There’s a lot that could’ve gone wrong for me in 2015: I could have been unemployed, I could have been kicked out of the United States, I could have lost the relationship I’m in. That none of the above happened is a minor miracle I’m thankful for.
Before you turn away, this post isn’t about me. Notice the New Year is one of those rare times that make people want to reflect in public about their successes, their challenges, their hopes and fears. In North America there are other holidays that elicit that reflection - Thanksgiving, Christmas, maybe the Fourth of July. But public reflection isn’t the point of those holidays - it’s instead family, probably consumerism, probably nationalism.
I want to make New Year’s Eve a holiday for public reflection. Consider all your friends who brace social media to post confessions. Consider all the countries who only gets covered by the media for their New Year’s celebrations. For all the cynicism about New Year’s parties, consider them as events where strangers enjoy life with other strangers, and consider that as a powerful act.
So fuck the fireworks - what’s more amazing than the fireworks are the myriad experiences around us, close to us and throughout the world. All of these experiences matter. Behind platitudes like “peace on Earth” and the forgotten resolutions is this simple truth.
The attacks in Paris form Europe’s 9/11, not because they change everything. The Madrid bombing in 2004 killed more people; there were the 7/7 London bombing, the Theo van Gogh murder, the 2003 Turkey bombing, and other sudden terrorist attacks that occurred before and faded away. The attacks in Paris form Europe’s 9/11 because the response is all too predictable.
Here’s a different way of setting up the argument. Why was 9/11 not referred to by anyone as “The American Lockerbie bombing” (except maybe by conspiracy theorists)? The whole point was that 9/11 was an unprecedented strike into a superpower’s consciousness, an attack that upended U.S. foreign policy and international relations as we know it. Bombings in London and Madrid were ostensibly retaliatory, but was not instrumental in altering international relations, by then entangled at the level of national leaders instead of the public.
Paris is different. It is the crescendo of a stumbling European foreign policy over the past decade, like 9/11 was to a U.S. looking for direction after the Cold War - the blockade of Iraq, failed interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Kosovo. The argument is not that the above interventions were individually good or bad, but that they were not yet coherent.
The same took place with Europe, which not only considers whether an European grand strategy exists but whether an European grand strategy is even possible, uniting its member nations. Should the arrow be pointed to the Arab Peninsula, or North Africa, or former colonies, or Russia? But, with a bit of prodding from the U.S., Europe - namely, France and the U.K. - have doubled down on the Middle East again.
What is a 9/11, or a Paris shooting, against this backdrop? It is grand strategy collapsing underneath domestic insecurity. When a country’s citizens are gunned down on the street by strangers, how little interests previously declared as integral to national security seem: “energy independence,” “free trade,” “geopolitical alliances.” No rebuilt grand strategy can avoid the question “how can your citizens not be gunned down on the street by strangers.”
The U.S. had dealt with a debate over grand strategy right out of the Cold War. Ideology was rampant: the realists, the neoliberals, the liberal democrats (not to be confused with the neoliberals). The precise details of their thinking does not matter as much as what overtook them: the “Clash of Civilizations people.” Call them neoconservatives if you want, but I think my label is more inclusive, more populist.
After the Huntington essay in the nineties, the Clash of Civilizations people view future conflict as cultural rather as ideological. As the bipolar world order collapsed, countries will ally themselves to culturally homogeneous nations and breed conflict with other civilization alliances for global power.
What is meant with the War on Terror thing, the idea of spreading democracy to the Middle East? It was the Clash of Civilizations people ascendant, seizing the fact that popular support sided heavily with any grand strategy that could promise no strangers gunning down citizens in the streets. It would hurt the Clash of Civilizations people and its opponents to see the results, which were inconclusive for the new grand strategy. Obama winded down Iraq and Afghanistan - but not fully, either.
The second test could have happened in the Pacific, except the Chinese still would rather wait than strike. It could have happened with ISIS’s first appearance, which could be evidence for one side of the Western-Islamic conflict hypothesis holding true.
