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I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding anarchy. Naturally, they discovered that all their existing prejudices were entirely confirmed by events. The act that caused the wave of protests and then wider disorder was the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, 17, one of a succession of such acts of police violence against minorites. Another Arab kid from a poor area. French police kill about three times as many people as the British ones do, though Americans can look away now.
One of the things that makes it difficult for me to write blogs these days is the my growing disgust at the professional opinion-writers who churn out thought about topics they barely understand, coupled with the knowledge that the democratization of that practice, about twenty years ago, merely meant there were more people doing the same. And so it is with opinion writers and micro-bloggers about France, a ritual performance of pre-formed clichés and positions, informed by some half-remembered French history and its literary and filmic representations (Les Misérables, La Haine), and, depending on the flavour you want, some some Huntingtonian clashing or some revolting against structural injustice. Francophone and Anglophone commentators alike, trapped in Herderian fantasies about the nation, see these events as a manifestation of essential Frenchness that tells us something about that Frenchness and where it is heading to next. Rarely, we’ll get a take that makes some comparison to BLM and George Floyd.
I even read some (British) commentator opining that what was happening on French estates was “unimaginable” to British people. Well, not to this one, who remembers the wave of riots in 1981 (wikipedia: “there was also rioting in …. High Wycombe”) and, more recently, the riots in 2011 that followed the police shooting of a young black man, Mark Duggan, and where protest against police violence and racism soon spilled over into country-wide burning and looting, all to be followed by a wave of repression and punitive sentencing, directed by (enter stage left) Keir Starmer. You can almost smell the essential Frenchness of it all.
There is much to despair about in these French evenements. Police racism is real and unaddressed, and the situation people, mostly from minorities, on peripheral sink estates, is desperate. Decades of hand-wringing and theorizing, together with a few well-meaning attempts to do something have led nowhere. Both politicians and people need the police (in its varied French forms) to be the heroic front line of the Republican order against the civilizational enemy, and so invest it with power and prestige – particularly after 2015 when there was some genuine police heroism and fortitude during the Paris attacks – but then are shocked when “rogue elements” employ those powers in arbitrary and racist violence. But, no doubt, the possibility of cracking a few black and Arab heads was precisely what motivated many of them to join up in the first place.
On the other side of things, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise are quite desperate to lay the mantle of Gavroche on teenage rioters excited by the prospect of a violent ruck with the keufs, intoxicated by setting the local Lidl on fire and also keen on that new pair of trainers. (Fun fact: the Les Halles branch of Nike is only yards from the fictional barricade where Hugo had Gavroche die.) There may be something in the riots as inarticulate protest against injustice theory, but the kids themselves were notably ungrateful to people like the LFI deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo whose attempts to ventriloquise their resistance were rewarded with a blow on the head. Meanwhile, over at the Foxisant TV-station C-News, kids looting Apple stores are the vanguard of the Islamist Great Replacement, assisted by the ultragauche. C-News even quote Renaud Camus.
Things seem to be calming down now, notably after a deplorable attack on the home of a French mayor that left his wife with a broken leg after she tried to lead her small children to safety. As a result, the political class have closed ranks in defence of “Republican order” since “democracy itself” is now under threat. I think one of the most tragic aspects of the last few days has been the way in which various protagonists have been completely sincere and utterly inauthentic at the same time. The partisans of “Republican order” and “democracy” perform the rituals of a system whose content has been evacuated, yet they don’t realise this as they drape tricolours across their chests. With political parties gone or reduced to the playthings of a few narcissistic leaders, mass absention in elections, the policy dominance of a super-educated few, and the droits de l’homme at the bottom of the Mediterranean, what we have is a kind of zombie Republicanism. Yet the zombies believe, including that all French people, regardless of religion or race, are true equals in the indivisible republic. At the same time, those cheering on revolt and perhaps some of those actually revolting, sincerly believing in the true Republicanism of their own stand against racism and injustice, even as the kids pay implicit homage to the consumer brands in the Centres Commerciaux. But I don’t want to both-sides this: the actual fighting will die down but there will be war in the Hobbesian sense of a time when the will to contend by violence is sufficiently known, until there is justice for boys like Nahel and until minorities are really given the equality and respect they are falsely promised in France, but also in the UK and the US. Sadly, the immediate prospect is more racism and more punishment as the reaction to injustice is taken as the problem that needs solving.
