Monday, February 19, 2018
The Politics of Shame
Donald Trump is a bad president. But that’s not why we loathe him.
Indifference to the environment, the human cost of a tattered social safety net, and the risks attendant to reckless nuclear threats are hardly unique aspects of Trump’s presidency: they’re the American way. It’s certainly alarming that Trump has repealed common-sense environmental regulations, threatened social services, and withdrawn from the Iran deal. But those acts, which would also feature in a hypothetical Ted Cruz presidency, don’t explain the scale of the reaction to Trump. They don’t account for the existence of neologisms like “Trumpocalypse,” or tell us why late-night hosts and satirists are constantly inventing new, creative ways to mock POTUS’s weave.
The feature that makes Trump unique, and the focus of a particular kind of outrage and contempt, is not his policy prescriptions or even his several hundred thousand character failings. God knows plenty of presidents have been horrible people. What sets Trump apart is his shamelessness.
For example, Trump is not the first president or popular public figure to be accused of sexual assault—it’s a crowded field these days. But he was the first to adopt a “takes one to know one” defense—using his political opponent’s husband’s accusers as a human shield to deflect personal responsibility.
Instead of following the prescribed political ritual for making amends after being caught in flagrante, namely, a contrite press conference featuring a stiff if loyal wife, Trump chose to go on the offensive, even insisting that the infamous “pussy tape” must have been a fabrication. Trump established the pattern of “doubling down” early on when he refused to walk back his comment that John McCain’s capture and subsequent torture during the Vietnam War disqualified him from being considered a war hero. It seems attempts to shame Trump only provoke more shameful acts which fail to faze him.
Where other presidents have been cagey, Trump is brazen. He did not invent the Southern Strategy, but he was the first to employ it with so little discretion that the term “dog whistling” now feels too subtle. (Remember, the tiki-marchers shouting “Jew[s] will not replace us” contained among them some “very fine people.”) There is no shortage of vain politicians, but while John Edwards felt compelled to apologize for his $400 haircut, Trump flaunts his saffron pompadour and matching face. Nepotism may be as old as the Borgias, but the boldness with which Trump has appointed family members and their agents to positions of authority still manages to stun. And while nuclear brinksmanship was a defining feature of 20th century presidencies, never before has the “leader of the free world” literally bragged about the size of his big red button and attempted to fat-shame the leader of a rival nuclear power.
Even when it appears as if Trump is on the verge of an apology or admission, he quickly lapses back into shamelessness. When Trump was criticized for lamenting violence on “many sides” following Heather Heyer’s murder in Charlottesville, Trump was pressured by advisers into releasing a statement explicitly condemning neo-Nazis. But he soon walked it back, once again blaming “both sides” and the “alt-left” for being “very violent.” (Again, remember which side featured a white supremacist who killed a woman.)
This impudence, this shamelessness, is essentially Trump’s calling card. And those who object to it have often sought to restore the balance by trying even harder to shame him, or, in the alternative, by trying to shame his followers into acting like reasonable human beings. “Shame on all of us for making Donald Trump a Thing,” wrote conservative writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry back in 2015. Throngs of protestors chanted “shame, shame, shame” along Trump’s motorcade route after his “fine people” remark. The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti wrote that shaming is both justified and “necessary” because “there are people right now who should be made to feel uncomfortable” because “what they have done is shameful.”
MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid has also sought to shame Trump voters, for example by tweeting: “Last November, 63 million of you voted to pretty much hand this country over to a few uber wealthy families and the religious far right. Well done.” Washington Monthly contributor David Atkins has echoed this sentiment, tweeting: “Good news white working class! Your taxes will go up, your Medicare will be cut and your kid’s student loans will be more expensive. But at least Don Jr can bring back elephant trunks on his tax deductible private jet, so it’s all good.”
“How could he/they!?” is a popular way to start sentences about either Trump or his supporters. The statistic that 53% of white women voted for Trump (how could they??) is a useful tool both for shaming others and the self-flagellation-cum-virtue-signaling characteristic of some white women who “knew better.” Even suggesting that politicians talk to Trump voters is grounds for ridicule. Forget scarlet letters—nothing short of community expulsion will do. They’re “irredeemable” after all. So why bother “reaching out”?
Believe me, I empathize. Trump’s policies hurt people, and the people who voted for him did so willingly. Given the easy-to-anticipate consequences of their votes, Trump voters do seem like bad people who should be ashamed. We’re often encouraged to engage more civilly with “people who disagree with us,” but the divergent value systems reflected by America’s two major political parties cut to the core of who we are. They are not necessarily mere disagreements, but deep moral schisms, which is why commentators like Valenti insist that a high level of outrage is appropriate to the circumstances. If you’re not outraged, you’re not taking seriously enough the harm done to the immigrant families torn apart by ICE. Mere fact-based criticisms of various policy positions feel inadequate, as if they trivialize the moral issues involved. It seems important to add that various beliefs, themselves, are shameful. No wonder, then, that the shared impulse isn’t just to disagree, but to “drag,” destroy, and decimate.
Given what’s at stake, I understand why shaming feels not only appropriate, but compulsory. It’s an inclination I share and sympathize with.
But in practice, I think it’s a mistake.
by Briahna Joy Gray, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Tyler Rubenfeld
Indifference to the environment, the human cost of a tattered social safety net, and the risks attendant to reckless nuclear threats are hardly unique aspects of Trump’s presidency: they’re the American way. It’s certainly alarming that Trump has repealed common-sense environmental regulations, threatened social services, and withdrawn from the Iran deal. But those acts, which would also feature in a hypothetical Ted Cruz presidency, don’t explain the scale of the reaction to Trump. They don’t account for the existence of neologisms like “Trumpocalypse,” or tell us why late-night hosts and satirists are constantly inventing new, creative ways to mock POTUS’s weave.
The feature that makes Trump unique, and the focus of a particular kind of outrage and contempt, is not his policy prescriptions or even his several hundred thousand character failings. God knows plenty of presidents have been horrible people. What sets Trump apart is his shamelessness.
For example, Trump is not the first president or popular public figure to be accused of sexual assault—it’s a crowded field these days. But he was the first to adopt a “takes one to know one” defense—using his political opponent’s husband’s accusers as a human shield to deflect personal responsibility.Instead of following the prescribed political ritual for making amends after being caught in flagrante, namely, a contrite press conference featuring a stiff if loyal wife, Trump chose to go on the offensive, even insisting that the infamous “pussy tape” must have been a fabrication. Trump established the pattern of “doubling down” early on when he refused to walk back his comment that John McCain’s capture and subsequent torture during the Vietnam War disqualified him from being considered a war hero. It seems attempts to shame Trump only provoke more shameful acts which fail to faze him.
Where other presidents have been cagey, Trump is brazen. He did not invent the Southern Strategy, but he was the first to employ it with so little discretion that the term “dog whistling” now feels too subtle. (Remember, the tiki-marchers shouting “Jew[s] will not replace us” contained among them some “very fine people.”) There is no shortage of vain politicians, but while John Edwards felt compelled to apologize for his $400 haircut, Trump flaunts his saffron pompadour and matching face. Nepotism may be as old as the Borgias, but the boldness with which Trump has appointed family members and their agents to positions of authority still manages to stun. And while nuclear brinksmanship was a defining feature of 20th century presidencies, never before has the “leader of the free world” literally bragged about the size of his big red button and attempted to fat-shame the leader of a rival nuclear power.
Even when it appears as if Trump is on the verge of an apology or admission, he quickly lapses back into shamelessness. When Trump was criticized for lamenting violence on “many sides” following Heather Heyer’s murder in Charlottesville, Trump was pressured by advisers into releasing a statement explicitly condemning neo-Nazis. But he soon walked it back, once again blaming “both sides” and the “alt-left” for being “very violent.” (Again, remember which side featured a white supremacist who killed a woman.)
This impudence, this shamelessness, is essentially Trump’s calling card. And those who object to it have often sought to restore the balance by trying even harder to shame him, or, in the alternative, by trying to shame his followers into acting like reasonable human beings. “Shame on all of us for making Donald Trump a Thing,” wrote conservative writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry back in 2015. Throngs of protestors chanted “shame, shame, shame” along Trump’s motorcade route after his “fine people” remark. The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti wrote that shaming is both justified and “necessary” because “there are people right now who should be made to feel uncomfortable” because “what they have done is shameful.”
MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid has also sought to shame Trump voters, for example by tweeting: “Last November, 63 million of you voted to pretty much hand this country over to a few uber wealthy families and the religious far right. Well done.” Washington Monthly contributor David Atkins has echoed this sentiment, tweeting: “Good news white working class! Your taxes will go up, your Medicare will be cut and your kid’s student loans will be more expensive. But at least Don Jr can bring back elephant trunks on his tax deductible private jet, so it’s all good.”
