Shame Me Once, Shame on You; Shame Me Twice, Shame on Me!

2020 is turning out to be a replay of 2016, campaign-wise.  Specifically, the Democrats are running another superannuated party hack whose main selling point is that he isn't Donald Trump, and they're furious that voters aren't as enthusiastic about him as they think we ought to be.  Even more than last time, though, they're on the attack against anyone who declares his or her lack of enthusiasm and criticizes the candidate or the party for running a lackluster campaign.  They accuse the dissenters of wanting Trump to win, and their venomous attacks again lack factual truth, rationality, and even good political sense.  Among their targets are Susan Sarandon, Bernie Sanders, former Sanders staffers such Brianna Joy Gray, the journalist David Sirota, and the podcaster and organizer Ryan Knight.  I've been spending more time than I should on Twitter, just for the pleasure of attacking the attackers in turn.  

One thing that has begun to bother me is the term commonly used for the attacks: "voter shaming."  I suppose it fairly captures what they're trying to do, but I don't think it's an effective epithet if, as I've been seeing, they see it as a valid strategy:

Calling it "vote-shaming" lets them know they've scored a hit, and that you don't know how to fight back.  It's another version of the liberal standby, "Oh, how can you say such an awful thing, you're an awful person!"  This never works, and one would think liberals would have figured that out by now, if one didn't know better.

I think that if you want to get the "vote-shamers" to back off, if you want to defeat them, you need to find ways to put them on the defensive.  And I feel a bit uneasy about telling people to grow a spine, but I really think they need to grow a spine.  Why should you be ashamed of doing what you believe to be right?  If you are ashamed of not liking Biden and Harris more, if you are ashamed of wanting substantive policies rather than platitudes, if you're ashamed of being angry at the Democratic Party establishment for waging an inadequate campaign against the most dangerous President of the past century and possibly ever, then maybe you need to pause and take stock.

My preferred term for what these people are doing is "voter suppression."  They clearly are less interested in winning over undecided, let alone opposed, voters than in getting their licks in against people they blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016: Sarandon, Sanders, and the like.  If you really want to persuade people to vote for your candidate, hurling abuse at them is exactly what you shouldn't be doing.  It's not as if this is some extreme-left, avant-garde, postmodern idea: it's the basic principle of canvassing and organizing.  Yet I'm seeing a lot of (admittedly anecdotal) reports of people telling Biden phonebankers that they're undecided, and being blown off, no attempt made to find out why they're undecided and persuade them to vote Biden/Harris.

I have to remember that people feel isolated and so find it hard to stand up to attacks from any direction, and I don't want to attack them myself.  I must have felt much the same way fifty years ago when I was just coming out and forming a left political stance, but although I did get attacked, from the left as well as from the right at times, I somehow kept bouncing back.  I know that within a year or two of coming out I was enjoying attempts by homophobes to try to shame me for being queer, even though there was in those days precious little solidarity from other gay people.  Somehow I felt that I was part of something larger than myself, a network of people who rejected bigotry and bit back at it, even if I knew few of them in my own locale.  I later learned that some of the writers and thinkers I felt connected to didn't live out their own rhetoric very well.  No matter: they gave me the courage to do it. The same was true of politics, though that took me longer to develop.

It just occurred to me that when I tried to get involved in local politics, the local party organization had nothing for me to do.  I left my name and phone number at the local Democratic Party office, but no one called me.  Maybe I should have tried harder, but why?  (Part of the problem was that I had an odd, irregular work schedule, and the local party was oriented to people who worked 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.)  The same happened in the 1990s when I volunteered for a new LGBT organization in town: I signed up, no one got back to me.  That organization, as I recall, didn't last very long anyway -- I wonder why!  One of the ongoing problems with left organizing is that it is more oriented to getting media attention, which the groups don't know how to exploit even if they get it, than to welcoming new members.

