I'm not recommending this SNL clip because it's funny. In a sense, I'm recommending it because it's not.

Yes, I know. Complaining that Saturday Night Live isn't funny anymore has been a cliche for longer than most of the cast members have been alive, but that's not really where I'm going with this. For one thing, it's not a question of anymore. The show never was consistently amusing or even interesting. That was never the point.

For a few years back in the 70s, Saturday Night Live did hit a very sweet spot, being on the intersection of the conceptual comedy movement of people like Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman on one side and the rise of the Second City school of sketch comedy on the other. It also benefitted from an early association with talents like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Buck Henry.

Lorne Michaels’ initial idea was to rip off National Lampoon's stage and radio shows keeping much of the cast and many of the writers. The material was toned down for television (including adding the Muppets to the original line-up), but it was clearly an unlicensed Lampoon TV show. That initial concept burned itself out fairly quickly and was definitely showing its age even before the 1980 reboot, which more or less introduced the current incarnation of the show.

SNL has been an institution for most of its run, and as a rule, intentionally funny institutions are rare. It's true that lots of incredibly talented people have worked for there, both in front of and behind the camera (Michaels has a good eye) and they do hit paydirt now and then, but that's not really what the show's about. 

Almost since its inception, people watched SNL so they could talk about what other people were talking about, and since at least second or third season, the producers have built the show around this. In addition to catchphrases and recurring characters who often didn't need to recur, this has led to increasing reliance on topical sketches that check off familiar figures and events, where the laughs come less from the jokes and more from the sense of recognition.

Sketches like this.

This follows a very old tradition. Don jr. rubbing his nose and looking for a bathroom with a mirrored countertop is the 2022 version of the famously drunk character walking out with an ice pack on his head. 

We've talked before about how bad art can often be more useful than great art.  Someone like Shakespeare will see things that their contemporaries miss which pretty much by definition makes she or he unrepresentative.

This sketch by comparison is the exact opposite, bad but representative of its moment. Some talented performers manage a few real laughs, but on the whole, it's just a bunch of walk-ons close-captioned for the comically impaired. The jokes are simply characters saying out loud obvious things about themselves: 

Fox News has been pushing Russian propaganda about Ukraine and is now desperately trying to backpedal since the position has become toxic;

Tucker Carlson is a smug, preppie racist;

Trump is a babbling idiot;

Fox viewers are old;

And so on.

There's no real imagination here, just a checklist of people and incidents associated with conservative media and the war in Ukraine, but it is that very lack of imagination that makes this useful. The writers made a list of things that they believed their audience would recognize and agree with. They seem to have been successful. The cold open without anything to recommend it other than the topic has gotten buzz, write-ups and over three million views on YouTube.

There is, of course, the bigger question of to what extent we can generalize from the SNL audience to the wider population, but that's a conversation that requires a different set of tools. 

Not merely a villain but also a fool

Excellent essay by Cory Doctorow on how (and how not to) break up tech giants like Google and the walking anti-trust violation formerly known as Facebook. The opening passage fits nicely with our long-running tech messiah thread.

Science fiction has a longstanding love-hate relationship with the tech tycoon. The literature is full of billionaire inventors, sometimes painted as system-bucking heroes, at other times as megalomanical supervillains.

From time to time, we even manage to portray one of these people in a way that hews most closely to reality: ordinary mediocrities, no better than you or I, whose success comes down to a combination of luck and a willingness to set aside consideration of the needs of others. It’s easy to find such people atop our increasingly steep economic pyramid, but it’s very hard to find any who’ll admit it. There is nothing a successful person hates more than being reminded that “meritocracy” is a self-serving myth, a circular logic that says, “The system puts the best people in charge, and I am in charge, therefore I am the best.”

But while the powerful remain blissfully insulated from the bursting of the meritocratic delusion, public sentiment is increasingly turning against the ultra-wealthy, and in the most interesting way possible. Today, the commercial tyrant isn’t merely seen as a villain, but also as a fool – someone whose greatness is due to an accident of history and a vacancy of mor­als, not the result of a powerful genius gone awry.

It’s a distinction with a difference. If Facebook is Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg is a once-in-a-millennium genius who did what no other could, then our best hope is to somehow gentle the Zuck, bring him into public service, like a caged ET that govern­ment scientists either bribe or torment into working on behalf of the human race. That’s the constitutional monarchy model, the model where we continue to acknowledge the divine right of kings, but bind them to the material plane by draping the king in golden chains of office whose ends are held by an aristocracy that keeps the monarch from getting too frisky.

But if Facebook is Facebook because Zuck got lucky, if he just combined cheap capital with regulatory tolerance for buying out the competition and building a legally impregnable walled garden around his users, then we don’t need Zuck or Facebook. There’s plenty more where he came from, and all we need to do is withdraw the privileges that regulatory forbearance granted him. That’s the republic model, where we get rid of the king and govern ourselves.

