Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, Ft Collins CO, May 23, 1976, recorded for an NBC TV special “Hard Rain”, aired September 13.
via:
[ed. What a day. I lived about a quarter mile from CSU stadium and could just walk over.]
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Micro Feedback Loops and Learning
I recently discovered Singer’s Studio, an iPhone app for voice training that is approximately the Best Thing Ever (h/t Raemon). It’s a work of pedagogical art, and describing what it does right pulls together various nebulous thoughts I’ve had about learning and developing intuitions for a particular domain.
How the app works: it gives me various singing exercises, and then tells me in real-time, via a pretty graph, if I’m singing on pitch. That’s it.
Okay, it does have a few other features, like:
How does this generalize?
This is a post about singing, but it’s also a post about learning skills in general.
Learning to sing (or to play the piano, tie one’s shoes, draw, dance, swim; all the things commonly known as procedural memory) isn’t like memorizing a list of dates for a history test. There are some steps that can usefully happen in the explicit verbal loop, like “remember to breathe from the diaphragm”, but the end goal is that basically nothing is being held in working memory, and everything happens on the level of microsecond-to-second intuitions and muscle memory. (...)
Implications
This app is a really cool category of thing, that’s only possible at all due to fairly recent technological advances, and there are probably a ton more instances that I don’t know about.
I’m curious where else this has been explored. Singing may be an easy case, because measuring a single straightforward variable, pitch, gets you so far. I can imagine an app that trains, say, krav maga fighting techniques, via video analysis and/or accelerometer data, but I’m not sure that’s possible yet given current tech.
It has me thinking about other pedagogical techniques, though. Martial arts teachers will shout real-time feedback at you ("turn your hips more! get your knee higher!") I’ve taught swimming, and one issue is that waiting until a swimmer finishes a lap before giving any feedback introduces a huge delay, but grabbing onto them every time they do something slightly wrong is incredibly irritating and disruptive. Now I’m imagining giving them waterproof headphones and narrating the feedback in real time (“elbow higher please”, “roll your shoulder deeper into the water”, “keep your head back when you breathe”, etc etc.) This would be so cool.
How the app works: it gives me various singing exercises, and then tells me in real-time, via a pretty graph, if I’m singing on pitch. That’s it.
Okay, it does have a few other features, like:
- A total score and breakdown by % of notes correct after each exercise.
- Letting me play myself back to see what being on vs slightly off pitch sounds like.
- Helpful text prompts such as “keep your tongue behind your teeth.”
- A built-in progression from easier to more complicated exercises.
- Exercises for a specific skill, like switching from head to chest voice.
- The ability to add challenge by turning down/off the piano playing my notes as I sing them.
- Not a built-in part of the app, but I can glance away from the screen and sing without the visual feedback, and then immediately check how I did. (...)
Rewardingness
It occurs to me that another feature, which I think is less key than the instantaneous pitch contour but still pretty important, is how it slightly gamifies the entire thing, and thus makes it addictive. There are % scores at the end of the exercise! And points! It logs my all-time high score for each exercise so I can try to beat it! It also logs how many minutes a day I’ve practiced. All of this makes me more likely to use it, and actually putting in the time is a key part of training any skill.
It’s also cool that I can listen to my voice and, in addition to catching mistakes (ouch!), notice when hey, wow, I actually sounded good there. This lets me gradually figure out what correlates with liking how my voice sounds, and it also gives me a warm glow of satisfaction and helps me feel like a Real Singer.
(I’m not sure if the app is cheating by doing some kind of post-processing on these recordings to make them sound pretty. Normally I hate recordings of myself speaking, let alone singing. Still, I’ll take it.)
It also seems relevant that there’s zero embarrassment factor – this isn’t a human watching me and judging me for daring to sing when I kind of suck. I’m pretty shameless, as humans go, but I’ve been slightly nervous with every voice teacher I’ve had – they’re an expert! they’re probably really unimpressed! – and tension is not good for singing well. With this, I can sing my heart out in the privacy of my apartment, and even feel safe experimenting.
It occurs to me that another feature, which I think is less key than the instantaneous pitch contour but still pretty important, is how it slightly gamifies the entire thing, and thus makes it addictive. There are % scores at the end of the exercise! And points! It logs my all-time high score for each exercise so I can try to beat it! It also logs how many minutes a day I’ve practiced. All of this makes me more likely to use it, and actually putting in the time is a key part of training any skill.
It’s also cool that I can listen to my voice and, in addition to catching mistakes (ouch!), notice when hey, wow, I actually sounded good there. This lets me gradually figure out what correlates with liking how my voice sounds, and it also gives me a warm glow of satisfaction and helps me feel like a Real Singer.(I’m not sure if the app is cheating by doing some kind of post-processing on these recordings to make them sound pretty. Normally I hate recordings of myself speaking, let alone singing. Still, I’ll take it.)
It also seems relevant that there’s zero embarrassment factor – this isn’t a human watching me and judging me for daring to sing when I kind of suck. I’m pretty shameless, as humans go, but I’ve been slightly nervous with every voice teacher I’ve had – they’re an expert! they’re probably really unimpressed! – and tension is not good for singing well. With this, I can sing my heart out in the privacy of my apartment, and even feel safe experimenting.
How does this generalize?
This is a post about singing, but it’s also a post about learning skills in general.
Learning to sing (or to play the piano, tie one’s shoes, draw, dance, swim; all the things commonly known as procedural memory) isn’t like memorizing a list of dates for a history test. There are some steps that can usefully happen in the explicit verbal loop, like “remember to breathe from the diaphragm”, but the end goal is that basically nothing is being held in working memory, and everything happens on the level of microsecond-to-second intuitions and muscle memory. (...)
Implications
This app is a really cool category of thing, that’s only possible at all due to fairly recent technological advances, and there are probably a ton more instances that I don’t know about.
I’m curious where else this has been explored. Singing may be an easy case, because measuring a single straightforward variable, pitch, gets you so far. I can imagine an app that trains, say, krav maga fighting techniques, via video analysis and/or accelerometer data, but I’m not sure that’s possible yet given current tech.
It has me thinking about other pedagogical techniques, though. Martial arts teachers will shout real-time feedback at you ("turn your hips more! get your knee higher!") I’ve taught swimming, and one issue is that waiting until a swimmer finishes a lap before giving any feedback introduces a huge delay, but grabbing onto them every time they do something slightly wrong is incredibly irritating and disruptive. Now I’m imagining giving them waterproof headphones and narrating the feedback in real time (“elbow higher please”, “roll your shoulder deeper into the water”, “keep your head back when you breathe”, etc etc.) This would be so cool.
by Swimmer963, Less Wrong | Read more:
Image: via
Which Box Do You Check?
Ever since El Martinez started asking to be called by the gender-neutral pronouns “they/them” in the ninth grade, they have fielded skepticism in a variety of forms and from a multitude of sources about what it means to identify as nonbinary.
There are faculty advisers on El’s theater crew who balk at using “they” for one person; classmates at El’s public school on the outskirts of Boston who insist El can’t be “multiple people”; and commenters on El’s social media feeds who dismiss nonbinary gender identities like androgyne (a combination of masculine and feminine), agender (the absence of gender) and gender-fluid (moving between genders) as lacking a basis in biology.
Even for El’s supportive parents, conceiving of gender as a multidimensional sprawl has not been so easy to grasp. Nor has El’s suggestion that everyone state their pronouns gained much traction.
So last summer, when the Massachusetts State Legislature became one of the first in the nation to consider a bill to add an “X” option for nonbinary genders to the “M” and “F” on the state driver’s license, El, 17, was less surprised than some at the maneuver that effectively killed it.
Beyond the catchall “X,” Representative James J. Lyons Jr. (he/him), a Republican, had proposed that the bill should be amended to offer drivers 29 other gender options, including “pangender,” “two-spirit” and “genderqueer.” Rather than open the requisite debate on each term, leaders of the Democratic-controlled House shelved the measure.
“He articulated an anxiety that many people, even folks from the left, have: that there’s this slippery slope of identity, and ‘Where will it stop?’” said Ev Evnen (they/them), director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, which is championing a new version of the bill.
As the first sizable group of Americans to openly identify as neither only male nor only female has emerged in recent years, their requests for recognition have been met with reservations that often cross partisan lines. For their part, some nonbinary people suggest that concerns about authenticity and grammar sidestep thornier questions about the culture’s longstanding limits on how gender is supposed to be felt and expressed.
“Nonbinary gender identity can be complicated,” said Mx. Evnen, 31, who uses a gender-neutral courtesy title. “It’s also threatening to an order a lot of people have learned how to navigate.”
And with bills to add a nonbinary marker to driver’s licenses moving through at least six legislatures this session, the expansive conception of gender that many teenagers can trace to middle-school lunch tables is being scrutinized on a new scale.
A Learning Curve
The wave of proposed gender-neutral legislation has prompted debate over whether extending legal recognition to a category of people still unknown to many Americans could undermine support for other groups vulnerable to discrimination. It has also highlighted how disorienting it can be to lose the gendered cues, like pronouns, names, appearance and mannerisms, that shape so much of social interaction.
Over the last few months, lawmakers have sought — not always successfully — to use the singular “they” when introducing nonbinary constituents who have appeared to testify. The elected officials have listened to tutorials on the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity (the former is who you go to bed with, the latter is who you go to bed as); to pleas for compassion from parents who have learned to refer to their children as “my kid” rather than “son” or “daughter”; and to why being called by binary pronouns feels, as Kayden Reff (they/them), 15, of Bethesda, Md., put it in testimony read by their mother, “as though ice is being poured down my back.”
There are faculty advisers on El’s theater crew who balk at using “they” for one person; classmates at El’s public school on the outskirts of Boston who insist El can’t be “multiple people”; and commenters on El’s social media feeds who dismiss nonbinary gender identities like androgyne (a combination of masculine and feminine), agender (the absence of gender) and gender-fluid (moving between genders) as lacking a basis in biology.
Even for El’s supportive parents, conceiving of gender as a multidimensional sprawl has not been so easy to grasp. Nor has El’s suggestion that everyone state their pronouns gained much traction.So last summer, when the Massachusetts State Legislature became one of the first in the nation to consider a bill to add an “X” option for nonbinary genders to the “M” and “F” on the state driver’s license, El, 17, was less surprised than some at the maneuver that effectively killed it.
Beyond the catchall “X,” Representative James J. Lyons Jr. (he/him), a Republican, had proposed that the bill should be amended to offer drivers 29 other gender options, including “pangender,” “two-spirit” and “genderqueer.” Rather than open the requisite debate on each term, leaders of the Democratic-controlled House shelved the measure.
“He articulated an anxiety that many people, even folks from the left, have: that there’s this slippery slope of identity, and ‘Where will it stop?’” said Ev Evnen (they/them), director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, which is championing a new version of the bill.
As the first sizable group of Americans to openly identify as neither only male nor only female has emerged in recent years, their requests for recognition have been met with reservations that often cross partisan lines. For their part, some nonbinary people suggest that concerns about authenticity and grammar sidestep thornier questions about the culture’s longstanding limits on how gender is supposed to be felt and expressed.
“Nonbinary gender identity can be complicated,” said Mx. Evnen, 31, who uses a gender-neutral courtesy title. “It’s also threatening to an order a lot of people have learned how to navigate.”
And with bills to add a nonbinary marker to driver’s licenses moving through at least six legislatures this session, the expansive conception of gender that many teenagers can trace to middle-school lunch tables is being scrutinized on a new scale.