“How could he/they!?” is a popular way to start sentences about either Trump or his supporters. The statistic that 53% of white women voted for Trump (how could they??) is a useful tool both for shaming others and the self-flagellation-cum-virtue-signaling characteristic of some white women who “knew better.” Even suggesting that politicians talk to Trump voters is grounds for ridicule. Forget scarlet letters—nothing short of community expulsion will do. They’re “irredeemable” after all. So why bother “reaching out”?
Believe me, I empathize. Trump’s policies hurt people, and the people who voted for him did so willingly. Given the easy-to-anticipate consequences of their votes, Trump voters do seem like bad people who should be ashamed. We’re often encouraged to engage more civilly with “people who disagree with us,” but the divergent value systems reflected by America’s two major political parties cut to the core of who we are. They are not necessarily mere disagreements, but deep moral schisms, which is why commentators like Valenti insist that a high level of outrage is appropriate to the circumstances. If you’re not outraged, you’re not taking seriously enough the harm done to the immigrant families torn apart by ICE. Mere fact-based criticisms of various policy positions feel inadequate, as if they trivialize the moral issues involved. It seems important to add that various beliefs, themselves, are shameful. No wonder, then, that the shared impulse isn’t just to disagree, but to “drag,” destroy, and decimate.
Given what’s at stake, I understand why shaming feels not only appropriate, but compulsory. It’s an inclination I share and sympathize with.
But in practice, I think it’s a mistake.
by Briahna Joy Gray, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Tyler Rubenfeld
Freestyle Skier's Complex Path Offers Olympic Rorschach Test
The words left Liz Swaney's lips without an ounce of irony. No telling curl of the lips. No wink. Nothing. She meant them. All of them.
"I didn't qualify for finals so I'm really disappointed," the 33-year-old Californian said after coming in last in the 24-woman field during Olympic women's halfpipe qualifying on Monday.
She seemed ... surprised.
Even though her score of 31.40 was more than 40 points behind France's Anais Caradeux, whose 72.80 marked the lowest of the 12 skiers to move on to Tuesday's medal round.
Even though Swaney finished in about the same position in each of the dozen events she competed across the globe over the last four years in the run-up to the Pyeongchang Games.
Even though her two qualifying runs at Phoenix Snow Park featured little more than Swaney riding up the halfpipe wall before turning around in the air and skiing to the other side. It was a sequence she repeated a handful of times before capping her final trip with a pair of "alley oops", basically inward 180 degree turns more fitting for the local slopes than the world's largest sporting event.
Halfpipe is judged on a 100-point scale. Swaney has yet to break 40 in an FIS-sanctioned competition, not because she regularly wipes out trying to throw difficult tricks but because she doesn't even try them.
Yet she's here in South Korea anyway as part of the Hungarian delegation, the latest in a series of quixotic pursuits that include running for governor of California as a 19-year-old student at Berkeley to trying out for the Oakland Raiders cheerleading team to mounting a push to reach the Olympics as skeleton racer for Venezuela. She only started skiing eight years ago and only got serious about it after the skeleton thing didn't take.
"I still want to inspire people to get involved with athletics or a new sport or a new challenge at any age in life," she said.
A tale that's hardly new, though Swaney's unusual path offers a Rorschach test of sorts on what the Olympics actually mean.
The games have long trafficked in the soft-focus narrative of plucky dreamers with no shot. Think Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, the bespectacled British ski jumper; the Jamaican bobsled team or relentlessly shirtless Tongan Olympian Pita Taufatofua , who came in 114th out of 116 skiers in the 15-kilometer cross-country race last week.
Korea entered 19-year-old Kyoungeun Kim in women's aerials earlier in the Games, the first skier from the host country to take on the event at the Olympics. Kim came in dead last while going off the smallest of the five "kicker" ramps used at the Games, the back flip she completed in the second round akin to something a teenager might do off a diving board at the neighborhood pool.
Taufatofua and Edwards embraced the uniqueness of their stories, fully allowing they were simply happy to be at the Olympics and nothing more. Kim represented Korea's first foray into the sport. All three of them competed for the countries they were born in.
Swaney's story is more complicated.
Let's get this out of the way early: she did nothing illegal to get here. She racked up the required FIS points to reach the Olympic standard. She went through the necessary hoops to join Team Hungary, the connection coming from her Hungarian maternal grandfather, who she said would have turned 100 on Tuesday. She's spent more than her fair share of money hopscotching continents chasing a dream she says was hatched watching the 1992 Games.
It was not easy and it was not cheap. Yet she kept at it. Keeping at it is kind of her thing. No matter how you try to frame the questions, the answers come back the same. She swears this isn't a publicity stunt. This is real.
"I'm trying to soak in the Olympic experience but also focusing on the halfpipe here and trying to go higher each time and getting more spins in," said Swaney, who wore bib No. 23 and stars-and-stripes goggles not as some sort of statement but basically because they were the least expensive in the athlete's store.
One problem. Swaney doesn't go very high. She doesn't spin very much.
Canadian Cassie Sharpe packed more twists into the first two tricks of her qualifying-topping run than Swaney did all day. In an event making its second Olympic appearance, one focused on progression and pushing the edge, Swaney's tentative, decidedly grounded trips down the pipe play in stark contrast to everyone else.
The English language announcer stayed largely quiet during Swaney's second run because, well, there wasn't much to describe. As Lady Gaga blared over the speakers, the crowd watched in silence for sparse applause at the end. The judges awarded her for doing back-to-back "alley oops," with the American judge even giving her a 33. It was better than her first, but it was nowhere near world class.
Swaney is here because she earned her way in.
Still, it leads to the inevitable question: should she be?
"I didn't qualify for finals so I'm really disappointed," the 33-year-old Californian said after coming in last in the 24-woman field during Olympic women's halfpipe qualifying on Monday.
She seemed ... surprised.
Even though her score of 31.40 was more than 40 points behind France's Anais Caradeux, whose 72.80 marked the lowest of the 12 skiers to move on to Tuesday's medal round.Even though Swaney finished in about the same position in each of the dozen events she competed across the globe over the last four years in the run-up to the Pyeongchang Games.
Even though her two qualifying runs at Phoenix Snow Park featured little more than Swaney riding up the halfpipe wall before turning around in the air and skiing to the other side. It was a sequence she repeated a handful of times before capping her final trip with a pair of "alley oops", basically inward 180 degree turns more fitting for the local slopes than the world's largest sporting event.
Halfpipe is judged on a 100-point scale. Swaney has yet to break 40 in an FIS-sanctioned competition, not because she regularly wipes out trying to throw difficult tricks but because she doesn't even try them.
Yet she's here in South Korea anyway as part of the Hungarian delegation, the latest in a series of quixotic pursuits that include running for governor of California as a 19-year-old student at Berkeley to trying out for the Oakland Raiders cheerleading team to mounting a push to reach the Olympics as skeleton racer for Venezuela. She only started skiing eight years ago and only got serious about it after the skeleton thing didn't take.
"I still want to inspire people to get involved with athletics or a new sport or a new challenge at any age in life," she said.
A tale that's hardly new, though Swaney's unusual path offers a Rorschach test of sorts on what the Olympics actually mean.
The games have long trafficked in the soft-focus narrative of plucky dreamers with no shot. Think Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, the bespectacled British ski jumper; the Jamaican bobsled team or relentlessly shirtless Tongan Olympian Pita Taufatofua , who came in 114th out of 116 skiers in the 15-kilometer cross-country race last week.
Korea entered 19-year-old Kyoungeun Kim in women's aerials earlier in the Games, the first skier from the host country to take on the event at the Olympics. Kim came in dead last while going off the smallest of the five "kicker" ramps used at the Games, the back flip she completed in the second round akin to something a teenager might do off a diving board at the neighborhood pool.
Taufatofua and Edwards embraced the uniqueness of their stories, fully allowing they were simply happy to be at the Olympics and nothing more. Kim represented Korea's first foray into the sport. All three of them competed for the countries they were born in.
Swaney's story is more complicated.
Let's get this out of the way early: she did nothing illegal to get here. She racked up the required FIS points to reach the Olympic standard. She went through the necessary hoops to join Team Hungary, the connection coming from her Hungarian maternal grandfather, who she said would have turned 100 on Tuesday. She's spent more than her fair share of money hopscotching continents chasing a dream she says was hatched watching the 1992 Games.
It was not easy and it was not cheap. Yet she kept at it. Keeping at it is kind of her thing. No matter how you try to frame the questions, the answers come back the same. She swears this isn't a publicity stunt. This is real.
"I'm trying to soak in the Olympic experience but also focusing on the halfpipe here and trying to go higher each time and getting more spins in," said Swaney, who wore bib No. 23 and stars-and-stripes goggles not as some sort of statement but basically because they were the least expensive in the athlete's store.
One problem. Swaney doesn't go very high. She doesn't spin very much.
Canadian Cassie Sharpe packed more twists into the first two tricks of her qualifying-topping run than Swaney did all day. In an event making its second Olympic appearance, one focused on progression and pushing the edge, Swaney's tentative, decidedly grounded trips down the pipe play in stark contrast to everyone else.