"Love Me, I'm a Liberal"

A couple of threads converged to remind me of this. First, I've been thinking about the relationships between the young revolutionaries of the sixties and the insurrectionists of today (and, given the typical age of Fox viewers, wondering how much of an overlap there is).

Second, the war in Ukraine and the various Russian scandals that came before it have highlighted longstanding rifts between liberals and the anti-anti-Trump left. This is part of a tradition that goes back to the split over war with Germany in the late thirties and the tankies of the fifties and sixties. 

Phil Ochs' "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" is one of the best and wittiest examples of sixties radical disgust with those just to the right. You can find complete annotated lyrics here, though the song is better listened to than read.




Excerpts:

Intro

In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic. 

...

I cheered when Humphrey was chosen

My faith in the system restored

I'm glad that the Commies were thrown out

Of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board

And I love Puerto Ricans and Negros

As long as they don't move next door

So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Ah, the people of old Mississippi

Should all hang their heads in shame

Now, I can't understand how their minds work

What's the matter don't they watch Les Crane?

But if you ask me to bus my children

I hope the cops take down your name

So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

...

Sure, once I was young and impulsive

I wore every conceivable pin

Even went to socialist meetings

Learned all the old union hymns

Ah, but I've grown older and wiser

And that's why I'm turning you in

So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

That last verse would prove to be prescient. Ochs' generation turned out to be far less committed to these causes than their parents were. He never saw his radical peers become reactionaries. He killed himself in 1976.

Five years ago at the blog -- the Watergate debt

Monday, March 13, 2017

The Washington Press Corps and the "Watergate debt"

I don't want to exaggerate the magnitude of this, but I have come around to the notion that one of the factors, albeit perhaps a small one, that helps explain the bizarre behavior of mainstream journalists toward Republican scandal over the past quarter century is the sense that the press corps owes one to the GOP after Watergate.

The scandal was the one instance in American history where a president was forced to resign and investigative journalism was arguably the main driver. The press aggressively pursued the story and the coverage was, at the very least, sometimes colored by the personal dislike that many journalists felt toward Nixon.

As the years passed and the former president (deservedly or not) managed to rehabilitate some of his reputation, the idea seemed to take root in the press corps that they needed to balance the scales. The idea was nurtured by the Republicans and conservative media but I don't believe it was planted by them. Like its sister belief, the biased liberal media theory, it was an idea born of and trapped in the 70s.

The Iran Contra scandal was both symptom and aggravating factor.  There were hesitation marks all over the reporting, and while some of these can be attributed to the extraordinary popularity and charisma of Ronald Reagan, the timidity of the press is still notable. Nonetheless, despite the relatively gentle handling, it was still another case of journalists pursuing a Republican scandal.

By comparison, the election of Bill Clinton seemed to represent an almost perfect opportunity to balance things out. Not only was Clinton a Democrat, he also was an outsider (which threatened the livelihood of veteran reporters whose status rested on their DC Rolodexes) and a Southern boy from the wrong side of the tracks (which played on deep-seated regional and, more importantly, class prejudices).

I was in or around Arkansas through the 90s and I remember a constant sense of amazement. Perhaps it was just my naivety, but I was completely unprepared for how low supposedly respectable journalists were willing to go once they'd committed to a narrative, even if it meant crawling in bed with the remnants of the state's  segregationist movement (I still remember my revulsion seeing the Washington press corps elevate Jim Johnson to elder statesman).

I've argued before that the bad journalism that took root during Whitewater was a contributing factor and possibly necessary condition for the Bush presidency, the build-up to Iraq, and a general undermining of democracy that culminated with the election of Donald Trump. It would be ironicc if misplaced guilt over great journalism helped contribute to the decline of the profession.

For related oints, check out thee following from Charles Pierce and Frontline.

"You say you want a revolution"

This was going to be part of an upcoming post but I decided it worked better freestanding. 

Back in the late sixties there was a surprising popular genre of apocalyptic dystopias inspired by fears of the youth movement. Countless examples in episodic television (three or four from Star Trek alone). The 1967 novel Logan’s Run (but not the 1976 movie which dropped the political aspects of the story). Arguably films If and Clockwork Orange (though in this case, not the book, which is more a part of the post-war panic over juvenile delinquency). Corman’s Gas-s-s-s. Certainly others I’m forgetting. 

Though not the best in the bunch, the most representative was Wild in the Streets.

Wild in the Streets figures prominently in Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies": [emphasis added]

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. The Scalphunters, for example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art — if such terms are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that is as crudely made as Wild in the Streets — slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism — can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a classic example of an unartistic movie. What makes these movies — that are not works of art — enjoyable? The Scalphunters was more entertaining than most Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what’s distinctive about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time. (George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in Viva Maria!) Somehow the alchemy of personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis — another powerfully funny actor of tremendous physical presence — worked, and the director Sydney Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn’t overdone.

