Freedom of speech, and how to reason productively about it

Most people develop opinions about how speech should be restricted via a priori reasoning from abstract principles, often absorbed from primary school civics lessons or other tribal recitations (for example, these days, social media memes).

But in a consequentialist, utilitarian framework, how discourse should be regulated depends on several empirical questions:

• Speech is a physical reality; the speech that occurs in a given medium can be measured.
• The beliefs, behaviors, and harms that a system of speech engenders are also physical realities, and also to some extent measurable.
• The effects of a given mode of speech regulation are also measurable realities.

To put it another way, media are systems with particular mechanics, like games; Twitter is a different game, for example, than Reddit, and both are different from digital journalism or cable news. The mechanics of a medium drive higher-level emergent dynamics, which (for nontrivial systems) can only be studied empirically. The proper instruments of study cannot be drawn from the toolkit of a priori philosophy alone; they require the methods of science and engineering: experimentation, simulation, modeling, comparison of modeling predictions against empirical data.

I posit that any practicing computer game designer could easily design a "speech game" where bad speech totally drives out good. In fact, this would be so easy that the only design challenge would be making it fun enough that anyone would want to play. As a player of that game, you would be a fool to embrace the strategy that "the remedy to be applied is more speech" (quoting Brandeis); you would simply be crushed; your adversaries would laugh at your naivete. I hope this idea seems obvious to you. But are you certain that we aren't all playing such a game in one or more spheres of real life?

It is sad to me that so much effort is spent (wasted!) arguing in totally unproductive circles about some aspect of free speech ("censorship", "cancel culture", "deplatforming", etc.), and so little effort is spent understanding empirically the connection between mechanics and dynamics.

On the Duplex demo

Disclaimer: I worked for Google long ago, and I may work there again someday. I had nothing to do with Duplex.

The Google Duplex demo has caused some fairly heated & widespread reactions; to paraphrase, "The person on the other end doesn't know or consent to talking to a robot! This is a deceptive violation of their rights!" I think that I understand, a little, why people react this way, but on balance I find it logically ridiculous. I am also convinced that it will seem both logically and emotionally ridiculous to most people within a generation.

As someone in my 40s, I understand the relationship that 20th century people once had with their phones. I am old enough to remember "reach out and touch someone" being a thing that real people felt was the primary purpose of telephonic communication. However, over the course of my adult life, this use case has been utterly swamped by the rise of automated or semi-automated telephonic processes, constructed by immense and remorseless engines of bureaucratic modernity, that use the telephone as an electronic siphon to suck value out of my time: legally protected political robo-calling, flagrantly illegal commercial robo-calling, telemarketing driven by script-reading call center employees (who, in this role, are functionally biological components of a machine, not autonomous individuals), and a constant nagging flood of scam hangup calls.

Conversely, nearly all outbound phone calls that I make, except to close friends and family, now involve navigation through a robotic phone tree. In other words, I am interacting with a succession of artificial voices for many minutes before a usually-brief chat with a human being.

In other words, for any human being less than about 45 years of age, nearly all telephonic interactions in their adult life have been to a large degree robotic. It is hard to get up in arms because the robots are going to be slightly more fluent in the future. They have been getting more fluent all my life (for example, many phone systems can now recognize numbers that are spoken rather than dialed on a touch-tone pad). I don't care. Deep down, you probably don't either.

Search your feelings; you know it to be true. How many times in your life have you picked up the phone to a telemarketing call and thought to yourself, "Oh thank goodness, I am super glad to have been interrupted in this fashion because it's a human being talking to me rather than a robot? My heart brims over with joy!" None. Zero times. You have never thought this.

On the other hand, suppose you received a call that said: "Hey, just wanted to let you know that a recently deceased distant relative left you a one million dollar inheritance; a check and a letter with details will be arriving in your mailbox today. You don't have to do anything else but cash the check, thanks, take it easy!" You would not care whether the voice was a robot or a human being. You would be skeptical, but when you got the check and the letter, which said, "By the way, a robotic call was placed to your phone number earlier today to inform you that this letter would arrive so you wouldn't miss it," you would not think to yourself, "OMG, I feel so unbelievably violated because that voice was a robot! Fuck this stupid million dollar check and fuck the horse that it rode in on!"

The moral valence of a phone call is determined by the value that the participating parties get out of the call, not by whether one or both parties on the call are mediated by machines that are slightly more adept than the machines which existed in 1992.

