Have you noticed there are almost no actual facts in the reporting of the Trayvon Martin shooting case? If you try to get to the bottom of a single assertion in the case, you’ll find a swirling vortex of nothingness. Indeed, the only official facts of the case that are publicly available that I’m aware of are the 911 calls. Almost everything else as far as I can tell has been inserted into the discussion by lawyers from the boy’s family. Of course, this hasn’t stopped the media at all. Story after story has been published with a seemingly random set of claims but each with a several years old picture of Trayvon top of fold. Now which picture they use would hopefully have no effect on me, but this choice of picture says one thing very clearly: whoever is dictating the narrative here is saying
Don’t you dare think rationally about this!!
Luckily for them it doesn’t seem like very many people are. It’s so crazy that Newt Gingrich is one of the most sane voices on this I was able to find
As I said, we are just far too short on facts to be making judgement calls at this point. Some of the only facts we have are that there was a shooting and that the attorneys for Martin’s family are spending an awful lot of effort to emotionally manipulate the media and the public in the absence of rational argument.
What’s clear though is that this spectacle, this media circus, has made room for a miscarriage of justice (there is no way they will not be able to prosecute Zimmerman even if his actions were truthfully lawful), and if that does occur it is just as shameful as the miscarriage of justice that would have been done if indeed this were some failure to investigate due to the boy’s race.
Thinking people–as opposed to the truly clueless who are easy to whip up into a frenzy–who are trying this case in the press instead of witholding judgement are NOT interested in justice even though that’s all they talk about.
Thus I’ve learned that a theory I developed about the right a while ago applies just as easily to progressives:
The drama of an outrageous spectacle and the companionship of sharing it with a crowd of fellow indignati are what matters most to an extremely large proportion of people who are acting on the civic stage. The “principles” they espouse to lather their rage are not actual principles they hold but are instead a set of positions where they’ve found making common cause with others to be most socially rewarding
Again, few people crying for JUSTICE here give a shit about justice or they would be as outraged by a trial in the press as they were about the prospect of someone killing a kid and getting away with it because the kid was black.
So that’s the bulk of my opinion on the meta-case.
The limited conclusions I’ve come to with all that preamble about not jumping to conclusions in a situation like these are as follows:
Here’s all we need to know to determine the just legal trajectory for this incident: In the second 911 call someone is screaming desperately for help–you don’t have to rely on Mary Cutcher’s provably incorrect account here, you can listen to it for yourself. Now, if this was Trayvon screaming we have a horrifying, disgusting murder on our hands and Zimmerman is a monster to be able to look into the eyes of someone screaming so desperately for help and to pull the trigger. On the other hand, if it was Zimmerman screaming, well to me the scream was terrified: the person screaming certainly thought they were in danger of great bodily harm, and if it was Zimmerman, he has committed no crime.
I read somewhere that Trayvon’s parents said that the scream on the tape was not their son–unlike most of you, though, I’m willing to be skeptical of something I’ve read online, so I won’t make any judgements based on this account, but I figure it’s worth putting out there since it goes against the enormous momentum of the alternative narrative while having approximately the same credibility, ie none.
Nevertheless even if it was Zimmerman’s scream, from the 911 call it seems like he wasn’t going to be easily dissuaded that Trayvon was up to no good and needed to be stopped, and his irresponsible decision to leave the car proves to me that no matter what happened afterwards, he shouldn’t have been allowed to possess a concealed firearm in the first place.
Everything should be made as simple as possible – but no simpler.
-Albert Einstein
It’s easy to see why engineering types are easy marks for libertarians, actually. You spend 4 years studying something that seems like it’s much more difficult and important than what those humanities and liberal arts people are doing down in the old run-down part of the campus.
You eventually find some reason to do some political thinking and with this “it’s just politics/economics/philosophy” attitude, you partition the political-philosophical landscape along some very high-entropy contours and leave it at that.
In reality though, the compressibility of your world view says a lot about how much time you put into it. If you can answer a political question with anything less than a 3 volume philosophical treatise, you’ve quit thinking about the issue too soon.
And yaknowwhat? A good place to start is reading people who have done just that…while it’s _just_ philosophy, these incredible thinkers who spent their whole lives doing it may have actually thought of something you didn’t happen upon while your code was compiling or while Reddit was down.
I love my libertarian friends, but almost all of them are extremely intelligent people who, with a dash of arrogance and intellectual laziness, have refused to iterate their world view past version 1.0
Take a small dose of whatever you take to induce skepticism and read this.
This guy certainly overexalts the Democrat presidents we’ve had recently–for instance, he misses out on the fact that members of the Bush team (Rumsfeld, Rove, Condoleeza, certainly and probably most of the rest) are an order of magnitude smarter than Obama and his band of know-nothing ass kissers who did much more political jockeying than actual worthwhile work to get to their positions of alleged intellectual authority, but he really nails the utter dim-wittedness of almost all Republican politicians and their fairly stupid, uniformly anti-intellectual base…
He also correctly identifies Gingrich as someone who is unbelievably shrewd though he doesn’t go so far as to state the fact that Newt, also, is much smarter than Obama and most of his team.