And Wild in the Streets? It’s a blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of against it because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t. It looks like other recent products from American International Pictures but it’s as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There’s not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there’s something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way — as Pop wit. The basic idea is corny — It Can’t Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed of fascists — but it’s treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth (it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety. There’s a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters threatening them — the daily papers merging into Village of the Damned. Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he’s done it with just enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).

It's easy to be dismissive of these fears fifty plus years later, but the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement was often extreme and was punctuated by the occasional bombing, bank robbery, etc.

But probably the biggest mistake people made when predicting the impact of the sixties youth movement was taking them at their word, believing that their commitment to radicalism (or even liberalism) would outlast the end of the Vietnam War. The post-war generation would change the country, but I doubt anyone in 1969 would have guessed how. 

Horrible Children

I've been thinking a lot about infantilism and the alt-right, particularly the possibility that being immersed in that world might cause or at least contribute to the strange, childish behavior we've been seeing. It's a thesis one is reluctant to bring up for a number of reasons: it's dismissive and needlessly insulting; it frees one from the need to address other positions or understand where they come from; it seldom leads anywhere productive. 

Sometimes, though, a possibility becomes so unavoidable that ignoring it becomes an act of dishonesty.  We have grown men throwing literal tantrums over wearing a mask. We have Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like spoiled twelve-year-olds at the State of the Union. We have Donald Trump.

This is not normal. The outbursts. The pouting. The contrariness. The substitution of "own the libs" attention getting devices for a political view.

And, yes, we can find examples in both parties, but in no way can this be considered symmetrical.

 

Bob Chipman has been thinking along related lines. Chipman is, as previously mentioned, one of our best critics/cultural commentators. Here he uses JoJo Rabbit as a stepping off point to explore the strangely childish quality of the Nazis. He even takes the connection between infantilism and Nazism further by bringing in a comparison to certain extreme reactionary segments of fan boy culture.

 

Two and a half threads worth your time (including a great Big Con reference)

Twitter has loads of issue and a potential for abuse arguably second only to Faceb-- sorry, Meta, but unlike whatever the hell it's called, Twitter (if used properly and that's a big if) can be one of the best places online for finding interesting and unexpected conversations with smart people. You have to be selective and pay close attention to who is recommending, speaking and replying, but if you stick with the informed and trustworthy, you can come across fascinating threads on topics like tire maintenance and the fate of nations. 

This is a thread that will explain the implied poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices based on this photo of a Pantsir-S1 wheeled gun-missile system's right rear pair of tires below & the operational implications during the Ukrainian mud season.🧵

1/ pic.twitter.com/LmxW43v6gy

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

...turned over and moved once a month for preventative maintenance reasons.

In particular you want to exercise the central tire air inflation system (CTIS) to see if lines have leaks or had insect/vermin nests blocking the system.

CTIS Controller & CTIS diagram👇👇

3/ pic.twitter.com/70NQnURiUj

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end. The side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips.

See early video:

5/https://t.co/QuOcZRw4Lj

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

It turns out that for those invading certain parts of Ukraine in early spring, this is a big deal.

Given the demonstrated levels of corruption in truck maintenance. There is no way in h--l that there are enough tires in the Russian army logistical system.

So their wheeled AFV/truck park is as road bound as Russian Army columns were in the 1st Russo-Finnish War.
9/ pic.twitter.com/6hPrDll8LE

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

At this point another tire expert pops up with an equally fascinating divergent thread.

Bit of a tire expert here. Those aren't Soviet-era heavy truck radials. Chinese military tires, and I believe specifically the Yellow Sea YS20. This is a tire I first encountered in Somalia and Sudan; it's a bad Chinese copy of the excellent Michelin XZL military tire design. 🇫🇷

— Karl T. Muth 🌐✈️📊 (@KarlMuth) March 3, 2022

Remember what I said about paying attention to who's replying? Noah Smith falls in the trustworthy category.  

You don't even understand, Karl has this level of esoteric knowledge about literally hundreds of things

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 3, 2022

Some of these threads read like first drafts of blog posts. The choppiness can be distracting, but it can also have a staccato quality where each point lands distinctly and has a chance to stand on its own.

14 year ago, the world's financial system came to the brink of collapse. Central banks scrambled to react. Businesses shuttered. People lost their homes. Many governments fell. Faith in our institutions shattered. The Occupy movement was launched. So was Bitcoin. 1/ pic.twitter.com/T0FKv7RpIw

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

The GFC was precipitated by "financial innovation": new tricks that allowed traditional financial activities to take place while evading the controls instituted to head off the kinds of systemic collapses that plagued nations for centuries. 3/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

"Credit swaps" allowed for effectively unlimited leverage, so that every routine transaction in the real economy could result in fortunes changing hands in the shadow banking world. 5/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

III. Bank-runs: When over-leveraged assets hit a bump, the leverage and the rigidity of the contracts meant to "de-risk" it triggered cascading price-drops, which sent investors running for the doors. 7/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

The shadow-banking system created a whole menagerie of exotic "products" that all shared one characteristic: they were complex. The complexity of these instruments made it hard to know when you were taking a sucker's bet. 9/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

I've been talking about Twitter vs. blogs and other platforms, but the relationships are symbiotic. 