Lastly, if the above doesn't convince you, here are two more quick reasons that the future will welcome talking bots:

• People under 30 today ("millennials" or whatever you want to call them) hate making voice calls. They will probably welcome any opportunity to delegate this stupid chore.
• People under 15 today will grow up taking bots for granted; for example, textual chatbots, or other types of bots in online games that they play. They will feel no horror at the idea that spoken-word bots can have warm, engaging voices.

Two white dresses

Striking juxtaposition (intentional?) on the CNN International home page just now:

One woman is the subject of the photo, and you see her eyes looking fearlessly at her vanquished opponent. Furthermore, she is important for having excelled in a worldwide competition of objective achievement. The other is a secondary subject, her eyes invisible but her gaze clearly directed at the primary subject of the photo, a man — whom, I suppose, she has also conquered, in a sense, although her fellow competitors for the prize are (as in the first photo) outside the frame. Furthermore she is newsworthy only because her new husband happens to be of royal birth. Wittstock is of course more conventionally beautiful than Kvitova as well.

I won't claim that sports are categorically more important than weddings of ceremonial heads of state, but someday I'd hope that the positions of these images would be reversed.

(Posted from lounge in BGI airport while waiting for a flight.)

The types of bestselling free Kindle books

Periodically I go on binges where I browse the Kindle bestsellers list and download most of the top 100 free books, more or less indiscriminately, without consideration for quality. I mean, what the hell, it's free and my Kindle 2 still has over 1.2GB of free storage (out of 1.4GB user space). Even the worst piece of formulaic pulp trash might be funny in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way; or at least there may be some anthropological interest (oh, so this is what women fantasize about?). Most of the stuff goes totally unread of course — I don't have time to even glance at a tenth of it — but I suppose I like having the option.

Anyway, it's interesting to note that as of January 2011, the top 100 free Kindle ebooks list consists of the following:

Count	Type	Example	Notes
50	Gutenberg ebooks	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Kindle conversions of public domain etexts from Project Gutenberg; mostly classics.
7	Games	Every Word	IMO Amazon should segregate these in their own section.
5	Thriller/Mystery	The Perfect Woman	Mostly in the gruesome-crimes subgenre, not the sleuthing subgenre.
8	Erotica/Romance	Rough Cut	Romance readers might claim that these are two categories but I defy you to draw the line among these titles.
2	ChickLit	Stuck in the Middle (Sister-to-Sister Book 1)	Apologies for the derogatory label but what do you want me to do with a cover and title like that?
11	Christian Fiction	Fools Rush In (Weddings By Bella, Book 1)	Often disguises itself quite stealthily as other genre fiction.
6	Other Fantasy	Don't Die, Dragonfly	Mostly spirits-and-vampires stuff, not Heroic Medieval Fantasy Product.
8	Alleged Nonfiction	The Winners Manual	Includes many crappy cookbooks and the Bible.
3	Other Fiction	The Stolen Crown	Arguably the bravest authors here, as non-series non-genre fiction has the least "author stickiness" of any fiction. Which isn't to say the writing's any good necessarily.

On banning prostitution (of a particular sort)

So, this Spitzer thing. Much commentary from male writers on the broader issue of prostitution and the merits of legalizing it; you may fruitfully begin your traversal with Ezra Klein or T. Cowen or even A. Tabarrok (whom I usually find odious).

My comment is simple and not at all original. There are many different ways of exchanging money for intimacy — physical or otherwise — that are not only legal, but mostly socially accepted, as long as one does them discreetly.¹ Here are some of them:

• It is legal to pay someone to go out on a date with you, and even be physically intimate with you (hugs, kisses, cuddling, etc.), as long as there is no explicit quid pro quo w.r.t. genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone to give you a sensual massage, as long as the massage does not involve direct prolonged genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone someone to strap you to a bench and strike you with a whip for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to take off their clothes and dance in front of you for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to perform arbitrary sex acts on camera with you, and then either sell or give away the video.
• It is legal to have sex with someone who would not be having sex with you if you did not buy them many gifts and support their lavish lifestyle. (Fun personal note: I have a (female) friend who knows a girl who once said, quite frankly, "I am not going to sleep with a man until he has spent at least a thousand dollars on me." See also this Valleywag post. See also all four characters on Sex and the City, none of whom ever dated a $25k-annual-salary social worker as far as I know.)