California "mom influencer" Kathleen Sorensen was sentenced to three months in jail after falsely accusing a Latino couple of trying to kidnap her children. Sorensen posted in December 2020 that the pair tried to take them from the parking lot of a Michaels craft store in Sonoma County, but surveillance footage from the scene showed she was making it up and she was ultimately convicted of knowingly making a false report of crime. — Read the rest
Attention conservation notice 1 – a long read about a simple idea. When reading trolls, focus on the anodyne-seeming starting assumptions rather than the obnoxious conclusions.
Attention conservation notice 2 – This is also available via my Substack newsletter, Programmable Mutter. I’ll still be writing on CT, but I have a book with Abe Newman coming out in a few months, so that there will be a lot of self-promotion and stuff that doesn’t fit as well with the CT ethos. And do pre-order the book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, if you think it sounds good! We’ve gotten some great blurbs from early readers including Kim Stanley Robinson, Francis Spufford, Margaret O’Mara, Steven Berlin Johnson, Helen Thompson, Chris Miller, and my mother (the last is particularly glowing, but sadly not likely to appear on the back). Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.
I’ve often had occasion to turn to Daniel Davies’ classic advice on “the correct way to argue with Milton Friedman” over the two decades since I’ve read it. The best white hat hacker is a reformed black hat hacker, and Dan (dsquared) knows both the offense and defense sides of trolling.
Dan (back in 2004!):
I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept. A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.
In the same friendly spirit, I’ll note that Jonathan Katz flounders a bit in his rebuttal of Richard Hanania. None of this is to blame Katz – Hanania is not only building on his knowledge of social science (he has a Ph.D.), but some truly formidable trolling techniques. Years ago, I upset Jonathan Chait by suggesting he was a highly talented troll of the second magnitude, if a bit crude in technique. Hanania is at an altogether different level. He’s not blessed with Friedman’s benign avuncularity, but he is as close to masterclass level as we are likely to get in this fallen world.
Hanania wants people to buy into a notion of “enlightened centrism,” where the space of reasoned debate would stretch from the left (Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Noah Smith, Jonathan Chait) through Andrew Sullivan and company to people on the right like Steven Sailer. Now, you might ask what an outright racist like Steve Sailer is doing on this list. You might even suspect that one of the rationales for constructing the list in the first place was to somehow shoehorn him into the space of legitimate debate. But to figure out how Hanania is trying to do this, you need to poke hard at the anodyne seeming assumptions, rather than be distracted by the explicitly galling conclusions.
That is where Katz stumbles. He gets upset at what Hanania says about the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action as the origin of wokeness, saying that Hanania “seems to think that the Civil Rights Act caused the civil rights movement, as opposed to the other way around,” tracing it all back to Barry Goldwater. Katz then remarks on Hanania’s claim in a podcast that “Government literally created race in America. Like not blacks and whites, but like basically everyone else — and Native Americans — basically everyone else was basically grouped according to the ways, you know, the federal bureaucracy was doing things.” Katz has some ripe prognostications about what Hanania hopes will happen if government got out of the way.
But Hanania isn’t relying on the authority of Barry Goldwater. He’s standing on the shoulders of academic research. In some cases – including much of the stuff that Katz focuses his fire on – left-leaning academic research. Even before I did a Google search, I surmised that Hanania’s civil rights arguments riffed on Frank Dobbins’ eminently respectable work of social science, Inventing Equal Opportunity. I don’t know which academics he’s invoking on the U.S. Census and the construction of categories such as Hispanic: there are just so many to choose from, ranging from moderates through liberals to fervently lefty.
You could go after the details of Hanania’s social science claims if you really wanted – I would be startled if there weren’t selective misreadings. It is hard to claim on the one hand that the state creates the structures of race, and on the other that structural racism is a gussied up conspiracy theory, without some fancy rhetorical footwork to work around the gaping logical crevasses. Getting involved in that kind of debate seems to me to be a waste of time. But disputing the broadest version of the case – that key aspects of equal opportunity, civil rights and ethnic categories emerged from modern politics and battles in the administrative state – seems even worse. The bull of Left Critique thunders towards the matador, who twitches his cape to one side, so that the poor beast careens into the side of the ring, and then staggers back with crossed eyes and mild concussion, raring for another go that will have the same unfortunate result, or worse.