If talk of leverage, complexity, rigidity and system risk gives you deja vu, you're not alone. In a superb new paper, @ProfHilaryAllen of @AmericanU's @AUWCL argues that #DeFi, the "distributed finance" wing of #web3, is really "Shadow Banking 2.0."https://t.co/tjjsKnHuDH 20/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

And I love the way Doctorow connects this to the classic book the Big Con.

If the mark was a gambler, they'd send a telegram ahead to their confederates calling for a stock swindle, where the gambler would be out of his depth. If the mark was a stock broker, they'd call for a horse-racing scam, because brokers didn't understand the ponies. 30/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

Scammers who work smart contracts don't even need to change up the swindle: no matter whether the mark is a coder or a banker, there will be key elements of the game they can't make heads nor tails of. 32/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog

 Friday, March 2, 2012

Bleeding heart Randians

Once again, Joseph has left it to me to play bad cop on the McArdle beat.

As you can see from the previous post, Megan McArdle has a piece up at the Atlantic complaining about the lack of sympathy for the wealthy when they find themselves in financial trouble.

Likewise, when middle class people take out a mortgage that's perfectly affordable on the income they've been enjoying for years, and then lose the house because they suddenly saw that income cut in half, we don't feel a delicious sense of joy because they finally got what was coming to them.

I keep getting the feeling that McArdle's default approach to complexity is to look at one dimension at a time until she finds a view she likes.

In this case the complexity lies in the way we see financial hardship. We generally react to news of other people's money troubles with a combination of sympathy and disapproval (read Charles Murray for an example of the latter). The level of sympathy is largely determined by where the fall leaves the victim while the level of disapproval depends on how avoidable the crisis seems to be. Both these factors tend to make us react somewhat more harshly to financial problems of the well-to-do.

And in the cases in question here, the avoidability level is up there. The Bloomberg story that McArdle was talking about concerned highly paid executives who are facing hardships because of smaller-than-expected bonuses. This is a very different situation than a drop in salary. Even for the very well paid a completely unexpected reduction in salary can cause problems. The possibility of a smaller bonus should always be expected.

These were financially literate professionals who failed to take into account the potential variability of their income stream and as a result made reckless decisions then failed to own up. This isn't to say that some of these families aren't facing painful disruptions. Of course we feel sympathy for them, particularly the children, but the adults in these situations got there because of bad decisions and now they have to take responsibility for their actions.

At least that's what McArdle used to believe.

Gentrification and Chinatown

Roy Choi is one of the culinary stars of the 21st Century. You'd be hard pressed to find a chef who has done more to change the way people think about dining, particularly here in LA, but Choi himself has mixed feelings about the impact he had had. Trendy restaurants bring real benefits to a neighborhood, but these often come at a cost.

In this episode of Choi's Broken Bread.

Roy’s Chinatown restaurant Chego opened in 2013, which soon became the poster child for gentrification in the area. Roy explores what he would have done differently as he retraces his steps through some of the neighborhood’s beloved establishments like Hop Woo and Phoenix Bakery. He also meets newcomers to the neighborhood Pearl River Deli and Endorffeine.

While journalists discussing the housing crisis are contractually obliged to cite San Francisco, places like Chinatown go largely unnoticed which is the opposite of what would happen in any rational discussion. For reasons discussed before and certain to be brought up again, SF is one of the worst major cities in California to develop from an urban planning standpoint. Chinatown, on the other hand, is ideally situated.

Chinatown also provides a much more representative and sympathetic picture of the concerns over gentrification. Like Boyle Heights, Chinatown has already paid a disproportionate share of the price for LA's development. 

The first Chinatown, centered on Alameda and Macy Streets (now Cesar Chavez Avenue), was established in 1880. Reaching its heyday from 1890 to 1910, Chinatown grew to approximately fifteen streets and alleys containing some two hundred buildings. It boasted a Chinese Opera theater, three temples, a newspaper and a telephone exchange. But laws prohibiting most Chinese from citizenship and property ownership, as well as legislation curtailing immigration, inhibited future growth.

From the early 1910s, Chinatown began to decline. Symptoms of a corrupt Los Angeles discolored the public's view of Chinatown; gambling houses, opium dens and a fierce tong warfare severely reduced business in the area. As tenants and lessees rather than outright owners, the residents of Old Chinatown were threatened with impending redevelopment, and as a result the owners neglected upkeep of their buildings.[3] Eventually, the entire area was sold and then resold, as entrepreneurs and developers fought over the area. After thirty years of decay, a Supreme Court ruling approved condemnation of the area to allow for construction of a major rail terminal, Union Station. Residents were evicted to make room for Union Station without a plan for the relocation of the Chinatown community.