The upshot is that everything is permitted, except the straightforward transaction of exchanging a modest sum of money for someone else to privately give you an orgasm by applying friction in the genital area. If you're sufficiently rich, or if your particular sexual kink does not require penetration, or if you like to have sex on camera, prostitution is legal for you. Laws against "prostitution" — which is to say, one very narrow subgenre of sexual commerce — are a hypocritical, hairsplitting exercise in moral hysteria and a massive waste of law enforcement resources.

Finally, I want to point out one more thing. The argument that (one narrow flavor of) prostitution should be illegal because it's closely linked to organized crime and human trafficking is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Prostitution" is undoubtedly tied to organized crime in part because society frowns upon it so much that respectable businesses don't want to be involved in it. Organized crime is fundamentally inefficient, due to unprotected property rights, unenforceable contracts, illiquidity of capital, and all the other standard problems that come with operating a business without the protection of a well-run modern government. If a business like McDonald's or Starbucks ran brothels, they would drive organized crime out of the market pronto. People like Nicholas Kristof heap opprobrium on "prostitution" and then bemoan the inevitable results, namely that women and girls get exploited by criminals.

This is roughly equivalent to the scam whereby Republicans get elected and trash the government every couple of decades, and then point to their own incompetence as proof of their ideology that government doesn't work. It is like pissing on the rug, and then complaining that the rug stinks of piss.²

---

¹ Bonus link: The Purchase of Intimacy, by Princeton sociology professor Viviana A. Zelizer, has been on my to-read list for a long time. Perhaps I will finally order it.

² In fact, I hereby coin a new term for this fallacy of reasoning, akin to "poisoning the well" or "begging the question": "pissing the rug". To piss the rug is to endorse a course of action which leads to a bad outcome, and then blame those who disagree with you for the bad outcome. The grandest example of pissing the rug in recent times is, of course, the Iraq War apologetic wherein liberal war opponents are blamed for the bad consequences that would follow withdrawal. Oh, wait — Kristof did that too. Maybe we should just call it the Kristof Maneuver.

99% of all Craigslist RnR posts

You! Yes, you, [member of group that I do not belong to]! In [situation] you failed to read my mind and, instead of behaving exactly the way that I want you to behave, you decided to behave in some different way! Allow me to enumerate the ways that this makes you a failure as a human being:

[Long-winded attempt to be amusing.]

(Optional:) Actually, come to think of it, there may be a reason you behaved the way that you did, instead of the way that I want you to behave! For example, [reason]. But that reason is a bad one, because it leads to an outcome that I dislike, and I am the center of the universe!

I am just trying to help here! Come on, [member of group that I do not belong to]! In the future, please be better at reading my mind and conforming to my desires!

When do people prefer unauthorized copies? (a few hypotheses)

T. Cowen points out that the people downloaded more unauthorized copies* of Resident Evil: Extinction than any other movie, making "most illicitly copied" a dubious proxy for actual popularity.

Here are several hypotheses on what media people are likely to copy without authorization (I'm sure that others have suggested these same hypotheses before):

Guilty pleasures

If you would feel ashamed to admit paying for something, you're more likely to download a free copy of it. Also, most legitimately purchased media have a visible footprint in either the physical or virtual world: anyone who looks can see the DVD box on your shelf or the movie download in your iTunes collection. But for unauthorized copies, the only footprint is a movie file tucked away in some corner of your hard drive. Normally, the signaling aspect of a media purchase is a feature, but for guilty pleasures, it's the opposite.

Low-quality media

Media companies sell basically all media of a certain type for a similar price (e.g., about $17 for a new film on DVD). Possibly this is due to fundamental fixed costs of production (a DVD costs $X to digitally master and $Y per unit to manufacture, transport, and warehouse); possibly it's because of social processes (the studio exec managing film X projected $Y margin per unit at retail, and cannot release it at a lower margin without losing status within the company). Regardless, when a product is of exceptionally low quality, more people will see the dollar price as unwarranted, and they will be more willing to spend time seeking out unauthorized copies (see the next point).

Youth culture

Young people have more time than money, and a large appetite for media (more time to watch movies when you don't have a full-time job, children, or other responsibilities). Obtaining an unauthorized copy of something requires a trade of time for money.

Low-availability media

If a media product is difficult to obtain via authorized channels --- for example, if a product is not available for sale in your country, but is available overseas --- then you are more likely to seek out an unauthorized copy.