More succinctly, you don’t want to be the bull in a fight that is rigged in favor of the bullfighter. Instead, as per dsquared, you want to figure out what is wrong with the terms of the fight and press back hard against them.
As best as I can make it out, Hanania’s “let us assume” moment comes in the middle of a series of apparently non-controversial claims about what “Enlightened Centrists” believe. In context, they initially appear to be things that any reasonable person would agree to, or not think unreasonable. I think most readers won’t even notice them, let alone the nasty stuff that is hiding beneath. Here’s what Hanania says:
Enlightened Centrists take what Bryan Caplan calls “Big Facts” seriously. They are kept in mind as new information about the world is brought to light. Some examples of Big Facts that ECs rely on are: the heritability of traits; the paradox of voting; the information problem inherent in central planning; the broken windows fallacy; Trivers’ theory of self-deception; the existence of cognitive biases; comparative advantage; the explanatory power of IQ; the efficient market hypothesis; and the elephant in the brain. New theories or ideas should be met with more skepticism if they contradict or are in tension with Big Facts that have been well established. ECs of different Level 3 ideologies will place more emphasis on certain Big Facts over others, though some, like the idea of historical progress, they all share.
Now, any sentence that non-ironically connects “Bryan Caplan” to “Big Facts” is a big fat warning sign. Hanania links to a Caplan essay that starts explaining what “Big Facts” are by citing Caplan’s own book attacking democracy. Many key claims in this book are less facts than factitious (my co-authors and I have written about this at some length). They suggest pervasive cognitive bias (in particular, bias against free market economists) undermines the case for regular democracy, so that we should go for markets instead, or perhaps give more votes to well educated people (who are, after all more likely to recognize that economists are right).
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. How exactly is Hanania using Big Factiness and for what purpose? He wants to define Enlightened Centrism so that it favors anti-democratic libertarianism, and brings “racial realists” like Steve Sailer into the conversation.
The apparently anodyne factual claims listed by Hanania systematically shift the terms of debate to undermine democracy and an economic role for the state, and instead promote markets and the belief that persistent inequalities result from some racial groups being systematically more stupid than others. To see this, it’s likely helpful to return to the passage in question, this time with the ideological translation function turned on. These translations are ideologically blunt, and perhaps tendentious, but I think they are pretty well on the mark.
Facts that ECs rely on are:
the heritability of traitsintelligence is racially inherited;the paradox of votingdemocracy doesn’t work;the information problem inherent in central planningsocialism doesn’t work either;the broken windows fallacyKeynesianism – guess what?– it just doesn’t work;Trivers’ theory of self-deceptioncitizens fool themselves with flattering just-so stories;the existence of cognitive biaseslet me tell you how citizens are biased;comparative advantagemarkets are teh awesome;the explanatory power of IQhave I mentioned race and intelligence already? Let me mention it again;the efficient market hypothesismarkets are even awesomer than I just said a moment ago; andthe elephant in the braincan I haz even more citizen cognitive bias?
As per the dsquared rule, if you stipulate to these beliefs, you’ve given the game away before it’s even begun. You have accepted that it is reasonable to believe that most people are biased fools, that democracy is inherently inferior to markets, and that differences in life outcomes for black people can largely be attributed to distribution of the genes for intelligence. Charge at the matador, if you want, but good luck to you! You’ll need it.
Or instead, as per dsquared’s advice, when you are dealing with a genuinely exceptional troll like Hanania, do not give away the underlying assumptions. Don’t be distracted by the red cape. Wedge your horns beneath the seemingly reasonable claims that are intended to tilt debate, lift those claims up, toss ‘em in the air and then gore.
