Doug Hanlon

[Doug Hanlon]

Ad can be extremely annoying.  And only a fool expects them to be always truthful — although they’re usually smart enough not to state outright lies, but simply to suggest things: buy this car and you too  – you overweight pallid dull-as-dishwasher schlumpf — will have a pretty girl riding next to you.

But … there is no alternative, or rather, not one you would want.  Somebody has to pay for all of Twitter’s infrastructure, pay the wages of the employees who scour the Tweets looking for rightwing thoughtcrime to punish, for all the internet’s hardware that Twitter uses.  Someone has to pay for it, and it’s going to be YOU, or I should say, in my native dialect, YOU-ALL.

Now, You-all can pay for it in several different ways: 

(1) By buying some of the things advertised on the website you want to use. This has the advantage that no single person — ie not YOU — has to buy anything, so long as enough people do.

(2)  By paying money to the website in question directly, either voluntarily (the way I support Wikipedia, which I could still use even if I paid nothing), or involuntarily, the way I subscribe to a few websites I want to follow and which restrict my access if I am not a subscriber.

(3) By paying taxes to the government, which would then pass them on to  the websites it approved of.  This is a very bad idea. It’s enough that the government leans on websites to do things it wants, like suppress information on Hunter Biden’s laptop. But if the government is the paymaster …

We could imagine, in theory, some directly- or indirectly-financed-by-the-government websites that were free of both fees and advertising… internet equivalents of NPR and the BBC. They could be alternatives to the advertising-supported media.

The problem here is that you can’t keep politics out, so even if these sites try their best to be ‘neutral’ or ‘balanced’, some people will feel aggrieved that their tax dollars are financing programs that they hate. I suppose if we could imagine social media that were just neutral platforms — sort of the equivalent of the highways we use — that might work. But there would immediately be strong pressure to exercise censorship in them — the way there already is on Twitter and Facebook.

I, for example, think the BBC puts out some really excellent programs, and I am willing to believe that a private equivalent wouldn’t do that.  But the BBC also puts on religious programs, which I pay for (via something called ‘the license fee’ — not quite taxes, but not voluntary if you own a TV set in the UK).

Worse, from my point of view, is the subtle and often not-so-subtle incessant political indoctrination the BBC does   — promoting the political world-view of its employees.  There is a movement here among conservatives to ‘defund the BBC’ and turn it into a private enterprise.  I personally would rather try to reform it so that it was not a political monolith … but this is probably much easier to say than to do.

Anyway, if you don’t like advertising on the free services you use, like Twitter … what is your alternative?

This is just another example of the reality of capitalism: the worst system in the world, except for the alternatives.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Doug Hanlon.

[Doug Hanlon]

It’s pointless to argue this issue in the abstract, since everyone can mouth generalities that all decent people would agree with.

So let’s take a concrete example: suppose someone does some research that indicates that one tribal group is more intelligent than another, for genetic reasons.  Or suppose this person just expresses this as his opinion, based on his exposure to both tribal groups.  (I use the word ‘tribal’ because it’s more precise than ‘race’.)

Should this person’s writings be published? Or published in the first case, i.e. where the research cannot be faulted on technical grounds.

In the second case, where they just express an observation about one tribal group being more intelligent, on genetic grounds, say, in a book  … should a responsible publisher bring out this book?  Should they still be welcomed in academic circles?

[Doug Hanlon]

As the West declines, we will see the disease of ‘wokeness’ invade previously ‘neutral’ areas. In most cases, since most of our intelligentsia is ‘woke’, we’ll see ‘woke’ political criteria push aside the previous rules which governed things like what articles get published in scientific journals.

Researchers will adjust what they write in order to please their politicized editors.

The link [https://quillette.com/2022/08/28/the-fall-of-nature/] quoted above, about Nature, is just one more example, albeit a shocking one, given that journal’s prestige.

(Another example of this descent into politicization is Scientific American, as witness their nasty obituary of a great scientist, E.O Wilson.  There will be protests at this overt politicization [https://razib.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-open] but it will continue, relentlessly.  The power to present reality as you want it to be is seductive.)

What we will see is the adoption, by those who work for government, universities, the media, or big ‘woke’ corporations, of the mentality that prevailed in the old Soviet Union.

Few intelligent people living there really believed the official propaganda — on the other hand, you did not dare contradict it, and in public, and in conversation with anyone except your very closest friends, you pretended to believe it. No one really did, and everyone knew that no one really did, but you kept up the pretense. But more than that. You sort of half-believed it. The psychic energy required to have a complete double-consciousness was just too much.  George Orwell called this ‘double-think’.