Improperly bundled products

If a media product is an aggregation of many separable parts, some of which are much more desirable than the others, then people are more likely to seek out an unauthorized copy of the parts they like.

I've never seen Resident Evil: Extinction, but I'm pretty sure that it falls squarely at the intersection of the first three of the above categories. Anecdotally, I think that many people know someone who would never pay for a Britney Spears album but has some kind of lame excuse for having a few tracks on their iPod.

The above hypotheses have several corollaries.

First, if unauthorized copying truly reduces returns to creators so much that it discourages creative output, then overpriced crap aimed at adolescents and young adults will be the first to go.

Second, media companies can reduce the amount of unauthorized copying by a variety of straightforward means, including:

• Reduce the price of crappy products. (Duh.)
• Offer very low-cost versions of media that require a time investment. For example, offer a low-cost subscription service where you must play a game for a certain amount of time (think World of Moviecraft) in order to obtain a download of a media product. Consumers who value time over money will still buy the DVD. Consumers who value money over time will play the game.
• Sell "brown sleeve" versions of guilty pleasures. Sell junky movies and music in a disposable cardboard sleeve instead of a DVD keep case or CD jewel case with album art. Or even sell them in deceptive packaging: reverse the cover insert for your Resident Evil DVD, and it can look like some depressing and obscure Swedish existentialist art film that nobody will ever want to pull off the shelf.

* I refuse to use the term "pirated", as it trivializes actual piracy (the sailing-ships kind), and blurs the important distinctions between different forms of intellectual property infringement.

Possibly the best thing ever written about Maureen Dowd

C. Bush writes...

So, even Dowd’s defender says mostly bad things about her, but what is more telling to me, ultimately, are the good things even her detractors say about her: she exaggerates, but she provokes with her sharp wit, etc. Well, here are some examples of that wit: “We had the Belle Epoque. Now we have the Botox Epoch.” (Oh --was that a tree breaking outside [my] window or the biggest SNAP! in history?!?).

...

For me the problem with Dowd is not that her style overrides her substance, it’s that her style is no good. Apparently someone somewhere in the world reads “Botox Epoque” and chuckles to themselves “Botox Epoque, that’s good!”

Respectable arguments against same-sex marriage

Random late-night browsing whilst procrastinating w.r.t. proofreading a camera-ready copy of a paper: as a thought experiment Belle Waring constructs an intellectually non-ridiculous argument against same-sex marriage; and (linked from the above comment thread) a plea for intellectual humility from Jane Galt, of all people, that's also not entirely ridiculous.

I have two reactions. First, any intellectually honest person who opposes same-sex marriage for the linked reasons should also support denial of marriage benefits to childless heterosexual couples. But opponents of same-sex marriage won't come out against childless heterosexual couples. Why not? Because society views childless heterosexuals (unlike homosexuals) as first-class citizens, and therefore, it would be incredibly unpopular to infringe on the autonomy of heterosexuals. People believe that heterosexual couples have a right to choose both marriage and childlessness for themselves. Besides, some childless heterosexual couples are childless for painful personal reasons; adding insult to injury by denying them marriage benefits seems beyond the pale. I could say closely analogous things for committed homosexual couples --- that they have the right to choose marriage, and that denying them benefits is cruel --- but the anti-same-sex-marriage forces wouldn't care. Therefore, let's admit the role that power, stemming from bigotry, plays in the acceptance of even the relatively respectable arguments proposed by Galt and Waring: although we would not treat heterosexuals this way, we will treat homosexuals this way, because it is popular to do so, and therefore we have the power to do so.

Second, on a somewhat different track, I want to make a larger point, which is that sometimes the well-being of society simply must defer to individual rights. Individuals are ends-in-themselves, whereas society is a means to furthering the ends of individuals. If guaranteeing individual rights commensurate with our values ultimately leads to the breakdown of society, then so be it.

It is conceivable that a society built upon individual autonomy, civil liberties, and equality before the law cannot be sustained indefinitely. It is conceivable that on the grand scale of history, each era when such institutions prevail is a brief interlude, like foam on the crest of a wave, which inherently rises and then subsides, whereas discrimination and oppression are a sturdy bedrock which endures. It is conceivable that the American experiment in constructing ever-widening circles of social equality contains the structural causes of its own collapse, and that it will therefore recede and be replaced by something more morally repugnant and more sustainable.