This is getting too long already, and I have a life, so I am not going to do the full bullfighter-toss. Instead, at the bottom of this post, I re-order Hanania’s claims so that the underlying assumptions come out more clearly, linking to resources that provide counter-evidence at length. Read if you want, but I’m providing this mostly as a source I can come back to later, or cite as needs be in desultory spats on social media. Notably, the various prebuttals come from co-authors, co-authors plus me, or, in one case, someone who I was interviewing. You can take this commonality (very plausibly) as evidence of my own biases, and enthusiasm to work with people who share them. But even if you think this, they still provide evidence that Hanania’s purported Big Facts are drenched with their own ideology, and in many cases have been bitterly debated for decades. Which is another way of saying that they aren’t established facts at all.
And some of the facts are really not like the others. It might seem weird – if you aren’t read into debates among particular kinds of libertarians – to see that stuff about IQ and heritability in there. What work exactly is this rather jarring set of claims doing for the concept of Enlightened Centrism,? Do identified left-leaning Enlightened Centrists like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias “rely on” these facts, as Hanania seems to suggest they do?
Readers – they do not. Hanania seemingly wants to reconstruct policy and intellectual debate around a center in which questions of race and IQ are once more legitimate topics of inquiry and discussion. Back in the 1990s (a time that Hanania is nostalgic for), soi-disant centrists such as Andrew Sullivan could devote entire special issues of the New Republic to the urgent debate over whether black people were, in fact, stupider than white people. Big Scientific Facts Said That It Was So! Now, that brand of intellectual inquiry has fallen into disrepute. Hanania, apparently yearns for it to come back. That, presumably, is why those claims about heritability and IQ are in there, and why Steve Sailer makes the cut.
As it happens, Matt was one of the “CT mates” cited in the 2004 dsquared post that was excerpted right at the beginning of this post. I’ve had disagreements with Matt since, on other stuff, but I am quite sure that both he and Ezra are bitterly opposed to the whole race and IQ project that Hanania wants to relegitimize. I can’t imagine that they welcome being placed on a spectrum of reasonable thought that lumps them together with racist creeps like Steven Sailer. But I can imagine why Hanania wants so to lump them – it provides a patina of legitimacy for opinions that have rightly been delegitimated, but that Hanania wants to bring back into debate.
So to see what Hanania is up to, it’s more useful not to be distracted by the provocative and outrageous. Instead, you want to look very closely at what seems superficially reasonable, seems to be the starting point for debate and ask: is there something wrong with these premises? In this case, the answer, quite emphatically, is yes.
Still, you (for values of ‘you’ that really mean ‘I’) don’t want to get dragged in further unless you absolutely have to. As Noah Smith, another of Hanania’s involuntary inductees into the Enlightened Centrist Hall of Fame said, “”Race and IQ” racism is a DDOS attack” on the time and attention of anti-racists. This naturally provoked Hanania to pop up in replies with a sarcastic rejoinder. When I wrote that Vox article I had to spend weeks dealing with Jordan Peterson acolytes popping up to inform me of the Established Scientific Facts about race and IQ. I really don’t want to be back there again. So take this post as an attack on premises, and a statement of principles, rather than the slightest hint at a desire to get stuck back into discussion on race-IQ and similar. Very possibly (he says after 3,000+ words) the best way of arguing with Richard Hanania is simply not to argue at all.
MORE DETAILED DISCUSSION OF PURPORTED “BIG FACTS” BELOW
Markets are Awesome I: the information problem inherent in central planning (socialism doesn’t work). Indeed, central planning doesn’t work. This does not provide, however, a warrant for unleashing free market wildness. Instead, it suggests that we need social democracy, with all its messiness. Why so? Read on.
Markets are Awesome II: the efficient market hypothesis Well, up to a point Lord Copper. The unfortunate fact is that the computational critique of state planners’ information problems also bollocks up the standard efficient market claims. At greater length: “allowing non-convexity messes up the markets-are-always-optimal theorems of neo-classical/bourgeois economics, too. (This illustrates Stiglitz’s contention that if the neo-classicals were right about how capitalism works, Kantorovich-style socialism would have been perfectly viable.)” At greater length again: “Bowles and Gintis: “The basic problem with the Walrasian model in this respect is that it is essentially about allocations and only tangentially about markets — as one of us (Bowles) learned when he noticed that the graduate microeconomics course that he taught at Harvard was easily repackaged as ‘The Theory of Economic Planning’ at the University of Havana in 1969.” And if markets are imperfect, and so too the state and democracy, then we sometimes need to set them against each other, as recommended by social democracy. For elaboration of how this applies to machine learning too, see this week’s Economist.