A Learning Curve
The wave of proposed gender-neutral legislation has prompted debate over whether extending legal recognition to a category of people still unknown to many Americans could undermine support for other groups vulnerable to discrimination. It has also highlighted how disorienting it can be to lose the gendered cues, like pronouns, names, appearance and mannerisms, that shape so much of social interaction.
Over the last few months, lawmakers have sought — not always successfully — to use the singular “they” when introducing nonbinary constituents who have appeared to testify. The elected officials have listened to tutorials on the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity (the former is who you go to bed with, the latter is who you go to bed as); to pleas for compassion from parents who have learned to refer to their children as “my kid” rather than “son” or “daughter”; and to why being called by binary pronouns feels, as Kayden Reff (they/them), 15, of Bethesda, Md., put it in testimony read by their mother, “as though ice is being poured down my back.”
by Amy Harmon, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Luong for The New York Times
[ed. I recently saw a notice for an upcoming "queer" party in Seattle (don't ask): “Queer" here is used as an umbrella term for anyone who identifies as not-heterosexual or not-cisgender, including but not limited to people who identify as: gay, lesbian, bisexual, genderqueer, agender, bigender, transgender, third gender, trans, genderfluid, gaymo, bicurious, asexual, homosexual, homofabulous, homoflexible, heteroflexible, intersex, questioning, pansexual, MTF, FTM, butch, femme, fag, dyke.
If you identify with one of these groups, then this party is for you!]
If you identify with one of these groups, then this party is for you!]
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Steely Dan
I got one and you want four
It's so hard to help you
I can't keep up with you no more
And you treat me like it's a sin
But you can't lock me in
You want me here with you right to the end
No thank you my friend
I fear the monkey in your soul
Won't you turn that bebop down
I can't hear my heart beat
Where's that fatback chord I found?
Honey don't you think it was wrong
To interrupt my song?
I'll pack my things and run so far from here
Goodbye dear
I fear the monkey in your soul
[ed. Crank it up. See also: this live Santa Monica version of Bodhisattva (starting at 2:25 to avoid the crazy inebriated introduction by Jerome Aniton: "Mr Steely Dan... whatevers." haha). It smokes. Didn't think they could out-amp the original. Also: this, this, and this.]
[ed. Crank it up. See also: this live Santa Monica version of Bodhisattva (starting at 2:25 to avoid the crazy inebriated introduction by Jerome Aniton: "Mr Steely Dan... whatevers." haha). It smokes. Didn't think they could out-amp the original. Also: this, this, and this.]
The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate
In “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” published in 1988, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky exposed the techniques that the commercial media used to promote and defend the economic, social and political agendas of the ruling elites. These techniques included portraying victims as either worthy or unworthy of sympathy. A Catholic priest such as Jerzy Popiełuszko, for example, murdered by the communist regime in Poland in 1984, was deified, but four Catholic missionaries who were raped and murdered in 1980 in El Salvador by U.S.-backed death squads were slandered as fellow travelers of the “Marxist” rebel movement. The techniques also included both narrowing the debate in a way that buttressed the elite consensus and intentionally failing to challenge the intentions of the ruling elites or the actual structures of power.
“Manufacturing Consent” was published on the eve of three revolutions that have dramatically transformed the news industry: the rise of right-wing radio and Fox-style TV news that abandon the media’s faux objectivity, the introduction of 24-hour cable news stations, and the creation of internet platforms—owned by a handful of corporations—that control the distribution of news and information and mine our personal data on behalf of advertisers, political campaigns and the government. The sins of the old media, bad though they were, are nothing compared with the sins of the new media. Mass media has degenerated into not only a purveyor of gossip, conspiracy theories and salacious entertainment but, most ominously, a purveyor of hate. Matt Taibbi, the author of “Hate Inc.: How, and Why, the Media Makes Us Hate One Another,” has dissected modern media platforms in much the same way that Herman and Chomsky did the old media.
The new media, Taibbi points out, still manufactures consent, but it does so by setting group against group, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel “1984” called the “Two Minutes Hate.” Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The result, Taibbi writes, is “packaged anger just for you.” The public is unable to speak across the manufactured divide. It is mesmerized by the fake dissent of the culture wars and competing conspiracy theories. Politics, under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on political personalities. Civic discourse is defined by invective and insulting remarks on the internet. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and unchallenged. The result is political impotence among the populace. The moral swamp is not only a fertile place for demagogues such as Donald Trump—a creation of this media burlesque—but channels misplaced rage, intolerance and animosity toward those defined as internal enemies.
The old media sold itself as objective, although as Taibbi points out, this was more a reflection of tone rather than content. This vaunted objectivity and impartiality was, at its core, an element of a commercial tactic designed to reach the largest numbers of viewers or readers.
“Objectivity was when I was told I couldn’t write with voice,” Taibbi told me when I interviewed him on my television show, “On Contact.” [Part one of the interview; part two.] “I couldn’t write with a point of view. Objectivity was to write in a dull, flat, third-person perspective. Don’t express yourself. Don’t be too colorful. This actually was, if you pick up The New York Times today, that same writing style. The original idea behind it is you didn’t want to turn off people on the start because they’re trying to reach the widest possible audience. This also infected radio, television. That’s why you have this Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather-style delivery, which was monotonal, flat, unopinionated. A lot of people thought this was some kind of an ethical decision that news organizations were making. In fact, what they were trying to do is reach the greatest number of people to sell the greatest number of ads. That’s how we developed that idea.”
The old media rigidly held to the fiction that there were only two kinds of political opinions—those expressed by Democrats and those expressed by Republicans. These two positions swiftly devolved into caricatures on radio and television. The classic example was the show “Crossfire,” in which two antagonists, the stereotypical liberal and the stereotypical conservative, could never agree. The liberal, Taibbi pointed out, “was always cast as the person who couldn’t punch back. He was always in retreat. The conservative was always in attack mode. A personality like Tucker Carlson.” These staged and choreographed confrontations were, in essence, sporting events.
“If you watch a [‘Sunday NFL] Countdown’ you’ll see the sets are designed exactly the same” as that of “Crossfire.” “The anchor on one side. There’s usually four commentators—two that represent each team. They have graphics that tell you what the score is, who is ahead, who is behind. We want people to perceive politics as something they have a rooting interest in. There’s no possibility of any gray area in any of this. Your political identity can’t possibly bleed into any other political identity. You are on one team or another. That’s it. We don’t even acknowledge the existence of people who have different types of ideas. For instance, anti-abortion but also pro-union. Whatever it is. That doesn’t exist in the media.”
The fact that on most big issues the two major political parties are in agreement is ignored. The deregulation of the financial industry, the militarization of police, the explosion in the prison population, deindustrialization, austerity, the endless wars in the Middle East, the bloated military budget, the control of elections and mass media by corporations and the wholesale surveillance of the population by the government all have bipartisan support. For this reason, they are almost never discussed.
“It’s always presented as two parties that are always in disagreement about everything,” Taibbi said, “which is not true.”
“We [members of the press] are not focusing on the timeless, permanent nature of how the system works,” he said. “We don’t think about the central bank. We don’t think about the security state. We don’t think about any of that stuff. We focus on personalities. Donald Trump versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That simplifies everything and allows us to not look at the bigger picture.”
Once the old media model imploded with the arrival of 24-hour news networks, Fox-style news and the internet, the monopoly of a few dominant newspapers and networks ended. In the new setting, media organizations tailor their content to focus on specific demographics.
“MSNBC, which has gone through some interesting changes over the years, markets itself as a left-leaning network,” Taibbi said. “But it was so intensely pro-war in 2002 that it had to uninvite Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue from the network. This latest thing was ‘Russiagate’ and the constant hyping of the narrative ‘If you watch, you might learn any minute that we, along with Robert Mueller, are going to take down the president.’ ”
The media model not only sets demographic against demographic, it mutes and destroys investigations into corporate systems of oppression and genuine dissent.
“You don’t have to make the news up for these people,” Taibbi said of the process of carving up the public. “You can just pick stories that they’re going to like. You start feeding them content that is going to ratify their belief systems. Fox did it first. They did it well. They started to make money. They were No. 1 for a long time. But this started to bleed into the rest of the business. Pretty soon, everybody was doing the same thing. It didn’t matter whether you were the food channel tailoring content for people who liked food or MSNBC who tailored content for people who leaned in a certain political direction, you were giving people stuff they wanted to hear.”
“Previously, you were looking at the illusion of debate,” Taibbi said of the old media model. “You would see people arguing on ‘Crossfire.’ On the op-ed pages, there were people who disagreed with each other. Now, most people’s news consumption experience is tailored entirely to their preferences. … If you’re only reading media that tailor to your particular belief system you’re not being exposed to other ideas. It’s going to be progressively more vituperative.”
“One of the first stories that taught the news business you can actually sell anger as a product was the [Monica] Lewinsky scandal,” Taibbi said.
MSNBC built its brand and its audience by relentlessly warning that the presidency of Bill Clinton was in mortal peril during the Lewinsky investigation. It repeated this formula by spending two years hyping the story of supposed Russian collusion with the Trump administration.
“What they were trying to do was basically create the impression that [a new] ‘Watergate was going on, you better tune in because at any moment this could all go kaput,’ ” Taibbi said of the Lewinsky scandal. “They got an enormous market share. Fox added a twist to it. Fox took the same concept and openly villainized the characters. They decided to make Bill and Hillary Clinton into caricatures and cartoon figures, aging hippies. They kept running clip after clip of Hillary Clinton talking about how she didn’t bake cookies. They knew their audience was going to react to all these images in a certain way. They sold people stories that make them angry. They told them, ‘If you keep tuning in, somehow you are a part of the process. You are a part of this ongoing prosecution of this culture enemy that we’re showing you. … We tell you about somebody you don’t like. We keep telling you about it over and over to dominate the ratings.’ ”
The result, Taibbi argues, is a marketing strategy that fosters addictive and aggressive behavior. The more the habits of readers and viewers on the internet and electronic devices are tracked, the more the addiction and aggression are fed.
“This creates more than just pockets of political rancor,” he went on. “It creates masses of media consumers who have been trained to only see in one direction, as if they have been pulled through history on a railroad track, with heads fastened in blinders, looking only one way. … Even without the vitriolic content, just the process of surfing and consuming the news has a lot of the same qualities as other addictions—like smoking cigarettes or taking drugs. People get addicted to the feel of their phones. They get addicted to the process of turning on screens. You especially get addicted to the idea that you’re going to turn on a news program or read an article and it’s going to tell you something that is going to anger you even more than you were yesterday.”
The template for news, Taibbi writes, is professional wrestling.
“Wrestling was a commercial formula that they figured out worked incredibly well,” Taibbi said of the corporate owners of news outlets. “There was a simplified morality play where there was a good guy, who was called the baby face, and a bad guy they called the heel. They relentlessly hyped the bad guy. The heel was more important in wrestling and more popular than the face. The amount of tickets they can sell is a direct correlation to how much people hate the bad guy. You have to have a hateable heel in order to make the formula work. This is how news works.”
by Chris Hedges, TruthDig | Read more:
“Manufacturing Consent” was published on the eve of three revolutions that have dramatically transformed the news industry: the rise of right-wing radio and Fox-style TV news that abandon the media’s faux objectivity, the introduction of 24-hour cable news stations, and the creation of internet platforms—owned by a handful of corporations—that control the distribution of news and information and mine our personal data on behalf of advertisers, political campaigns and the government. The sins of the old media, bad though they were, are nothing compared with the sins of the new media. Mass media has degenerated into not only a purveyor of gossip, conspiracy theories and salacious entertainment but, most ominously, a purveyor of hate. Matt Taibbi, the author of “Hate Inc.: How, and Why, the Media Makes Us Hate One Another,” has dissected modern media platforms in much the same way that Herman and Chomsky did the old media.
