NYT opinion columnist M. Gessen displays shockingly little concern for free-speech values...

... in the podcast "The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate/It’s our politics": 

I think we need a harm reduction philosophy of covering Trump and his party and the election. And these are some things to consider: One is to cut his or Vance’s mic when they start lying.

So not only is censorship the go-to remedy, but it's one-sided — openly one-sided.  

And I know this is a hugely controversial idea, and it’s usually controversial because it will enable them to scream censorship, but there needs to be a philosophy of journalism that is oriented toward the public good.

That is, Gessen has thought through the censorship problem and determined that "harm reduction" or "the public good" supervenes the free flow of ideas to the people and allowing us to choose what we like. Gesson seems to object even to the speech that is objecting to the suppression of speech — to the "them" who "scream censorship."

When I talk to my students about it...

Gessen teaches journalism at the City University of New York.

I always say: Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned.

How is speech like water? Speech comes from a human mind. And when is speech "information"? When it is truth? Poison is not water, but an additional substance tainting the water. Lies and mistakes in speech are not like poison in water. How would you go about purifying speech and turning it into "information"? The traditional American ideology is that the way to get to the truth is to have a free flow of words — a marketplace of ideas — and to let people read and hear and think and have their own discussions about what is true. How could you possibly know the truth in advance and deliver it to the people? 

But Gessen pushes on with the analogy, which has been tested in the CUNY classroom:

And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public...

So a censor is posited at the outset. 

... it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water.

The censor is presumed to have the capacity to tell truth from lies. And the government is visualized as having the power to criminalize speech.

And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans. And if we think of ourselves as conveyors, as mediators, as media, who transport this information, this water, then we have this abiding responsibility to do something about it. We can’t just turn to one of the candidates and say, “I’d like to see you take a sip of that. And see what happens to you.”

So one idea is to turn off the microphone when the disfavored candidate is deemed to be lying. But that is not all. Gessen continues:

I think we also need to figure out ways to contextualize the candidates. Certainly, this two-minute-per-person debate format is not conducive to creating nuanced or contextualized pictures.

Ah! Nuance! Context! I have tags for "nuance" and "context." I love when that happens. A chime goes off in my blogger brain. But back to Gessen:

But what if we had a different format? What if journalists prepared fact-based reports to create context for the debate? Who said that the debate absolutely has to be broadcast live? If we have one person who is lying in the debate, maybe that’s not the best possible format.

If you increase the power of the journalists who are known to disfavor one of the candidates, why would that person agree to debate? There are so many other outlets for free speech. The water overflows its once-solid banks and floods where it will. Now where is your fantasy of control?

Quebec police warn citizens not to post video of individuals stealing packages from doorsteps because it might amount to "defamation."

The world has gone mad. https://t.co/wBxNJp7O3i

— Christina Hoff Sommers (@CHSommers) January 10, 2024

On that theory, they should tell you never to speak in public about anyone, because you might defame them. What is the law of defamation in Quebec? Is there still a criminal provision?

How could a video of package theft be false? I don't know, but I'm going to stop redelivering misdelivered packages that arrive at my door. What if that video were run backward and put it on line? Context!

"The contradictions of a gay man falling in genuine love with a woman — while retaining his attraction to men — are captured..."

"... in a lovely passage using Bernstein’s score for the ballet 'Fancy Free' (which would morph into the Broadway musical 'On the Town'), turning the dance into a metaphorical pas de deux. (Or is it trois?).... Lenny is the free-spirited, wildly charismatic star of his and Felicia’s lives, but it’s Felicia who grounds him.... When tensions in their relationship reach their apotheosis, [Bradley] Cooper stages the showdown in their bedroom at the Dakota apartment building while the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade tootles by outside. Just as Felicia is hurling the most hurtful, damaging things she can say — warning her husband that if he isn’t careful, he’ll end up 'a lonely old queen' — a giant inflatable Snoopy floats by the window, a sad, whimsically surreal rebuke."

Writes Ann Hornaday in "Bravo, Bradley Cooper: ‘Maestro’ is a grand, messy symphony of moments/The director and star of the Leonard Bernstein biopic tells the conductor’s story, and that of his wife (Carey Mulligan), with electric, sometimes scattershot verve" (WaPo).