Markets are Awesome III: The “broken windows” fallacy (Keynesianism doesn’t work). Under other reasonable assumptions, the “broken windows fallacy” is itself fallacious and misleading.
Markets are Awesome IV: Comparative Advantage. This is indeed a very important idea, but as per Dani Rodrik, “Our theories — such as the theory of value or the theory of comparative advantage — are just scaffoldings, which need a lot of context-specific detail to become usable. Too often economists debate a policy question as if one or the other theory has to be universally correct. Is the Keynesian or the Classical model right? In fact, which model works better depends on setting and context. Only empirical diagnostics can help us know which works better at any given time — and that is more of a craft than a science, certainly when it is done in real time. If we economists understood this, it would make us more humble, less dogmatic, and more syncretic.” I don’t imagine that this flavor of humility is what is being called for in Hanania’s piece
Democracy is Unworkable I: Trivers’ theory of self-deception (citizens tell themselves flattering just-so-stories). This is only half of the cognitive psychology story. People bullshit themselves all the time, but they also have an evolved capacity to detect bullshit in others. The implication is that group reasoning (under the right circumstances) can consistently produce better results than individual ratiocination, with results for democracy described below.
Democracy is Unworkable II and III: The existence of cognitive biases/the elephant in the brain (have I mentioned cognitive bias yet). Really, these are both slight restatements of Democracy is Unworkable I (the “elephant in the brain” refers to Simler and Hanson’s book of the same name). Both Caplan and Jason Brennan have written books claiming that the pervasiveness of cognitive bias undermines the case for democracy. I’ve already mentioned the pop version of the counterargument. Here’s the academic statement of what this plausibly means for democratic theory. The Simler and Hanson book is clearly aware of the key sources for these counterarguments (one of them is mentioned in a footnote) but doesn’t deign to engage with them.
Democracy is Unworkable IV: The Paradox of Voting (democracy doesn’t work). The problem with this paradox is that it relies on the assumption that voters are rational agents. This entire genre of argument is based in rational choice, which means that it does not sit well with Democracy Is Unworkable claims I, II and III. This incompatibility of ideologically attractive critiques leads a variety of anti-democrats to hop furiously from one foot to another, all the while making special claims to stave off any mean-spirited suggestion that there is lots of irrational behavior in markets too. The resulting intellectual acrobatics are quite impressive in one sense; not at all in another.
Race and IQ I: The heritability of traits (intelligence is racially inherited). Actually, heritability does not mean what most people thinks it means. Moreover, technical meaning blows up many of the standard ‘science proves my racism’ arguments that are unfortunately so common on the Internets.
Race and IQ II: the explanatory power of IQ (IQ differences across race are real). There is excellent reason to believe that IQ has little explanatory power – it is a statistical cluster rather than a single and causally consequential underlying trait. Put more succinctly, the notion that we are able to measure general intelligence is based on a “statistical myth.” Again, this has painful implications for the Internet Libertarian Race-IQ Science Complex.
There’s lots more that could be said, but I think that’s enough to drive the point home, and it’s anyway as much as I’m willing to write on this topic. Finis.
“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
The post Don’t Save Yourself, Save the World: A Dialogue with Vincent Lloyd appeared first on Public Books.
Well Colombia have agreed to publish a second dark, dark, intense book. Clearly they couldn't get enough of Dark Ecology, the Wellek Lectures that I gave in the lineage of Cixous and Balibar, and now they're going to work with me to get this one out for Earth Day 2024.
It's a book about slavery, racism, capitalism, AI, ecology, despair, religion and mysticism. It's freaking AWESOME. I wasn't quite ready to say stuff like that out loud when I last worked for Columbia.
Because Columbia have done this, I'm now committing to them. I've been living my life waiting for approval and love in so many ways and I am DONE. Love is a thing you DO not a thing you wait for. That phenomenology cashes out to being a theater critic and in the end, all the plays are bad. Because you're waiting for them to be bad. I got really good at getting up and leaving the theater no matter where the play was at: I could see the writing on the wall. So at least there's that. But that is still...that.
