I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL next WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON next FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.
Remember the Global War on Terror? I know, it's been a minute. But there was a time when we were all meant to take terrorism – real terrorism, the knocking-down-buildings kind, not the being-mean-to-Teslas kind – seriously.
Back in the early oughts, I remember picking up a copy of the Financial Times in an airport lounge and flipping through it, and coming across an "advice to corporate management" column in which the question was, "Should I take out terrorism insurance for my business?" The columnist's answer: "The actual risk to your business of a terrorism-related disruption rounds to zero. However: a) your shareholders don't understand this, an b) your insurance company does. That means that you can buy a very large amount of terrorism insurance for a very small amount of money, making this a cheap price to pay to mollify your easily frightened investors."
I never forgot that little piece of writing. It was a powerful reminder that successful large-scale enterprises must attend to the world as it is, not as ideology dictates that it should be. This was – and is – a deeply heterodox position among the ideological defenders of capitalism, who continue to uphold Milton Friedman's maxim that:
Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)
These ideologues – who often cross over from boardrooms into governments – are with the GW Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a member of the "reality-based community":
When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
But ultimately, someone has to make investments and plans that take accord of the world as it is, the adversaries they face, the real and material emergencies unfolding around them. When the Pentagon announces that henceforth the climate emergency will take a prime place in its threat assessments and budgets, that's not "the military going woke" – it's the military joining the reality-based community:
This explains the radical shear between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page – in which you'll learn that governments can't solve any problems and markets solve all problems (including the problem of governments) – and the news reporting within, in which the critical role of the state in regulating and fueling markets is acknowledged.
The tension between the right's ideologues in boardrooms and governments and the operational people in charge of keeping the machines running has only escalated since the War on Terror days. There's an important sense in which leftists – as materialists – are playing the same game as these operational managers of capitalism. Take Thomas Piketty, the socialist economist whose blockbuster 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century argued that rising inequality threatened capitalism itself:
By analyzing three centuries' worth of capital flows, Piketty showed that when inequality reached a certain tipping point, the result was societal upheaval that continued until so much capital had been destroyed that inequality was reduced (because everyone had been pauperized). Piketty appealed to capitalism's technocrats to institute redistributive programs. His point was that building hospitals and schools was ultimately cheaper than paying for the guard-labor you'd need to keep people from building guillotines outside the gates of your walled estate.
The rise and rise of surveillance tech, and its successors, such as lethal drones and offshore gulags, can be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of Piketty's thesis. By lowering the cost of guard labor, it might possible to stabilize a society with higher levels of inequality, by identifying and neutralizing the people who are radicalized by the system's unfairness before you get an outbreak of guillotines:
But reality is stubborn. Capitalism's defenders can insist that society will continue to function while wages stagnate and greedflation stokes the cost of living crisis, but ultimately, the military can't afford to have a fighting force that's in hock to payday lender usurers who are tormenting their families with arm-breaker collection calls:
As Stein's Law – a bedrock of finance – has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The ideologues of capitalism can insist that Luigi Mangione is a monster and an aberration, an armed freeloader who wants something for nothing. But privately, their own security forces are telling them otherwise.
Writing for The American Prospect, Daniel Boguslaw reports on a leaked intelligence dossier from the Connecticut regional intelligence center – a "fusion center" created as part of the War on Terror – wherein we learn that the American people sees Mangione as a modern Robin Hood:
Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online. It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.
The Connecticut fusion center isn't the only part of capitalism's operational wing that's taking notice of this. Today, Ken Klippenstein reports on an FBI threat assessment about the "heightened threat to CEOs":
The report comes from the FBI's counter-terrorism wing, which (Klippenstein notes) is in the business of rooting out "pre-crime" – identifying people who haven't committed a crime and neutralizing them. As Klippenstein writes, Trump AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have both vowed to treat anti-Tesla protests as acts of terror. That's the view from the top, but back on the front lines of the Connecticut fusion center, things are more reality-based:
[The public] may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.
Any good investor knows that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The only question is: will that halt is a controlled braking action, or a collision with reality's brick wall?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts
I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?
Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment
Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:
Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:
And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:
The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/
Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."
This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.
Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:
The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:
This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:
Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai
Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:
All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:
All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":
In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:
FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:
This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:
There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:
The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1
I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."
This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1
Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1
The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Karl Rove as an unnamed source in the NY Times in 2004
[People like you] are in what we call the reality-based community... [you] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.... That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
OMG thank you for your additions to that Joe Biden post. So much of the anti-establishment tumblr discourse is like "I heard this dude was trash. feed him to the dogs." American politics is intensely complex (and flawed) and it just seems like such an injustice to reduce issues to hearsay. I'm not saying Biden is a hero, but that the 24 hour news cycle and the perpetuation of these non-sourced truths in an echo chamber is literally how Trump won and it's no better when it's done on the left!!
You’re welcome!
As I said, I am here for reliable sourcing of news.