Chinatown was gradually demolished, leaving many businesses without a place to do business and forcing some to close. A remnant of Old Chinatown persisted into the early 1950s, situated between Union Station and the Old Plaza. Several businesses and a Buddhist temple lined Ferguson Alley, a narrow one-block street running between the Plaza and Alameda. The most notable of the surviving buildings was the old Lugo Adobe, having been built in 1838 by the prominent Californio family. Some decades later, the Lugo Adobe became the original home of Loyola Marymount University, and later, it was rented to Chinese-Americans who ran shops on the ground floor and a lodging house upstairs. Christine Sterling, who had brought to fruition the Olvera Street and China City projects, argued that remaining buildings of Old Chinatown were an eyesore and advocated successfully for the razing of all the remaining structures between the Plaza and Union Station.

We need more housing and places like Chinatown, Boyle Heights, and Watts are well-suited for development and densification. At the same time, residents of these neighborhoods have legitimate concerns. Framing the debate and a conflict between noble YIMBYs and villainous NIMBYs is not productive and it is enormously unfair. 

Sartre on Trolls

Josh Marshall shares this extraordinarily sharp passage from John-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, which seems to capture the essence of trolling. Trolls understand the asymmetry of reasonableness. They understand that when your opponents feel constrained by the need to engage seriously and responsibly, the willingness to be ridiculous and offensive can provide a great advantage.  

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” 

No, Mr. Baquet, that wasn't what happened. We were there. We took notes.

Following up from last week's post. 

Dean Baquet speaking to the New Yorker. 

If I had to do that over again, oh, my God, I would do that very, very, very differently. I mean, we treated Trump seriously. We treated him as an investigative story. But I would have covered the country a lot differently in the months leading up to the election of Donald Trump.

The revisionism here is truly stunning. The NYT was widely criticized at the time for downplaying or ignoring entirely numerous Trump scandals (particularly compared to the Washington Post) while spending the majority of their time and energy on Clinton scandals, almost none of which really panned out. 

Charles Pierce described this as a war between the NYT and the Post. Baquet would now like you believe they were on the same side all along but we know better.

Because, like I said, we took notes. 

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

"Why do you hate us for caring too much?" – – Dispatches from a besieged institution

Public Editor
From Wikipedia

The job of the public editor is to supervise the implementation of proper journalism ethics at a newspaper, and to identify and examine critical errors or omissions, and to act as a liaison to the public. They do this primarily through a regular feature on a newspaper's editorial page. Because public editors are generally employees of the very newspaper they're criticizing, it may appear as though there is a possibility for bias. However, a newspaper with a high standard of ethics would not fire a public editor for a criticism of the paper; the act would contradict the purpose of the position and would itself be a very likely cause for public concern.

I don't want to impose a template, but generally one expects public editors to serve as the internal representative of external critical voices, or at least to see to it that these voices get a fair hearing. A typical column might start with acknowledging complaints about something like the paper's lack of coverage of poor neighborhoods. The public editor would then discuss some possible lapses on the paper's part, get some comments from the editor in charge, and then, as a rule, either encourage the paper to improve its coverage in this area or, at the very least, take a neutral position acknowledging that both the critics and the paper have a point.

Here are some examples from two previous public editors of the New York Times.


Clark Hoyt

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Margaret Sullivan

Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.

What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous government sources, as too many Times articles do.

…

The Times needs to fix its overuse of unnamed government sources. And it needs to slow down the reporting and editing process, especially in the fever-pitch atmosphere surrounding a major news event. Those are procedural changes, and they are needed. But most of all, and more fundamental, the paper needs to show far more skepticism – a kind of prosecutorial scrutiny — at every level of the process.

Two front-page, anonymously sourced stories in a few months have required editors’ notes that corrected key elements – elements that were integral enough to form the basis of the headlines in both cases. That’s not acceptable for Times readers or for the paper’s credibility, which is its most precious asset.

If this isn’t a red alert, I don’t know what will be.

But these are strange days at the New York Times and the new public editor is writing columns that are not only a sharp break with those of her predecessors, but seem to violate the very spirit of the office.

In particular, Liz Spayd is catching a great deal of flak for a piece that almost manages to invert the typical public editor column. It starts by grossly misrepresenting widespread criticisms of the paper, goes on to openly attack the critics making the charges, then pleads with the paper's staff to toe the editorial line and ignore the very voices that a public editor would normally speak for .