Okay. I'm all for such tootling. But is there any of "Radical Chic" in this new movie? (Read Tom Wolfe's great essay here, where it belongs, at New York Magazine.)

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition."

"Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has 'invented' himself by saying 'no' to nature – consists of his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgic and in search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude."

Wrote Octavio Paz in "The Labyrinth of Solitude." 

I wasn't reading that book. I encountered the first line of the quote in a puzzle just now and went looking for more context. I became aware that the sentence was alone and experienced a longing that it realize itself in a paragraph. 

"Susan Benesch, the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said that genocidal leaders often use fear of a looming threat..."

"... to prod groups into pre-emptive violence. Those who commit the violence do not need to hate the people they are attacking. They just need to be afraid of the consequences of not attacking. For instance, before the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Hutu politicians told the Hutus that they were about to be exterminated by Tutsis. During the Holocaust, Nazi propagandists declared that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people. Before the Bosnian genocide, Serbs were warned to protect themselves from a fundamentalist Muslim threat that was planning a genocide against them. 'I was stunned at how similar this rhetoric is from case to case,' Ms. Benesch told me.... 'It’s as if there’s some horrible school that they all attend.'...  Fear speech is much less studied than hate speech.... The 'nontoxic and argumentative nature' of fear speech prompts more engagement than hate speech...."

 
From "Few Are Addressing One of Social Media’s Greatest Perils" by Julia Angwin (NYT).

Is this a suggestion that "fear speech" should be censored? No. What Angwin recommends that social media companies do more fact-checking, add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts," and rely less on the kind of "engagement algorithms" that promote "outrageous and divisive content." She'd also like us, the users of social media, to notice fear speech and to challenge it ourselves, to provide our own counterspeech — "not necessarily to change the views of true believers but rather to provide a counter‌narrative for people watching on the sidelines."

That's a big part of what I try to do with this blog.

"A fantasy persists, in the popular imagination, of sperm as Olympic swimmers, racing toward an egg that passively awaits fertilization."

"Clancy and Hazard are both keen to complicate this simplistic picture of conception. Sperm are drawn in by uterine waves, Clancy asserts, 'a special type of muscle contraction that helps control the speed at which sperm reach the egg, propelling them on a journey that would otherwise be too long for them to make on their own.' Hazard also emphasizes the organ’s strength. 'The womb is a muscle,' she writes. 'We can compare it quite accurately to a clenched fist, not only in size, but in power.'"

 
From "What We Still Don’t Know About Periods/The stigma surrounding menstruation may have had severe consequences for research into reproductive health" (The New Yorker).

What simplistic pictures are you keen to complicate in the name of womanly self-esteem?

Quickly escalating on Twitter, an out-of-context quick escalation.

Someone got misgendered in the room and all hell broke loose pic.twitter.com/nAocDH5NDe

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 28, 2023

I tried to find the context, but didn't. Perhaps you can help.

"You were really shouting at him.... Your shouting, though, was really loud.... You want to get more information from him, not... telling him what he needs to do. You kind of sounded like you were telling him what to do.... You don’t want to do that."

Said Bob Woodward's wife — Elsa Walsh, also a reporter — after she heard him talking on the phone to then-President Trump.

Quoted in "The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger" (WaPo).

Woodward's response was "Okay. But we’re in a different world now, sweetie."

You can hear Bob Woodward yelling at Trump at the link. WaPo and Woodward are making a big thing out of sharing the tapes. Shades of Nixon, perhaps, or so they hope. But Trump wasn't speaking to his insiders in secret. He was doing an interview with Bob Woodward. Yet Woodward and WaPo present this disclosure of the "tapes" as if they are stretching the limits of their professional methods in order to warn the public about... what they've been warning the public about throughout the Trump era:

Context? We don't need context!

pic.twitter.com/HWjjhFUuBO

— Comics Outta Context 🏳️‍🌈 (@ComicContext) July 27, 2022

"All the kids were screaming and yelling. I remember, I said to the kids, I go, 'Well, OK, well, what do you guys think I did wrong?'"