The new media, Taibbi points out, still manufactures consent, but it does so by setting group against group, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel “1984” called the “Two Minutes Hate.” Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The result, Taibbi writes, is “packaged anger just for you.” The public is unable to speak across the manufactured divide. It is mesmerized by the fake dissent of the culture wars and competing conspiracy theories. Politics, under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on political personalities. Civic discourse is defined by invective and insulting remarks on the internet. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and unchallenged. The result is political impotence among the populace. The moral swamp is not only a fertile place for demagogues such as Donald Trump—a creation of this media burlesque—but channels misplaced rage, intolerance and animosity toward those defined as internal enemies.The old media sold itself as objective, although as Taibbi points out, this was more a reflection of tone rather than content. This vaunted objectivity and impartiality was, at its core, an element of a commercial tactic designed to reach the largest numbers of viewers or readers.
“Objectivity was when I was told I couldn’t write with voice,” Taibbi told me when I interviewed him on my television show, “On Contact.” [Part one of the interview; part two.] “I couldn’t write with a point of view. Objectivity was to write in a dull, flat, third-person perspective. Don’t express yourself. Don’t be too colorful. This actually was, if you pick up The New York Times today, that same writing style. The original idea behind it is you didn’t want to turn off people on the start because they’re trying to reach the widest possible audience. This also infected radio, television. That’s why you have this Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather-style delivery, which was monotonal, flat, unopinionated. A lot of people thought this was some kind of an ethical decision that news organizations were making. In fact, what they were trying to do is reach the greatest number of people to sell the greatest number of ads. That’s how we developed that idea.”
The old media rigidly held to the fiction that there were only two kinds of political opinions—those expressed by Democrats and those expressed by Republicans. These two positions swiftly devolved into caricatures on radio and television. The classic example was the show “Crossfire,” in which two antagonists, the stereotypical liberal and the stereotypical conservative, could never agree. The liberal, Taibbi pointed out, “was always cast as the person who couldn’t punch back. He was always in retreat. The conservative was always in attack mode. A personality like Tucker Carlson.” These staged and choreographed confrontations were, in essence, sporting events.
“If you watch a [‘Sunday NFL] Countdown’ you’ll see the sets are designed exactly the same” as that of “Crossfire.” “The anchor on one side. There’s usually four commentators—two that represent each team. They have graphics that tell you what the score is, who is ahead, who is behind. We want people to perceive politics as something they have a rooting interest in. There’s no possibility of any gray area in any of this. Your political identity can’t possibly bleed into any other political identity. You are on one team or another. That’s it. We don’t even acknowledge the existence of people who have different types of ideas. For instance, anti-abortion but also pro-union. Whatever it is. That doesn’t exist in the media.”
The fact that on most big issues the two major political parties are in agreement is ignored. The deregulation of the financial industry, the militarization of police, the explosion in the prison population, deindustrialization, austerity, the endless wars in the Middle East, the bloated military budget, the control of elections and mass media by corporations and the wholesale surveillance of the population by the government all have bipartisan support. For this reason, they are almost never discussed.
“It’s always presented as two parties that are always in disagreement about everything,” Taibbi said, “which is not true.”
“We [members of the press] are not focusing on the timeless, permanent nature of how the system works,” he said. “We don’t think about the central bank. We don’t think about the security state. We don’t think about any of that stuff. We focus on personalities. Donald Trump versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That simplifies everything and allows us to not look at the bigger picture.”
Once the old media model imploded with the arrival of 24-hour news networks, Fox-style news and the internet, the monopoly of a few dominant newspapers and networks ended. In the new setting, media organizations tailor their content to focus on specific demographics.
“MSNBC, which has gone through some interesting changes over the years, markets itself as a left-leaning network,” Taibbi said. “But it was so intensely pro-war in 2002 that it had to uninvite Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue from the network. This latest thing was ‘Russiagate’ and the constant hyping of the narrative ‘If you watch, you might learn any minute that we, along with Robert Mueller, are going to take down the president.’ ”
The media model not only sets demographic against demographic, it mutes and destroys investigations into corporate systems of oppression and genuine dissent.
“You don’t have to make the news up for these people,” Taibbi said of the process of carving up the public. “You can just pick stories that they’re going to like. You start feeding them content that is going to ratify their belief systems. Fox did it first. They did it well. They started to make money. They were No. 1 for a long time. But this started to bleed into the rest of the business. Pretty soon, everybody was doing the same thing. It didn’t matter whether you were the food channel tailoring content for people who liked food or MSNBC who tailored content for people who leaned in a certain political direction, you were giving people stuff they wanted to hear.”
“Previously, you were looking at the illusion of debate,” Taibbi said of the old media model. “You would see people arguing on ‘Crossfire.’ On the op-ed pages, there were people who disagreed with each other. Now, most people’s news consumption experience is tailored entirely to their preferences. … If you’re only reading media that tailor to your particular belief system you’re not being exposed to other ideas. It’s going to be progressively more vituperative.”
“One of the first stories that taught the news business you can actually sell anger as a product was the [Monica] Lewinsky scandal,” Taibbi said.
MSNBC built its brand and its audience by relentlessly warning that the presidency of Bill Clinton was in mortal peril during the Lewinsky investigation. It repeated this formula by spending two years hyping the story of supposed Russian collusion with the Trump administration.
“What they were trying to do was basically create the impression that [a new] ‘Watergate was going on, you better tune in because at any moment this could all go kaput,’ ” Taibbi said of the Lewinsky scandal. “They got an enormous market share. Fox added a twist to it. Fox took the same concept and openly villainized the characters. They decided to make Bill and Hillary Clinton into caricatures and cartoon figures, aging hippies. They kept running clip after clip of Hillary Clinton talking about how she didn’t bake cookies. They knew their audience was going to react to all these images in a certain way. They sold people stories that make them angry. They told them, ‘If you keep tuning in, somehow you are a part of the process. You are a part of this ongoing prosecution of this culture enemy that we’re showing you. … We tell you about somebody you don’t like. We keep telling you about it over and over to dominate the ratings.’ ”
The result, Taibbi argues, is a marketing strategy that fosters addictive and aggressive behavior. The more the habits of readers and viewers on the internet and electronic devices are tracked, the more the addiction and aggression are fed.
“This creates more than just pockets of political rancor,” he went on. “It creates masses of media consumers who have been trained to only see in one direction, as if they have been pulled through history on a railroad track, with heads fastened in blinders, looking only one way. … Even without the vitriolic content, just the process of surfing and consuming the news has a lot of the same qualities as other addictions—like smoking cigarettes or taking drugs. People get addicted to the feel of their phones. They get addicted to the process of turning on screens. You especially get addicted to the idea that you’re going to turn on a news program or read an article and it’s going to tell you something that is going to anger you even more than you were yesterday.”
The template for news, Taibbi writes, is professional wrestling.
“Wrestling was a commercial formula that they figured out worked incredibly well,” Taibbi said of the corporate owners of news outlets. “There was a simplified morality play where there was a good guy, who was called the baby face, and a bad guy they called the heel. They relentlessly hyped the bad guy. The heel was more important in wrestling and more popular than the face. The amount of tickets they can sell is a direct correlation to how much people hate the bad guy. You have to have a hateable heel in order to make the formula work. This is how news works.”
by Chris Hedges, TruthDig | Read more:
Image: Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Bezos Reveals His Ugly Vision For The World He’s Trying To Rule
“Guess what the best planet is in this solar system?” asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a recent media event on his Blue Origin space program.
“It’s easy to know the answer to that question,” he continued. “We’ve sent robotic probes like this one to all of the planets in our solar system. Now, some of them have been fly-bys, but we’ve examined them all. Earth is the best planet. It is not close. This one is really good.”
Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space.
Bezos claimed that the growing human population and growing energy consumption will force us to make a choice between “stasis and rationing” and “dynamism and growth”, and claimed that the latter item in his dichotomy is possible only by moving humans off the planet.
“If we’re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins,” Bezos said. “This would be an incredible civilization. What would this future look like? Where would a trillion humans live? Well it’s very interesting, someone named Gerry O’Neill, a physics professor, looked at this question very carefully and he asked a very precise question that nobody had ever asked before, and it was, ‘Is a planetary surface the best place for humans to expand into the solar system?’ And he and his students set to work on answering that question, and they came to a very surprising–for them–counterintuitive answer: No.”
Bezos went on to describe how the limited surface areas, distance, and gravitational forces of the other planets in our solar system make settling on those planets impractical and cost-prohibitive, while constructing giant space cylinders closer to Earth which can hold a million people is far more practical. These cylinders would spin to replicate Earth’s gravitational pull with centrifugal force.
Here are some illustrations Bezos used in his presentation to show us what these “O’Neill colonies” might look like:
“These are really pleasant places to live,” Bezos said. “Some of these O’Neill colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities. They might pick historical cities and mimic them in some way. There’d be whole new types of architecture. These are ideal climates. These are short-sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day, no rain, no storms, no earthquakes.”
No rain? No weather? Just big, spinning cylinders floating monotonously in space? A trillion divided by a million is one million, which means that the best idea the richest man in the world can come up with for the future of our species is to fill our solar system with a million of these floating homogenized space malls.
“If we build this vision, these O’Neill colonies, where does it take us? What does it mean for Earth?” Bezos asked. “Earth ends up zoned, residential, and light industry. It’ll be a beautiful place to live, it’ll be a beautiful place to visit, it’ll be a beautiful place to go to college, and to do some light industry. But heavy industry, polluting industry, all the things that are damaging our planet, those will be done off Earth. We get to have both. We get to keep this unique gem of a planet, which is completely irreplaceable–there is no Plan B. We have to save this planet. And we shouldn’t give up a future of our grandchildren’s grandchildren of dynamism and growth. We can have both.”
Now, if you look at the behavior of Jeff Bezos, who exploits his employees and destroys his competitors, and who some experts say is trying to take over the underlying infrastructure of our entire economy, you can feel reasonably confident that this man has no intention of leaving “this unique gem of a planet”, nor of having the heirs to his empire leave either. When you see this Pentagon advisory board member and CIA contractor planning to ship humans off the Earth’s surface so the planet can thrive, you may be certain that he’s talking about other humans. The unworthy ones. The ones who weren’t sociopathic enough to climb the capitalist ladder by stepping on the backs of everyone else.
And make no mistake, when Bezos talks about saving the planet for “our grandchildren’s grandchildren”, he’s not just talking about his heirs, he’s talking about himself. Bezos has invested large amounts of wealth in biotech aimed at reversing the aging process and cracking the secret of immortality.
This is the sort of guiding wisdom that is controlling the fate of our species, everyone. The world’s most ambitious plutocrat envisions a world in which, rather than evolving beyond our destructive tendencies and learning to live in collaboration with each other and our environment, we are simply shipped off into space so that he can stretch out and enjoy our beautiful planet. That’s his best idea.
Our plutocratic overlords aren’t just sociopaths. They’re morons.
Bezos’ incredibly shallow vision for humanity reminds me of something Julian Assange said at a 2017 London festival via video link about the way Silicon Valley plutocrats are trying to become immortal by finding a way to upload their brains onto computers.
“I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they are going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded on these artificial intelligences, and live forever in a simulation, therefore will have eternal life,” Assange said. “It’s a religion for atheists. They’ll have eternal life, and given that you’re in a simulation, why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties all around you. It’s like the 72 virgins, but it’s like the Silicon Valley equivalent.”