Then too, even if I'm not a joiner I'm still enmeshed in a network of left media that keeps me informed.  I don't sit around surrounded by hordes of the conventionally political, the inhabitants and devotees of the two-party system, without any sources of information to buttress me against corporate media propaganda.  I tend to forget that most people don't know about alternative media, which is why so many people are flocking to follow Ryan Knight's Twitter account.  But we've been there before: I'm seeing echoes of the exaltation many people expressed to Michael Moore, or Noam Chomsky: At last somebody dares to tell the truth!  They're looking for someone to follow, a hero or heroine who'll tell them what to think; and when they find out that their hero has feet of clay or, worse, doesn't want to tell them what to think, he or she would rather they think for themselves, they'll fall resentfully away, looking for the next hero.  I went through something like this myself when I was younger, though I didn't usually reject those who'd taught me: I honored and cherished what I'd learned from them, and added on more teachers.

What to do, then?  I don't know, and I'm not optimistic.  But for now, I'd like people to stop using the term "vote-shaming."  They have nothing to be ashamed of, only the vote-suppressors do.  They also need to remember that you don't learn to do politics, winning politics at any rate, while standing on one foot.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the more inspiring success stories of late, didn't just stand on a street corner, give a speech, win a primary, and then win an election and go to Congress.  She got involved with Justice Democrats, who welcomed her (along with others), trained her, and supported her.  And then she defeated an entrenched, complacent incumbent and won the general and went to Congress.  Ignore the vote-suppressors, don't let them get to you; you aren't alone.  Look at how others are answering them, and work out your own response.

People Keep Using This Word, Etc.

David Sirota is a fine journalist, so I'm not picking on him specifically here.  I've seen a lot of other people do the same thing:

Modest proposal: if you took over a political party & then oversaw that party losing Congress & most statehouses, and then you additionally oversaw it losing the presidency to a reality TV star, you’re no longer in a position to lecture anyone about electability or effectiveness.

I agree completely with the substance of this remark.  It's the "Modest proposal" part that bugged me.  I take it to be an allusion to Jonathan Swift's satirical tract of that title, published in 1729, in which he proposed to fatten Irish babies for English tables. If you're following Swift's example, a "modest proposal" is sarcastic in the first instance -- you know it's outrageous -- and in the second, you do not actually mean that your recommendation should be followed.

I presume that Sirota, by contrast, is quite serious in proposing that the Democratic Party leadership STFU. So there's no sarcasm here, no satire.  It's as tone-deaf as Hillary Clinton's use of George Orwell's 1984 in her apologia pro snafu sua What Happened.  Yet Sirota is not a stupid man.  As I've said, I've seen other intelligent people announce modest proposals that they mean unironically.  How does this happen?

Where Do Credentials Come From, Mommy?

On to other matters. David Sirota posted this a couple of days ago:

Sirota's a smart journalist, and I take him seriously.  But in this case -- no, I don't think so.

First, I thought polls showed that most people hate the media because they see them as too adversary, too hostile to wealth and power. Judging from what I hear from people I know and those I read on social media, that belief probably divides along partisan lines, as when Republicans believe that the media just make up stuff about their President.  I noticed that many Democrats believed that Hillary Clinton lost because the Lying Media misled the public about her.  So it seems to me that many people want the media to be loyal to wealth and power as represented by their own party.

Second, I question the word "ideologically."  Most people don't know what it means anyhow, and I don't think that loyalty to wealth and power is usually ideological.  Rather it's opportunistic ("I've got mine and I want to hang on to it"), personal (because a person likes and identifies with the wealthy and powerful, hoping that some of the goodies will trickle down), and self-interested.

Third, a 2016 poll

found respondents valued accuracy above all else, with 85 percent of people saying it was extremely important to avoid errors in coverage. Timeliness and clarity followed closely, with 76 percent and 72 percent respectively saying those attributes were imperative among media sources.