"And a line formed. These kids said everything about gender, and this and that and the other, but they didn’t say anything about art.... And this is my biggest gripe with this whole controversy with 'The Closer': That you cannot report on an artist’s work and remove artistic nuance from his words. It would be like if you were reading a newspaper and they say, 'Man Shot In The Face By a Six-Foot Rabbit Expected To Survive,' you’d be like, 'Oh my god,’ and they never tell you it’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon.... When I heard those talking points coming out of these children’s faces, that really, sincerely, hurt me. Because I know those kids didn’t come up with those words. I’ve heard those words before. The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it... And it has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my right, my freedom, of artistic expression. That is valuable to me. That is not severed from me. It’s worth protecting for me, and it’s worth protecting for everyone else who endeavors in our noble, noble professions.... And these kids didn’t understand that they were instruments of oppression. And I didn’t get mad at them.... They’re kids. They’re freshmen. They’re not ready yet. They don’t know."

Said Dave Chappelle, quoted in "Dave Chappelle special quietly released on Netflix, defends trans jokes" (NY Post). I need to watch this immediately.

UPDATE, 8:59 a.m.: I just watched it.

The Ideal City.

That's "The Ideal City" by Fra Carnevale, c. 1480–1484. 

This post was created to front-page something that appeared after the fold on another post today, so if you care about context, read through to the "FROM THE EMAIL" section of the post that went up at 7:09 a.m.

I like it out of context too. The image itself seems out of context — idealized.

"More than two thousand episodes [of Desert Island Discs] are available online as downloads or podcasts..."

"... and I began listening to them a few years ago, as a way of glimpsing times other than my own. I love hearing about the path-altering memories of others—what it was like to experience Beatlemania or Motown or punk before they were settled narratives. At first, I was drawn to specific guests, hoping to learn more about the interiority of David Beckham (the Stone Roses, Elton John, Sidney Bechet), what kind of music Zadie Smith liked (Biggie, Prince, Madonna), where the cultural theorist Stuart Hall found inspiration (Bach, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley—'the sound that saved a lot of second-generation black West Indian kids from just, you know, falling through a hole in the ground').... It’s come to seem less like a show about music and creative inspiration than one about the possibility of loneliness. How do you find meaning in total isolation?... As many people prepare for weeks of 'social distancing' and working from home, we return to comforts.... It never occurred to me, until fairly recently, that this exercise was different from merely naming your favorite songs, or what you considered to be the best.... I didn’t realize that the desert-island choices were really a question about mortality.... What would it mean to survive and find yourself alone (Pharoah Sanders)? Would you bask in memories of friendship (the Beach Boys) and good times (Derrick May), of your greatest love (the Intruders)? Would those memories be too painful? Maybe you would want to listen to music that existed free of context—the last splendid and uplifting thing you heard before getting lost, a reminder that the world goes on without you?"

From "Join Me in My Obsession with 'Desert Island Discs'" by Hua Hsu (in The New Yorker). Go here for the shows.

ADDED: To be clear: "It’s an interview show with a simple premise: each celebrity guest discusses the eight recordings that he or she would bring if cast away alone on a desert island." Just 8 songs. Not albums.

A "master class in biased reporting"? Seems like pretty normal biased reporting to me.

Let me be direct and clear: This article is a master class in biased reporting and editing. There are so many subtle ways that it seeks to manipulate the reader into taking Franken's side.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 22, 2019

One reason I rarely do Twitter is that it doesn't look right to me to make comments on things you don't link to or even cite. You just assume people know what you're talking about. It seems a tad mental. If you did this in real-life conversations, it would be weird.

Embedding these 2 tweets on my blog, I now feel that I should explain the context and link to the Jane Mayer article about Al Franken (yes, it's Al Franken, not some other Franken). Of course, if I were writing a mainstream news article, I'd have to say Al Franken, the former Senator from Minnesota who was... oh, it's too tedious to spell out.... I enjoy the freedom of not having to do that, but I resist the freedom of Twitter, to just blurt out my latest thought with no preface, no context.