So what? Happiness is always finite, but at least it is happiness. Most love affairs contain within them the seeds of their own destruction, but this does not compel us not to love. If equality before the law cannot endure forever, then at least we're lucky enough to have lived in a time when it prevailed. Maybe in some distant future, after same-sex marriage and America's million other concessions to the pursuit of individual happiness have destroyed America, and some dark millennia have passed without us, some other people will, for a fleeting few centuries, be lucky enough to live in such an era again. If so, then I hope that they, too, refuse to destroy their happiness in order to save it.

"Tomorrow, I will go back to being funny, and your show will still blow."

I've been thinking more about Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance (video mirrors via Lessig and Lisa Rein), and his followup on The Daily Show.

It's telling that Tucker Carlson's main rejoinder is that Stewart didn't ask "pointed" questions when John Kerry appeared on The Daily Show. On its face, this seems a clear enough criticism, and even a fair one. But in order to understand Carlson fully, you have to examine his words closely in the wider context of Washington journalism. From the CNN transcript (emphases mine):

CARLSON: It's nice to get them to try and answer the question. And in order to do that, we try and ask them pointed questions. I want to contrast our questions with some questions you asked John Kerry recently.

...[deletia]...

CARLSON: Kerry won't come on this show. He will come on your show.

STEWART: Right.

CARLSON: Let me suggest why he wants to come on your show.

STEWART: Well, we have civilized discourse.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Well, here's an example of the civilized discourse. Here are three of the questions you asked John Kerry.

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: You have a chance to interview the Democratic nominee. You asked him questions such as -- quote -- "How are you holding up? Is it hard not to take the attacks personally?"

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: "Have you ever flip-flopped?" et cetera, et cetera.

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: Didn't you feel like -- you got the chance to interview the guy. Why not ask him a real question, instead of just suck up to him?

Now, this exchange has a clear enough "secular" meaning --- i.e., the meaning it conveys to laypeople --- but I think it has an additional layer of "esoteric" meaning --- i.e., its meaning among people who, like Tucker Carlson, inhabit the peculiar world of Washington journalism. Admittedly, I'm not one of those people, but I read about it here and there, so bear with me as I speculate about it.

In this world, news organizations reward journalists for breaking "scoops" and "exclusives", which requires access to sources --- the more highly-placed the sources, the better. But, of course, all highly-placed sources have powerful incentives to influence news coverage, and so they use "access" as carrot and stick to reward complaisant journalists and punish independent ones. Journalists therefore engage in a perpetual and carefully calibrated balancing act, trying to please their editors without offending their sources.

Ideally, journalists would all be brilliant and hard-working enough to fight the pernicious enfeebling effects of the "access" trap. Ideally, journalists would respond to punitive access-denial by redoubling their efforts and digging deeper to find independent sources. Ideally, the press corps would show some solidarity by collectively blasting politicians for playing the access game in the first place, even though the game gives certain individual journalists a competitive advantage.

In practice, journalists are often dimwitted, lazy, and selfish, and hence they become captives of the game.¹

Talk shows operate under similar incentive structures: your producer wants you to get high-profile guests, so you have an incentive to kiss ass. Meet the Press's Tim Russert was able to get Bush for a rare exclusive interview because Bush's handlers knew that Russert wasn't going to be confrontational or ask hard followup questions.

In this context, Carlson isn't merely accusing Stewart of asking Kerry lame questions. Look at the transcript: Carlson's accusing Stewart of playing this game, of asking lame questions in exchange for access to Kerry --- or, more precisely, of acting like a pushover for certain (liberal) guests because that will increase the likelihood of getting more guests like them.

And in making this accusation, Carlson makes a fundamental error, because The Daily Show isn't playing the access game at all. Under Jon Stewart's leadership, The Daily Show's mission has been simple and twofold:

1. Be funny.
2. Enlighten your viewers. (This clause is what separates TDS from the likes of Jay Leno, who is intermittently funny but whose jokes rarely reach beyond dragging out a dozen variations on the conventional wisdom's caricatures-of-the-hour.)