The English language announcer stayed largely quiet during Swaney's second run because, well, there wasn't much to describe. As Lady Gaga blared over the speakers, the crowd watched in silence for sparse applause at the end. The judges awarded her for doing back-to-back "alley oops," with the American judge even giving her a 33. It was better than her first, but it was nowhere near world class.
Swaney is here because she earned her way in.
Still, it leads to the inevitable question: should she be?
by Will Graves, AP | Read more:
Image: Getty via Yahoo
Sunday, February 18, 2018
“Fuck You, I Like Guns.”
America, can we talk? Let’s just cut the shit for once and actually talk about what’s going on without blustering and pretending we’re actually doing a good job at adulting as a country right now. We’re not. We’re really screwing this whole society thing up, and we have to do better. We don’t have a choice. People are dying. At this rate, it’s not if your kids, or mine, are involved in a school shooting, it’s when. One of these happens every 60 hours on average in the US. If you think it can’t affect you, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. So let’s talk.
I’ll start. I’m an Army veteran. I like M-4’s, which are, for all practical purposes, an AR-15, just with a few extra features that people almost never use anyway. I’d say at least 70% of my formal weapons training is on that exact rifle, with the other 30% being split between various and sundry machineguns and grenade launchers. My experience is pretty representative of soldiers of my era. Most of us are really good with an M-4, and most of us like it at least reasonably well, because it is an objectively good rifle. I was good with an M-4, really good. I earned the Expert badge every time I went to the range, starting in Basic Training. This isn’t uncommon. I can name dozens of other soldiers/veterans I know personally who can say the exact same thing. This rifle is surprisingly easy to use, completely idiot-proof really, has next to no recoil, comes apart and cleans up like a dream, and is light to carry around. I’m probably more accurate with it than I would be with pretty much any other weapon in existence. I like this rifle a lot. I like marksmanship as a sport. When I was in the military, I enjoyed combining these two things as often as they’d let me.
With all that said, enough is enough. My knee jerk reaction is to consider weapons like the AR-15 no big deal because it is my default setting. It’s where my training lies. It is my normal, because I learned how to fire a rifle IN THE ARMY. You know, while I may only have shot plastic targets on the ranges of Texas, Georgia, and Missouri, that’s not what those weapons were designed for, and those targets weren’t shaped like deer. They were shaped like people. Sometimes we even put little hats on them. You learn to take a gut shot, “center mass”, because it’s a bigger target than the head, and also because if you maim the enemy soldier rather than killing him cleanly, more of his buddies will come out and get him, and you can shoot them, too. He’ll die of those injuries, but it’ll take him a while, giving you the chance to pick off as many of his compadres as you can. That’s how my Drill Sergeant explained it anyway. I’m sure there are many schools of thought on it. The fact is, though, when I went through my marksmanship training in the US Army, I was not learning how to be a competition shooter in the Olympics, or a good hunter. I was being taught how to kill people as efficiently as possible, and that was never a secret.
As an avowed pacifist now, it turns my stomach to even type the above words, but can you refute them? I can’t. Every weapon that a US Army soldier uses has the express purpose of killing human beings. That is what they are made for. The choice rifle for years has been some variant of what civilians are sold as an AR-15. Whether it was an M-4 or an M-16 matters little. The function is the same, and so is the purpose. These are not deer rifles. They are not target rifles. They are people killing rifles. Let’s stop pretending they’re not.
With this in mind, is anybody surprised that nearly every mass shooter in recent US history has used an AR-15 to commit their crime? And why wouldn’t they? High capacity magazine, ease of loading and unloading, almost no recoil, really accurate even without a scope, but numerous scopes available for high precision, great from a distance or up close, easy to carry, and readily available. You can buy one at Wal-Mart, or just about any sports store, and since they’re long guns, I don’t believe you have to be any more than 18 years old with a valid ID. This rifle was made for the modern mass shooter, especially the young one. If he could custom design a weapon to suit his sinister purposes, he couldn’t do a better job than Armalite did with this one already.
This rifle is so deadly and so easy to use that no civilian should be able to get their hands on one. We simply don’t need these things in society at large. I always find it interesting that when I was in the Army, and part of my job was to be incredibly proficient with this exact weapon, I never carried one at any point in garrison other than at the range. Our rifles lived in the arms room, cleaned and oiled, ready for the next range day or deployment. We didn’t carry them around just because we liked them. We didn’t bluster on about barracks defense and our second amendment rights. We tucked our rifles away in the arms room until the next time we needed them, just as it had been done since the Army’s inception. The military police protected us from threats in garrison. They had 9 mm Berettas to carry. They were the only soldiers who carry weapons in garrison. We trusted them to protect us, and they delivered. With notably rare exceptions, this system has worked well. There are fewer shootings on Army posts than in society in general, probably because soldiers are actively discouraged from walking around with rifles, despite being impeccably well trained with them. Perchance, we could have the largely untrained civilian population take a page from that book?
I understand that people want to be able to own guns. That’s ok. We just need to really think about how we’re managing this. Yes, we have to manage it, just as we manage car ownership. People have to get a license to operate a car, and if you operate a car without a license, you’re going to get in trouble for that. We manage all things in society that can pose a danger to other people by their misuse. In addition to cars, we manage drugs, alcohol, exotic animals (there are certain zip codes where you can’t own Serval cats, for example), and fireworks, among other things. We restrict what types of businesses can operate in which zones of the city or county. We have a whole system of permitting for just about any activity a person wants to conduct since those activities could affect others, and we realize, as a society, that we need to try to minimize the risk to other people that comes from the chosen activities of those around them in which they have no say. Gun ownership is the one thing our country collectively refuses to manage, and the result is a lot of dead people.
I can’t drive a Formula One car to work. It would be really cool to be able to do that, and I could probably cut my commute time by a lot. Hey, I’m a good driver, a responsible Formula One owner. You shouldn’t be scared to be on the freeway next to me as I zip around you at 140 MPH, leaving your Mazda in a cloud of dust! Why are you scared? Cars don’t kill people. People kill people. Doesn’t this sound like bullshit? It is bullshit, and everybody knows. Not one person I know would argue non-ironically that Formula One cars on the freeway are a good idea. Yet, these same people will say it’s totally ok to own the firearm equivalent because, in the words of comedian Jim Jeffries, “fuck you, I like guns”.
Yes, yes, I hear you now. We have a second amendment to the constitution, which must be held sacrosanct over all other amendments. Dude. No. The constitution was made to be a malleable document. It’s intentionally vague. We can enact gun control without infringing on the right to bear arms. You can have your deer rifle. You can have your shotgun that you love to shoot clay pigeons with. You can have your target pistol. Get a license. Get a training course. Recertify at a predetermined interval. You do not need a military grade rifle. You don’t. There’s no excuse.
“But we’re supposed to protect against tyranny! I need the same weapons the military would come at me with!” Dude. You know where I can get an Apache helicopter and a Paladin?! Hook a girl up! Seriously, though, do you really think you’d be able to hold off the government with an individual level weapon? Because you wouldn’t. One grenade, and you’re toast. Don’t have these illusions of standing up to the government, and needing military style rifles for that purpose. You’re not going to stand up to the government with this thing. They’d take you out in about half a second.
Let’s be honest. You just want a cool toy, and for the vast majority of people, that’s all an AR-15 is.
by Anna, EPSAAS | Read more:
I’ll start. I’m an Army veteran. I like M-4’s, which are, for all practical purposes, an AR-15, just with a few extra features that people almost never use anyway. I’d say at least 70% of my formal weapons training is on that exact rifle, with the other 30% being split between various and sundry machineguns and grenade launchers. My experience is pretty representative of soldiers of my era. Most of us are really good with an M-4, and most of us like it at least reasonably well, because it is an objectively good rifle. I was good with an M-4, really good. I earned the Expert badge every time I went to the range, starting in Basic Training. This isn’t uncommon. I can name dozens of other soldiers/veterans I know personally who can say the exact same thing. This rifle is surprisingly easy to use, completely idiot-proof really, has next to no recoil, comes apart and cleans up like a dream, and is light to carry around. I’m probably more accurate with it than I would be with pretty much any other weapon in existence. I like this rifle a lot. I like marksmanship as a sport. When I was in the military, I enjoyed combining these two things as often as they’d let me.