I mean, damn. First of all, how stupid do you have to be to overlook the fact that science has virtually no understanding of consciousness and doesn’t even really know what it is? Even if these idiots find a way to upload their neurological patternings onto some AI’s virtual simulation, it’s not like they’d be there to experience it. It would just be a bunch of data running in a computer somewhere, mimicking the personality of a dead person and experienced by no one. People who believe that all there is to them is their dopey mental patterns have not spent any time whatsoever exploring what they are, and have no idea what it is to be human. The fact that anyone would think they could become immortal by digitizing their churning, repetitive personality patterns is crazy, and the fact that they’d want to is even crazier.
People who think this way should shut up and learn about life, not rule the world in a plutocratic system where money translates directly to political influence. People who think that humans can be happily unplugged from the ecosystemic context in which they evolved, the ecosystemic context of which they are an inseparable part, and people who think they can become immortal by uploading their wanky personalities onto a computer should shut the fuck up, spend some time alone with themselves, maybe try some psilocybin mushrooms, and learn a bit about what it means to be human. They certainly shouldn’t be calling the shots.
Earth is our home. It’s what we’re made for. The earth went through a lot to give you life. Sparks had to catch, oceans had to freeze, billions of cells had to survive endless disease, all of these amazing things had to happen just right to give you life. You belong here. You are as much a creation of the earth as the air you breathe. You may feel like a singular organism but you’re actually as much a singular organism as one of the many billions of organisms that make up your body. You and earth are one. And because you evolved on earth, you are perfectly adapted to earth and it is perfectly adapted to you. It yearns for your breath as you yearn for its breeze on your face.
“It’s easy to know the answer to that question,” he continued. “We’ve sent robotic probes like this one to all of the planets in our solar system. Now, some of them have been fly-bys, but we’ve examined them all. Earth is the best planet. It is not close. This one is really good.”
Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space.
Bezos claimed that the growing human population and growing energy consumption will force us to make a choice between “stasis and rationing” and “dynamism and growth”, and claimed that the latter item in his dichotomy is possible only by moving humans off the planet.
“If we’re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins,” Bezos said. “This would be an incredible civilization. What would this future look like? Where would a trillion humans live? Well it’s very interesting, someone named Gerry O’Neill, a physics professor, looked at this question very carefully and he asked a very precise question that nobody had ever asked before, and it was, ‘Is a planetary surface the best place for humans to expand into the solar system?’ And he and his students set to work on answering that question, and they came to a very surprising–for them–counterintuitive answer: No.”
Bezos went on to describe how the limited surface areas, distance, and gravitational forces of the other planets in our solar system make settling on those planets impractical and cost-prohibitive, while constructing giant space cylinders closer to Earth which can hold a million people is far more practical. These cylinders would spin to replicate Earth’s gravitational pull with centrifugal force.
Here are some illustrations Bezos used in his presentation to show us what these “O’Neill colonies” might look like:
No rain? No weather? Just big, spinning cylinders floating monotonously in space? A trillion divided by a million is one million, which means that the best idea the richest man in the world can come up with for the future of our species is to fill our solar system with a million of these floating homogenized space malls.
“If we build this vision, these O’Neill colonies, where does it take us? What does it mean for Earth?” Bezos asked. “Earth ends up zoned, residential, and light industry. It’ll be a beautiful place to live, it’ll be a beautiful place to visit, it’ll be a beautiful place to go to college, and to do some light industry. But heavy industry, polluting industry, all the things that are damaging our planet, those will be done off Earth. We get to have both. We get to keep this unique gem of a planet, which is completely irreplaceable–there is no Plan B. We have to save this planet. And we shouldn’t give up a future of our grandchildren’s grandchildren of dynamism and growth. We can have both.”
Now, if you look at the behavior of Jeff Bezos, who exploits his employees and destroys his competitors, and who some experts say is trying to take over the underlying infrastructure of our entire economy, you can feel reasonably confident that this man has no intention of leaving “this unique gem of a planet”, nor of having the heirs to his empire leave either. When you see this Pentagon advisory board member and CIA contractor planning to ship humans off the Earth’s surface so the planet can thrive, you may be certain that he’s talking about other humans. The unworthy ones. The ones who weren’t sociopathic enough to climb the capitalist ladder by stepping on the backs of everyone else.
And make no mistake, when Bezos talks about saving the planet for “our grandchildren’s grandchildren”, he’s not just talking about his heirs, he’s talking about himself. Bezos has invested large amounts of wealth in biotech aimed at reversing the aging process and cracking the secret of immortality.
This is the sort of guiding wisdom that is controlling the fate of our species, everyone. The world’s most ambitious plutocrat envisions a world in which, rather than evolving beyond our destructive tendencies and learning to live in collaboration with each other and our environment, we are simply shipped off into space so that he can stretch out and enjoy our beautiful planet. That’s his best idea.
Our plutocratic overlords aren’t just sociopaths. They’re morons.
Bezos’ incredibly shallow vision for humanity reminds me of something Julian Assange said at a 2017 London festival via video link about the way Silicon Valley plutocrats are trying to become immortal by finding a way to upload their brains onto computers.
“I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they are going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded on these artificial intelligences, and live forever in a simulation, therefore will have eternal life,” Assange said. “It’s a religion for atheists. They’ll have eternal life, and given that you’re in a simulation, why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties all around you. It’s like the 72 virgins, but it’s like the Silicon Valley equivalent.”
I mean, damn. First of all, how stupid do you have to be to overlook the fact that science has virtually no understanding of consciousness and doesn’t even really know what it is? Even if these idiots find a way to upload their neurological patternings onto some AI’s virtual simulation, it’s not like they’d be there to experience it. It would just be a bunch of data running in a computer somewhere, mimicking the personality of a dead person and experienced by no one. People who believe that all there is to them is their dopey mental patterns have not spent any time whatsoever exploring what they are, and have no idea what it is to be human. The fact that anyone would think they could become immortal by digitizing their churning, repetitive personality patterns is crazy, and the fact that they’d want to is even crazier.
People who think this way should shut up and learn about life, not rule the world in a plutocratic system where money translates directly to political influence. People who think that humans can be happily unplugged from the ecosystemic context in which they evolved, the ecosystemic context of which they are an inseparable part, and people who think they can become immortal by uploading their wanky personalities onto a computer should shut the fuck up, spend some time alone with themselves, maybe try some psilocybin mushrooms, and learn a bit about what it means to be human. They certainly shouldn’t be calling the shots.
Earth is our home. It’s what we’re made for. The earth went through a lot to give you life. Sparks had to catch, oceans had to freeze, billions of cells had to survive endless disease, all of these amazing things had to happen just right to give you life. You belong here. You are as much a creation of the earth as the air you breathe. You may feel like a singular organism but you’re actually as much a singular organism as one of the many billions of organisms that make up your body. You and earth are one. And because you evolved on earth, you are perfectly adapted to earth and it is perfectly adapted to you. It yearns for your breath as you yearn for its breeze on your face.
by Caitlin Johnstone, CatlinJohnstone.com | Read more:
Images: Jeff Bezos
Monday, May 27, 2019
In Your Hands, My Dissatisfied Countrymen: The Jaquess-Gilmore Mission
“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” —Jefferson Davis, July 1864
By the time Sherman’s armies had scorched and bow-tied their way to the sea, by the time Halleck had followed Grant’s orders to “eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their own provender with them,” and by the time Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan was finished squeezing every drop of life out of the Confederacy, there had to be those who wondered what possible logic would lead intelligent men like Jefferson Davis to make such a catastrophic choice.
Yet, the South almost won the gamble. With secession, they had challenged the core of the American Experiment, the democratic principle of equal rights, general (male) suffrage, government by a majority, and a peaceful transition of power when that majority so indicated. They also posed an existential question for the North: Was adherence to a principle, even a cherished one like the Union, worth lives and property?
The Civil War is fascinating on so many levels, but what made it fundamentally different than any other conflict that preceded it was that, for the first time, two peoples with the ability to exercise electoral oversight engaged in a protracted armed conflict. This implied something new. The simplest mechanisms of civic beliefs: the right to disagree publicly, to organize, to place elected leadership on notice that their jobs could be at risk, would all play an unexpectedly crucial role in the manner in which the war began and was ultimately prosecuted.
There is no question that the issue was ripe. The Jefferson Davis quote, self-serving though it may be, reflects the reality of a political war that had been going on for more than a decade. The South (or at least the Fire-Eaters, who were more influential than their numbers would imply) had talked themselves into eternal dissatisfaction. They had also convinced themselves that the North would lack backbone when pushed. Threatening to leave if Lincoln were to win the election wasn’t just bluster. The South saw him as a real threat, and secession mutterings progressed to secession organizing. Several Southern States did legislative groundwork in anticipation of a Lincoln win, and they swung into action immediately thereafter. Between December 20,1860 and February 1, 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and finally Texas seceded, all before Lincoln could even take the Oath of Office.
Of course, that wasn’t the entire South—there was significant Unionist sentiment in many places, and slaveholding Border States actually remained loyal. Bear in mind as well that in no state, even in the Deep South, did slaveholders or even slaveholding families represent a majority. But, as William Freehling points out in The Reintegration of American History, a different type of political culture predominated, one that was far more hierarchical and patriarchal. It wasn’t just that the economic elites (often meaning the Planter Class) held power. It was the way they expressed that power: A plantation required a self-sacrificing leader making all the decisions and receiving in return obedience from inferiors—slaves, employees, tradesmen, wives, and people of a lower social standing. Apply that mind-set to politics, and you have the few choosing for the many.
As to the North, the picture was more complex, in part because divergent views had greater access to power. There were plenty of Southern sympathizers, not just Copperheads but also “Doughfaces” like outgoing President James Buchanan. There were bankers and business people who wanted access to Southern markets. There were also many rank and file Democrats who stuck, out of loyalty, with an increasingly Southern-dominated party. But, just as Southern anger burned, so did resentment in the North. The constantly escalating Southern demands, always couched in hyperbolic terms, grated. Lincoln himself had made this point powerfully at Cooper Union in 1859—the South demanded not just Northern obeisance, but also Northern complicity in what many thought of as a profound moral wrong.
Secession made it palpable, real, and now. It forced Northerners to decide whether the whole thing was worth it. Maybe another set of concessions would work, but, if not, why not just let the slavemongers go their own way, and be done with the problem altogether? The entire country held its breath.
It was at this point that the South (or, at least South Carolina) took a fateful step: They fired first, shelling Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. Northern public opinion moved sharply in the direction of intervention, but Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to respond also induced four Southern States, first Virginia, the big prize, then Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, to join the Confederacy.
Why did South Carolina do it? There was no strategic reason—Major Anderson lacked the supplies to sustain his command for any length of time. It’s reasonable to suspect that the aristocratic Southern leadership, steeped in the culture of honor and duels, and contemptuous of a presumed Northern lack of manly fiber, simply assumed it would be easy.
But if the firing on Fort Sumter misjudged the situation, a second Southern assumption was far better. No quick strike was going to end the rebellion. They could fight a largely defensive war—the North would have to come to them, and they felt they had superior military leadership, easier logistics, and far better knowledge of the topography. In short, the South could win just by not losing, and the longer the war went on, the greater the risk to Lincoln that public support would erode.
In the short run, this is exactly what occurred. Poor generalship and tactics led to Northern defeats on the battlefield and at the ballot box: In 1862, Democrats gained 27 seats in the then-184-seat House of Representatives. Northern fortunes picked up militarily in 1863 and early 1864 with the victory at Gettysburg and the capture of New Orleans, but by midsummer they were back to slogging it out again, with heavy loss of life.