“Over the last two decades, research shows the public has grown increasingly skeptical of the news industry,” the report reads. “The study reaffirms that consumers do value broad concepts of trust like fairness, balance, accuracy, and completeness. At least two-thirds of Americans cite each of these four general principles as very important to them.”

That's moving and inspiring, only -- how do respondents know whether a news source is accurate?  From what I see, for many people "accuracy" means that the news tells them what they want to hear.  How often do most people pay any attention to the corrections department of their newspaper?  The meaning of terms like fairness, balance, and the like are disputed in the press, and I don't see any reason to believe that news consumers are any clearer about them than the professionals.  I see many people who dismiss news sources lightly -- ah, they'll print anything if it'll make them money, they're just trying to divide us, etc.  Again, all very well, but they still seem to trust some sources, usually Fox News or Breitbart or Limbaugh or Mike Savage or Rachel Maddow.  If they trust them, it isn't because they've carefully examined the facts (wherever they would get facts in the first place) and subjected them to rigorous scrutiny, and decided that their preferred network or commentator is reliable.

Interestingly, though, those who are cynical about "the media" in general tend to trust local news sources, which isn't a bad idea except that local news sources are increasingly non-local in ownership and control.  It's like public education: many people are sure that Our Schools across the nation are failing miserably, but they like and trust their own local schools.

Which makes this column from last December, by the Washington Post's media columnist Margaret Sullivan, interesting.  She found that when they were allowed to discuss the question at length, instead of replying to narrow poll questions, people (she talked to several dozen, outside the Beltway) had a much more nuanced understanding of the news.

But not that much more nuanced.  She heard a lot of complaint about "bickering" in the media, for example from this "young Trump voter":

"I wish the bickering would stop," he said, referring to commentary by pundits. He listens to Fox News Radio on SiriusXM, and he compares what he hears there with what's offered on CNN and other news outlets, like NBC News, which he watches some evenings: "There's a pretty stark contrast between what they report." So he weighs them against each other. "At this point, I'm pretty tired of it all," he explained, saying he wants reporting presented straight — just the facts, with less opinion attached. "It's called the news — it's not supposed to be about their agendas." Journalists, especially cable pundits, he said, "need to grow up."

I doubt very much that the bickering will stop, at least not until people stop listening to it.  I've run into numerous people with the same complaint, and I've begun asking them why, if they hate the bickering so much, they continue listening to it.  At best they stop for a while, and then they tune back in.  But panels of pundits aren't all there is to the news media, as this guy seems to realize.  I almost never listen to such roundtables, having quit decades ago when I realized how useless they mostly were -- and in those days the emotional temperature they exhibited was a lot lower.  It happens that I recently watched the now-notorious "I'm a communist, you idiot" segment from Good Morning Britain on Youtube; after watching Piers Morgan's antics, I can understand why people would object to this sort of thing -- so why do they watch it at all?  Many clearly do; what do they get from it?  It can't be for the information.  I was amazed at the utter lack of professionalism Morgan displayed; if he gets away with it regularly, someone at ITV must like him. I prefer reading text, largely because it filters out grandstanding like Morgan's.

Wanting the news to report "just facts" seems no less quixotic to me.  It's true, the line between "news" and "commentary" is blurred, but it always has been.  When I see old (Sixties or Seventies' vintage, say) news stories from the New York Times, I'm constantly struck by the amount of commentary that found its way into them.  But even leaving that aside, which facts an outlet chooses to report, which stories it finds significant, which stories it ignores, what facts it leaves out, who it talks to -- all these factors put a slant on the "news."

Sullivan puts heavy stress on the claim, which I don't dispute, that reporters almost never make up stories.  I bet she'd be surprised to find out that a harsh press critic like Noam Chomsky not only agrees with her, he regularly commends the professionalism and competence of most mainstream reporters.  He directs most of his criticism at the institutions: the companies, the corporations, the publishers, the editors.  The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, contrary to the fantasies of many of its critics, is not a conspiracy theory but a theory about institutions and their interests.  I'm less bothered by the fact that many media/press people mistake it for a conspiracy theory -- that's a natural human defense mechanism -- than that many of Chomsky's fans make the same misreading.