I lived in the old Soviet Union for a few months, in 1985, just before Gorbachev, and made several friends there. I returned for short periods of time after that, and it was very interesting to watch them, over time, slowly being able to say  and think,  things that were strictly verboten before Gorbachev.  Now we’ll see the reverse process, starting in the US, as people who know better start to pretend to believe what the authorities tell them to believe.

In fact, something similar has been going on for a long time in some places.  The Portland, Oregon school board quite consciously teaches ridiculous falsehoods to Black children, things that the nice white progressives on the Board know are nonsense, and has done so for over thirty years.  But they do it for, as they see it, good reasons.  And they have the power.

Of course, teaching distorted versions of history to children is probably universal. Usually, outright lies are not told, it’s just that inconvenient truths are missed out or brushed over.  This used to be most blatant, in the US, in K-12 schools … but now we’ll see the same method introduced into universities.

It used to be the case that this sort of thing did not occur in scientific journals.  But the ‘woke’ infection has now reached them as well.

One bright spot: a Soviet citizen once said to a Westerner that he actually was in a better position than someone reading the supposedly ‘free’ press in the West. He said that he (and his friends) knew that they were being lied to by their press, so they were extra careful when reading it, to try to dig out the truth the jounalists were concealing. But people in the West, he said, were naive about their papers, and were thus easier to fool.

I suppose this is less true now, since the mainstream media are openly partisan, and willing to suppress inconvenient facts to advance the political cause of their owners.  We no longer have a ‘neutral’ media: you can choose to listen to Fox News and similar, or to the New York Times and Washington Post, and CNN  and in either case you’re getting news focussed through partisan lenses.  So we’ll need to develop that skeptical attitude of the wise Soviet citizen.

It’s a shame to see this happening to scientific journals, but there you are — scientists are not insulated from the political and social pressures of the society in which they exist.

Too bad.  As Trotsky said, “The motor force of progress is truth and not lies.”

[Doug Hanlon]

I think Autumn has hit the nail on the head.  In THIS instance, the anti-abortionists are not, technically, violating the principle of free speech.  From their point of view, prohibiting the provision of information about how to have an abortion would be like prohibiting posting where Salman Rushdie is hiding, or providing information on how to make a deadly poison from household materials. The ‘shouting fire in a crowded theatre’ exception.

The good people at FIRE probably know this, but are desperate for an instance of rightwing violations of free speech, because they don’t wan’t to appear partisan. Their motives are good.

Which, however, brings up an interesting question: today, it’s mainly the Left who don’t like free speech, and the Right who defend it.  However, it wasn’t always this way.  Go back fifty or sixty years, and  you’ll find the Right calling for the firing of professors who supported the victory of the NLF in Vietnam, or disrupting meetings where Communist Party members are speaking (personal experience).

So we can suspect that the change here shows that partisans of both the Left and the Right don’t really believe in Free Speech — they only believe in it when it’s their side that is being inconvenienced or threatened by its absence.

However, people can learn from events, and it would be nice if people on the Right were pushed to make a committment, in principle, to Free Speech — including for Communists, AntiFa’s, Muslims, Atheists.

And to that end, perhaps it would be a good idea to catalog all the recent examples we can find, of Rightwing attacks on free speech.  (Note for hairsplitters:  ‘crowded theatre’, check; private institutions, check. We’re talking about classic Free Speech issues.)

Closely congruent to this issue is the question of private institutions that are, in effect, public in nature. For many years, the Left complained — rightly — that newspapers, being privately owned, were inherently in favor of private ownership, and that this was a powerful force biassing the political process.  The Right’s reply was, start your own if you don’t like it.

Now the shoe is on the other hoof.  For ‘newspapers’ read ‘social media’, which are owned by corporations which are ‘woke’, and pro-Democratic Party.  So Facebook deleted references to Hunter Biden’s laptop, because they might tilt the 2020 election towards Trump.  (And Sam Harris agreed that lying was justified in this case.)

Now, some people on the Right are making the case that the Left did: Social Media are really public utilities, even if privately-owned, and should be subject to some sort of ‘equal time’ regulation, and/or prohibited from censoring people for their political statements.  (Personally, I think the Left was correct long ago, and the Right is correct now, even if they’re hypocrites.)

[Doug Hanlon]

Of course, the Americas were taken from the original inhabitants by force.

If we should ‘cancel’ people — like Thomas Jefferson — who were slave owners two hundred years ago, ie judge them by the standards of civilized countries in the 21st Century, then of course we should return these lands to the descendants of the people who were the subjects of this grand armed robbery.

But that would inconvenience the virtue-signallers along with all the other descendants of the original robbers, so of course it cannot even be considered.

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