Criticism of Lincoln intensified. Seemingly everyone from across the Northern political spectrum found something to dislike in his policies. Influential thought-leaders like William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley, and Theodore Tilton came to the conclusion that Lincoln was a failure and needed to be replaced. Others started a John C. Frémont movement, which would have seriously impacted Lincoln’s chances in the general election. At the Republican National Convention in Baltimore, whispers began for a Grant candidacy. Lincoln did secure re-nomination, but, right afterwards, hostilities broke out again with his own party after he pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, which was far more punitive than he wanted and would have seized control of the process from the Executive Branch.
The disappointments mounted. In June 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early launched a surprise raid on Washington itself, and almost broke through. By August, against a backdrop of continued military frustrations and a revitalized Democratic Party about to nominate General George McClellan, Lincoln wrote his famous “Blind Memo” to his Cabinet: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.” At the very time that memo was written, a serious attempt was made to have a second convention, in Cincinnati, on September 28, to replace Lincoln as the nominee.
Weariness with the war wasn’t confined to the North, although Davis was more secure as a result of his six-year term. The public wanted something done. This gave rise to an unusual number of peace talks, peace feelers, and ad hoc peace conferences. Lincoln even sent the ever-complaining Horace Greeley to one. But perhaps the most interesting is the only one that engaged Jefferson Davis directly, the ragtag Jaquess-Gilmore Mission.
Colonel James Jaquess was a Methodist preacher and soldier from Illinois, James Gilmore a businessman from New York with contacts in the South. Jaquess had long had an obsession with bringing peace to both sides, and requested leave to travel South to meet with like-minded people. Finally, in June of 1864, Lincoln gave a pass to the two to travel to Richmond and attempt to connect with the Confederate President. They were given no formal status or negotiating authority, but were made generally aware of Lincoln’s bottom line—a reconstituted Union, the end of hostilities, and emancipation.
After a preliminary meeting with Judah P. Benjamin, then the Confederacy’s Secretary of State, they were granted an audience with Davis himself on July 17, 1864. What followed was an extraordinary back and forth that may give us as clear a roadmap to Davis’s thinking as we could possibly find. Jeffries later published an account of the meeting, and, making allowances for period language and perhaps a little puffery, it is worth reading in its entirety.
What first strikes you is how absolutely clear Davis was: The war could only end with the North withdrawing. The blame was entirely on them (“At your door lies all the misery and the crime of this war—and it is a fearful, fearful account.”). The North, by insisting on Union, “would deny to us what you exact for yourselves—the right of self-government.” When Jaquess suggested that he had many Southern friends who wished reconciliation, Davis disagreed: “They are mistaken… They do not understand Southern sentiment.”
Jaquess was a determined man, and he pressed his case. Surely peace was desirable? Davis was unmoved: “I desire peace as much as you do. I deplore bloodshed as much as you do; but I feel that not one drop of the blood shed in this war is on my hands; and I look up to my God and say this. I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves; and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last men of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize his musket and fight his battles, unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for Slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that or extermination we will have.”
Over and over Davis returns to his central themes. Independence is non-negotiable. The South hates the North and will never rejoin it, and the North has no right to demand it stay. Each State is only in the Union as a result of a consent that can be withdrawn at any time.
Jaquess then proposes something so far-fetched that it is incredible he could have possibly thought either Lincoln or Davis would ever agree to it: An armistice, followed by a national vote that would choose between two competing proposals—(1) Peace with Disunion, or (2) Peace with Union, emancipation, no confiscation, and universal amnesty.
Davis rejects it, first with the technical objection that one Southern State had no legal right to end slavery in another. But then, in just a few words, he defines why any vote would never be acceptable, no matter the terms: “We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority, and this would subject us to it again.”
With that, the substantive part of the discussion is over. Jaquess and Jeffries take their leave, and on the way out are met by Judge Robert Ould, who had helped arrange the meeting. Judge Ould inquired about the results: “Nothing but war—war to the knife,” said Jeffries. Jaquess, who had staked so much emotionally on his ability to broker peace, was clearly disappointed at Davis’ fixation on an impossible result. Quoting Hosea 4:17, he adds, “Ephraim is joined to his idols—let him alone.”
by Michael Liss, 3QD | Read more:
Image: uncredited
By the time Sherman’s armies had scorched and bow-tied their way to the sea, by the time Halleck had followed Grant’s orders to “eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their own provender with them,” and by the time Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan was finished squeezing every drop of life out of the Confederacy, there had to be those who wondered what possible logic would lead intelligent men like Jefferson Davis to make such a catastrophic choice.
Yet, the South almost won the gamble. With secession, they had challenged the core of the American Experiment, the democratic principle of equal rights, general (male) suffrage, government by a majority, and a peaceful transition of power when that majority so indicated. They also posed an existential question for the North: Was adherence to a principle, even a cherished one like the Union, worth lives and property?
The Civil War is fascinating on so many levels, but what made it fundamentally different than any other conflict that preceded it was that, for the first time, two peoples with the ability to exercise electoral oversight engaged in a protracted armed conflict. This implied something new. The simplest mechanisms of civic beliefs: the right to disagree publicly, to organize, to place elected leadership on notice that their jobs could be at risk, would all play an unexpectedly crucial role in the manner in which the war began and was ultimately prosecuted.
There is no question that the issue was ripe. The Jefferson Davis quote, self-serving though it may be, reflects the reality of a political war that had been going on for more than a decade. The South (or at least the Fire-Eaters, who were more influential than their numbers would imply) had talked themselves into eternal dissatisfaction. They had also convinced themselves that the North would lack backbone when pushed. Threatening to leave if Lincoln were to win the election wasn’t just bluster. The South saw him as a real threat, and secession mutterings progressed to secession organizing. Several Southern States did legislative groundwork in anticipation of a Lincoln win, and they swung into action immediately thereafter. Between December 20,1860 and February 1, 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and finally Texas seceded, all before Lincoln could even take the Oath of Office.Of course, that wasn’t the entire South—there was significant Unionist sentiment in many places, and slaveholding Border States actually remained loyal. Bear in mind as well that in no state, even in the Deep South, did slaveholders or even slaveholding families represent a majority. But, as William Freehling points out in The Reintegration of American History, a different type of political culture predominated, one that was far more hierarchical and patriarchal. It wasn’t just that the economic elites (often meaning the Planter Class) held power. It was the way they expressed that power: A plantation required a self-sacrificing leader making all the decisions and receiving in return obedience from inferiors—slaves, employees, tradesmen, wives, and people of a lower social standing. Apply that mind-set to politics, and you have the few choosing for the many.
As to the North, the picture was more complex, in part because divergent views had greater access to power. There were plenty of Southern sympathizers, not just Copperheads but also “Doughfaces” like outgoing President James Buchanan. There were bankers and business people who wanted access to Southern markets. There were also many rank and file Democrats who stuck, out of loyalty, with an increasingly Southern-dominated party. But, just as Southern anger burned, so did resentment in the North. The constantly escalating Southern demands, always couched in hyperbolic terms, grated. Lincoln himself had made this point powerfully at Cooper Union in 1859—the South demanded not just Northern obeisance, but also Northern complicity in what many thought of as a profound moral wrong.
Secession made it palpable, real, and now. It forced Northerners to decide whether the whole thing was worth it. Maybe another set of concessions would work, but, if not, why not just let the slavemongers go their own way, and be done with the problem altogether? The entire country held its breath.
It was at this point that the South (or, at least South Carolina) took a fateful step: They fired first, shelling Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. Northern public opinion moved sharply in the direction of intervention, but Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to respond also induced four Southern States, first Virginia, the big prize, then Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, to join the Confederacy.
Why did South Carolina do it? There was no strategic reason—Major Anderson lacked the supplies to sustain his command for any length of time. It’s reasonable to suspect that the aristocratic Southern leadership, steeped in the culture of honor and duels, and contemptuous of a presumed Northern lack of manly fiber, simply assumed it would be easy.
But if the firing on Fort Sumter misjudged the situation, a second Southern assumption was far better. No quick strike was going to end the rebellion. They could fight a largely defensive war—the North would have to come to them, and they felt they had superior military leadership, easier logistics, and far better knowledge of the topography. In short, the South could win just by not losing, and the longer the war went on, the greater the risk to Lincoln that public support would erode.
In the short run, this is exactly what occurred. Poor generalship and tactics led to Northern defeats on the battlefield and at the ballot box: In 1862, Democrats gained 27 seats in the then-184-seat House of Representatives. Northern fortunes picked up militarily in 1863 and early 1864 with the victory at Gettysburg and the capture of New Orleans, but by midsummer they were back to slogging it out again, with heavy loss of life.
Criticism of Lincoln intensified. Seemingly everyone from across the Northern political spectrum found something to dislike in his policies. Influential thought-leaders like William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley, and Theodore Tilton came to the conclusion that Lincoln was a failure and needed to be replaced. Others started a John C. Frémont movement, which would have seriously impacted Lincoln’s chances in the general election. At the Republican National Convention in Baltimore, whispers began for a Grant candidacy. Lincoln did secure re-nomination, but, right afterwards, hostilities broke out again with his own party after he pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, which was far more punitive than he wanted and would have seized control of the process from the Executive Branch.
The disappointments mounted. In June 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early launched a surprise raid on Washington itself, and almost broke through. By August, against a backdrop of continued military frustrations and a revitalized Democratic Party about to nominate General George McClellan, Lincoln wrote his famous “Blind Memo” to his Cabinet: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.” At the very time that memo was written, a serious attempt was made to have a second convention, in Cincinnati, on September 28, to replace Lincoln as the nominee.
Weariness with the war wasn’t confined to the North, although Davis was more secure as a result of his six-year term. The public wanted something done. This gave rise to an unusual number of peace talks, peace feelers, and ad hoc peace conferences. Lincoln even sent the ever-complaining Horace Greeley to one. But perhaps the most interesting is the only one that engaged Jefferson Davis directly, the ragtag Jaquess-Gilmore Mission.
Colonel James Jaquess was a Methodist preacher and soldier from Illinois, James Gilmore a businessman from New York with contacts in the South. Jaquess had long had an obsession with bringing peace to both sides, and requested leave to travel South to meet with like-minded people. Finally, in June of 1864, Lincoln gave a pass to the two to travel to Richmond and attempt to connect with the Confederate President. They were given no formal status or negotiating authority, but were made generally aware of Lincoln’s bottom line—a reconstituted Union, the end of hostilities, and emancipation.
After a preliminary meeting with Judah P. Benjamin, then the Confederacy’s Secretary of State, they were granted an audience with Davis himself on July 17, 1864. What followed was an extraordinary back and forth that may give us as clear a roadmap to Davis’s thinking as we could possibly find. Jeffries later published an account of the meeting, and, making allowances for period language and perhaps a little puffery, it is worth reading in its entirety.
What first strikes you is how absolutely clear Davis was: The war could only end with the North withdrawing. The blame was entirely on them (“At your door lies all the misery and the crime of this war—and it is a fearful, fearful account.”). The North, by insisting on Union, “would deny to us what you exact for yourselves—the right of self-government.” When Jaquess suggested that he had many Southern friends who wished reconciliation, Davis disagreed: “They are mistaken… They do not understand Southern sentiment.”
Jaquess was a determined man, and he pressed his case. Surely peace was desirable? Davis was unmoved: “I desire peace as much as you do. I deplore bloodshed as much as you do; but I feel that not one drop of the blood shed in this war is on my hands; and I look up to my God and say this. I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves; and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last men of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize his musket and fight his battles, unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for Slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that or extermination we will have.”