Like many people, Sullivan is concerned that so many Americans get their news from Facebook or other social media.  She reports that a Bernie Sanders supporter is "aware that some of what's on social media has been fabricated."  The thing is that neither Facebook nor Twitter nor any other social media outlet I know of produces its own news: I don't "get news from Facebook or Twitter," I get references and links and recommendations, which point me to reports and stories and essays I may decide to read at length.  I know not to believe everything I see there; what I find fascinating is that so many of the same people who are vocally cynical about the media are also extremely credulous, shocked to learn that The Onion just makes stuff up and you aren't supposed to take their stories as fact.  They have even more difficulty understanding that there are people who really do make stuff up and post it in order to fool people -- the piteous photos, for example, of little children in hospital beds, if you give them an amen and a like then Facebook will donate a dollar to their medical fund.  Cynicism and credulity are highly selective.

Sullivan continues:

Much worse was my conversation with Jason Carr of Green Bay, Wis., a middle-aged member of the Oneida Nation who was visiting his girlfriend in western New York. Wearing a "Born to Chill" T-shirt and sitting behind the wheel of his Ford F-150 pickup truck in a KeyBank parking lot, Carr told me that media reports strike him as nothing but "a puppet show" that is "filtered and censored" by big business. He buys into the conspiracy theories that the United States government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that the 2012 massacre of Connecticut schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged. Carr didn't vote in the presidential election and said there's nothing the news media could do to earn his trust. "I don't believe anything they say," he said. "They get paid to be wrong." I left the conversation shaking my head, knowing that, as is clear from the huge following of sites like the conspiracy-promoting Infowars, he's far from alone in his beliefs.

My question for Jason Carr, if I could ask one, would be which sources -- media, that is -- he gets his information from, and why he trusts them over other media.  He didn't invent the "conspiracy theories" he believes; he got them from somewhere, and he trusts those sources.  Why them and not others?  Sullivan, I suspect, would regard Carr's sources, whatever they are, as untrustworthy because they're uncredentialed.  But where do credentials come from?  Even in the good old days before the Internet, anyone could start a newspaper, and most of the newspapers in the US used to be independently owned and run.  It was not uncommon for even small communities to have two newspapers, a Republican one and a Democratic one.  So which one was real news, which one was trustworthy?  How did you decide which source to trust?  The same way you do nowadays on the Internet: by exercising your critical faculties.  It's good to bear in mind that corporate media tend to report the news from the point of view of the stockholder class; but there is no source that has no point of view.  There is no magic crystal ball that will bring you the Truth, allowing you to shut off your mind.

This doesn't mean assuming that the media are out to lie to you; it means assuming that the news is produced by fallible human beings with biases, and with the best will and intentions they won't always be right.  Their stories will be partial, both in the sense of incomplete and that of biased.  So I (and you) need to be aware of that, as well as of our own limitations and biases.  It's not always easy, though it gets somewhat easier with practice -- and then one day you find that your bullshit detector failed spectacularly and you fell for an amazingly bogus story.  Whereupon you pick yourself up and go on, chastened and ready to continue learning.

Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other

I doubt it myself: More likely Americans will just hope for a new president they can deify, while demonizing the one currently in office.  Republican loyalists always found it easy to remember that Obama was human, and Democratic loyalists can see Trump's feet of clay without corrective lenses.  The hard part is not to deify the president you support, and most people seem to find it not just hard but impossible.

This meme, whose creator apparently removed it from Twitter after it was criticized, fits in nicely here:

The most obvious point the meme's maker overlooked was that he or she was describing Donald Trump.