Now, the other side of the hypothesis is to be tested. Europe remembers the bombings of the past, hears about refugees in perpetuity, feels threatened by immigration in general. Will Europeans seize the moment in Paris and be full-throated partners with the U.S., ready to fight a civilizational struggle again?
There is admittedly a conspiratorial bent to this prediction, equating it with a false flag operation of some sort. That is not my point. My point is that, to the people who see everything hued by ideology, what happened in Paris is not just a time for mourning.
This is the first way in which the response to Paris is predictable. Both sides have vested interests, though those who just fell out of power will want the victory more. Just ask Marco Rubio.
The second way involves human rights. The evidence for this is much more direct: will France round up its refugees; expand its domestic security apparatus; stick electronic tags on all “terrorism suspects,” like Sarkozy suggests? It will also be the subject of debate, like they had been in the U.S. in the post 9/11 era.
The debate will take the form of articles like this one by William Saletan. Yes, it’s a Slate article, but the gist of it could be readopted: the decade-long stretch free from mass terror attacks in the Western world, and the liberty of national governments to muddle out a new direction, was only a “period.” They will be addressed to people with preciously little memory of fear (not just youth in this case).
It will also be a segmented debate. People have been reposting news about the ISIS attack in Lebanon, or the Kenya shooting by Al-Shabab earlier this year. But what is the point of these articles apart from persuading other Americans or Europeans? We are not yet at a point where everyone strokes her chin about the questions behind Kenya’s own campaign against Islamists in Somalia, or the mangling between ISIS and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
That is a clear sign of rights discourse on the wane: let’s not wonder about expanding the frontier, but fortifying our beachheads. Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, has already declared a state of war. Hollande wants a state of emergency lasting into the year. there is no time to waste.
It is dismal to predict everything that happened in the U.S. will happen again in Europe. But in some ways I am optimistic: what will happen in Europe will not be much worse from what happened in the U.S. Some aspects certainly will: Europe will never agree to resettle 120,000 refugees again, or everyone will know that mass surveillance is around the corner,
Two mechanisms will offer stability. First, power is diffused enough among its sovereign nations that a coordinated security platform will still be hard to establish (I would guess over which countries foot the bill). Second, integration is still valuable enough that a country will not unilaterally risk leaving the EU and build a hardline policy relative to the EU’s poorly managed one.
It also bears saying that counter-intelligence staff between countries have been in communication throughout the past decade, setting terrorism warnings and military drills in relative secrecy from public inquiry. The worst excesses will not be repeated, which makes investigating the ones they realized work best even more difficult.
However, maybe we could take another step back viewing the situation. The response to Paris is predictable for all its introspection toward the Western world. We are not at the point where we ask how Chinese or Indians react to ISIS (not well, given China and India were both subject to terrorist attacks in the past decade) or ask how it matters.
European grand strategy now has to focus on the Middle East, if only due to public pressure alone. Five years onward, though, who knows if we would know any of it mattered. In the multipolar world, the question is never just about if the Western nation should bomb or shoot. It is also about the Faustian bargain by Iraqis who accept living under ISIS, about that by Turks who support a movement that intimidates Kurds, or if the Western nation’s non-intervention leaves room for another country to intervene with greater brutality.
Otherwise, we have this absurd scenario: a decade and a half after Europeans mocked Americans for triggering war abroad due to their domestic insecurity, the Americans can say the exact same thing to the Europeans.
No one would be the wiser. Theoretical arguments do not translate well across languages. Neither does fear.
This is ostensibly a post about trigger warnings, just like how most discussion around trigger warnings are not about trigger warnings themselves. The structure is weird. I start by offering a model of trigger warnings, though the second details are not really relevant to the point in the second half. Some characteristics of the model, though, will be crucial in discussing that second half.
How should we best think about trigger warnings? This is a subtle question, which much of the discussion around them evade entirely. The thesis ends up not being about trigger warnings, but about “The New Infantilism,” “The Closing of the American Mind,” “wussification.” It almost reads like a clash between generations, until you realize that the Gen-Xers that are on the offensive today were just as ridiculed by baby boomer Allan Bloom in the eighties.