The post about Biden was not wrong, per se, but I wish the OP and the additional poster had sourced their information to a credible source. It is all the more frustrating because when I went digging I found several reliable sources within the first five minutes. It’s not that hard! And it doesn’t take too much time.
One of the important things about using reliable sources is that a) they provide, ideally, substantiated facts that can be analyzed and put into context and b) when they provide analysis it is, again ideally, not ideological rhetoric. We all need baseline facts with which to form opinions and views and arguments - they might differ but at least we’re starting from the same place.
I am as guilty as any on here of getting sucked into an echo-chamber. What is important is remembering that online spaces tend to be highly curated and so what you see on here is not what everyone else in the world thinks and also might suffer from severe bias.
Getting out, reading as un-biased as you can get sources, is very important to a healthy political dialogue. Something this country, all countries I shouldn’t wonder, need more of.
(also, I am sure you saw it already, but I wrote a brief thing exactly on this subject of the importance of reliable sources of information.)
I would like to take this moment to say a brief piece on the importance of reliable news sources.
One of the greatest problems with this election cycle was that we were all operating in closed circles with different facts. The Leftist/Progressives-Who-Think-HRC-Is-Literally-Evil have their “facts”, the liberals/HRC-Isn’t-Literal-Evil-But-Does-Have-issues-At-Least-Isn’t-A-Fascist had their “facts”, the conservatives/fuck-we-have-to-hold-the-party-together-fuck-fuck had theirs, and the alt-right/trump-is-a-god-make-america-great-again in turn had theirs.
Naturally, you should all see the problem here.
Part of this is due to the fact that we exist within echo chambers of self-curated spaces both online and often offline. This means that we only receive news that provides confirmation bias and we choose to believe sources, however dubious, so long as they continue to provide us with comfort that our world view in all ways is correct.
This is not a new phenomenon; however it has been exacerbated by the internet and places like Tumblr and Facebook. People do not read articles, they read headlines. They do not click through and investigate whether or not the source is credible, they accept truth at surface value.
Whilst we have a massive amount of information at our finger tips, and this is good and liberating and democratizing of knowledge, it does in turn require more work on our part to discern the fact from the bias from the fiction.
With the growth of online news outlets we begin to see places like Alternet and Breitbart (for two opposite sides, because ALL sides do this) which are not reliable sources. This leads to a devaluation of factual reality. In the words of the infamous Karl Rove memo from the 2000s, ‘when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities’ (x).
Rove was poking holes in the Reality-Based Community notion – that is that people base their opinions on observed reality rather than ideology or doctrine. It’s an informal phrase and one that was bandied about in a mocking manner in the 2000s when, as Rove so judiciously points out, the White House was creating new realities based on ideology and not observation of facts.
Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, anyone?
What I am asking is for people to be more critical, more ready to question their own assumptions and views. To understand that marketing campaigns, both for and against politicians, can be orchestrated as if it is fact when really they are doing what Rove and other Bush era politicians did (and many more, both before and after Bush).
Prior to the internet and places like Vox (which I have my own problems with. They do not do journalism so much as analysis and present conclusions for their audience, assuming their audience cannot do so on their own. That is not journalism. That is a sham) and other outlets Americans got their news from limited sources: three to four TV stations, newspapers, and the radio.
Yes, this then caused issues of monopoly of information but one of the benefits is that we were all working with the same set of information. You have facts about a situation and while you and I might draw different conclusions from them at least we are working within the same reality.
Not so, at the moment. The progressive reality versus the liberal reality versus the centre-right/Reagan-era conservative reality versus the alt-Right reality. The white reality and the black reality and the latino reality and the Asian reality. The straight reality the queer reality the ace reality. This does not allow for conducive conversation because we are all having different conversations with different facts and different perceptions of what we assume to be reality.
Part of this, especially the racial and gender/sexuality based conversations, can be aided through simple education and contact. Studies show that those who have consistent contact with the perceived Other gradually lessen prejudice and anti-Other views they originally carried (Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination, Stuart Oskamp ed., ch. 5).
Policy and political conversations on the other hand require a base line reality. A point of sameness from which we can all work. If we are approaching climate change with a different set of “facts”, all treated as if they are equally valid, we are not going to get anywhere. We have not gotten anywhere. We will continue to not get anywhere.
All of this to say: when you see things floating around on your dashboard or your FB feed look at the source, if it’s not a reliable newspaper or news source that has qualified and trained journalists be wary. Find something to back it up (or disprove it, as the case may be).
Be smart about shit. Don’t assume that something is true just because it aligns with what you believe. Always question and be critical. Without that we cannot have a healthy democracy.
The aide said that guys like me 'were in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from our judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do
Unnamed senior advisor to George W. Bush, speaking to (brilliant) journalist Ron Suskind
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html
People like you are part of what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality... That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
An aide to George W Bush to reporter Ron Suskind, summer 2002. "Without a Doubt", Ron Suskind, 'The New York Times', October 17, 2004