With all that said, enough is enough. My knee jerk reaction is to consider weapons like the AR-15 no big deal because it is my default setting. It’s where my training lies. It is my normal, because I learned how to fire a rifle IN THE ARMY. You know, while I may only have shot plastic targets on the ranges of Texas, Georgia, and Missouri, that’s not what those weapons were designed for, and those targets weren’t shaped like deer. They were shaped like people. Sometimes we even put little hats on them. You learn to take a gut shot, “center mass”, because it’s a bigger target than the head, and also because if you maim the enemy soldier rather than killing him cleanly, more of his buddies will come out and get him, and you can shoot them, too. He’ll die of those injuries, but it’ll take him a while, giving you the chance to pick off as many of his compadres as you can. That’s how my Drill Sergeant explained it anyway. I’m sure there are many schools of thought on it. The fact is, though, when I went through my marksmanship training in the US Army, I was not learning how to be a competition shooter in the Olympics, or a good hunter. I was being taught how to kill people as efficiently as possible, and that was never a secret.As an avowed pacifist now, it turns my stomach to even type the above words, but can you refute them? I can’t. Every weapon that a US Army soldier uses has the express purpose of killing human beings. That is what they are made for. The choice rifle for years has been some variant of what civilians are sold as an AR-15. Whether it was an M-4 or an M-16 matters little. The function is the same, and so is the purpose. These are not deer rifles. They are not target rifles. They are people killing rifles. Let’s stop pretending they’re not.
With this in mind, is anybody surprised that nearly every mass shooter in recent US history has used an AR-15 to commit their crime? And why wouldn’t they? High capacity magazine, ease of loading and unloading, almost no recoil, really accurate even without a scope, but numerous scopes available for high precision, great from a distance or up close, easy to carry, and readily available. You can buy one at Wal-Mart, or just about any sports store, and since they’re long guns, I don’t believe you have to be any more than 18 years old with a valid ID. This rifle was made for the modern mass shooter, especially the young one. If he could custom design a weapon to suit his sinister purposes, he couldn’t do a better job than Armalite did with this one already.
This rifle is so deadly and so easy to use that no civilian should be able to get their hands on one. We simply don’t need these things in society at large. I always find it interesting that when I was in the Army, and part of my job was to be incredibly proficient with this exact weapon, I never carried one at any point in garrison other than at the range. Our rifles lived in the arms room, cleaned and oiled, ready for the next range day or deployment. We didn’t carry them around just because we liked them. We didn’t bluster on about barracks defense and our second amendment rights. We tucked our rifles away in the arms room until the next time we needed them, just as it had been done since the Army’s inception. The military police protected us from threats in garrison. They had 9 mm Berettas to carry. They were the only soldiers who carry weapons in garrison. We trusted them to protect us, and they delivered. With notably rare exceptions, this system has worked well. There are fewer shootings on Army posts than in society in general, probably because soldiers are actively discouraged from walking around with rifles, despite being impeccably well trained with them. Perchance, we could have the largely untrained civilian population take a page from that book?
I understand that people want to be able to own guns. That’s ok. We just need to really think about how we’re managing this. Yes, we have to manage it, just as we manage car ownership. People have to get a license to operate a car, and if you operate a car without a license, you’re going to get in trouble for that. We manage all things in society that can pose a danger to other people by their misuse. In addition to cars, we manage drugs, alcohol, exotic animals (there are certain zip codes where you can’t own Serval cats, for example), and fireworks, among other things. We restrict what types of businesses can operate in which zones of the city or county. We have a whole system of permitting for just about any activity a person wants to conduct since those activities could affect others, and we realize, as a society, that we need to try to minimize the risk to other people that comes from the chosen activities of those around them in which they have no say. Gun ownership is the one thing our country collectively refuses to manage, and the result is a lot of dead people.
I can’t drive a Formula One car to work. It would be really cool to be able to do that, and I could probably cut my commute time by a lot. Hey, I’m a good driver, a responsible Formula One owner. You shouldn’t be scared to be on the freeway next to me as I zip around you at 140 MPH, leaving your Mazda in a cloud of dust! Why are you scared? Cars don’t kill people. People kill people. Doesn’t this sound like bullshit? It is bullshit, and everybody knows. Not one person I know would argue non-ironically that Formula One cars on the freeway are a good idea. Yet, these same people will say it’s totally ok to own the firearm equivalent because, in the words of comedian Jim Jeffries, “fuck you, I like guns”.
Yes, yes, I hear you now. We have a second amendment to the constitution, which must be held sacrosanct over all other amendments. Dude. No. The constitution was made to be a malleable document. It’s intentionally vague. We can enact gun control without infringing on the right to bear arms. You can have your deer rifle. You can have your shotgun that you love to shoot clay pigeons with. You can have your target pistol. Get a license. Get a training course. Recertify at a predetermined interval. You do not need a military grade rifle. You don’t. There’s no excuse.
“But we’re supposed to protect against tyranny! I need the same weapons the military would come at me with!” Dude. You know where I can get an Apache helicopter and a Paladin?! Hook a girl up! Seriously, though, do you really think you’d be able to hold off the government with an individual level weapon? Because you wouldn’t. One grenade, and you’re toast. Don’t have these illusions of standing up to the government, and needing military style rifles for that purpose. You’re not going to stand up to the government with this thing. They’d take you out in about half a second.
Let’s be honest. You just want a cool toy, and for the vast majority of people, that’s all an AR-15 is.
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: America is Under Attack and the President Doesn't Care... nor do Republicans if it'll help in the next election.]
[ed. See also: America is Under Attack and the President Doesn't Care... nor do Republicans if it'll help in the next election.]
The Tyranny of Convenience
Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.
As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best.
Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance.
Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.
Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.
Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.
Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.
However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.
This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.
The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.
By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co-opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.
You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.
Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.
So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort. (...)
I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?
Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
[ed. This reminds me of an earlier post (The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis) and the concept of "telic" and "atelic" activities: the "distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake."]
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.
As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best.
Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance.
Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.
Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.
Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.
Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.
However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.
This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.
The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.
By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co-opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.
You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.
Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.
So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort. (...)
I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?
Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
by Tim Wu, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Hudson Christie[ed. This reminds me of an earlier post (The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis) and the concept of "telic" and "atelic" activities: the "distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake."]
Saturday, February 17, 2018
The State of Informed Bewilderment
The question that I’ve been asking myself for a long time is, what kind of framing should we have for the dilemmas posed by the technology we’re living through at the moment? I’m interested in information technology, ranging widely from digital technology and the Internet on one hand to artificial intelligence, both weak and strong, on the other hand. As we live through the changes and the disturbances that this technology brings, we’re in a state of mind that was once admirably characterized by Manuel Castells as "informed bewilderment," which was an expression I liked.
We’re informed because we are intensely curious about what’s going on. We're not short of information about it. We endlessly speculate and investigate it in various ways. Manuel’s point was that we actually don’t understand what it means—that’s what he meant by bewilderment. That’s a very good way of describing where we are. The question I have constantly on my mind is, are there frames that would help us to make sense of this in some way?
One of the frames that I’ve explored for a long time is the idea of trying to take a long view of these things. My feeling is that one of our besetting sins at the moment, in relation for example to digital technology, is what Michael Mann once described as the sociology of the last five minutes. I’m constantly trying to escape from that. I write a newspaper column every week, and I've written a couple of books about this stuff. If you wanted to find a way of describing what I try to do, it is trying to escape from the sociology of the last five minutes.
In relation to the Internet and the changes it has already brought in our society, my feeling is that although we don’t know really where it’s heading because it’s too early in the change, we’ve had one stroke of luck. The stroke of luck was that, as a species, we’ve conducted this experiment once before. We’re living through a transformation of our information environment. This happened once before, and we know quite a lot about it. It was kicked off in 1455 by Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of printing by movable type.
In the centuries that followed, that invention not only transformed humanity’s information environment, it also led to colossal changes in society and the world. You could say that what Gutenberg kicked off was a world in which we were all born. Even now, it’s the world in which most of us were shaped. That’s changing for younger generations, but that’s the case for people like me.
Why is Gutenberg useful? He’s useful because he instills in us a sense of humility. The way I’ve come to explain that is with a thought experiment which I often use in talks and lectures. The thought experiment goes like this:
I’m obsessed with the idea of longer views of things. In the area I know, which is information technology, the speed with which stuff appears to change has clearly outdistanced the capacity of our social institutions to adapt. They need longer and they’re not getting it.
A historian will say that’s always been the case, and maybe that’s true. I just don’t know. If you’re a cybernetician looking at this, cybernetics had an idea of a viable system. A viable system is one that can handle the complexity of its environment. For a system to be viable, there are only two strategies. One is to reduce the complexity of the environment that the system has to deal with, and that, broadly speaking, has been the way we’ve managed it in the past.
For example, mass production—the standardization of objects and production processes—was a way of reducing the infinite variety of human tastes. Henry Ford started it with the Model T by saying, "You can have any color as long as it’s black." As manufacturing technology—the business of making physical things—became more and more sophisticated, then the industrial system became quite good at widening the range of choice available, and therefore coping with greater levels of variety.
How many different models does Mercedes make? I don't know. Every time I see a Mercedes car, it’s got a different number on it. I used to think Mercedes made maybe twenty cars. My hunch is that they make probably several hundred varieties of particular cars. The same is true for Volkswagen, etc. Because manufacturing became so efficient, it was able to widen the range of choice.
Fundamentally, mass production was a way of coping with reducing the variety that the system had to deal with. Universities are the same. The way they coped with the infinite range of things that people might want to learn about was to essentially say, “You can do this course or you can do that course. We have a curriculum. We have a set of options. We have majors and minor subjects.” We then compress the infinite variety that they might have to deal with into much smaller amounts.