Anyway, we talked about the Al Franken article yesterday, here. The idea that it wouldn't be biased never crossed my mind, so it's hard for me to see anything as subtle. The interesting question is therefore why Nate Silver chose this occasion to call out a journalist for using skill to manipulate readers. And Silver's tweet is just as much of a "master class" in bias, just as "subtle" in its effort to bias readers.

Silver sees the use of quotation marks around "zero tolerance" as a nudge to think of Kirsten Gillibrand as "sloganeering" or hypocritical, but did he even check to see whether The New Yorker is simply following its own convention of copy editing? I searched The New Yorker archive for "zero tolerance" and "#MeToo" and found:

"The Transformation of Sexual-Harassment Law Will Be Double-Faced," by Jeannie Suk Gersen (December 2017): "And, echoing their successful student counterparts over the past several years, the men will claim in court that the pressure to implement a 'zero tolerance' policy against harassment led employers to act without sufficient investigation or proper process, motivated by the employees’ male gender."

"Can Hollywood Change Its Ways?/In the wake of scandal, the movie industry reckons with its past and its future" by Dana Goodyear (January 2018): "In the past, men who got caught used a magic spell: 'I am an alcoholic/sex addict and am seeking treatment.'... [T]he magic spell no longer works. In its place is the righteous meme of 'zero tolerance.'"

Now, it might be that The New Yorker generally disapproves of a "zero tolerance" approach, but would that cause it to adopt quotation marks? The New Yorker has a special reputation for copy editing. I've read the copy editor's book, "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen." Excerpt:

Lu taught me to do without hyphens when a word is in quotation marks, unless the word is always hyphenated; the quotation marks alone hold the words together, and it would be overkill to link them with a hyphen as well. (Capital letters and italics work the same way.) Eleanor once mystified me by putting a hyphen in “blue stained glass” to make it “blue-stained glass.”

That may explain why New Yorker articles about Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy leave off the quotation marks:

"What the Bible Really Says About Trump’s Zero-Tolerance Immigration Policy" by James Carroll (June 2018): "Attorney General Jeff Sessions invokes the Bible to justify the heinous zero-tolerance immigration policy, which incarcerates children."

"Will Anyone in the Trump Administration Ever Be Held Accountable for the Zero-Tolerance Policy?" by Jonathan Blitzer (August 2018): "The failure of the zero-tolerance policy has done little, if anything, to diminish the group’s standing; on the contrary, Miller has only seemed to gain allies in the government."

I strongly doubt that The New Yorker disapproves of Gillibrand's staunch feminism more than Trump's approach to illegal immigration.

But there is a fine point of punctuation here. When you write "zero-tolerance policy," you're using the phrase "zero tolerance" as an adjective, and — as the indented passage above explains — you need to "hold the words together." You could use either quote marks or a hyphen, and I think the idea is that the hyphen looks less fussy. But in the quote about Gillibrand — "a feminist champion of 'zero tolerance' toward sexual impropriety" — "zero tolerance" isn't used as an adjective, so a hyphen isn't an option — unless you reword it as "a feminist champion of a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual impropriety."

Since rewording is an option, it was possible to avoid the "air quotes" effect of making it seem as though Gillibrand is some sort of demagogue. But to switch to a hyphen would be to treat #MeToo non-tolerance the same as Trump's immigration non-tolerance. Would that improve the treatment of Gillibrand? Maybe these are 2 different ways of subtly attacking someone, and there's some sexism in the choice. Gillibrand is disparaged as ditzy — using a dumb slogan. Trump is disparaged as a cruel oppressor.

Enough of that. Here's something subtle that I think neither Silver nor Mayer considered. To champion "'Zero tolerance' toward sexual impropriety" is NOT zero tolerance! The word "impropriety" drains the absolutism from "zero." What are we going to call "improper"? It's subjective, and the answer can be: Whatever we won't tolerate at all. Flexible.

And since we've come this far, we might as well see the subjectivity and flexibility in "sexual" and "tolerance." Is intensely sniffy neck-nuzzling "sexual"? Analysis of Joe Biden's behavior toward young girls has generally led to the answer no. And "tolerance" can mean doing nothing at all. Suppose we eradicate "tolerance" — and I do take "zero" seriously. That could mean only that we stop doing nothing at all. We could end the state of tolerance by simply expressing disapproval, something as mild as: I see what you're doing and I find it unacceptable.