I have to wonder whom it's addressed to.  Many liberals and progressives took exactly these points into consideration when they voted for Clinton.  Clinton won the popular vote; she only lost in the Electoral College.  Those who voted for Trump and tilted the Electoral College in his favor were mostly not, as far as I know, liberals or progressives.  So this appears to be just one more party-loyalist attack on the thought criminals who Let Hillary Down, though it's not clear just how they (we) did so. Things have come to such a turn that a loyalist like this could admit, if only rhetorically, that Clinton was not a very inspiring candidate, and so on.  That's of no importance.  More important is that whoever made this still has no idea what went wrong.

Some responses on Twitter indicated that the mememaker, faced with these and other criticisms, has deleted the tweet in which it appeared, saying that all they meant was that we should be good to each other, or some such vacuous prattle.  But this sort of barely passive-aggressive attack on the voters he or she pretends to be appealing to is the exact opposite of being good to each other.

... Posting has, I confess with tears and in sackcloth and ashes, been sparse around here lately, and I'm afraid it's not going to improve much very soon.  I may be moving to a new residence, and while everything is up in the air I'll be even less likely to write.  But I'm still alive and functional, at least in principle.

P.S.  Seth MacFarlane reposted the "Dear Liberals and Independents" meme on Twitter.  Someone replied with a corrected version:

Of course, that won a scolding from a Clintonbot.  Maybe a meaner version of the meme is called for.  I'll give it some thought.

The Tower of Brabble

(Brabble = "paltry noisy quarrel")

This article by David Sirota urges readers to "trash their smartphones," which might or might not be a good idea. I'm sympathetic to it -- I just have a basic cellphone, and the only upgrade I'm thinking about is to a phone with a QWERTY keyboard -- but on the whole I still disagree with his analysis.

Sirota begins thusly:

A miracle is occurring as you read these words - that's right, an impossible-to-explain miracle of the mind. Somehow, you just managed to read a complete sentence - and that's nearly inexplicable these days.

Oh, horsepucky. This is pure Occidental hyperbole. Since he published it at Salon.com, one of the text-heavier sites around these days, he must know it's bullshit. Sirota gives no evidence for that statement; I suppose it's just one of those things that Everybody Knows. He continues:

There you sit, hammered by stimuli - on your computer screen, you're pounded by an overflowing RSS reader, twitching Facebook and Twitter feeds, an email box constantly chirping at you and IM bubbles doing their best pop-up video impression; off in the distance, your television frantically flits between images of explosions and a screaming, over-coiffed suit whose impossibly fat head floats disembodied above a never ending ticker-tape; and on your desk, face up, a cell phone perpetually spasming with text messages, photos from friends, yet more email and, of course, phone calls.

Well, there you are. It isn't just smartphones, it's what the media (the major perpetrators) call Information Overload. Instant messaging programs, Facebook, Twitter, most e-mail -- these are all corporate media, and being corporate they are enemies of your ability to concentrate. They want to shift your attention away from wherever it is now to something else, anywhere else as long as it's paid content. The more commercial links you click on, the more money someone makes. The more edits in the videos or tv shows or movies you watch, the more excited you'll be, and the more you'll find more leisurely-paced content boring. TV news is limited in time, so concision is at a premium, and of course complex thoughts can't be expressed in soundbytes, but complex thoughts are the Devil's playground, so it's all good.

The necessity to be connected at all times is partly habit, but it's also mandated by a lot of white-collar work, as Jill Andresky Frazier showed in her book White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (Norton, 2001). As the crumbling economy has deteriorated even further and employment instability has made more inroads into management, you have to be on call -- accessible, available, connected -- at all times. If you aren't, someone else is willing, and will be happy to take your job.

None of this is news, of course. Various Jeremiahs have been yelping that television is destroying our attention spans for decades, and every new technology that affects information, from writing to printing to the telephone to electronic media, has been denounced as a threat to our civilization. But that was then and this is now, and this time, Sirota insists (along with others of his ilk), it's really true!