Most of our institutions, the ones that still govern our societies and indeed our industries, evolved in an era when the variety of their information environment was much smaller than it is now. Because of the Internet and related technologies, our information environment is orders of magnitude more complex than institutions had to deal with even fifty years ago, certainly seventy years ago. And what that means in effect is that in this new environment, a lot of our institutions are probably not viable in the cybernetic sense. They simply can’t manage the complexity they have to deal with now.
The question for society and for everybody else is, what happened? What will happen then? How will they evolve? Will they evolve? One metaphor that I have used for thinking about this is that of ecosystems. In other words, we now live in an information ecosystem. If you’re a scientist who studies natural ecosystems, then you can rank them in terms of complexity.
For example, at one level you could say that we have moved from an information environment, which was a simple ecosystem, rather like a desert, and is much closer to something that’s now like a rainforest. It's characterized by much more diversity, by much higher density of publishers and free agents, and of the interactions between them and the speed with which they evolve and change. Most of our social institutions have not evolved to deal with this metaphorical rainforest, in which case we can expect painful changes in institutions over the next fifty to 100 years as they have to reshape in order to stay viable. Universities are suffering from that already.
by John Naughton, Edge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
We’re informed because we are intensely curious about what’s going on. We're not short of information about it. We endlessly speculate and investigate it in various ways. Manuel’s point was that we actually don’t understand what it means—that’s what he meant by bewilderment. That’s a very good way of describing where we are. The question I have constantly on my mind is, are there frames that would help us to make sense of this in some way?
One of the frames that I’ve explored for a long time is the idea of trying to take a long view of these things. My feeling is that one of our besetting sins at the moment, in relation for example to digital technology, is what Michael Mann once described as the sociology of the last five minutes. I’m constantly trying to escape from that. I write a newspaper column every week, and I've written a couple of books about this stuff. If you wanted to find a way of describing what I try to do, it is trying to escape from the sociology of the last five minutes.In relation to the Internet and the changes it has already brought in our society, my feeling is that although we don’t know really where it’s heading because it’s too early in the change, we’ve had one stroke of luck. The stroke of luck was that, as a species, we’ve conducted this experiment once before. We’re living through a transformation of our information environment. This happened once before, and we know quite a lot about it. It was kicked off in 1455 by Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of printing by movable type.
In the centuries that followed, that invention not only transformed humanity’s information environment, it also led to colossal changes in society and the world. You could say that what Gutenberg kicked off was a world in which we were all born. Even now, it’s the world in which most of us were shaped. That’s changing for younger generations, but that’s the case for people like me.
Why is Gutenberg useful? He’s useful because he instills in us a sense of humility. The way I’ve come to explain that is with a thought experiment which I often use in talks and lectures. The thought experiment goes like this:
I want you to imagine that we’re back in Mainz, the small town on the Rhine where Gutenberg's press was established. The date is around 1476 or ’78, and you’re working for the medieval version of Gallup or MORI Pollsters. You’ve got a clip slate in your hand and you’re stopping people and saying, "Excuse me, madam, would you mind if I asked you some questions?" And here’s question four: "On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is definitely yes and 5 is definitely no, do you think that the invention of printing by movable type will A) undermine the authority of the Catholic Church, B) trigger and fuel a Protestant Reformation, C) enable the rise of something called modern science, D) enable the creation of entirely undreamed of and unprecedented professions, occupations, industries, and E) change our conception of childhood?"That’s a thought experiment, and the reason you want to do it is because nobody in Mainz in, say, 1478 had any idea that what Gutenberg had done in his workshop would have these effects, and yet we know now that it had all of those effects and many more. The point of the thought experiment is, as I said, to induce a sense of humility. I chose that day in 1478 because we’re about the same distance into the revolution we’re now living through. And for anybody therefore to claim confidently that they know what it means and where it’s heading, I think that’s foolish. That’s my idea of trying to get some kind of perspective on it. It makes sense to take the long view of the present in which we are enmeshed. (...)
I’m obsessed with the idea of longer views of things. In the area I know, which is information technology, the speed with which stuff appears to change has clearly outdistanced the capacity of our social institutions to adapt. They need longer and they’re not getting it.
A historian will say that’s always been the case, and maybe that’s true. I just don’t know. If you’re a cybernetician looking at this, cybernetics had an idea of a viable system. A viable system is one that can handle the complexity of its environment. For a system to be viable, there are only two strategies. One is to reduce the complexity of the environment that the system has to deal with, and that, broadly speaking, has been the way we’ve managed it in the past.
For example, mass production—the standardization of objects and production processes—was a way of reducing the infinite variety of human tastes. Henry Ford started it with the Model T by saying, "You can have any color as long as it’s black." As manufacturing technology—the business of making physical things—became more and more sophisticated, then the industrial system became quite good at widening the range of choice available, and therefore coping with greater levels of variety.
How many different models does Mercedes make? I don't know. Every time I see a Mercedes car, it’s got a different number on it. I used to think Mercedes made maybe twenty cars. My hunch is that they make probably several hundred varieties of particular cars. The same is true for Volkswagen, etc. Because manufacturing became so efficient, it was able to widen the range of choice.
Fundamentally, mass production was a way of coping with reducing the variety that the system had to deal with. Universities are the same. The way they coped with the infinite range of things that people might want to learn about was to essentially say, “You can do this course or you can do that course. We have a curriculum. We have a set of options. We have majors and minor subjects.” We then compress the infinite variety that they might have to deal with into much smaller amounts.
Most of our institutions, the ones that still govern our societies and indeed our industries, evolved in an era when the variety of their information environment was much smaller than it is now. Because of the Internet and related technologies, our information environment is orders of magnitude more complex than institutions had to deal with even fifty years ago, certainly seventy years ago. And what that means in effect is that in this new environment, a lot of our institutions are probably not viable in the cybernetic sense. They simply can’t manage the complexity they have to deal with now.
The question for society and for everybody else is, what happened? What will happen then? How will they evolve? Will they evolve? One metaphor that I have used for thinking about this is that of ecosystems. In other words, we now live in an information ecosystem. If you’re a scientist who studies natural ecosystems, then you can rank them in terms of complexity.
For example, at one level you could say that we have moved from an information environment, which was a simple ecosystem, rather like a desert, and is much closer to something that’s now like a rainforest. It's characterized by much more diversity, by much higher density of publishers and free agents, and of the interactions between them and the speed with which they evolve and change. Most of our social institutions have not evolved to deal with this metaphorical rainforest, in which case we can expect painful changes in institutions over the next fifty to 100 years as they have to reshape in order to stay viable. Universities are suffering from that already.
by John Naughton, Edge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.
Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.
This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.
Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).
In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.
Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):
In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe for paranoia. The most toxic consequence of social media manipulation, whether by the Russian government or others, may have nothing to do with its success as propaganda. Instead, it is that it sows an existential distrust. People simply do not know what or who to believe anymore. Rumors that are spread by Twitterbots merge into other rumors about the ubiquity of Twitterbots, and whether this or that trend is being driven by malign algorithms rather than real human beings.
Such widespread falsehood is especially explosive when combined with our fragmented politics. Liberals’ favorite term for the right-wing propaganda machine, “fake news,” has been turned back on them by conservatives, who treat conventional news as propaganda, and hence ignore it. On the obverse, it may be easier for many people on the liberal left to blame Russian propaganda for the last presidential election than to accept that many voters had a very different understanding of America than they do.
Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.
This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).
In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.
Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):
The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again.These obsessions had some of their roots in Dick’s complex and ever-evolving personal mythology (in which it was perfectly plausible that the “real” world was a fake, and that we were all living in Palestine sometime in the first century AD). Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.” (...)
In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe for paranoia. The most toxic consequence of social media manipulation, whether by the Russian government or others, may have nothing to do with its success as propaganda. Instead, it is that it sows an existential distrust. People simply do not know what or who to believe anymore. Rumors that are spread by Twitterbots merge into other rumors about the ubiquity of Twitterbots, and whether this or that trend is being driven by malign algorithms rather than real human beings.
Such widespread falsehood is especially explosive when combined with our fragmented politics. Liberals’ favorite term for the right-wing propaganda machine, “fake news,” has been turned back on them by conservatives, who treat conventional news as propaganda, and hence ignore it. On the obverse, it may be easier for many people on the liberal left to blame Russian propaganda for the last presidential election than to accept that many voters had a very different understanding of America than they do.
by Henry Farrell, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: NikiSublime
[ed. See also: It's the (Democratic-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech (Wired)]
[ed. See also: It's the (Democratic-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech (Wired)]
The Cone of Uncertainty: Parenting on the Edge of Climate Change
There’s a special kind of dread that breeds in the path of a hurricane.