"The Washington Post spoke to seven scholars of the eugenics movement; all of them said that Thomas’s use of this history was deeply flawed."

Does anyone read something like that and simply trust the "scholars" to give the true account of the eugenics movement and what today resembles it? I say no, because I'm not including the trust that skips a step and believes the the scholars because they want to preserve abortion rights and they need Clarence Thomas to be wrong. My question is whether scholars these days are trusted as a source of truth about a hot social issue.

WaPo has 7 scholars, and they deliver the conclusion — "a gross misuse of historical facts,"  "amateur historical mistake," "really bad history," "historically incoherent," "ignorant and prejudiced," "just not historical." That's the bottom line if that's all you need, but I need the article to quote Thomas, accurately and in context, and to have the historians specify what is bad, otherwise I don't know whether they are doing the same thing they say he's doing, using what they can find and making interpretations that serve their policy preferences. The fact that they're "scholars" doesn't work anymore (if it ever did).

“Eugenicists were initially hostile to birth control because they knew that the women who would use it were the type of women they would want to encourage to reproduce, so-called ‘better’ women — upper-middle-class women,” said Kevles, the Yale professor. “When they finally came around to it, they did it in the face of a practical reality — they caught up to what their constituency was doing.... I’ve been studying this stuff for 40 years, and I’ve never been able to find a leader of the eugenics movement that came out and said they supported abortion,” Lombardo said. 

Thomas cited high rate of abortion for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome in developed countries (98 percent in Denmark, 90 percent in the United Kingdom, 77 percent in France and 67 percent in the United States, according to the statistics he cites), the practice of sex-based abortions in Asia (to eliminate female fetuses), and statistics that show higher rates of abortion among blacks than whites, to make his argument that abortion is akin to eugenics.

But many of the historians were quick to point out that abortion — a personal choice by an individual — differed significantly from the state-mandated programs foisted involuntarily on others by eugenicists.

That's not a disagreement about history, their area of expertise. That's an argument about how far to go in using history. I agree with the historians about the distinction — and said so when the case came out, here — but I didn't use historical analysis to arrive at that view. The historians are reaching beyond their area of expertise and doing legal analysis. That's fine. They're entitled to participate in the debate about the meaning of legal rights, but the idea that because of their scholarship their opinion trumps Thomas's fails.

WaPo quotes a historian whose book was cited by Thomas — "It was absolutely decontextualized" — and a reaction from Ed Whelan at the National Review — "just another in the sorry genre of 'you properly cited my work in the course of an argument I don’t agree with.'"

Should we try to understand Governor Northam or demand that he Al Franken himself?

Is the Democratic Party the party of no forgiveness? Does it need its own guy to kill himself because they want to be able to kill other people? Unquestionably, if a picture like this...



... had shown up from President Trump's old yearbook, Democrats would yell that he must resign. How can they retain their credibility to ruin Republicans if they don't destroy their own? I see Kamala Harris jumped right in to lead the pack. Harris is to Northam what Gillibrand was to Franken. Instant death. No pausing to reflect on human frailty. No empathy for the the imperfect judgment of young people. No contextualizing, even so soon after people misread what they saw in the photograph of the Covington Catholic boy and the Native American elder.

What was the context? Is asking for the context extending white privilege and contributing to the ravages of racism? I want to read Northham's own statement. Does that make me complicit in historical evil? The Democratic frontrunner for President, Kamala Harris, didn't sound interested in context, understanding, or empathy. She performed snap judgment. Northam must resign.

But let's read. Let's see what Northam gives us to think about.

Earlier today, a website published a photograph of me from my 1984 medical school yearbook in a costume that is clearly racist and offensive.

So we know that is him in the photograph... but which one is he? And why isn't he telling us?! Maybe if I could figure out which costume is worse, I'd know why he isn't telling. The KKK character is the evil one, but the other one is blackface, and everyone knows that a white person must never, ever put on blackface. I mean, Ted Danson didn't know in 1993 (and Whoopi Goldberg dared him to do it (he said)) but young Ralph Northam was supposed to know in 1983.