A real treasure of a comment on the article from someone named Constantine XI:
From the view of an educated person, the GOP candidates are almost all clearly intellectually impaired. Yet they seem to celebrate the fact that they’re not city-slickers with book learnin’. It is a reflection that the very top of the GOP is the superrich who are relatively well-educated and extrememly well-endowed with money. The candidates are dutiful to these elites by motivating working-class people to vote for them and their policies. They scapegoat minorities and other countries for America’s problems and, once in office, enact economic and foreign policies that assault the interests of the poor.
It’s an ingenous plan. The poorer tea-party people are actually victims who unwittingly scream for their economic and civil rights to be taken away. It’s so sad that it’s cruel.
That comment is so dead on it’s not even funny, but what he is leaving out is that the democrats do exactly the same thing, only they tie up the loose ends corresponding to the compassionate, guilt-ridden, upper middle class and the same scapegoat minorities that are the demons xenophobic wing of the right.
Almost the only thing you can be sure of in American electoral politics is that someone who is casting a vote has almost surely been tricked into voting against their self interest by a team of people much, much smarter than them with a lot more money and time on their hands to figure out how to get that person to vote that way.
These two slices of the pie are almost all there is because independents.do.not.exist (at any level of significance).
To be clear, voting for either party is against the best interest of almost anyone, unless you’re a millionaire in which case it is probably more rational to vote for the Republicans than the Democrats.
In this system, in fact, the rational choice for almost everyone isn’t to pick some third party hero. The rational choice is to not vote because the difference between third party candidates’ polling numbers in the past and how they’ve actually performed proves that most people just can’t resist voting for “the lesser of two evils” when they walk into the voting booth.
And this lesser of two evils politics has gotten us to the point–by punting the definition of evil farther into the abyss with each election–that a non-obstructionist vote (voting for a party candidate, in particular) is a morally reprehensible act for which an unwitting person should be pitied and someone who knows better–compassionate leftist or predatory conservative–should be ashamed!
Whipped up fairly quickly with google motion charts and data from Saez and Piketty the first economists to do real work on not just the haves and have-nots but the have-everythings and have-nothings (This excellent book talks about this study and a great number of other things which might be of interest to the 99% movement).
Animated chart here
I’m reading this (subscription required) and Thomas Frank has some quotes from Andrew Carnegie.
He says the “duty of the man of wealth” was
to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community–the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren…
Then Frank says:
The same way of thinking led Carnegie to support the estate tax–”of all forms of taxation this seems the wisest,” he wrote. It was wise because it would “induce the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life,” and if he didn’t it would return most of his hoardings tot he “community from which it chiefly came.”
An interesting side note: In this article he also cite some studies about the behavioral aspects of social status. Conclusion: the wealthy are just a little bit more sociopathic than the rest of us.
One 2009 study in Psychological Science found that, in conversations with strangers, higher-status people tend to do more doodling and fidgeting and also to use fewer “engagement cues”–looking at the other person, laughing, and nodding their heads. A 2010 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that “lower-class individuals” turned out to be better performers on measures of such “prosocial” virtues as generosity, charity, and helpfulness. A third study found that those of higher status were noticeably worse at assessing the emotions of others or figuring out what facial expressions meant.
The fact that the wealthy in these studies have just slightly more emotional response than serial killers explains a lot.
A couple of dopes at ABC news have chimed in on this whole attempted assassination and political rhetoric discussion.
The key quote from this article is this:
BOTTOM LINE: Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way to become part of the story. And she may well face further criticism for the timing and scope of her remarks. She is already taking heat for her use of the term “blood libel” (see today’s Tweets). In her video she notes, “President Obama and I may not agree on everything, but I know he would join me in affirming the health of our democratic process.” It remains to be seen exactly what Obama will say tonight, but White House aides say another goal of his address will be to lift the nation up in this moment, not sully it with politics.
I positively _loathe_ Sarah Palin, but she didn’t butt her nose in to become part of the story: for the most part, the Sheriff and the media, by pronouncing the extremely dubious claims that rhetoric in general and specifically by Palin had anything to do with this, have forced her into the story.
And contrary to what the authors suggest in the piece (somewhere they say that Palin is going to lose a lot of credibility for her statement on the matter), ,I think people are going to believe that Palin is the victim of a smear campaign perpetrated by people who are exploiting this tragedy for political ends
My evidence for this? I think she’s as close to the anti-christ as any politican has come in a long time and even I have come to this conclusion, surely her sympathizers–which are legion–and people who are much less left-wind than me will do the same.
It might be good to explain briefly how I score the information I come across.
- Ideally one gives no points to arguments which have compelling arguments based solely on emotion and anecdote, but occasionally this standard is bound to be circumvented.
- Thus, it’s important to give weight to arguments which are logical or inductively plausible, in the presence of uncertainty.