Neither of these goals requires high-level access or high-profile guests. The Daily Show operates outside the whole world of incentives familiar to Carlson's colleagues. Jon Stewart et al. can chug along merrily, season after season, simply by mocking the previous day's newspaper headlines and cable news clips. In fact, Stewart's sharpest barbs tend to lacerate the media rather than politicians. Gaining "access" simply doesn't constitute a significant part of The Daily Show's winning strategy. No doubt the show was happy to get John Kerry, Richard Clarke, and other high-profile guests, but the vast majority of the audience would watch even if the show never had such guests. Or, indeed, if the show never had guests at all --- the guest segment, which only occupies the last third of the show (after the second commercial break), is usually the least funny part.

And so The Daily Show operates in tremendous freedom, a freedom that they use to powerful effect. Carlson's criticism, by its esoteric meaning, is just plain wrong.²

Now, suppose we give Carlson the benefit of the doubt and consider the secular meaning. In this case Carlson isn't wholly wrong; he's just trivial. Sure, Stewart should have asked Kerry better questions. However, even if we grant this point, it's a pretty minor one, compared to the devastating hits Stewart lands on Carlson. First of all, I think Carlson misrepresents or misunderstands parts of the interview --- when Stewart asked Kerry, "Have you ever flip-flopped?", he was satirizing the silliness of letting an empty catch-phrase set the terms of political debate. In other words, he was making fun of people like Carlson. Second, as I've already said, the interview segment of The Daily Show has never been terribly important to its success. Finally, although Stewart's interview questions may not always be "tough", his interviews generally reflect a combination of respect, curiosity, and an earnest desire to get past shallow talking points. Given the comedy/talk-show format, and given that the interview only lasts about seven minutes, Stewart does a terrific job. "Toughness" is a phony measure of journalistic and comedic integrity. The true measure is whether the journalism and the comedy honor the truth.

Now, admittedly, Stewart's reply to Carlson --- that Crossfire shouldn't hold itself to the low, low standards of The Daily Show --- is a dodge (as my man AJ notes). Obviously, The Daily Show ought to bear some responsibility for its coverage, just as Crossfire does.

Stewart's reply should have been: "Maybe I wasn't as tough on Kerry as I could have been, but our comedy is fundamentally honest, whereas your debate show is fundamentally dishonest. When we make fun of something, we're very careful to do it in a way that respects the truth --- whereas when you criticize something, you're generally engaging in hackery. We're not hurting America. You are."

So why didn't Stewart come back with this statement? Probably some combination of modesty and a reluctance to admit publicly to taking himself seriously. It's popularly assumed that comedy is the antithesis of seriousness; at least, comedians and others often claim that comedy works best when it doesn't have an agenda and skewers everybody equally. But in fact, much of the greatest comedy (1) has a deadly serious agenda, beneath the laughter, and (2) advocates against the powerful and for the powerless. These are two facts that most comic writers, artists, and performers understand on a gut level. The alleged value-neutrality of comedy is a social fiction that serves the dual purpose of allowing its targets to save face ("Well, they really make fun of everybody, not just me.") and giving comedians plausible deniability in the face of power. Court jesters have always lived by the king's sufferance, and they require cover to do so.

So Stewart should be forgiven for employing this dodge. I'd argue that the substance of his criticism remains valid, and the substance of Carlson's criticism is (depending on your reading) either incorrect or inconsequential.

I do, on the other hand, agree with Nick Confessore, who writes in TAPPED:

As a side note, I do think Stewart misdirects his ire. Personally, I'm less concerned with vapid cable chat shows -- which very few people watch and not many people take seriously -- than I am with vapid print and network news coverage, which many more people see and take seriously.

My friends should find my agreement no surprise. I bitch on this blog fairly regularly on Sundays about something or other that I find in the Sunday Times. Stewart's right that bad cable chat shows hurt America. But bad news coverage hurts America more.

On the third hand, I think that people find Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance satisfying partly because they understand it as an attack on shallow hackery in general, and not merely the particular shallow hackery of debate shows like Crossfire. Stewart's been declaiming from his little alcove on Comedy Central for years. This appearance was, to some extent, a coming out: Jon Stewart, tossed among the lions, telling them off to their face.

---

¹ In fairness to journalists: reporters work under tremendous deadline pressure; reporting without high-level access probably requires a lot more labor; and individual news organizations don't really have enough "boots on the ground" to counteract the superior firepower of a modern political spin operation. This is not to excuse the ridiculous reporting of people like Elisabeth Bumiller, but merely to acknowledge that reporters operate at a structural disadvantage.