What was the occasion? A costume party of some sort? Is there anything to be said about the apparent camaraderie between the Klansman and the black man? Some vision of the peaceable kingdom: "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together..."



But a white man put on blackface and another white man put on a KKK outfit and that's all the there is: Northam's statement, adding nothing but a confession that he was inside one of those costumes, implicitly says, there is no context to consider. To contextualize would be to minimize guilt, when he wants to take on full guilt... except for the little detail of costume was his. (Is he waiting to hear which costume is worse? Which one does he want to be, given that he has to be one?)

The statement continues:

I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo...

You mean as a Klansman or as a black man? I'd like to know, even as I'm unsure which is worse.

... and for the hurt that decision caused then and now. This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today...

But who were you then? What did the costume mean? Were you actually a racist at the time? I'd like to know what he remembers thinking and what other people said. Maybe he isn't talking about it because there was some garish racial foolery or even bigotry, but I suspect he's keeping it short because he's been advised that any attempt to explain will be taken as a failure to take racism seriously. You'll be making it worse.

... and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine, and in public service. But I want to be clear, I understand how this decision shakes Virginians’ faith in that commitment. I recognize that it will take time and serious effort to heal the damage this conduct has caused. I am ready to do that important work. The first step is to offer my sincerest apology and to state my absolute commitment to living up to the expectations Virginians set for me when they elected me to be their Governor.

The elements of an apology are thus firmly in place. Must he also resign? This isn't the Senate. He can't be expelled by a bunch of Senators like Al Franken. But Al Franken ousted himself when the Senators banded together against him. Will Northam take himself out? If he does, what will it mean?

Let's look to Kamala Harris as a source of meaning. Her tweet:

Leaders are called to a higher standard, and the stain of racism should have no place in the halls of government. The Governor of Virginia should step aside so the public can heal and move forward together.

Northam did something 30 years ago. How is his presence in the "halls of government" the presence of the "stain of racism"? This is grandiose and severe language. And yet it purports to give priority to healing and moving forward. If we really cared about healing and moving forward, wouldn't we believe that a man may have moved forward over the course of 30 years and not insist that he is stained forever?

If we are stained forever by what is in the past, then there is no healing, no moving forward — ever, no matter what. So how could Northam's resignation help us do what cannot be done? And, most absurdly, how are we moving forward "together" if the main thing that must be done is to leave one of us behind? There is no "together," no "healing," no "moving forward," just relentless stain, rejection, and punishment.

I'm concentrating on Kamala Harris, because she seems to be the Democratic Party frontrunner for President and because her call for Northam's resignation is the first one I've heard, but others have followed the same path of no forgiveness. The candidates for President look desperate not to be left behind. They see which way things seem to be going and they rush to get there too. Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown,  John Hickenlooper,  Eric Swalwell (who?), Terry McAuliffe. I see why they have to do it, to preserve the Democratic Party brand, and yet I think it's an awful brand — relentless, unforgiving, without context, without careful consideration.

And (most ironically) it makes it harder to say that racism is pervasive and runs throughout humanity. We're stuck in a shallow ritual of identifying scapegoats and imagining that we could emerge from that ritual stainless and whole.

"New research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet."

"However, ensuring she does not offend users has been a challenge for the world’s largest online retailer.... Amazon customers can participate by saying 'let’s chat' to their devices. Alexa then tells users that one of the bots will take over, unshackling the voice aide’s normal constraints.... Amazon has been willing to accept the risk of public blunders to stress-test the technology in real life and move Alexa faster up the learning curve, the person said.... But Alexa’s gaffes are alienating others, and Bezos on occasion has ordered staff to shut down a bot, three people familiar with the matter said. The user who was told to whack his foster parents wrote a harsh review on Amazon’s website, calling the situation 'a whole new level of creepy.' A probe into the incident found the bot had quoted a post without context from Reddit.... The privacy implications may be even messier. Consumers might not realize that some of their most sensitive conversations are being recorded by Amazon’s devices.... The next challenge for social bots is figuring out how to respond appropriately to their human chat buddies.... One bot described sexual intercourse using words such as 'deeper,' which on its own is not offensive, but was vulgar in this particular context...."