But that’s not it, a major factor for me is
If something is extremely controversial or far from conventional wisdom, I am willing to give it more points than an equally logical argument defending the status quo.
For example, an argument saying drunk driving laws are unjust and should be repealed will pique my curiosity, and I’ll do what I can to find whatever valid points exist in the argument since such a conclusion must either be entirely invalid or contain some very clever reasoning and premises.
I think this is strongly in keeping with the model agnostic paradigm (and reminds me of the difference between stochastic and regular hill-climbing in optimization, you may have to move in the direction of an imperfect argument in a new direction to get to an optimal point of view, overall) where the goal is to try not to believe your BS (belief system) too much and to be receptive to things which are controversial to your BS.
It rings slightly overdramatic, but I really think Chris Hedges has drawn a fairly elegant comparison with the dynamics of the US system and two classic dystopias in 2011: A Brave New Dystopia
His main idea is that both Huxley and Orwell were right: Huxley’s Brave New World where we are seduced by corporations into illiterate consumerist bliss will give way as that same system eats good governance alive, forces it to instead spend all it has to subsidize the corporate status quo, and leaves the people out in the cold angry enough to require an authoritarian Big Brother security state to keep the disaffected masses in check.
Some good quotes (emphasis mine throughout):
Overall, we are definitely in a Brave New World
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
On control:
In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism . We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow.
Onto 1984:
…anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.
I got a chuckle from bin Laden as Goldstein:
Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.
And perhaps the most haunting parallel is here:
The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
I’m sure that last bit describes exactly what winding up on the wrong side of the new security apparatus is like.
But it’s not just Manning and unspecified Arabs who wind up under state scrutiny:
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
Like I said, overall it makes me feel like maybe we’re not quite there yet, but the slightly exaggerated picture that Hedges is painting is certainly not very far from the truth and is guaranteed to become less so as time goes by.
This article is basically a conversation between Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges and I have a quote from it form Nader about the state of journalism that I like.
“They are afraid of the right-wing because the right-wing bellows, and they have become right-wing,” Nader said of the commercial press. “They have become fascinated by the bias of Fox. And they publicize what Fox is biased on. The coverage of O’Reilly and Beck and their fights is insane. In the heyday of coverage in the 1960s of what we were doing, it was always less than it should have been, but now it is almost zero. Why do we take this? Why do we accept this? Why isn’t Chris Hedges three times a year in the Op-Ed? Why is it always Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and all these homicidal maniacs? Why are they there? Why is John Bolton constantly published in The Washington Post and The New York Times? Where is Andrew Bacevich? Bacevich told me he has had five straight Op-Eds rejected by the Post and the Times in the last two years. And he said he is not inclined to send anymore. How many times do you hear Hoover Institution? American Enterprise Institute? Manhattan Institute. These goddamned newspapers should be picketed.”
With the exception of blips like we’re seeing with the extremely dubious painting Palin as responsible for this shooting in Arizona, (to equate this completely insane individual’s actions with any terrestrial notion of cause and effect is taking enormous liberty with the facts at best and outright exploiting a tragedy at worst) I think this is mostly true.
For the most part the supposedly liberal media is so scared of the label that it’s become, in practice at least, conservative the vast majority of the time. They occasionally find a flimsy pretense to say how they really feel (the aforementioned Palin smear as well as doing whatever it could to get Obama elected), but it’s usually so obvious that they’re doing this that they get called out on it and then retreat even further becoming an even bigger platform for neoconservative press.
I think they should return to their roots and serve as vanguards of democracy and progress and if this turns out to be unflattering to the conservative agenda, then they should cast it as a referendum on the right wing, not journalism.
As a footnote, the true motives of the press as inferred from the occasional glimpses behind the mask of alleged impartiality are far from what any sane person would call very radical or left wing. No longer can it be said that the press is a haven of radical thinkers who are against the establishment. Most of our journalists are educated professionals enamored of the trappings of corporate democracy and economy with superficially progressive social agendas.
Indeed, any serious look at questions surrounding class and economic matters would
quickly free the journalistic profession from any charges of liberal or left-wing bias. Over
the past two generations, journalism, especially at the larger and more prominent news
media, has evolved from a blue-collar job into a desirable occupation for the well-
educated upper middle class. Urban legend has it that when news of the stock market
crash came over the ticker to the Boston Globe newsroom in 1929, the journalists all
arose to give Black Monday a standing ovation. The rich were finally getting their
comeuppance. In contrast, when the news of the stock market crash reached the Globe
newsroom in 1987, journalists frantically phoned their brokers. As recently as 1971 just
over one-half of U.S. newspaper journalists had college degrees; by 2002 nearly 90
percent did. The median salary for a journalist at one of the forty largest circulation
newspapers in the United States in 2002 was nearly double the median income for all
U.S. workers.
from Robert McChesney. The problem of the media: U.S. communication politics in the Twenty-First century.
So these professional journalists might be to the left of Ron Paul and maybe even a lot of the establishment, but in terms of the historical and global political spectrum, they rate somewhere right of center, by and large.