So this is my proclamation to the world. I'm with Columbia now. Like how my best buddy Jeff Kripal (the X Men actors have to read his work when they're on set) is with Chicago. It's a great thing. I kept thinking when I found that out, he must have a lot of space in his soul to think, he doesn't have to keep waiting for people to say yes like me, who acts like they're a character in a Jane Austen novel.
That never occurred to me until this week, when Columbia accepted Hell. But it had occurred to me in my personal life, in part because my mum's family traces their lineage back to the lower gentry in the later eighteenth century. And that's a horrible precarious place to be. My grandmother to cap it all was Welsh lower gentry. Imagine Sense and Sensibility, but set in Wales. Just horrible ancient colonial vibes. You're dead unless Mister Right sweeps you off your feet. So you have to sit around ever so politely waiting for Mister Right, not putting a foot wrong, including doing a single day of work, and you can't access your own money until said Mister Right shows up.
This was me and book contracts. I thought it was great, a kind of naive drifting that meant I wasn't pushy and manipulative, and I'm not. But this is better. I'm not Elinor Dashwood. That energy crippled my family. Austen novels are about the terrible pain of a precarious class, women in the lower gentry during a time of enclosure and transition from primitive accumulation to automated capitalism.
Hell is about masters and slaves. Hell is about the Devil. Hell is about the biosphere as the Devil and ideas about the Devil as the Devil that's burning the biosphere.
Hell is also about AI. ery directly, because it’s totally relevant. I think the real driver here is the master slave template that drives everything else (subject versus object, male versus female, active versus passive…). We need to abolish that template. The idea of creating the perfect slave that is then the perfect master is basically every story about selling one’s soul to Satan.
Treating the biosphere like that, because treating each other like that, is why AI people are blundering into this and why that feeling of “the search for AI is like an unstoppable AI” keeps happening…
After yesterdays's expulsion of two Tennessee state lawmakers — Rep. Justin Jones (D) and Rep. Justin Pearson (D) — for leading gun control rallies following the Nashville shooting, a third lawmaker involved in the demonstrations explains why she was spared the axe. — Read the rest
From Hell: How to Dance with the Devil on Your Back
Like Satan, an algorithm is a servant that carries out your commands...perfectly (be careful what you wish for). Think about plantations. They're attempts to force human beings to carry out other human beings' commands perfectly. A silicon wafer is a plantation for electrons.
So many other links but that's one huge main one.
...I used to live in Davis, CA. It was a gigantic factory, made of columns and rows and columns and rows of fruit trees and almond trees and etc, stretching as far as the eye could see. Machine-like in its precision. The Great Central Valley is so flat you can see it from space, and they use lasers to guide the irrigation channels. Workers and enslaved people also treated with this kind of profit maximizing precision aka violence.
Next step: all the dualisms that plague us, subject-object, human-animal, person-machine, masculine-feminine...are possible because of the master-slave template of Mesopotamian-style societies with a certain agricultural logistics running in the background.
The fantasy of AI is that its personhood will be "greater than the hum of its parts" (as Daniel Dennett put it).
This is precisely the problem. We are inventing the wheel of the master-slave duality, and hardwiring it into powerful machines made of silicon and plastics and metals, and robot dogs. Dogs have always been trained as slaves.
(Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo are creeping into Prospero's cell, trying to ... I don't know what, they might not know what: surprise? usurp? rag? the colonial wizard Prospero. Ariel is Prospero's I don't know what: servant? police? ideology?)
A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds, and hunt them about, PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on
Hey, Mountain, hey!
Silver I there it goes, Silver!
Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark!CALIBAN, STEPHANO, and TRINCULO, are driven out
Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o' mountain.
Hark, they roar!
Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour
Lie at my mercy all mine enemies:
Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou
Shalt have the air at freedom: for a little
Follow, and do me service.Exeunt
Since marginalized communities tend to suffer disproportionately when governments make contemptible policy choices, it stands to reason that those communities might develop a heightened sensitivity about the merits of new policies. At the very least they have reason to cultivate a perspective and preferences that differ from people with resources (money, power, societal standing) to buffer them from the consequences of poor policy stewardship.
That perspective has a kernel of wise counsel.
