Brooks' friend in any real sense. He views her like a child, endowed with a very simple, unrefined intellect rendering her incapable of appreciating the diet of a superior figure, a mind so basic that it was frozen fast by a menu. In true upper-class ninny fashion, he presents this in a somewhat self-deprecating manner, but that doesn't change the fact that he views her as his lesser, someone lacking in what he considers very fundamental knowledge.<br />
<br />
But then again, why <i>wouldn't</i> he view this totally real person as his lesser? That's a lesson he would have learned many times in those years since he learned that kissing William Buckley's ass would give him a pass into the world of the elite. What he writes about the poor is certainly less hostile than what we've seen from Williamson, McArdle or Murray, more in line with the "noble savages" sentiment of the delicately aristocratic, but in practice that doesn't mean much. Think about the views of well-to-do Englishmen on the original noble savages - noble, yes, with a pure and harmonious existence, but still decidedly <i>inferior</i>, in need of the correcting influence of their "civilized" betters. To Brooks, people from the sticks might as well be the denizens of some lost tribe, and the problem is that we're not taking his good advice.<br />
<br />
This, however, is only a small part of what I hope to lay out. Part I addresses how one gets into what Driftglass calls the Club. The answer is simple - show that you hew to the prevailing worldview of the other members of the Club. But while the belief in personal superiority is a critical part of that worldview, it's not the whole thing. In Part II, we'll delve a little deeper into the world that those elite journalists serve.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-24196611158356941642018-03-28T11:06:00.002-07:002018-03-28T11:06:42.489-07:00More Content A-Comin'I'd like to start by <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03810-4" target="_blank">leaving this link here</a>. Please click and let all your friends know.<br />
<br />
So I'm not long for this country. Currently, I'm in the process of fleeing my physically and mentally grueling poverty-wage job to gamble for the chance at something - anything - better. This hasn't left me a lot of time to write nonsense on this neglected space, but I do have something, one final statement on bothsiderism that draws on things I've featured here and a few I haven't.<br />
<br />
But while I attempt to put that together, I'd like to call some attention to the fact that I have finally had a piece of fiction published in a pro-rated market. It's<i> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03810-4" target="_blank">Nature</a></i><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03810-4" target="_blank"> magazine</a>, believe it or not, and I sincerely hope that you'll take two minutes out of your busy lives to read it and maybe tell some other people.<br />
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Thanks in advance, everyone.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1876181230093314707.post-141623833790574122018-02-13T15:32:00.000-08:002018-02-13T15:33:05.179-08:00One Star for McMeganTL;DR - Do your part to embarrass McArdle - <a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R3D8NX7PX5D560/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0143126369" target="_blank">go here and vote my review helpful</a>.<br />
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So we all know about the <i>New York Times</i>. We know that, courtesy of the most anti-press administration since Nixon's nose was growing, the NYT has enjoyed a lot of love from the American left over the past year. We also know that they've celebrated by employing a select group of interns to wipe their asses with every paper headed to everyone left-of-center - figuratively, of course, at least as far as I know.<br />
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Well, it seems that the <i>Washington Post</i> has felt left out. Hot on the heels of the excellent film <i>The Post</i> highlighting their critical role in protecting press freedom, they've decided to hire someone most famous for joking about beating people with whom she disagreed about the War on Iraq. Yes, our own Megan McArdle has once again tripped and fallen upwards. Beautiful timing, too, given that <a href="https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/megan-mcardle-pulled-off-the-owned-trifecta-owned.html" target="_blank">this was the last thing she did that had any impact</a>. I'll grant that Megs didn't realize how out-of-touch that piece made her look, but I do have to love the little self-blind Twitter tantrum she threw once the reviews started rolling in. I'm sure that really pleased them at the Post, although anyone hiring McArdle has to be prepared for that sort of thing.<br />
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At this point, I suspect that these hirings are an attempt - in the name of "fairness" - to clean the Trump-stink off of the American right, a political movement that by all rights should be sinking into the Marianas Trench as we speak. Allowing this to happen would be a woeful violation of the tenets of the High and Holy Church of Bothsiderism which, after all, requires two sides. So now enters Megan McArdle as the latest wingnut diversity hire, here to help test the lifeboats before they're floated out to sea. Because sure, she may be lazy and careless and ethically questionable and a terrible writer and lacking not merely empathy but even basic human sentimentality, but she's not an overt racist so she's already improving their image.<br />
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The first complete series I finished for this moribund little archive was on McArdle's book <i><a href="http://illit.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-upside-of-down-master-post.html" target="_blank">The Upside of Down</a></i>, and you've better believe that I've been pimping that one out. However, I'd really like to celebrate McArdle's promotion by getting my Amazon review of the book pushed to the front page. I tried this with <i>The Road to Character</i> and briefly appeared right under the book before the expected ass-kissing pushed it back down. Fortunately, McArdle is not nearly as celebrated as David Brooks so I'm hoping this will be an easier hill to climb. Just <a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R3D8NX7PX5D560/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0143126369" target="_blank">go here</a>, vote it useful, and maybe leave a comment telling me how brilliant I am.<br />
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Thanks bunches.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0