They call it the ‘cone of uncertainty’ – that brightly coloured funnel on the weather map that traces the possible paths of a storm. It’s a statistical mishmash created from dozens of predictions of varying quality, and when you see the dark red centre touch your part of the map, you can almost feel the barometric pressure dropping. You might have days to prepare, days before you know whether it’ll really hit you and how badly. You might not have days to get out, not if the roads are clogged and the gas stations are mobbed; certainly not if you have to work and don’t have cash on hand. You hunker down as best you can, waiting for the first rainbands and the next, for the eye to pass over and the eyewall to return.
Two months before Hurricane Irma, I take my seven-year-old daughter down Alligator Alley: the stretch of Interstate 75 that runs through the Everglades, the massive wetland that covers most of South Florida. It now spans only half the three million acres it once covered, thanks to the breakneck pace of agricultural development and suburban McMansions, but that’s still enough to make the maps look as though the Florida peninsula was dipped into a vat of green. Eight million people – a third of the state’s population – draw their drinking water from this wild and desolate place.
Travelers are advised to bring plenty of water, food, a canister of gas, and a first-aid kit, since there are no hospitals or restaurants and cellular coverage is minimal. Alligator Alley has only the Miccosukee and Seminole reservations and a few rest stops with bathrooms and vending machines. Flocks of turkey buzzards populate the picnic pavilions. A few feet from the parked cars, solid land drops off into sawgrass marsh. It would be easy to step out into the swamp and disappear: this is a protected reserve for the Florida panther, for birds and fish, and of course for alligators. Back when the Everglades was bigger, wilder, enslaved Africans escaped from sugarcane plantations and ran for their lives into those tall, sharp blades. Those who survived found aid and alliances with the local Seminole people.
I tell my daughter about this as we drive from my grandmother’s funeral in Miami to my parents’ house near Clearwater. We watch towering thunderheads sweep across the sea of grass, pouring furiously on us and then retreating into darkness, leaving a rainbow in the rear-view mirror. I want to take her to the Seminole reservation, to skim across the water in a noisy fan-powered airboat so she will remember this place. There is a museum there, too, with recreated houses on stilts, connected by little bridges. It’s a testament to human adaptation, to learning how to live in three feet of alligator-infested water. These are things I want her to learn – but the sun is brutal and the mosquitoes already have the taste of our blood, so we stay in the car. With no way to stream music, we sing our way through endless hours of the same view: water, sawgrass, power lines strung along the horizon, straight road ahead.
I remember what my cousin Ross, an Orlando comedian, told me about deciding to home-school his sons: ‘I want them to see Florida while it’s still here.’ I tell my daughter to remember, remember this. I want her to tell her grandchildren about it – as though it isn’t the height of arrogant optimism to imagine her grandchildren.
‘I want to go to space,’ she tells me. Seven-year-olds have a way of changing the subject abruptly, so I go with it. She’s always wanted to be a veterinarian. Why this sudden shift? ‘So we can still be alive even when the earth burns up.’
The impending planetary catastrophe is often on her mind. She thinks about death a lot. This is normal, of course – children ask the most important questions, especially at funerals, and God help the adults who don’t answer them seriously. She declares her desire to be buried, not cremated; she wants her beloved companion Doggy Pillow buried with her, so no one can bother it. ‘What kind of species will take over the earth after we’re gone?’ she asks. I admit I don’t know. ‘I don’t want them to mess with Doggy Pillow.’
If it has occurred to her that I will probably die before she does, she hasn’t mentioned it. But the planet will die before she does, that much seems clear – the planet as we know it, at any rate, the one that supports us and feeds us and slakes our thirst.
Her love of animals makes her a natural conservationist, and in the Anthropocene even books for children must address what is going on. Do you like sharks? Did you know that sharks can displace their jaws to snap at prey? Did you know that sharks are disappearing at an astonishing rate? My daughter declares that she will save the oceans by putting up signs telling people not to litter. It sounds no less effective than carbon offset trading.
She is surprised when I tell her about the icy, snowy Pennsylvania winters of my 1980s childhood. Her Pennsylvania winters are not like that. This February the ice-cream truck came by and we ate our cones on the back porch in the sunshine. Her friend’s ice-skating birthday party was cancelled due to a lack of ice.
Why, she asks, don’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be freaking out?
We read a book about second-graders who want to fight global warming. ‘What really freaks grown-ups out is not being in charge,’ the characters say. ‘If grown-ups weren’t scared of nature, they’d probably try harder to save it from global warming.’
We are freaking out, of course: quietly, while the oligarch-in-chief dismantles what little inadequate infrastructure might even notionally allow us do something on any major scale. We perform our anger, our disbelief, but the world is too busy ending to witness our performance. We go to work with an extra layer of sunscreen or an inhaler for the allergic asthma that flares when the trees, jarred from their seasonal rhythm, release their pollen all at once. We are scared of nature. We are most definitely not in charge.
At the end of June, a news conference: prominent figures from the UN and the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, with an urgent message. Runaway irreversible climate change, the headlines read.
The Paris Accords, from which President Trump has made an undignified exit, were never enough, never even intended to be enough. They aimed for a rise of no more than 1.5° Celsius – but research indicates that this is unlikely, given that ‘average global temperatures were already more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38°C in February and March’ in 2016. ‘Sharp and permanent’ reductions to carbon emissions are needed in the next three years if we are even to mitigate the consequences. Chris Field of Stanford University, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, comments that ‘the 1.5°C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.’ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is blunt: ‘The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.’
Three years. We thought we had twenty.
In July 2017, climate change seems imminent but still more or less distant. It’s possible, especially if you are a politician, to ignore something that is three years away. We inhabit the deep red centre of the cone of uncertainty, but the skies are still clear. We are the doomed Russian aristocrats who spent the summer of 1917 partying with wild abandon, their ears popping with the pressure of a brewing revolution. It’s not the proletariat or peasantry rising up to relieve us of our luxuries, though: it’s the earth itself, sea and sky working in coalition, trees and air conspiring.
We look at the numbers: If we cut all carbon emissions to net zero in the next twenty years – a feat that would require the overthrow of capitalism – we might, might, escape with a sea-level rise that is only catastrophic, with only mass migrations and hunger and thirst, with only a drastic reduction in our species instead of extinction.
Three years for a change so drastic as to be completely incompatible with capitalism. It feels impossible – but then, what changes felt impossible in 1914? In 1932? We laugh now at Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that we had reached the ‘end of history’. Yet climate change presents, if not an end to history’s course, then a sharp and dangerous corner around which we cannot see. History’s pace quickens as the climate warms, events piling onto one another with disorienting speed, norms changing irreversibly. We will have to change faster, or the last opportunity will slip away without our even grasping for it. The task before us is mass expropriation on a scale not seen since perhaps the end of US slavery, a reversal of the colonial land grab that began the process – and if it doesn’t happen now, we can expect to abandon city after city to the rising waters. If that expropriation has the potential to be unfathomably violent, we have already begun to fathom the violence that awaits us if we eschew it. The world my daughter will know at seventeen is going to be radically different from this one; when she is old, our world maps will be even less familiar to her than 1914’s are to us.
They call it the ‘cone of uncertainty’ – that brightly coloured funnel on the weather map that traces the possible paths of a storm. It’s a statistical mishmash created from dozens of predictions of varying quality, and when you see the dark red centre touch your part of the map, you can almost feel the barometric pressure dropping. You might have days to prepare, days before you know whether it’ll really hit you and how badly. You might not have days to get out, not if the roads are clogged and the gas stations are mobbed; certainly not if you have to work and don’t have cash on hand. You hunker down as best you can, waiting for the first rainbands and the next, for the eye to pass over and the eyewall to return.
Two months before Hurricane Irma, I take my seven-year-old daughter down Alligator Alley: the stretch of Interstate 75 that runs through the Everglades, the massive wetland that covers most of South Florida. It now spans only half the three million acres it once covered, thanks to the breakneck pace of agricultural development and suburban McMansions, but that’s still enough to make the maps look as though the Florida peninsula was dipped into a vat of green. Eight million people – a third of the state’s population – draw their drinking water from this wild and desolate place.Travelers are advised to bring plenty of water, food, a canister of gas, and a first-aid kit, since there are no hospitals or restaurants and cellular coverage is minimal. Alligator Alley has only the Miccosukee and Seminole reservations and a few rest stops with bathrooms and vending machines. Flocks of turkey buzzards populate the picnic pavilions. A few feet from the parked cars, solid land drops off into sawgrass marsh. It would be easy to step out into the swamp and disappear: this is a protected reserve for the Florida panther, for birds and fish, and of course for alligators. Back when the Everglades was bigger, wilder, enslaved Africans escaped from sugarcane plantations and ran for their lives into those tall, sharp blades. Those who survived found aid and alliances with the local Seminole people.