Over and over Davis returns to his central themes. Independence is non-negotiable. The South hates the North and will never rejoin it, and the North has no right to demand it stay. Each State is only in the Union as a result of a consent that can be withdrawn at any time.
Jaquess then proposes something so far-fetched that it is incredible he could have possibly thought either Lincoln or Davis would ever agree to it: An armistice, followed by a national vote that would choose between two competing proposals—(1) Peace with Disunion, or (2) Peace with Union, emancipation, no confiscation, and universal amnesty.
Davis rejects it, first with the technical objection that one Southern State had no legal right to end slavery in another. But then, in just a few words, he defines why any vote would never be acceptable, no matter the terms: “We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority, and this would subject us to it again.”
With that, the substantive part of the discussion is over. Jaquess and Jeffries take their leave, and on the way out are met by Judge Robert Ould, who had helped arrange the meeting. Judge Ould inquired about the results: “Nothing but war—war to the knife,” said Jeffries. Jaquess, who had staked so much emotionally on his ability to broker peace, was clearly disappointed at Davis’ fixation on an impossible result. Quoting Hosea 4:17, he adds, “Ephraim is joined to his idols—let him alone.”
by Michael Liss, 3QD | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Let's start with a couple of stories. This first one, you probably know.
The boy's father could tell something was different. At six months old, the boy could balance on his father's palm as he walked through their home. At 10 months he could climb down from his high chair, trundle over to a golf club that had been cut down to size and imitate the swing he'd been watching in the garage. At two—an age when physical developmental milestones include "kicks a ball" and "stands on tiptoe"—he went on national television and used a shoulder-height club to drive a ball past an admiring Bob Hope. That same year he entered his first tournament and won the 10-and-under division.
At eight, the son beat his father for the first time. The father didn't mind, because he was convinced that his boy was singularly talented, and that he was uniquely equipped to help him. The boy was already famous by the time he reached Stanford, and soon his father opened up about his importance. His son would have a larger impact than Nelson Mandela, than Gandhi, than Buddha, he insisted. "He has a larger forum than any of them," he said. "I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One."
This second story, you also probably know. You might not recognize it at first.
His mom was a coach, but she never coached him. He would kick a ball around with her when he learned to walk. As a boy, he played squash with his father on Sundays. He dabbled in skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer at school. "I was always very much more interested if a ball was involved," he would say.
Many experts argue that in order to be successful in any field, one must start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. But what if the opposite is true? Some of the world’s best athletes, musicians, scientists, artists and inventors are actually generalists, not specialists, and they present a powerful argument for how to succeed in any field.
Though his mother taught tennis, she decided against working with him. "He would have just upset me anyway," she said. "He tried out every strange stroke and certainly never returned a ball normally. That is simply no fun for a mother." Rather than pushy, a Sports Illustrated writer would observe that his parents were "pully." Nearing his teens, the boy began to gravitate more toward tennis, and "if they nudged him at all, it was to stop taking tennis so seriously."
As a teenager, he became good enough to warrant an interview with the local newspaper. His mother was appalled to read that, when asked what he would buy with a hypothetical first paycheck from tennis, her son answered, "a Mercedes." She was relieved when the reporter let her listen to a recording of the interview. There'd been a mistake: The boy had said "mehr CDs," in Swiss German. He simply wanted "more CDs."
The boy was competitive, no doubt. But when his tennis instructors decided to move him up to a group with older players, he asked to move back so he could stay with his friends. After all, part of the fun was hanging around after his lessons.
By the time he finally gave up other sports to focus on tennis, other kids had long since been working with strength coaches, sports psychologists and nutritionists. But it didn't seem to hamper his development. In his mid-30s, an age by which even legendary players are typically retired, he would still be ranked No. 1 in the world.
In 2006, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer met for the first time, when both were at the apex of their powers, and they connected as only they could. "I've never spoken with anybody who was so familiar with the feeling of being invincible," Federer would describe it.
Still, the contrast was not lost on him. "[Tiger's] story is completely different from mine," he told a biographer in 2006. Woods's incredible upbringing has been at the heart of a batch of bestselling books on the development of expertise, one of which was a parenting manual written by his father, Earl. Tiger was not merely playing golf. He was engaging in "deliberate practice," the only kind that counts in the now-famous 10,000 hours rule to expertise. Reams of work on expertise development shows that elite athletes spend more time in highly technical, deliberate practice each week than those who plateau at lower levels. And Tiger has come to symbolize that idea of success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.
But when scientists examine the entire developmental path of athletes, they find that the eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will later become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a "sampling period." They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
In 2014, I included some of the findings about late specialization in sports in the afterword of my first book, The Sports Gene. The following year I accepted an invitation to talk about that research from an unlikely audience—not athletes or coaches but military veterans brought together by the Pat Tillman Foundation. In preparation, I perused scientific journals for work on specialization and career-swerving outside the sports world. I was struck by what I found. One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities. I found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one.
I also realized that some of the people whose work I deeply admired from afar—from Duke Ellington (who shunned music lessons to focus on drawing and baseball as a kid) to Maryam Mirzakhani (who dreamed of becoming a novelist and instead became the first woman to win math's most famous prize, the Fields Medal)—seemed to have more Roger than Tiger in their development stories. I encountered remarkable individuals who succeeded not in spite of their diverse experiences and interests, but because of them.
The boy's father could tell something was different. At six months old, the boy could balance on his father's palm as he walked through their home. At 10 months he could climb down from his high chair, trundle over to a golf club that had been cut down to size and imitate the swing he'd been watching in the garage. At two—an age when physical developmental milestones include "kicks a ball" and "stands on tiptoe"—he went on national television and used a shoulder-height club to drive a ball past an admiring Bob Hope. That same year he entered his first tournament and won the 10-and-under division.
At eight, the son beat his father for the first time. The father didn't mind, because he was convinced that his boy was singularly talented, and that he was uniquely equipped to help him. The boy was already famous by the time he reached Stanford, and soon his father opened up about his importance. His son would have a larger impact than Nelson Mandela, than Gandhi, than Buddha, he insisted. "He has a larger forum than any of them," he said. "I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One."
This second story, you also probably know. You might not recognize it at first.
His mom was a coach, but she never coached him. He would kick a ball around with her when he learned to walk. As a boy, he played squash with his father on Sundays. He dabbled in skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer at school. "I was always very much more interested if a ball was involved," he would say.Many experts argue that in order to be successful in any field, one must start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. But what if the opposite is true? Some of the world’s best athletes, musicians, scientists, artists and inventors are actually generalists, not specialists, and they present a powerful argument for how to succeed in any field.
Though his mother taught tennis, she decided against working with him. "He would have just upset me anyway," she said. "He tried out every strange stroke and certainly never returned a ball normally. That is simply no fun for a mother." Rather than pushy, a Sports Illustrated writer would observe that his parents were "pully." Nearing his teens, the boy began to gravitate more toward tennis, and "if they nudged him at all, it was to stop taking tennis so seriously."
As a teenager, he became good enough to warrant an interview with the local newspaper. His mother was appalled to read that, when asked what he would buy with a hypothetical first paycheck from tennis, her son answered, "a Mercedes." She was relieved when the reporter let her listen to a recording of the interview. There'd been a mistake: The boy had said "mehr CDs," in Swiss German. He simply wanted "more CDs."
The boy was competitive, no doubt. But when his tennis instructors decided to move him up to a group with older players, he asked to move back so he could stay with his friends. After all, part of the fun was hanging around after his lessons.
By the time he finally gave up other sports to focus on tennis, other kids had long since been working with strength coaches, sports psychologists and nutritionists. But it didn't seem to hamper his development. In his mid-30s, an age by which even legendary players are typically retired, he would still be ranked No. 1 in the world.
In 2006, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer met for the first time, when both were at the apex of their powers, and they connected as only they could. "I've never spoken with anybody who was so familiar with the feeling of being invincible," Federer would describe it.
Still, the contrast was not lost on him. "[Tiger's] story is completely different from mine," he told a biographer in 2006. Woods's incredible upbringing has been at the heart of a batch of bestselling books on the development of expertise, one of which was a parenting manual written by his father, Earl. Tiger was not merely playing golf. He was engaging in "deliberate practice," the only kind that counts in the now-famous 10,000 hours rule to expertise. Reams of work on expertise development shows that elite athletes spend more time in highly technical, deliberate practice each week than those who plateau at lower levels. And Tiger has come to symbolize that idea of success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.
But when scientists examine the entire developmental path of athletes, they find that the eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will later become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a "sampling period." They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
In 2014, I included some of the findings about late specialization in sports in the afterword of my first book, The Sports Gene. The following year I accepted an invitation to talk about that research from an unlikely audience—not athletes or coaches but military veterans brought together by the Pat Tillman Foundation. In preparation, I perused scientific journals for work on specialization and career-swerving outside the sports world. I was struck by what I found. One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities. I found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one.
I also realized that some of the people whose work I deeply admired from afar—from Duke Ellington (who shunned music lessons to focus on drawing and baseball as a kid) to Maryam Mirzakhani (who dreamed of becoming a novelist and instead became the first woman to win math's most famous prize, the Fields Medal)—seemed to have more Roger than Tiger in their development stories. I encountered remarkable individuals who succeeded not in spite of their diverse experiences and interests, but because of them.
by David Epstein, SI | Read more:
Images: CBS/Getty Images: Courtesy of the Federer Family
Sunday, May 26, 2019
Bart Starr (1934-2019)
Legendary Packers quarterback Bart Starr dies at age 85 (Green Bay Press Gazette).
Image: via
[ed. A class act all the way, one of the greatest.]
The Faux Revolution of Mindfulness
According to its backers we’re in the midst of a “mindfulness revolution.” Jon Kabat-Zinn, recently dubbed the “father of mindfulness,” goes so far as to proclaim that we’re on the verge of a global renaissance, and that mindfulness “may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple hundred years.”
Really? A revolution? A global renaissance? What exactly has been overturned or radically transformed to garner such grand status?
The last time I watched the news, Wall Street and corporations were still conducting business-as-usual, special interests and political corruption were still unchecked, and public schools were still suffering from massive underfunding and neglect. The concentration of wealth and inequality is now at record levels. Mass incarceration and prison overcrowding have become a new social plague, while the indiscriminate shooting of African Americans by police and the demonizing of the poor remains commonplace. America’s militaristic imperialism continues to spread, and the impending disasters of global warming are already rearing their ugly heads.
Against this background, the hubris and political naiveté of the cheerleaders of the mindfulness ‘revolution’ is stunning. They seem so enamored of doing good and saving the world that these true believers, no matter how sincere, suffer from an enormous blindspot. They seem mindless of the fact that all too often, mindfulness has been reduced to a commodified and instrumental self-help technique that unwittingly reinforces neoliberal imperatives.
For Kabat-Zinn and his followers, it is mindless and maladapted individuals who are to blame for the problems of a dysfunctional society, not the political and economic frameworks within which they are forced to act. By shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals for managing their own wellbeing, and by privatizing and pathologizing stress, the neoliberal order has been a boon to the 1.1 billion dollar mindfulness industry.
In response, mindfulness has arisen as a new religion of the self, unencumbered by the public sphere. The revolution it proclaims occurs not out in the streets or through collective struggle and political protests or nonviolent demonstrations, but in the heads of atomized individuals. A recurrent message is that our failure to pay attention to the present moment - our getting lost in mental ruminations and mind-wandering - is the underlying cause of our dissatisfaction and distress.
Kabat-Zinn takes this one step further. He claims that our “entire society is suffering from attention disorder-big time.” Apparently, stress and social suffering are not the result of massive inequalities, nefarious corporate business practices or political corruption, but of a crisis inside our heads, what he calls a “thinking disease.”