Think about trigger warnings instead as what its proponents always claim - as a mechanism to improve general well-being. Think also about how the modern customs around trigger warnings arose specifically out of online publishing and blog culture in the mid-00s (Buzzfeed wrote a good piece on this).
Here’s a possible model of trigger warnings. Its existence is tied to the market structure of online publishing, a set of homogeneous good markets, separated by severe informational asymmetries. The request for trigger warnings screens ability in each homogeneous market. The interplay between perfect information within the homogeneous good market and imperfect information between markets rationalizes trigger warnings’ utility to the in-group and the out-group’s befuddlement toward it.
In real people words, online publishing is a cutthroat business. There’s no guarantee that anyone will read your blog, nor that you know much about blogs that exist outside what friends with common interests show you. Consider that trigger warnings exist on feminist blogs: while feminism is a complicated subject, most regular visitors will not spurn Jezebel and live or die only by what’s on xoJane. In addition, Jezebel and xoJane are not going to make a day’s worth of posts giving hat tips to Harry Potter fanfiction or academic philosophy.
Let’s say someone stumbles on your blog post on philosophy. While she agrees with most of what you say, your casual reference of aborted fetuses upsets her; she thinks you have no idea what you’re talking about. She will have read many posts by people like you in her Google/Tumblr searches.
But she has an idea to differentiate the people who don’t know what they talk about from those who do: trigger warnings. “Label potentially upsetting material as trigger warnings; I will think you're a better person for doing so, and I will get less up in your grill about any misconception I see." Those people who see substantial cost in writing that warning - and people do - get pushed down in the market.
Since each corner of the blogging/tweeting world has its own chronology and specific controversies, the screening mechanism that is the trigger warning could work within that corner. Outside of that corner, the TWs designed for that corner do not work as well. The controversies of feminist blogs are not as heated in academic philosophy, such that trigger warnings applied indiscriminately will not be an effective screening device for the philosophically-interested reader.
What’s the point? The real panic around trigger warnings surrounds its usage in colleges. I’ve always struggled to explain how my views are in that debate, but if you absorbed the model I presented you can understand the following argument.
Trigger warnings serve a screening role on Tumblr and in blogs, where the decision facing the consumer is to click on a web page or not. Since consumers can even filter trigger warning tags on social media these days, there are no failures in the screening mechanism’s implementation.
Trigger warnings are not suited for colleges, not because it violates the value of free speech or whatever, but because it cannot be effectively implemented. College is not a market society; it’s an apprenticeship society. The mentors, college faculty, has power the way a blogger does not; he can credibly refuse to follow the mechanism by right of “academic freedom.” The decision facing the consumers is no longer just clicking on a web site, but weighing the opportunity cost of forking tens of thousands of dollars and four years of your freedom for an apprenticeship.
The stakes are higher. The screening mechanism, in econ-speak, is not assuredly “incentive-compatible” with the faculty member. Nor is it “budget-balanced,” in that there may be no way to transfer money between actors so no one feels they lost out submitting themselves to this mechanism.
At the same time, trigger warnings are compatible with the value of free speech. Hell, it exists because it’s a mechanism that makes the marketplace of ideas run more smoothly. Those who disobey the apprenticeship structure of college courses, working instead with market-making administrators, are the ones pursuing the market solution here. (It is then ironic that libertarian blogs, like Reason.com, come out so strongly against these market-based solutions.)
Yet we should recognize that real hysteria around trigger warnings are not generated by students, or reflected in American society outside of being the butt of a joke. The hysteria is generated by faculty: faculty who fear administration breathing down their necks, faculty who gave up a decade of their freedom for the promise of academic freedom.
If the hysterics claim trigger warning mechanisms are an extension of 90s P.C. culture, then I can claim their hysteria are an extension of encroaching college administration from the 90s onwards. The “corporatization of college education,” if it debases education in the long run, takes away faculty’s bargaining power in the short run. Then their complaints are less about trigger warnings as they are about administration’s attempts to enforce those mechanisms, taking faculty under inquisition or whatever.
I propose something else: the hysteria over trigger warnings by faculty is reluctance to acknowledge that they have lost. Students will rather cooperate with administration to deter faculty than the other way around. “Trigger warnings” are only one such policy. Maybe faculty have a hard time understanding this: what about the value of academic freedom?