[Emphasis added]

The Truth About ‘False Balance’

False balance, sometimes called “false equivalency,” refers disparagingly to the practice of journalists who, in their zeal to be fair, present each side of a debate as equally credible, even when the factual evidence is stacked heavily on one side.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what drives false equivalency, with the leading contenders being a desire to maintain access to high-placed sources, long-standing personal biases against certain politicians, a fear of reprisal, a desire to avoid charges of liberal bias, and simple laziness (a cursory both-sides-do-it story is generally much easier to write than a well investigated piece). Caring too much about fairness hardly ever makes the list and it certainly has no place in the definition.

Spayd then accuses the people making these charges of being irrational, shortsighted, and partisan.

I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates. CNN’s Brian Stelter focused his show, “Reliable Sources,” on this subject last weekend. He asked a guest, Jacob Weisberg of Slate magazine, to frame the idea of false balance. Weisberg used an analogy, saying journalists are accustomed to covering candidates who may be apples and oranges, but at least are still both fruits. In Trump, he said, we have not fruit but rancid meat. That sounds like a partisan’s explanation passed off as a factual judgment.

But, as Jonathan Chait points out, Weisberg has no record of being a Hillary Clinton booster. The charge here is completely circular. He is partisan because he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump and he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump because he is partisan.

But the most extraordinary part of the piece and one which reminds us just how strange the final days of 2016 are becoming is the conclusion.

I hope Times journalists won’t be intimidated by this argument. I hope they aren’t mindlessly tallying up their stories in a back room to ensure balance, but I also hope they won’t worry about critics who claim they are. What’s needed most is forceful, honest reporting — as The Times has produced about conflicts circling the foundation; and as The Washington Post did this past week in surfacing Trump’s violation of tax laws when he made a $25,000 political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general as her office was investigating Trump University.

Fear of false balance is a creeping threat to the role of the media because it encourages journalists to pull back from their responsibility to hold power accountable. All power, not just certain individuals, however vile they might seem.

Putting aside the curious characterization of the Florida AG investigation as a tax evasion story (which is a lot like describing the Watergate scandal as a burglary story or Al Capone as a tax evader), equating her paper's pursuit of the Clinton foundation with the Washington Post's coverage of Trump is simply surreal on a number of levels.

For starters, none of the Clinton foundation stories have revealed significant wrongdoing. Even Spayd, who is almost comically desperate to portray her employer in the best possible light, had to concede that “some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did.” By comparison, the Washington Post investigation continues to uncover self-dealing, misrepresentation, tax evasion, misuse of funds, failure to honor obligations, ethical violations, general sleaziness and blatant quid prop quo bribery.

More importantly, the Washington Post has explicitly attacked and implicitly abandoned Spayd's position. Here's how the Post summed it up in an editorial that appeared two days before the NYT column.

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

Charles Pierce's characteristically pithy response to this editorial was "The Washington Post Just Declared War on The New York Times -- And with good reason, too."

If is almost as if Spayd thinks it's 2000, when the NYT could set the conventional wisdom, could decide which narratives would followed and which public figures would be lauded or savaged. Spayd does understand that there is a battle going on for the soul of journalism, but she does not seem to understand that the alliances have changed, and the New York Times is about to find itself in a very lonely position.

In memory of Raymond Smullyan

Smullyan's first career was as a stage magician, which is an almost perfect Chekhovian plot twist, surprising at first then nearly inevitable in retrospect. What else would he be? 

In the spirit of Smullyan, here are a math-themed magic trick and a magic-themed math lecture, both from Dr. Tori Noquez.






The Mathematics of 8 Perfect Faro Shuffles

When Threads collide -- the MAGAization of crypto

The public face of cryptocurrencies and NFTs may be liberal celebrities and trendy lifestyle journalists, but the political faction that has really embraced Web3 leans hard to the right.

Just look at who is out promoting bitcoin now ... Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz, and Tucker Carlson.

It should be extremely evident now where that space is heading. https://t.co/7tQFHJnvx5

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) February 19, 202

Looks like the absolute craziest Americans are lining up to shill for crypto coins. It's pretty crystal clear which side crypto folks are on now. https://t.co/WaWtxgmf4r

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) February 20, 2022

Also, and for the record, public disclosure forms show she holds low- to mid- 6 figures worth of BTC

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) February 18, 2022

And this from the Verge:

But very little of that was discussed at today’s press conference. The event kicked off with three of the protest movement’s organizers, including Tamara Lich, a former fitness instructor and singer in an Alberta band called Blind Monday, who played a prominent role in organizing a GoFundMe campaign that raised about 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.8 million) for the anti-vaxx protest.

After spending several minutes disparaging “fake news” and praising supporters like Jordan Peterson, a philosopher whose work is admired by the right, the group turned to Bitcoin.

BJ Dichter, who introduced himself as “vice president and spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy,” said the group has been in touch with “some of the most prominent Bitcoiners on YouTube” to learn how to use cryptocurrency to raise money for their cause. (GoFundMe shut down the group’s fundraising campaign last week, citing “violence and other unlawful activity” during the demonstrations.)