There’s an abundance of evidence that policies ranging from de-industrialization since the 1970s to the “drug war” of the 1980s and 1990s to the pandemic response today dramatically harmed Black communities more than white or affluent ones. Same goes for the distribution of pain that comes with structural poverty and economic recessions.
But I’m thinking about foreign policy. Specifically, I have a hunch that Black Americans have a comparatively good bullshit detector about statecraft.
Why? Not because of anything innate or “biological,” but because of their historical experience in the United States and their overrepresentation in structural (and literal) violence as a consequence of US policy choices. Greater personal stakes means greater attentiveness to costs and risks, and therefore better judgment.
The caveat is that African Americans are far from monolithic, and that sometimes extends to how they view US foreign policy. The US decision to enter World War I was exceedingly controversial and regrettable, but even prominent Black intellectuals of the time saw the war as a chance to secure their place in American society by supporting it.
Black opinion about World War II—a war that offered some social mobility for African Americans—was more uniformly favorable. Even though it was a war of empire against empire, it was not only that, and the greater evil was clear enough to most.
In Vietnam, Black opinion was almost entirely critical of the war. Not only because Black Americans were being disproportionately drafted, court-martialed, and subsequently killed. And not only because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. decried, Congress used the cost of the Vietnam War as an excuse to cut anti-poverty programs that helped Black America.
But also because their quarrel was not with those seeking freedom abroad (the Vietnamese) but rather those denying their freedom at home (the Cold Warriors). As Muhammad Ali said in refusing to be drafted:
My enemy is the white people, not the Viet Cong or Chinese or Japanese. You’re my opposer when I want freedom. You’re my opposer when I want justice. You’re my opposer when I want equality.
And of course, Black Americans were mostly opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even though, perversely, that war and the larger War on Terror construct gave Black Americans the chance at societal inclusion, so long as they became patriotic “terror warriors.” I was active duty Air Force during the early War on Terror years, and the only sustained critiques I was exposed to came from hip-hop.
So at the risk of oversimplifying, the Black community would have counseled in favor of World War II, against Vietnam, and against both Iraq and the War on Terror. Sounds like good judgment to me.
And yet the idea that the public—in whole or in part—is fit to judge foreign policy is alien to Washington.
By tradition, foreign policy is both an elite and elitist activity. The business of national security and diplomacy involves short reaction times, state secrets, bourgeoise social networks, and growing planetary complexity—all of which lends itself to elitism and technocracy. Foreign policy practitioners have long since taken a Lippmann-esque turn away from any conception of participatory democracy in foreign policy in favor an elite stewardship model that disavows the existence of a public mind or public will.
When I worked as a foreign policy practitioner, I recall having a haughty, dismissive attitude toward the public—much like my peers and superiors. I’ve since struggled with the problematic of how to do foreign policy in a way that makes it more participatory beyond just greater diversity in the diplomatic corps.
As the United States retools its economy and military to combat Russia, contain China, and prolong US global primacy, we find ourselves in another moment when US foreign policy is structuring the reality that the rest of us have to live within. One of several aspects that troubles me about all this “great-power competition” stuff is that it has proceeded entirely as a Washington-elite project. It has not answered to the public—to say nothing of the Black community—in any meaningful way.
In that context, I recorded an episode of my podcast with Christopher Shell at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was a wide-ranging discussion anchored in survey results of Black Americans’ views of the military, Ukraine policy, Taiwan, and US interventionism abroad. His findings told an interesting story that reveals gaps between Black American opinion and the overall thrust of US policy.
Black Americans have an overwhelmingly favorable view of the US military, but:
There’s much more than that in the data, and class position affects a lot of these views—the least economically secure tend to be opposed to war, which should not be surprising given what wars usually mean for those who are already hard up or oppressed.
Policy practitioners should be keenly attentive to what Black Americans think generally. It’s not just a matter of fidelity to an ideal of participatory democracy; there could be strategic merit to centering their perspective in the conduct of policies ostensibly done in their name. It might be a way of avoiding more Vietnams and Iraqs, or worse.
This is cross-posted at Van’s newsletter.