The answer isn’t complicated. The barriers to entry for academia - up to a decade spent as a PhD student, postdocs, jargon, student debt - selects against college-attending minorities and underprivileged groups. It’s likelier for underprivileged students to stop by the office of college administrators, who may have more in common with them than faculty from two generations and two income classes away. If you had to choose between academia and college administration, the latter has better exit options straight out of senior year.
That is why infantilism is a loaded word - a term used by certain faculty who are upset they are now part of a competitive labour market, with purpose of denigrating their customers or competitors to their position. In most American industries, ill will like this will get you fired. We will have to see with the ivory tower.
This is a post about the Greek crisis, surprising as it may seem; it’s supposed to be a tragedy, not a mystery. Indeed, we were supposed to have known after the referendum what the outcome would be: Greece sliced out of the Eurozone. In our pride, something has been left unsaid: the sheer dearth of what we know happened during these Eurogroup summits. Same can be said about what happened during Syriza meetings, absent this Ambrose Evans-Pritchard piece about Syriza planning to send out IOUs as they prepare to run out of Euros.
This is a bit boggling to my North American mind, where there’s always a staffer in some political leader’s office willing to stab someone’s back off-record. The Greek crisis may seal the deal on the fate of the European Union, but we aren’t close to preparing a history of a four-year long event, absent the NSA snooping Merkel to reveal she knew Greek debt was unsustainable.
Let’s take this further. What does it imply when people accuse both sides of being slaves to “the idea of austerity,” “ordoliberalism,” “far-left ideology” or other such vagaries? It possibly implies said people don’t have a finer understanding of what’s motivating the sides here. On the non-Greek side, I count three exclusive incentives:
The incentive to retain credibility, marked by the theory that Europeans need to proceed in the usual creditor way to a defaulting Greece.
The incentive to maintain political control and totally carve out the Greek regime, expressed here and here:
The incentive to get our money back, either to continue an implicit bailout of banks with Greek sovereign debt (here) or to prevent a total default on the current two bailouts (here)
On the Greek side, I count two exclusive incentives: the incentive to build a leftist state in a defaulted Greece (Greek observers claim this a lot) or the incentive for rabble-rousing nationalism (what leftist critics of Syriza claim).
On both sides there is apparently the incentive for solidarity to a member of Europe, but if that was dominant we would have had a solution a long time ago.
We have 4-3 competing incentives on both sides, 18 players with veto power on the non-Greek side (since a third bailout or debt relief needs to be approved by every Eurozone parliament), and about a dozen players on the Greek side (the size of the Greek ministry). Many of the players got to where they are because of a coalition agreement - Syriza literally being a coalition of parties - and is under threat of veto.
How the hell can you predict or even speculate what has or will happen with so many permutations of scenarios?
A subtler point is that people have been keen to describe the Greek crisis as a conflict between the “Eurogroup” and “Greece.” But this partition of the status quo into two “coalitions” isn’t good for any predictive power unless you’ve predicted the prisoner’s dilemma outcome since 2011 - a Grexit.
While that is increasingly likely, the chaos governing these negotiations make speculation on a deal not easy. The same goes for what the fallout could be, in terms of changes in expectations toward European states, following Grexit. The same even goes for interpreting what was behind the decisions that led the Greek crisis to this point, before which tiny shifts in preferences exposed Europe’s unrobustness.
The more we talk about the endless summits and the contingency strategies, the more we hide the looming uncertainty. Uncertainty does not mean we’re headed for disaster, but it does dampen anyone’s ability to make a point about this whole crisis.
It’s a wholly different mystery why no one bartering in this chaotic system has started spilling the beans about the process, eliminating possible distributions of incentives across the players and the uncertainty. Or is Varoufakis the first one to do it, feeding Evans-Pritchard what he knows? Who the hell knows?
Four days after a shooter killed nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, this terrorist act has been retold in a few ways:
Ta-Nehisi Coates will argue along the white supremacy line, where the shooter’s motive falls along lines that have been rehashed throughout American history, since the dawn of slavery.