Dichter turned the press conference over to a man named “Nick” who he described as the group’s “Bitcoin team lead for the Freedom Convoy.” Nick, sporting a thick beard and a black sweatshirt with the Bitcoin logo in the upper-right corner, started by setting expectations. “I wouldn’t call myself an expert,” he said. “But I am a liaison to the experts in the Bitcoin world.” Nick said the aim was to fight for the group’s freedom to raise money “without being shackled by the censorship put in place by our legacy financial system.”

After several minutes of a lecture on the advantages of a decentralized fundraising platform, supporters watching the livestream seemed flummoxed.

“This is not what I thought it would be, thanks guys but I’m thinking you will be losing some money support with this... anyway, have a good day,” wrote one commenter. Others implored the group to ditch the Bitcoin talk and get back to the issue at hand: truckers fighting against vaccine mandates.

“I get the safety of donating to Bitcoin… but why are we promoting digital currency?!” another wrote.

In some respects, the convergence of the anti-vaxx protests and Bitcoin was probably inevitable. Last month, the protests drew support from one of the biggest proponents of Bitcoin in the world, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who tweeted “Canadian truckers rule.” Former President Donald Trump has voiced support, and right-wing figures from Tucker Carlson to Ben Shapiro to Michael Flynn have seized on the trucker protests.

The group sees Bitcoin as a possible solution to its fundraising woes. And they may have some support, too. A group of Canadian Bitcoin supporters who go by the moniker “HonkHonkHodl” [Here's a quick intro to HODLing -- MP] have created a crypto crowdfunding campaign on the platform Tallycoin as an alternative funding portal for the Freedom Convoy.

In a less-than-surprising plot twist, the move to Bitcoin didn't work out that well for the truckers.

There’s lots of talk of needing money. “None of us know how to use that goddamn bitcoin,” says one guy.

“I’ve got kids… I need some money here. I can’t do this,” says another.

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) February 14, 2022

Conservatives and crypto is not just a North American thing.

Jemima Kelly writing for the Financial Times.

Long-time Alphaville readers will remember that back in 2018, after a certain cabinet minister — then a mere disgraced Tory MP — resigned from two appointments related to blockchain technology when we discovered a secret crypto pay deal, we saw it fit to initiate a series called “What’s the Tory crypto story?” (This title will resonate if you happen to be over the age of about 30 and British.)

After that slight embarrassment for now Transport Secretary Michael Green Grant Shapps, the Tory crypto train has kept on chugging merrily along. There was the spectacular flop of Tory Baroness Mone’s crypto project, EQUI; there was then-chancellor Philip “Spreadsheet” Hammond promoting blockchain as an easy solution for the Irish Borderproblem; more recently there was chair of the UK foreign affairs committee Tom Tugendhat preaching the virtues of crypto by deploying unforgettable syntax such as “when the queen’s head leaves the coin and goes on to the blockchain”. And before any of them, of course, there was David Cameron — a man known for his impeccable taste in all things financial.

It’s not just crypto; it’s blockchain too. In a November report entitled “BlockchainIndustry in the UK Landscape Overview 2021” by “Innovation Eye” and the “Big Innovation Centre”, the ruling party’s love affair with all things related to the distributed dream ledger over the past five years is charted. It’s a nice and politically informative chart:

Just look at that sea of blue! If you’re wondering about the block of red in the second line, well that’s Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Upon Tyne Central, who has a background in technology. But when she mentions blockchain, it’s to say things like: “For some, blockchain is a way of avoiding government”, and that the “libertarian idea that technology is the answer to everything has driven our regulatory approach for too long”. Music to our luddite lugholes, tbh.

Over on the other side of the chamber, though, there’s a new crypto playa in town. And the new pusher of virtual currencies is none other than king of virtual tears himself, Mr Matthew Hancock, a former cabinet minster and now mere disgraced Tory MP (you might notice a theme).

None of this is all that surprising to those who have been following the story. If you push past the next-big-thingism and the Ponzi scheme aspects, the underlying appeal of Web3 has always been the libertarian wet dream of money and property freed from the tyranny of the state. 

Of course, the fact that the current conservative movement is swarming with grifters has certainly sped things along.

'We really did hit peak stupid' -- Linette Lopez on the return to reality-based markets

Lopez was unfashionably early to this party, having pointed out for years the absurdity and precariousness of the hype and bullshit economy. Her reporting and analysis have been consistently frank and independent, as have her regular appearances on public radio's Marketplace.

 On a not unrelated note, Elon Musk hates her. 

This latest column won't make her any more popular.

Every once in a while on Wall Street there is what is called a "washout": a cataclysmic shift in the market that swaths of the investment community do not survive. Wall Street is standing on the edge of such an event. So if you want your "billionaire tears," you shall have them.