"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." Though the authorship of this quote is still contested, examples continue to abound, whether liberals refusing to mask for co-workers who might be immune-compromised or want to protect themselves and their families from COVID, or Christians in the United States and other countries weaponizing victimhood. — Read the rest
Guest post by Ladyane Souza, Luise Koch, Maria Paula Russo Riva, and Natália Leal
Women who break the glass ceiling in politics are often depicted as disrupting the long-standing patriarchal structures that have traditionally kept women away from the public eye. The stereotypical “ideal” politician is usually based on a male perspective of strength and having a “thick skin,” which reinforces these patriarchal norms. Efforts to maintain the gendered status quo in politics are widespread, and include delegitimization and intimidation tactics such as misogynistic attacks or rape threats. Technological innovations provide additional fertile ground for such intimidation—and even violence—against women in politics. Though much of online hate is shared through social media, the consequences spill over into the offline world. Online abuse imposes financial and time-consuming burdens on female politicians who must, in addition to other pressing tasks, improve security, combat disinformation, and report perpetrators.
Many women politicians believe that they simply have to endure violence in order not to be perceived as emotional, weak, or unfit for the job. Some have managed to thrive politically despite being confronted with severe digital violence, like the 2021 German Green party candidate for chancellor, Annalena Baerbock, who is now minister for foreign affairs. Other female politicians decide to exit politics, like two former leftist congresswomen from Brazil who publicly announced their decision to not run in the 2022 elections after being targeted by severe online hate.
Why do some female candidates and victims of online violence drop out of politics while others endure? Our research shows that there are no simple answers. As part of a research project on online misogyny against politically active women, we interviewed five female Brazilian candidates for parliament. We found that women react differently to online violence: some simply ignore it or shrug it off, some choose to respond, and others stop engaging online altogether.
Since the use of social media is greatest among 25–34 year-olds, it is likely that younger female politicians who rely on social media are especially susceptible to being targeted. Black, Asian, and minority ethnic groups also tend to receive disproportionately higher amounts of abuse than many white female politicians. Personal characteristics such as age, skin color, and ethnicity are thus factors likely to increase the risk of women being targets of abuse and leaving politics. Furthermore, the severity of abuse, recurrence of attacks, and countries’ legal support mechanisms may play a crucial role in women’s decisions to persist in or exit politics.
The ultimate goal of violence against women in politics is to convey that women are not welcome at the political table. This means that when female politicians leave public life due to online violence, it is not because they choose to do so, but rather because patriarchally led structural forces succeeded in achieving their intended end, which is to cast off all women to political ostracism one by one. Because the problem is structural, the solutions need to be structural too. The blame for quitting must not be put on the female politicians individually, but rather on the absence of mechanisms to protect these women in the first place. Yet, the topic continues to be covered as a matter of personal choice and weakness, which disregards that online violence seeks to achieve political outcomes.
What must be done then to protect women in office from online violence? Apart from obvious proposals involving social media platforms preemptively countering and removing hateful content, multi-sectoral responses should be considered. This could involve putting in place initiatives such as developing support networks; creating comprehensive legal frameworks protecting digital rights; improving data collection on prevalence, incidences, and experiences of online harassment; and training public servants, communicators, and psychologists to address violence against women in politics and its victims.
Australia’s online safety regulator eSafety is a good model. The world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online, eSafety has formed a global partnership involving international organizations, civil society, and the private sector to strengthen laws to deter perpetrators of abuse and hold them accountable. The German non-profit HateAid is another—the group provides counseling and legal support in cases of digital violence.
One further blind spot that must be urgently tackled is the lack of funding to address the digital and physical security of female candidates. An understanding is beginning to emerge on the harms from gender-based attacks online, with Sweden leading the way with its first “online rape” conviction.
Women’s participation in politics is crucial, and much progress has been made in opening up the political space. But more needs to be done to protect women from the special burden they face of online abuse.
Ladyane Souza is a lawyer, consultant, and researcher who holds a Master’s in Human Rights from the University of Brasilia. Luise Koch is an economist and researcher who is pursuing her PhD at the Technical University of Munich. Maria Paula Russo Riva is a human rights lawyer and political scientist. Natália Leal is a journalist and CEO at Agência Lupa, the first fact-checking institution in Brazil and the 2021 Knight International Journalism Award winner.
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