I tell my daughter about this as we drive from my grandmother’s funeral in Miami to my parents’ house near Clearwater. We watch towering thunderheads sweep across the sea of grass, pouring furiously on us and then retreating into darkness, leaving a rainbow in the rear-view mirror. I want to take her to the Seminole reservation, to skim across the water in a noisy fan-powered airboat so she will remember this place. There is a museum there, too, with recreated houses on stilts, connected by little bridges. It’s a testament to human adaptation, to learning how to live in three feet of alligator-infested water. These are things I want her to learn – but the sun is brutal and the mosquitoes already have the taste of our blood, so we stay in the car. With no way to stream music, we sing our way through endless hours of the same view: water, sawgrass, power lines strung along the horizon, straight road ahead.
I remember what my cousin Ross, an Orlando comedian, told me about deciding to home-school his sons: ‘I want them to see Florida while it’s still here.’ I tell my daughter to remember, remember this. I want her to tell her grandchildren about it – as though it isn’t the height of arrogant optimism to imagine her grandchildren.
‘I want to go to space,’ she tells me. Seven-year-olds have a way of changing the subject abruptly, so I go with it. She’s always wanted to be a veterinarian. Why this sudden shift? ‘So we can still be alive even when the earth burns up.’
The impending planetary catastrophe is often on her mind. She thinks about death a lot. This is normal, of course – children ask the most important questions, especially at funerals, and God help the adults who don’t answer them seriously. She declares her desire to be buried, not cremated; she wants her beloved companion Doggy Pillow buried with her, so no one can bother it. ‘What kind of species will take over the earth after we’re gone?’ she asks. I admit I don’t know. ‘I don’t want them to mess with Doggy Pillow.’
If it has occurred to her that I will probably die before she does, she hasn’t mentioned it. But the planet will die before she does, that much seems clear – the planet as we know it, at any rate, the one that supports us and feeds us and slakes our thirst.
Her love of animals makes her a natural conservationist, and in the Anthropocene even books for children must address what is going on. Do you like sharks? Did you know that sharks can displace their jaws to snap at prey? Did you know that sharks are disappearing at an astonishing rate? My daughter declares that she will save the oceans by putting up signs telling people not to litter. It sounds no less effective than carbon offset trading.
She is surprised when I tell her about the icy, snowy Pennsylvania winters of my 1980s childhood. Her Pennsylvania winters are not like that. This February the ice-cream truck came by and we ate our cones on the back porch in the sunshine. Her friend’s ice-skating birthday party was cancelled due to a lack of ice.
Why, she asks, don’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be freaking out?
We read a book about second-graders who want to fight global warming. ‘What really freaks grown-ups out is not being in charge,’ the characters say. ‘If grown-ups weren’t scared of nature, they’d probably try harder to save it from global warming.’
We are freaking out, of course: quietly, while the oligarch-in-chief dismantles what little inadequate infrastructure might even notionally allow us do something on any major scale. We perform our anger, our disbelief, but the world is too busy ending to witness our performance. We go to work with an extra layer of sunscreen or an inhaler for the allergic asthma that flares when the trees, jarred from their seasonal rhythm, release their pollen all at once. We are scared of nature. We are most definitely not in charge.
At the end of June, a news conference: prominent figures from the UN and the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, with an urgent message. Runaway irreversible climate change, the headlines read.
The Paris Accords, from which President Trump has made an undignified exit, were never enough, never even intended to be enough. They aimed for a rise of no more than 1.5° Celsius – but research indicates that this is unlikely, given that ‘average global temperatures were already more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38°C in February and March’ in 2016. ‘Sharp and permanent’ reductions to carbon emissions are needed in the next three years if we are even to mitigate the consequences. Chris Field of Stanford University, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, comments that ‘the 1.5°C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.’ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is blunt: ‘The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.’
Three years. We thought we had twenty.
In July 2017, climate change seems imminent but still more or less distant. It’s possible, especially if you are a politician, to ignore something that is three years away. We inhabit the deep red centre of the cone of uncertainty, but the skies are still clear. We are the doomed Russian aristocrats who spent the summer of 1917 partying with wild abandon, their ears popping with the pressure of a brewing revolution. It’s not the proletariat or peasantry rising up to relieve us of our luxuries, though: it’s the earth itself, sea and sky working in coalition, trees and air conspiring.
We look at the numbers: If we cut all carbon emissions to net zero in the next twenty years – a feat that would require the overthrow of capitalism – we might, might, escape with a sea-level rise that is only catastrophic, with only mass migrations and hunger and thirst, with only a drastic reduction in our species instead of extinction.
Three years for a change so drastic as to be completely incompatible with capitalism. It feels impossible – but then, what changes felt impossible in 1914? In 1932? We laugh now at Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that we had reached the ‘end of history’. Yet climate change presents, if not an end to history’s course, then a sharp and dangerous corner around which we cannot see. History’s pace quickens as the climate warms, events piling onto one another with disorienting speed, norms changing irreversibly. We will have to change faster, or the last opportunity will slip away without our even grasping for it. The task before us is mass expropriation on a scale not seen since perhaps the end of US slavery, a reversal of the colonial land grab that began the process – and if it doesn’t happen now, we can expect to abandon city after city to the rising waters. If that expropriation has the potential to be unfathomably violent, we have already begun to fathom the violence that awaits us if we eschew it. The world my daughter will know at seventeen is going to be radically different from this one; when she is old, our world maps will be even less familiar to her than 1914’s are to us.
by Sarah Grey, Salvage | Read more:
Image: NOAA
Friday, February 16, 2018
A Reading on Collective Angst
Our Jerri-Lynn, who mainly lives overseas, was briefly in the US last month and dropped by our NYC meetup. She commented to me that she was very eager to leave because she could sense how high the general tension level was. She didn’t go on at great lengths why, but it was clear that at least some of it came from the success the press was having at whipping up outrage over Trump, and often not for the right reasons, such as over his mainly ineffective executive orders as opposed to his success in getting hard core conservative judges confirmed. It’s not hard to add to the list of topics that go beyond the usual media “If it bleeds, it leads” rule: the risk of nuclear war (even though those supposedly nutcase North Koreans appear to have diffused that with some Olympic diplomacy), Rooskies, #MeToo, more open hostility towards “out” groups ranging from immigrants to the white working class to Muslims. And that’s before we get to listing sources of stress: way too many people with student debt, older people with little to no likelihood of being able to afford retirement unless they leave the US, upper middle class parents spending and pulling strings to make sure their kids wind up in the right social stratum.
Because Lambert and I read so much of this sort of thing on a daily basis, we’re somewhat desensitized. But we’ve both noticed and regularly discussed in the last few weeks that the news flow has become, for lack of a more precise word, weird. The big stories somehow don’t seem that big, perhaps because they more and more seem like variants on shopworn themes. For instance, there is still news and jousting coming out of the Mueller investigations, but the media’s default posture of This Is Really Big and Will Finally Bring Trump Down has come to have a “Boy that cried ‘wolf'” flavor to it. Yet we both find the secondary stories, which ought to be more interesting and relevant in light of the “too much attention on Washington” orientation of the press, seem flatter than usual.
In other words, even though we’ve been cranking out articles, both Lambert and I have been struggling to find things that we deem to be interesting and postworthy. It may be that we’re overstimulated and our calibration is a bit off. For instance, I couldn’t get very worked up about the stock market tsuris of last week. Wake me up if it might endanger something that matters, like the financial system or the real economy.
With that as background, I have an odd confession to make. Even though I am a moody creature, I am able to trace precisely what has got me in the state I am in, whether good or bad. But all day, I’ve been very agitated, when absolutely nothing unusual happened, not even a dustup in the comments section.
Because Lambert and I read so much of this sort of thing on a daily basis, we’re somewhat desensitized. But we’ve both noticed and regularly discussed in the last few weeks that the news flow has become, for lack of a more precise word, weird. The big stories somehow don’t seem that big, perhaps because they more and more seem like variants on shopworn themes. For instance, there is still news and jousting coming out of the Mueller investigations, but the media’s default posture of This Is Really Big and Will Finally Bring Trump Down has come to have a “Boy that cried ‘wolf'” flavor to it. Yet we both find the secondary stories, which ought to be more interesting and relevant in light of the “too much attention on Washington” orientation of the press, seem flatter than usual.
In other words, even though we’ve been cranking out articles, both Lambert and I have been struggling to find things that we deem to be interesting and postworthy. It may be that we’re overstimulated and our calibration is a bit off. For instance, I couldn’t get very worked up about the stock market tsuris of last week. Wake me up if it might endanger something that matters, like the financial system or the real economy.
With that as background, I have an odd confession to make. Even though I am a moody creature, I am able to trace precisely what has got me in the state I am in, whether good or bad. But all day, I’ve been very agitated, when absolutely nothing unusual happened, not even a dustup in the comments section.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
[ed. Exactly. It feels like something terrible is coming (and needs to happen), some cathartic form of resolution. See also: The Second Coming.]