Why now? Well, after more than a decade of keeping interest rates near zero, the Federal Reserve is all but assured to raise them multiple times in the coming year to fight inflation. In the world of finance, these hikes are akin to messing with the Earth's gravity. Assets that were once attractive — companies that used cheap capital to grow rapidly without making a profit — will be shunned. Some of the investors who ate up those growth stories will go out of business. This is not a drill. It's the beginning of a bear market . And based on conversations with some of the most elite investors on Wall Street, it's clear that this drop isn't a months-long process. It'll take a year or more.

"I think there's going to be a few people who've really gone over their skis and will get hurt badly," one billionaire value investor told me.

Silly season's over, folks

Before the pandemic, the most pressing problem for central banks around the world was the meandering recovery from the financial crisis. Growth was sluggish, and inflation was well short of their target, prompting the Fed and others to keep interest rates historically low to encourage banks to give out loans and juice the economy. A side effect of making money easy to borrow was that all kinds of garbage ideas could get funding and all kinds of garbage companies could stay in business. Combine that with lax corporate law enforcement and you have Wall Street without consequences. Investors were champing at the bit to pile into companies that used fantastical metrics, like WeWork, and lapped up every utterance from billionaire CEOs who promised flashy technology but consistently underdelivered, like, say, Elon Musk.

And that was before millions of bored, homebound Americans jumped into the market via Robinhood and other trading apps. Armed with their pandemic-era stimulus checks, they bought crypto, piled into blank-check companies called SPACs, and joined message boards claiming that stocks like AMC and GameStop were going "to the moon." Awash with capital, companies — especially in tech — saw their valuations leave Earth's atmosphere and make a home somewhere on Saturn. Short sellers were culled. Value investors went into hiding.

"We really did hit peak stupid, but peak stupid extended beyond truly, truly stupid and then we went to bottom-of-the-ocean-rare-earth-metal-companies stupid," the value investor told me.

This is the kind of bubble a financial professional should see forming — one where investors lose sight of fundamentals like profitability and cash flow and embrace a kind of Beanie Baby zeitgeist. In fairness, on Wall Street you can make a lot of money dancing to the music at a bubble party. Or you can stand by the snacks and watch. What you cannot do is pretend that the music will never stop.

We've all heard the sound financial insight that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I'd like to offer a corollary: The market can go back to rational faster than you can get out of it.  

Who could have seen this coming?

Comments in brackets.

Virgin Hyperloop axes half its staff in focus on freight

by Simeon Kerr and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Virgin Hyperloop has made almost half of its staff redundant as the company developing the high-speed transport system pivots from passenger travel to freight.

[In the overwhelming majority of cases, speed is worth far more money for people than for freight. When time is that valuable, you can always go by air, which also offers flexibility of destination.]

The US company said that 111 people were laid off on Friday, as the group focuses on delivering a cargo version of the experimental transport, which propels pods through low-pressure tubes at speeds of up to 670mph.

[Because completely changing your business model and infrastructure requirements requires way fewer staff.]

...

The company is “changing direction”, it added. “It really has more to do with global supply chain issues and all the changes due to Covid.”

[Just so we're clear. This is a land-based system that is, under the most wildly optimistic assumptions, years away from having a single operational line, let alone the extensive network needed to make this model viable. And they're making these changes in response to current "global supply chain issues."]

Backers of the company, which is developing technology first proposed by Elon Musk, include Dubai government logistics provider and ports operator DP World and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

[Neither Virgin nor any other "hyperloop" company has spent a single dollar developing Elon Musk's completely unworkable air-caster based proposal. They are working on maglev vactrains. All they kept was the name.]

...

And internal turmoil has followed the departure of Virgin Hyperloop co-founder Josh Giegel last year, triggering a “massive talent flight” as other executives also quit the company, according to one former senior employee. “Morale is low and there is no confidence in the new direction.”

Shunning passenger transport was triggering a “complete unravelling” at the group and would put its sole contract with the Saudi government in jeopardy, the person said.

...

“It’s abundantly clear that potential customers are interested in cargo, while passenger is somewhat farther away,” DP World said. “Focusing on pallets is easier to do — there is less risk for passengers and less of a regulatory process.”

[Though no apparent reduction in the infrastructure component, which means no significant cost reduction period.]

The company is also considering a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or Spac, two people briefed on its strategy said. Virgin Hyperloop, Virgin Group and DP World declined to comment on any plans.

[There had to be a Spac.]

This is all, to use the technical term, polishing the turd. The company, which has raised more than $400mn in funding, is very probably running on fumes at this point. They can't come out and say this because they need more money and there's nothing that spooks the greater fool herd like the whiff of desperation. I suspect even Dubai is looking for an exit and it's remarkably difficult for a big, flashy business idea to be so stupid that it scares Dubai.