In other words, capitalism itself is not inherently problematic; rather, the problem is the failure of individuals to be mindful and resilient in a precarious and uncertain economy. And not surprisingly, the mindfulness merchants have just the goods we need to be contented mindful capitalists.
Mindfulness, positive psychology and the happiness industry share a common core in terms of the de-politicization of stress. The ubiquity of individualistic stress rhetoric - with its underlying cultural message that stress is a given - should make us suspicious. As Mark Fisher points out in his book Capitalist Realism, the privatization of stress has led to an “almost total destruction of the concept of the public.”
Stress, we are told by the mindfulness apologists, is a noxious influence that ravages our minds and bodies, and it is up to us as individuals to ‘mindful up.’ It’s a seductive proposition that has potent truth effects. First, we are conditioned to accept the fact that there is a stress epidemic and that it is simply an inevitability of the modern age. Second, since stress is supposedly omnipresent, it’s our responsibility as stressed-out subjects to manage it, get it under control, and adapt mindfully and vigilantly to the thralls of a capitalist economy. Mindfulness targets this vulnerability, and, at least on the surface, appears as a benign technique for self-empowerment.
But in her book One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea, Dana Becker points out that the stress concept obscures and conceals “social problems by individualizing them in ways that most disadvantage those who have the least to gain from the status quo.” In fact, Becker has coined the term stressism to describe “the current belief that the tensions of contemporary life are primarily individual lifestyle problems to be solved through managing stress, as opposed to the belief that these tensions are linked to social forces and need to be resolved primarily through social and political means.”
Really? A revolution? A global renaissance? What exactly has been overturned or radically transformed to garner such grand status?
The last time I watched the news, Wall Street and corporations were still conducting business-as-usual, special interests and political corruption were still unchecked, and public schools were still suffering from massive underfunding and neglect. The concentration of wealth and inequality is now at record levels. Mass incarceration and prison overcrowding have become a new social plague, while the indiscriminate shooting of African Americans by police and the demonizing of the poor remains commonplace. America’s militaristic imperialism continues to spread, and the impending disasters of global warming are already rearing their ugly heads.
Against this background, the hubris and political naiveté of the cheerleaders of the mindfulness ‘revolution’ is stunning. They seem so enamored of doing good and saving the world that these true believers, no matter how sincere, suffer from an enormous blindspot. They seem mindless of the fact that all too often, mindfulness has been reduced to a commodified and instrumental self-help technique that unwittingly reinforces neoliberal imperatives.For Kabat-Zinn and his followers, it is mindless and maladapted individuals who are to blame for the problems of a dysfunctional society, not the political and economic frameworks within which they are forced to act. By shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals for managing their own wellbeing, and by privatizing and pathologizing stress, the neoliberal order has been a boon to the 1.1 billion dollar mindfulness industry.
In response, mindfulness has arisen as a new religion of the self, unencumbered by the public sphere. The revolution it proclaims occurs not out in the streets or through collective struggle and political protests or nonviolent demonstrations, but in the heads of atomized individuals. A recurrent message is that our failure to pay attention to the present moment - our getting lost in mental ruminations and mind-wandering - is the underlying cause of our dissatisfaction and distress.
Kabat-Zinn takes this one step further. He claims that our “entire society is suffering from attention disorder-big time.” Apparently, stress and social suffering are not the result of massive inequalities, nefarious corporate business practices or political corruption, but of a crisis inside our heads, what he calls a “thinking disease.”
In other words, capitalism itself is not inherently problematic; rather, the problem is the failure of individuals to be mindful and resilient in a precarious and uncertain economy. And not surprisingly, the mindfulness merchants have just the goods we need to be contented mindful capitalists.
Mindfulness, positive psychology and the happiness industry share a common core in terms of the de-politicization of stress. The ubiquity of individualistic stress rhetoric - with its underlying cultural message that stress is a given - should make us suspicious. As Mark Fisher points out in his book Capitalist Realism, the privatization of stress has led to an “almost total destruction of the concept of the public.”
Stress, we are told by the mindfulness apologists, is a noxious influence that ravages our minds and bodies, and it is up to us as individuals to ‘mindful up.’ It’s a seductive proposition that has potent truth effects. First, we are conditioned to accept the fact that there is a stress epidemic and that it is simply an inevitability of the modern age. Second, since stress is supposedly omnipresent, it’s our responsibility as stressed-out subjects to manage it, get it under control, and adapt mindfully and vigilantly to the thralls of a capitalist economy. Mindfulness targets this vulnerability, and, at least on the surface, appears as a benign technique for self-empowerment.
But in her book One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea, Dana Becker points out that the stress concept obscures and conceals “social problems by individualizing them in ways that most disadvantage those who have the least to gain from the status quo.” In fact, Becker has coined the term stressism to describe “the current belief that the tensions of contemporary life are primarily individual lifestyle problems to be solved through managing stress, as opposed to the belief that these tensions are linked to social forces and need to be resolved primarily through social and political means.”
by Ronald Purser, Open Democracy | Read more:
Image: Thai Ronald McDonald. Flickr/Daniel Grosvenor. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The Austerity of Luxury
There is not enough seating here in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5, even though there is a lot of it. I keep bumping into people as I move around—it’s just an overcrowded space with too many bodies in it. The plastic seats are uncomfortable and hard, and about one in every 20 has a power outlet. (I was among the lucky few, but my outlet doesn’t work.) Even though Terminal 5 is in a bright, clean, modern building—the largest free-standing structure in the U.K., apparently—it feels cramped.
And yet, somehow, while the airport authorities have not managed to make space for passengers, they have managed to make space for a series of luxury storefronts. In Terminal 5 you can visit Prada, Burberry, Hermès, Rolex, Dior, Cartier, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Tiffany. If you want a £5000 handbag or a £200 bottle of cologne while you’re at the airport, Terminal 5 has you covered.
I find it a troubling sign of our age that to most people passing through the terminal, this doesn’t seem insane. I haven’t seen anyone in the Prada store since I’ve been here, but while there’s a sense that Terminal 5 is “upscale” nobody seems to think it’s profoundly dysfunctional and wrong. (...)
Thanks to expanding global inequality, we’re constantly seeing new bifurcations in the experience of rich people and ordinary people. At amusement parks, the rich can pay to go on rides sooner. They can hire people to stand in line for them. Their communities are gated, their schools are private, their airport lounges are roped off. All of this is going to continue to get worse: The number of everyday situations in which “we’re all in this together” will disappear. They will drive on traffic-free private toll roads and use members-only “public” parks. The things we hold in common will deteriorate, because they are no longer subsidized by the wealthy. Public schools are the most obvious example—instead of giving money that will be used to educate poor children, the rich simply retreat to their own segregated communities where the schools are magnificent. Meanwhile, the Detroit schools are literally falling apart. The airports will be the same: Economy class will be more and more uncomfortable, possibly even without seats, while first class will be ever more opulent.
I was struck by something else about Terminal 5, though, that you’ve probably noticed in your own journeys through Neoliberal Hellworld: It wasn’t even that luxurious for the rich. They get expensive things, to be sure, but they don’t really seem to get nice things. This was my experience the one time I was upgraded to first class. There was more legroom, which was good. But most of the other tweaks to the experience were things like calling me “Mr. Robinson,” and generating the feeling of superiority rather than the authentic experience of superior pleasure. You may have been struck, if you’ve ever entered a McMansion, by the fact that it isn’t actually a very comfortable house. All that money is buying status objects, but it’s often not buying the actual best things. The best house is not the largest house, because the largest house tends to be extremely inconvenient and makes you feel small and alone. (...)
Isn’t it a little strange? The rich are trapped just like we are, all they can do is choose which brand of bag or watch they want. Their airport, just like ours, has no trees or flowers, no fountains, no river running through it. Their time at the airport will not be much less depressing than yours, though they will spend it in a more comfortable chair. They live in expensive austerity, a world calculated to be maximally efficient in the delivery of pleasure that end up delivering a technologically sophisticated tedium.
I have bought expensive things now and then. I am for a “luxury leftism” that encourages people to have nice possessions, and I own a far-too-expensive dressing gown and a trio of beautiful suits. For these purchases to be pleasurable to me, however, they had to feel very special. If I had bought these treats at an airport because I was bored and had money, they would have meant very little. The people who make designer clothing and accessories work hard to make the experience “feel special,” but there is something absurd about putting these shops in an airport, like having a vending machine for precious gemstones. I do not believe that the rich are even getting the kind of experience that they are paying for when they are being sold designer handbags as a way of passing time, next to the racks of mystery novels and granola bars. It’s luxury without any of the feeling of special delight that should accompany indulgence.
And yet, somehow, while the airport authorities have not managed to make space for passengers, they have managed to make space for a series of luxury storefronts. In Terminal 5 you can visit Prada, Burberry, Hermès, Rolex, Dior, Cartier, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Tiffany. If you want a £5000 handbag or a £200 bottle of cologne while you’re at the airport, Terminal 5 has you covered.
I find it a troubling sign of our age that to most people passing through the terminal, this doesn’t seem insane. I haven’t seen anyone in the Prada store since I’ve been here, but while there’s a sense that Terminal 5 is “upscale” nobody seems to think it’s profoundly dysfunctional and wrong. (...)Thanks to expanding global inequality, we’re constantly seeing new bifurcations in the experience of rich people and ordinary people. At amusement parks, the rich can pay to go on rides sooner. They can hire people to stand in line for them. Their communities are gated, their schools are private, their airport lounges are roped off. All of this is going to continue to get worse: The number of everyday situations in which “we’re all in this together” will disappear. They will drive on traffic-free private toll roads and use members-only “public” parks. The things we hold in common will deteriorate, because they are no longer subsidized by the wealthy. Public schools are the most obvious example—instead of giving money that will be used to educate poor children, the rich simply retreat to their own segregated communities where the schools are magnificent. Meanwhile, the Detroit schools are literally falling apart. The airports will be the same: Economy class will be more and more uncomfortable, possibly even without seats, while first class will be ever more opulent.
I was struck by something else about Terminal 5, though, that you’ve probably noticed in your own journeys through Neoliberal Hellworld: It wasn’t even that luxurious for the rich. They get expensive things, to be sure, but they don’t really seem to get nice things. This was my experience the one time I was upgraded to first class. There was more legroom, which was good. But most of the other tweaks to the experience were things like calling me “Mr. Robinson,” and generating the feeling of superiority rather than the authentic experience of superior pleasure. You may have been struck, if you’ve ever entered a McMansion, by the fact that it isn’t actually a very comfortable house. All that money is buying status objects, but it’s often not buying the actual best things. The best house is not the largest house, because the largest house tends to be extremely inconvenient and makes you feel small and alone. (...)
Isn’t it a little strange? The rich are trapped just like we are, all they can do is choose which brand of bag or watch they want. Their airport, just like ours, has no trees or flowers, no fountains, no river running through it. Their time at the airport will not be much less depressing than yours, though they will spend it in a more comfortable chair. They live in expensive austerity, a world calculated to be maximally efficient in the delivery of pleasure that end up delivering a technologically sophisticated tedium.
I have bought expensive things now and then. I am for a “luxury leftism” that encourages people to have nice possessions, and I own a far-too-expensive dressing gown and a trio of beautiful suits. For these purchases to be pleasurable to me, however, they had to feel very special. If I had bought these treats at an airport because I was bored and had money, they would have meant very little. The people who make designer clothing and accessories work hard to make the experience “feel special,” but there is something absurd about putting these shops in an airport, like having a vending machine for precious gemstones. I do not believe that the rich are even getting the kind of experience that they are paying for when they are being sold designer handbags as a way of passing time, next to the racks of mystery novels and granola bars. It’s luxury without any of the feeling of special delight that should accompany indulgence.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
First Do No Harm
Democrats who've made "Medicare for All" a top health care priority are running up against their toughest opponent yet: their own neighborhood hospitals.