Maybe so. But where's the evidence? Sirota has nothing but anecdotes and what Everybody Knows. (Can't you feel your mind degrading right now? Did you even make it to the end of this sentence? You see! I told you.) But then he says this:

The science is pretty clear in showing that the Internet is rewiring our cerebral circuitry and re-melting our plasticky gray matter in ways that can addict us to the short information bursts that the Internet specializes in.

Those two links at "pretty clear" go to two articles by Nicholas Carr, a writer at The Atlantic. One article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", offers no scientific evidence at all about the effects of the Internet on our brains -- none. Carr admits that "we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition," and then provides a link to one study of "online research habits," in which researchers

examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

This proves basically nothing. Imagine a study of the old library card catalogs and printed journal indexes that scholars used to use before such resources went online. I know from my own experience that someone observing my own use of such tools would have found the same pattern of behavior: skimming, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source I'd already visited. That's because only a small amount of the material I skimmed over was useful to my work. And this is the sum total of Carr's evidence for the deleterious effect of the Internet: he says that the study he cited "suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think." "Suggests" is a far cry from "pretty clearly showing."

I wouldn't be surprised if researchers behaved like this, but again, it has more to do with economic and political pressures in academia than with anything about the Internet. In the good old days an academic could get tenure with barely any publications at all; but since the explosion of higher education in the US since World War II, with more and more Ph.D.s being ground out by the universities, and fewer and fewer jobs for them, they've had to compete with each other by publishing more. This produces vast numbers of articles, dissertations, and books, far too many for any human being to read and digest. Nowadays in the humanities you need at least a book published by an academic press, and some articles besides don't hurt. That's the economic pressure, but it's buttressed by political pressure from state legislatures to provide "objective" evidence that you, O pointy-headed intellectual, deserve your job. A scholarly book or article needs to include citations of other scholars' work, another "objective" criterion of quality. The Internet makes it easier to track down references, and produce that all-important paper (or increasingly, electronic) trail that will get you a secure job, and possibly free you to think instead of collect material for the footnotes.

The other article by Carr that Sirota linked to is an interview in which he expands on his concerns without any new evidence, much less "science." At best this "suggests" that Sirota is guilty of the same sloppiness he decries, and I suppose he can blame it on the Internet, but writers and scholars did the same thing long before there was an Internet.

Of course, ignoring structural and political factors is another feature (not a bug) of the corporate media. I agree with Sirota that ramping down one's use of rapid-fire media is a good idea, though for the reasons I've mentioned, it may not be as easy as exercising a little willpower. Sirota does admit that for some people a smartphone may be a "genuine necessity, by virtue of one's work," but claims that most who justify it on that ground are just trying to excuse their "addiction."

So what about someone like me, whose "addiction" is to print, to sentences and paragraphs and longer strings of text? C'mon, gimme a little taste, I need just a little, please... Sirota doesn't mention e-readers, and whatever my reservations about them, there's no doubt that people are using them to read, you know, books. The concentration of publishing into fewer and fewer conglomerates, like that of media into fewer and fewer media consortiums (consortia?) is connected to the success of e-books, but it's not the fault of the Internet either.

One other factor might be worth mentioning here, and that's the magical thinking that underlies a lot of the celebration of computers and the Internet. Recently I read something that reminded me that many people expected word processors to do more than just make it technically easier to compose, edit, and format text: on some level they expected it to produce content as well -- just sit back and let the computer write your novel for you! The same consideration applied to graphics and video software: you still had to come up with the content yourself -- it's so unfair! Other people expected the Web to do their "thinking and communicating" for them:

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.

They too were disappointed when they found out that it was just a tool for transmitting information: they were still going to have to do their own thinking. Still other people thought that computers would be pets. Still no go. And these fantasies were harbored and promulgated by computer geeks themselves, though of course they were useful in advertising as computers caught on among non-geeks. In the end, there's no real escape from what is for so many people the misery of being human: computers and the Internet are not saviors, though they could be useful tools for those who want to save themselves. That's hard work, though.