Bill Maher will argue along the right-wing media line, where the shooter was incensed by a bout of sensationalism on Fox News et al. that drives people to such madness.
Foreign correspondents in the US, with some liberal pundits, will argue along the culture of gun violence line, which finds second amendment rights just as inexplicable as when they learned about them two decades ago.
Facebook is popping with the solidarity against lone wolves line, where the shooter only needs to be thought of as batshit crazy and the real heroes are the congregation members who still forgave.
On a site like Infowars, there’s talk about a drug epidemic line, where the shooter’s madness was the inevitable consequence of the pills he was popping, supplied in the shadow of big pharma.
These processes of narrative reinvention and reimagination, spewed out mere days after the event is over in the age of hot takes, wouldn’t be so repulsive if it wasn’t centred around a mass murder.
That’s a bold claim to make. I’m not arguing that any one of those five groups above should stop talking about it; it’s their job, it’s what they do. What interests me is what happens after we latch Charleston to the narrative we linked together about how our society is today.
By a good stroke of fortune, we have President Obama and Jon Stewart considering a question that should always be asked in a tragedy’s wake. Though we say we understand what happened, don’t we still choose to do jack shit about it? Then what the hell is this understanding of ours supposed to do?
As consolation? Consolation that, had more people understood what is happening in society the way you do, this shooting could have been prevented? These thoughts entertain the imagination, since we can conjure up universes where a marauding Black friend of the shooter took him seriously or a church member was an expert marksman. But this doesn’t make conversation go anywhere.
Really, any argument that says our understanding should serve to console ourselves is questionable. Consolation is just a wordier way of exactly choosing to do nothing about the situation, which is what seems wrong in the first place.
As an invitation? Invitation to others to feel the same moral outrage that you have toward white supremacy, or the right-wing media, or drugs and all that? Then we must ask ourselves why we should all be responding with moral outrage to what’s wrong with the world. There may be a case to make for someone to think coldly about this issue, to keep calm and think of policy solutions.
As affirmation of your own biases? That would be an awfully pessimistic picture of what we should do in times like these. It would affirm the idea of an American beyond saving, and the best we can do is feel self-righteous coasting through it.
Obviously I’m not exhausting all the possibilities there, or making very tight arguments for or against them. This question - “what is this understanding of ours supposed to do” is exhausting. It’s a question that has relevance in the absence of anything being done.
In a more hopeful world, we would think that we would balance the probabilities among potential causes of this shooting and other events like it. We would be Bayesians, taking in the evidence after the event and figuring out which policies would have the most preventive effect. Then we would divide our activity lobbying to end certain ills in our society, in proportion to the amount of harm they do.
But, instead of reason impacting our politics, politics now impact our reason. It’s almost as if our thinking has become colonized by the American political cycle: there is only enough time to pass through one law that addresses one cause, so we have to choose the one cause we feel would make the most difference. Other reasons do not aid our thinking, but are our enemies.
What the hell do we expect from Charleston? I no longer think it’s so crazy, following the above discussion, to answer “everything that we expected before.”
The usage of we throughout this piece has been broad: American or non-American, black or white, insightful or absurd, independent of how clever we may seem. It’s a testament to the real degree of segregation and isolation in society when even a mass shooting isn’t so uniformly impactful to trigger a change in these expectations.
I’ve seen a lot of advertising by some Northwestern startup trying to make money off of major prereq tutoring. This got me thinking: how do we think about part-time tutoring today? (the following is really rough)
Part-time tutoring is prolific. Test-prep companies have been around forever and hire graduates looking for work. The internet made it easier to bring small prep companies to scale (like this one). You can also auction off your tutoring services on a centralized platform (like Craigslist or InstaEDU).
Economic trends don’t really click sometimes, though, until you see a good headline. Here’s one: “Are Tutors the New Waiters?” It nicely sums up the idea that high-performing students can work in tutoring as a part-time job instead of washing dishes and waiting tables. Other non-obvious consequences of this idea:
Looking at each case of private tutoring in isolation, you may easily dismiss each occurrence as a sneak assault on the integrity of education and all. However, looking at private tutoring as a work alternative, the benefits are clear. It is obviously more productive to put smart minds on intellectual questions than on dishwashing chores.