The multibillion-dollar industry has emerged as the most formidable foe of single-payer health care. It’s helped assemble a coalition of health care lobbies that has launched social media campaigns attacking Medicare for All and its most high-profile proponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), while fighting narrower Democratic proposals to expand federal health coverage over concerns any change would slash hospital revenue.
That’s created a dilemma for Medicare for All champions who cast themselves as crusaders against a broken health care system full of greedy insurers and drug companies, yet remain wary of taking on hospitals that rank as top employers in many congressional districts and are seen by the public as life-saving institutions.
“We’re not cutting out hospitals, we are keeping the existing hospital system,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a leader of Democrats’ Medicare for All caucus and fierce critic of corporate influence, adding “they’re very much going to be a partner at that table.”
The bill would all but end private insurance and regulate hospitals in a vastly different way, dramatically changing operators’ business model and costing community hospitals as much as $151 billion a year, according to one estimate published in JAMA.
The industry's stand against Medicare for All comes amid lobbying on separate and intensifying bipartisan efforts to address "surprise" medical bills, with hospitals fighting other parts of the health care industry to ensure they’re not the ones who have to swallow the bulk of the patient’s tab.
Hospitals now drive a significant share of the nation's health care spending, though the public doesn't see it because insurers wind up paying much of the bill. And hospitals make up for the relatively lower payments they get for Medicare and Medicaid patients by shifting some of the expense to patients with private insurance, which pays more than double Medicare rates, according to a new study that’s put the hospital industry on the defensive.
The calculus would change dramatically under Medicare for All, which would free millions more patients to seek no-cost medical care while slashing hospitals’ pay rates and putting up to 1.5 million jobs at stake.
"Every congressman has got a major hospital in their district, and that hospital is a major employer,” said Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine at Stanford, who co-authored the JAMA article. “And so how hard we can push on hospitals given that is an open question.” (...)
For-profit hospital trade group Federation of American Hospitals led the formation of The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future — a coalition spanning the provider, insurer and drug lobbies formed solely to oppose major efforts to expand government coverage. Its 30 members include hospitals’ other lobbying juggernaut, the American Hospital Association, and a slew of big operators including Ascension — the nation’s largest Catholic health system — and Texas hospital management giant Tenet Healthcare.
The Partnership has spent more than $68,000 attacking Medicare for All on Facebook and Twitter this year, and plans to spend at least six figures targeting voters and Washington policymakers, according to a person familiar with its strategy. Its frequent email blasts deride Medicare for All as a costly government takeover that would destabilize the health system and cut access to care.
In recent weeks, The Partnership launched a series of broadsides at Sanders, a 2020 presidential contender, reflecting a conscious decision to directly challenge the top-tier Democratic candidate over his health care rhetoric, the person familiar with the strategy said.
Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, responded by calling the group “a partnership to protect America’s health industry profits” and a front for profiteering corporations.
by Adam Cancryn and Rachel Roubein, Politico | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: It’s time to disrupt the existing hospital business model (Brookings).]
The multibillion-dollar industry has emerged as the most formidable foe of single-payer health care. It’s helped assemble a coalition of health care lobbies that has launched social media campaigns attacking Medicare for All and its most high-profile proponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), while fighting narrower Democratic proposals to expand federal health coverage over concerns any change would slash hospital revenue.
That’s created a dilemma for Medicare for All champions who cast themselves as crusaders against a broken health care system full of greedy insurers and drug companies, yet remain wary of taking on hospitals that rank as top employers in many congressional districts and are seen by the public as life-saving institutions.“We’re not cutting out hospitals, we are keeping the existing hospital system,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a leader of Democrats’ Medicare for All caucus and fierce critic of corporate influence, adding “they’re very much going to be a partner at that table.”
The bill would all but end private insurance and regulate hospitals in a vastly different way, dramatically changing operators’ business model and costing community hospitals as much as $151 billion a year, according to one estimate published in JAMA.
The industry's stand against Medicare for All comes amid lobbying on separate and intensifying bipartisan efforts to address "surprise" medical bills, with hospitals fighting other parts of the health care industry to ensure they’re not the ones who have to swallow the bulk of the patient’s tab.
Hospitals now drive a significant share of the nation's health care spending, though the public doesn't see it because insurers wind up paying much of the bill. And hospitals make up for the relatively lower payments they get for Medicare and Medicaid patients by shifting some of the expense to patients with private insurance, which pays more than double Medicare rates, according to a new study that’s put the hospital industry on the defensive.
The calculus would change dramatically under Medicare for All, which would free millions more patients to seek no-cost medical care while slashing hospitals’ pay rates and putting up to 1.5 million jobs at stake.
"Every congressman has got a major hospital in their district, and that hospital is a major employer,” said Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine at Stanford, who co-authored the JAMA article. “And so how hard we can push on hospitals given that is an open question.” (...)
For-profit hospital trade group Federation of American Hospitals led the formation of The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future — a coalition spanning the provider, insurer and drug lobbies formed solely to oppose major efforts to expand government coverage. Its 30 members include hospitals’ other lobbying juggernaut, the American Hospital Association, and a slew of big operators including Ascension — the nation’s largest Catholic health system — and Texas hospital management giant Tenet Healthcare.
The Partnership has spent more than $68,000 attacking Medicare for All on Facebook and Twitter this year, and plans to spend at least six figures targeting voters and Washington policymakers, according to a person familiar with its strategy. Its frequent email blasts deride Medicare for All as a costly government takeover that would destabilize the health system and cut access to care.
In recent weeks, The Partnership launched a series of broadsides at Sanders, a 2020 presidential contender, reflecting a conscious decision to directly challenge the top-tier Democratic candidate over his health care rhetoric, the person familiar with the strategy said.
Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, responded by calling the group “a partnership to protect America’s health industry profits” and a front for profiteering corporations.
by Adam Cancryn and Rachel Roubein, Politico | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: It’s time to disrupt the existing hospital business model (Brookings).]
Saturday, May 25, 2019
[ed. Harming its reputation?! With who... cockroaches?]
Comcast does so much lobbying that it says disclosing it all is too hard (Ars Technica)
Image: Cindy Ord/Getty
The Office Rookies Who Ask for the World
It can be an awkward standoff.
After only a year on the job, more young employees are approaching their managers for a promotion, asking, “All right, I’m ready. What’s next?” says Christopher Kalloo of New York, who heads college relations for a big retailer. New hires have little patience with entry-level tasks, he says. “They want to help with strategy. They want to help drive the business.”
Some managers say they’re taken aback, wondering, “Who do these rookies think they are?”
More than 75% of Gen Z members believe they should be promoted in their first year on the job, according to a recent survey of 1,000 participants ages 18 to 23 by InsideOut Development, a workplace-coaching company. Employers see similar patterns among younger millennials in their late 20s and early 30s.
The trend has managers scrambling to manage young employees’ expectations without driving them out the door. Many are finding new ways to respond, by carving out step-by-step career paths for restless new hires, or handing out new titles or small bonuses. A few hold “workversary” celebrations for employees passing the one-year mark to recognize their accomplishments on the job.
Young employees who push too hard risk derailing their careers by projecting a sense of entitlement. Alex Klein, a vice president and recruiter at VaynerMedia, an 800-employee global agency based in New York, says new recruits are constantly questioning him about promotion opportunities. Many also ask to be considered for a raise earlier than the agency’s customary timetable.
“Those are great questions to ask. I want to hire people who want to grow,” Mr. Klein says. “But you also need to leave the employer with the impression that you want to earn it.”
Their impatience can frustrate employers. Joseph Cacciola was dismayed when a talented recent college grad he’d hired grew restless after six months.
“She was having these crises of confidence, saying, ‘Well, you haven’t offered me a promotion, so I interviewed someplace else,’ ” says Mr. Cacciola, a senior vice president for an entertainment company in New York. He arranged for her to take programming courses at the company’s expense, but she still left for a higher-paying job because he couldn’t offer her as big a raise as she wanted.
“If you try to do everything you can and it still doesn’t work, I’m kind of like, ‘Well, all right, so be it,’ ” he says.
Competing to advance comes naturally to many new hires. “This generation has been given permission by their parents and teachers and other authority figures to just go for it, go for the gold, ask for whatever you want,” says Julie Jansen, author of a career book, “I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This.”
Years spent in school, with its year-by-year advancement schedules and frequent feedback, leave them ill-prepared for a workforce in which promotion rates vary widely by employer and industry, says Jill Tipograph, the New York-based co-founder of Early Stage Careers, which helps prepare college grads for the workforce and mentors them on their first job. “Young employees just think, ‘Oh, I’ve been here a year, so that means I’m getting promoted, right?’ ” she says. “Promoted to what?”
Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ | Read more:
Image: James Steinberg
After only a year on the job, more young employees are approaching their managers for a promotion, asking, “All right, I’m ready. What’s next?” says Christopher Kalloo of New York, who heads college relations for a big retailer. New hires have little patience with entry-level tasks, he says. “They want to help with strategy. They want to help drive the business.”
Some managers say they’re taken aback, wondering, “Who do these rookies think they are?”
More than 75% of Gen Z members believe they should be promoted in their first year on the job, according to a recent survey of 1,000 participants ages 18 to 23 by InsideOut Development, a workplace-coaching company. Employers see similar patterns among younger millennials in their late 20s and early 30s.The trend has managers scrambling to manage young employees’ expectations without driving them out the door. Many are finding new ways to respond, by carving out step-by-step career paths for restless new hires, or handing out new titles or small bonuses. A few hold “workversary” celebrations for employees passing the one-year mark to recognize their accomplishments on the job.
Young employees who push too hard risk derailing their careers by projecting a sense of entitlement. Alex Klein, a vice president and recruiter at VaynerMedia, an 800-employee global agency based in New York, says new recruits are constantly questioning him about promotion opportunities. Many also ask to be considered for a raise earlier than the agency’s customary timetable.
“Those are great questions to ask. I want to hire people who want to grow,” Mr. Klein says. “But you also need to leave the employer with the impression that you want to earn it.”
Their impatience can frustrate employers. Joseph Cacciola was dismayed when a talented recent college grad he’d hired grew restless after six months.
“She was having these crises of confidence, saying, ‘Well, you haven’t offered me a promotion, so I interviewed someplace else,’ ” says Mr. Cacciola, a senior vice president for an entertainment company in New York. He arranged for her to take programming courses at the company’s expense, but she still left for a higher-paying job because he couldn’t offer her as big a raise as she wanted.
“If you try to do everything you can and it still doesn’t work, I’m kind of like, ‘Well, all right, so be it,’ ” he says.
Competing to advance comes naturally to many new hires. “This generation has been given permission by their parents and teachers and other authority figures to just go for it, go for the gold, ask for whatever you want,” says Julie Jansen, author of a career book, “I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This.”
Years spent in school, with its year-by-year advancement schedules and frequent feedback, leave them ill-prepared for a workforce in which promotion rates vary widely by employer and industry, says Jill Tipograph, the New York-based co-founder of Early Stage Careers, which helps prepare college grads for the workforce and mentors them on their first job. “Young employees just think, ‘Oh, I’ve been here a year, so that means I’m getting promoted, right?’ ” she says. “Promoted to what?”
Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ | Read more:
Image: James Steinberg
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