² And, as further evidence that Tucker Carlson really intends the esoteric meaning, observe the note of catty jealousy in Carlson's remark: "Kerry won't come on this show. He will come on your show." A similar note of jealousy appeared during Stewart's appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show, wherein O'Reilly said: "OK, when you get a guy like Kerry on... and again, he bypassed me, so I took it personally, he went over to talk to you..." In the universe of talking heads, landing a high-profile guest is a status symbol: it signifies your influence in the national dialogue, or at least your exalted place in the chattering classes' pecking order. Carlson and O'Reilly cover their jealousy with humor, but it's nevertheless recognizable. I submit that it simply doesn't occur to Carlson and O'Reilly that Stewart isn't playing the same game that they are --- that The Daily Show doesn't especially care about access, or star-guest one-upmanship.

Social software in global cultures

Interesting post at Many to Many:

An interesting interview with Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell challenges assumptions of technology in disparate cultures. “My hypothesis was that there was no variation, that there was a global middle class engaged in the same kinds of relationships with technology. It was a hypothesis that was rapidly disproved.” We have highlighted the use of social software to support third places, between work and home, by early adopters in the West, however:

One of the things that became clear in Asia, and is becoming true in the West, but we’re not really good at seeing it, is that people are using these technologies for those third activities. In Asia, it’s visible in the way people use mobile devices to support religious activities. The nicest example is people using their mobile phones to find Mecca. LGE, a Korean handset company, has produced a Mecca-finding handset with GPS technology in it. So it’s a tool of religious devotion. They anticipated selling 300 million units in the first couple years.

The world is turning into a Bruce Sterling novel.

Monoculturalism replacing racism?

Interesting comment from one of M. Yglesias's comments threads:

I'm from the South, and I don't agree that racism is the only thing behind the rise of the GOP and the decline of the Democrats. Racism is on the decline in the South, I believe. What is replacing racism is something that I'd called "monoculturalism" (an invented antonym of "multiculturalism"). Souherners (like people everywhere) want there to be cultural constants that they can assume everyone shares: constants such as belief in God, two parents (one of each sex), love of football, pride in Southern heritage, love of barbeque, etc. Southerners are uncomfortable around people who are too different---such as Muslims, Hindus, homosexuals or vegetarians. Racial diversity is not very important anymore, as long as people of different races can learn to act the same and support the same football teams.

Question: Is this actually an improvement?

Is that tea you're drinking there?

From Orlando Figes's estimable A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (hardcover edition link), which I'm reading this summer as a way of getting my mind off work:

Self-improvement was a natural enough aspiration among skilled workers, like Kanatchikov, who were anxious to rise above their peasant origins and attain the status in society which their growing sense of dignity made them feel they deserved. Many harboured dreams of marrying into the petty-bourgeoisie and of setting themselves up in a small shop or business. They read the boulevard dailies, such as the Petersburg Sheet (Peterburgskii listok), which espoused the Victorian ideals of self-help, guided its readers in questions of good taste and decorum, and entertained them with sensational stories about the glamorous and the rich.

It was only to be expected that this search for respectability should be accompanied by a certain priggishness on the part of the labour élite, a fussy concern to set themselves apart from the 'dark' mass of the peasant-workers by conducting themselves in a sober and 'cultured' way. But among those peasant-workers, like Kanatchikov, who would later join the Bolsheviks, this prudishness was often reflected in an extreme form. Their sobriety became a militant puritanism, as if by their prim and ascetic manners, by their tea-drinking and self-discipline, they could banish their peasant past completely. 'We were of the opinion that no conscious Socialist should ever drink vodka,' recalled one such Bolshevik. 'We even condemned smoking. We propagated morality in the strictest sense of the word.' It was for this reason that so many rank-and-file Bolsheviks abstained from romantic attachments, although in Kanatchikov's case this may have had more to do with his own dismal failure with women. The worker-revolutionaries, he later admitted, 'developed a negative attitude toward the family, toward marriage, and even toward women'. They saw themselves as 'doomed' men, their fate tied wholly to the cause of the revolution, which could only be compromised by 'contact with girls'. So strait-laced were these pioneering proletarians that people often mistook them for Pashkovites, a pious Bible sect. Even the police sometimes became confused when they were instructed to increase their surveillance of 'revolutionary' workers who drank only tea.

Figes's history is packed with colorful details like this one. A 900-page history of the Russian Revolution may sound like the literary equivalent of broccoli, but it's actually a great, absorbing read. Recommended.