Until the past few decades, tutoring was either a voluntary act of kindness or not part of a salaried labor market. How has it become a profitable, salaried profession? I want to say it’s due to search costs - we live in an age with greater choice of specialized education paths, which means more people outside of those paths looking in. Tutoring rates then reflect the search costs of those wanting information that gets them on the path.
Tutoring as a profession breeds inequality, independent of tutoring firms recruiting students from top schools. Let’s say there are no costs to starting up a tutoring service. Not everyone is equipped to be a good tutor; in fact, you would think there is a strong correlation between being a good tutor and receiving tutorship, such that good tutoring practices are handed down between clients.
If we assume high-productivity tutoring practices are handed down in this way, with some probability of failure, the supply of high-productivity tutors would decrease over time. The clearing price for high-productivity tutors would rise, and those of ineffective tutors would fall if the market were to clear.
There’s a tradeoff here between the raw increase in welfare tutoring brings and the growth in inequality it fosters, independent of what the demand for tutors looks like. People will rail on about the privilege of elite tutoring firms, but they will be a small part of a tutoring economy if tutoring websites become big worldwide. Independent of elite firms, inequality will occur.
My model above is bad in one way: it does not allow for the possibility of (re)discovering high-productivity tutoring practices, likely from someone revisiting information stored in books or on the internet (like Stackexchange). That’s why I foresee debate over whether we should be willing to answer random people’s questions on the internet for free.
We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in: inequality, corruption, economic injustice, etc.
Simon Pegg, actor and filmmaker, claims that geek culture has dumbed down society and left many people feeling hurt and betrayed.
I know that since Ebola is no longer a risk in America and other Western countries, most people have stopped caring about it, but it’s nice to know that as of today, Liberia is officially Ebola-free.
Graduated high school. | Kissed someone. | Collected something really stupid.| Smoked a cigarette. | Got so drunk you passed out. | Gone to a rock concert. | Helped someone. | Gone fishing. | Watched four movies in one night. | Gone long periods of time without sleep. | Lied to someone. | Snorted cocaine. | Failed a class. | Smoked weed. | Dealt drugs. | Been in a car accident. | Been in a tornado. | Been to a funeral. | Burned yourself. | Ran a marathon. | Cried yourself to sleep. | Spent over $200 in one day. | Flown on a plane. | Cheated on someone. | Been cheated on. | Written a 10 page letter. | Gone skiing. | Been sailing. | Had a best friend. | Lost someone you loved. | Shoplifted something. | Been to jail. | Dangerously close to being in jail. | Had detention. | Got in trouble for something you didn’t do. | Stolen books from the library. | Gone to a different country. | Dropped out of school. | Watched the “Harry Potter” movies. | Had an online diary. | Had a yard sale. | Had a lemonade stand. | Actually made money at the lemonade stand. | Been in a school play. | Been fired from a job. | Swam with dolphins. | Taken a lie detector test. | Voted for someone on a reality TV show. | Written poetry. | Read more than 20 books a year. | Gone to Europe. | Loved someone you shouldn’t have. | Used a coloring book over age 12. | Had surgery. | Had stitches. | Taken a taxi. | Seen the Washington Monument. | Had more than 5 IM’s/online conversations going at once. | Overdosed. | Been in a fist fight/split one up. | Gone surfing in California. | Had a hamster/guinea pig. | Pet a wild animal. | Used a credit card. | Did “spirit day” at school. | Dyed your hair. | Got a tattoo. | Got straight A’s. | Been on the Honor Roll. | Know someone with HIV or AIDS. | Made out with someone. | Played on a sports team. | Snuck out of the house. | Swore at a teacher. | Gone laser tagging. | Had a romantic relationship. | Been on the TV. | French braided. | Skinny-dipped. | Driven a car. | Performed in front of an audience. | Gone bungee-jumping. | Been to Mexico. | Crashed a car. | Sky dived. | Been kissed in the rain. | Made an 11:11 wish. | Drank alcohol. | Made a mistake.
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