As one commenter put it:
As one commenter put it:
The economy is ambling a drunkard’s walk climbing a knife’s edge. The Corporations remain hard at work consolidating and building greater monopoly power, dismantling what remains of our domestic jobs and industry, and building ever more fragile supply chains. The government is busy dismantling the safety net, deconstructing health care, public education and science, bolstering the wealth of the wealthy, and stoking foreign wars while a tiff between factions within those who rule us fosters a new cold war and an arms build-up including building a new nuclear arsenal. In another direction Climate Disruption shows signs of accelerating while the new weather patterns already threaten random flooding and random destruction of cities. It already destroyed entire islands in the Caribbean. The government has proven its inability and unwillingness to do anything to prepare for the pending disasters or help the areas struck down in the seasons past. The year of Peak Oil is already in our past and there is nothing to fill its place. The world populations continue to grow exponentially. Climate Disruption promises to reduce food production and move the sources for fresh water and the worlds aquifers are drying up. It’s as if a whole flock of black swans is looking for places to land.and another:
I’m starting to think that what we are experiencing is the realization that we’ve spent way too much time expecting that explaining our selves, our diverse grievances, and our political insights would naturally result in growing an irresistible movement that would wash over, and cleanse our politics of the filth that is the status quo.
It is sobering to realize that it took almost four decades for the original Progressive Era organizers to bring about even the possibility of change.
I think it’s dawning on us that we’re not re-experiencing the moment before the election of Franklin Roosevelt, and the beginning of the New Deal, we’re actually just now realizing the necessity of the daunting task of organizing, which makes our times resemble 1890 more than 1935.
Government by the people, and for the people has been drowned in the bath-tub, and the murderers have not only taken the reigns of power, but have convinced half the population that their murderous act represents a political correction that will return America to greatness.
It remains to be seen whether we will find it in our hearts to embrace both the hard, and un-glamorous work of relieving the pain inflicted by the regime that has engulfed us, and the necessity of embracing as brothers and sisters those who haven’t yet realized that it is the rich and powerful who are the problem, and not all the other poor and oppressed.
Blue Cross Of Idaho Takes The Plunge To Sell Non-ACA-Compliant Plans
On February 13, 2018, Blue Cross of Idaho filed five new individual market plans that will not comply with federal law under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These new “Freedom Blue” plans were filed in response to an executive order signed by Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter and implementing guidance issued by the Idaho Department of Insurance (DOI) in January 2018. Because the plans do not comply with the ACA, insurers that offer them are opening themselves up to significant legal risk and generating additional uncertainty for the market. To avoid this (and attempts by other states that to replicate Idaho’s path), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could step in to enforce the ACA’s consumer protections, as the agency is required to do so under the Public Health Service Act and federal regulations.
What’s In The New Plans?
Gov. Otter’s executive order and the bulletin issued by the DOI essentially authorize a state-level version of the “Cruz amendment,” which Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) offered to the Better Care Reconciliation Act during efforts to repeal the ACA last year. The amendment—which would have allowed insurers to offer non-ACA-compliant plans in the individual market so long as they offered plans through the marketplace—was criticized for its potential to increase premiums in the ACA-compliant market and erode protections for consumers with preexisting conditions.
Idaho’s approach—which creates an uneven playing field of market rules—and the decision by Blue Cross of Idaho to offer these non-ACA-compliant “state-based plans” is likely to have similar effects on the Idaho market. Blue Cross will continue to offer marketplace plans that comply with the ACA through Your Health Idaho, the Idaho marketplace. However, they will also sell new “Freedom Blue” plans which are currently under review by the DOI. Blue Cross of Idaho hopes to begin selling the new plans in early March, with coverage going into effect in early April. These plans would be available on a year-round basis (rather than offered during an open enrollment period like ACA plans) and sold directly from Blue Cross.
Some media outlets are reporting that the state-based plans are similar to Blue Cross’ marketplace plans, but this is very misleading. The plans are quite dissimilar. They must be, or else the average rate for these plans would not be 25 to 50 percent lower than the rate of Blue Cross of Idaho’s bronze marketplace plans. These differences may not be immediately apparent from Blue Cross marketing materials; however, if they follow the DOI’s guidance, consumers who enroll in these plans may find themselves paying higher premiums based on health status, facing preexisting condition exclusions and benefit caps, and needing to pay much more money out-of-pocket before being protected financially.
The first major difference is that Blue Cross would take health status into consideration before calculating a consumer’s final premium—a significant return to the pre-ACA era. Under the DOI guidance, Blue Cross could charge individuals with a personal or family medical history up to 50 percent more in premiums based solely on health status. These plans could also exclude coverage for preexisting conditions unless a consumer had continuous coverage (meaning they were enrolled in health insurance before they enrolled in this policy without more than a 63-day break). Older Idahoans could also be charged more relative to the ACA and those who use tobacco could face heftier surcharges as well.
Some additional differences are highlighted in Blue Cross marketing materials; consumers could see significant increases in their medical costs thanks to dollar caps on benefits and caps on annual out-of-pocket expenses that are nearly twice as high as under the ACA. The state-based plans have an annual benefit cap of $1 million and dollar caps on certain benefits such as physical therapy, both of which are prohibited under the ACA. The state-based plans also have significantly higher annual out-of-pocket maximums relative to ACA plans: up to $12,000 for an individual and $24,000 for a family. There is also what appears to be a separate annual out-of-pocket maximum of $6,500 for prescription drugs. These changes alone could more than double the cost of medical care for an individual or family. And, although some press reports suggest that most plans will cover maternity care, there is no detail in the Blue Cross marketing materials and nothing to suggest that other benefit categories that are missing under state law (such as pediatric vision and dental care) would be covered.
What’s In The New Plans?
Gov. Otter’s executive order and the bulletin issued by the DOI essentially authorize a state-level version of the “Cruz amendment,” which Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) offered to the Better Care Reconciliation Act during efforts to repeal the ACA last year. The amendment—which would have allowed insurers to offer non-ACA-compliant plans in the individual market so long as they offered plans through the marketplace—was criticized for its potential to increase premiums in the ACA-compliant market and erode protections for consumers with preexisting conditions.
Idaho’s approach—which creates an uneven playing field of market rules—and the decision by Blue Cross of Idaho to offer these non-ACA-compliant “state-based plans” is likely to have similar effects on the Idaho market. Blue Cross will continue to offer marketplace plans that comply with the ACA through Your Health Idaho, the Idaho marketplace. However, they will also sell new “Freedom Blue” plans which are currently under review by the DOI. Blue Cross of Idaho hopes to begin selling the new plans in early March, with coverage going into effect in early April. These plans would be available on a year-round basis (rather than offered during an open enrollment period like ACA plans) and sold directly from Blue Cross.Some media outlets are reporting that the state-based plans are similar to Blue Cross’ marketplace plans, but this is very misleading. The plans are quite dissimilar. They must be, or else the average rate for these plans would not be 25 to 50 percent lower than the rate of Blue Cross of Idaho’s bronze marketplace plans. These differences may not be immediately apparent from Blue Cross marketing materials; however, if they follow the DOI’s guidance, consumers who enroll in these plans may find themselves paying higher premiums based on health status, facing preexisting condition exclusions and benefit caps, and needing to pay much more money out-of-pocket before being protected financially.
The first major difference is that Blue Cross would take health status into consideration before calculating a consumer’s final premium—a significant return to the pre-ACA era. Under the DOI guidance, Blue Cross could charge individuals with a personal or family medical history up to 50 percent more in premiums based solely on health status. These plans could also exclude coverage for preexisting conditions unless a consumer had continuous coverage (meaning they were enrolled in health insurance before they enrolled in this policy without more than a 63-day break). Older Idahoans could also be charged more relative to the ACA and those who use tobacco could face heftier surcharges as well.
Some additional differences are highlighted in Blue Cross marketing materials; consumers could see significant increases in their medical costs thanks to dollar caps on benefits and caps on annual out-of-pocket expenses that are nearly twice as high as under the ACA. The state-based plans have an annual benefit cap of $1 million and dollar caps on certain benefits such as physical therapy, both of which are prohibited under the ACA. The state-based plans also have significantly higher annual out-of-pocket maximums relative to ACA plans: up to $12,000 for an individual and $24,000 for a family. There is also what appears to be a separate annual out-of-pocket maximum of $6,500 for prescription drugs. These changes alone could more than double the cost of medical care for an individual or family. And, although some press reports suggest that most plans will cover maternity care, there is no detail in the Blue Cross marketing materials and nothing to suggest that other benefit categories that are missing under state law (such as pediatric vision and dental care) would be covered.
by Katie Keith, Health Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. "Freedom Blue"(...as they say, a fool and his money are soon parted). I guess if you name anything Freedom someone will buy it. Want some Freedom fries with that?]
[ed. "Freedom Blue"(...as they say, a fool and his money are soon parted). I guess if you name anything Freedom someone will buy it. Want some Freedom fries with that?]
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”
For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”
Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.
“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”
The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.
Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.
In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.
Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.
With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all before.
Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:
“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.
It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.
People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”
Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.” (...)
Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”
For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”
Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”
The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.
Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.
In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.
Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.
With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all before.
Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today because he wrote them down.)
“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.
It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.
People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”
Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.” (...)
Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)