From "'Kill your foster parents': Amazon's Alexa talks murder, sex in AI experiment" (Reuters).

"Part of winning retweets and likes is sending missives your community will love. Given how human beings police group boundaries, that means..."

".... making jokes only your friends understand, slamming common enemies, expressing sentiments in ways that signal group belonging. Twitter is a medium that rewards us for snark, for sick burns, for edgy jokes and cruel comments that deepen the grooves of our group. And then it’s designed to make the sickest of those burns and the worst of those jokes go viral, reaching far beyond their intended audience, with untold consequences.... [Twitter] is built to reward us for snarky in-group communication and designed to encourage unintended out-group readership. It fosters both tribalism and tribal collision. It seduces you into thinking you’re writing for one community but it gives everyone the ability to search your words and project them forward in time and space and outward into another community at the point when it’ll do you maximum damage. It leaves you explaining jokes that can’t be explained to employers that don’t like jokes anyway...."

From "The problem with Twitter, as shown by the Sarah Jeong fracas/Behind our Twitter wars lies Twitter’s problems" by Ezra Klein (Vox).

Don Jr. sounds awful, with "There is a little bit of sweet revenge in it for me and certainly, probably, the family"...

... but if the biggest problem with the Nunes memo was that it isolated a few things out of context, then you ought to want to hear the whole context that contains that one juicy remark.



Jr. begins with, "What if Bush had done this to Obama?," which is a great question, calling us to think in neutral objective terms — the polar opposite of thinking about "revenge" for "the family."

He develops the idea that the investigation has always been corrupt, and when Jesse Watters asks him if "it's always been rotten to the core," Don Jr. says:

It always has been. We always said that. It is so ridiculous that — let it go though. The real problem I have with it — other than millions in legal fees and lots of time wasted and being smeared throughout the media for years — at least they uncovered this — what if they wouldn't have? If they would have just let it go at this point — I mean — there is a little bit of sweet revenge in it for me and certainly, probably for the family in the sense that if they wouldn't have done this, this stuff would be going on. This would be going on at the highest levels of government. They'd be continuing to do it to my father, trying to undermine his actions. Imagine how effective he could be — given the year he's had — without this cloud over his head. So I want them to come — but come to a conclusion already because you've been looking for 2 years. You've come up with nothing other than their own nefarious actions and their own collusions. So at this point, you've gotta come to something. Just come to something. Because, if they try to drag it out for a year, they try to drag it so that the Democrats have their talking points. I watch it right now. You see the Democratic Senators — "This is McCarthyism" — I'm like — "What?!" You have a guy that's been screaming "Russia! Russia! Russia!" with no evidence, obvious collusion — all this shade — for 18 months, screaming about McCarthyism? The irony is ridiculous at this point.

"Revenge" was a terribly bad word choice for him there — especially alongside "the family." (And it didn't help that he mispronounced "nefarious" so that it began with the first 2 syllables of "Neapolitan.")

And he does string a lot of ideas together in a casual speech style that's a lot like his father's. This can be confusing, especially when the word "it" flies by. A little bit of sweet revenge in what?

Trump antagonists are going to see the popping out of the word "revenge" as highly significant. It resonates with the idea that Trump doesn't understand the proper functioning of law and government but views the presidency as a realm of personal power. It reminds them of Trump's continual insinuations about "loyalty." Don Jr. jabbered a lot of words, but that one word — revenge! — revealed the nasty inner workings of the Trump family.

To Trump fans, "revenge" will seem like an odd word that feels diluted by all the other words. It was immediately moderated by the phrase "in the sense that" and all that followed. You can see that Don Jr. feels that he and his father have been terribly mistreated (and prevented from doing even more of their good works) and those terrible Democrats might easily have gotten away with their nefarious plot against the President.

But I think even in the Trump-sympathetic reading, there's a revelation of how Trump talks about himself behind the scenes, that he feels beleaguered and must fight for his life in a battle of good and evil. I want to balance that by saying that I think many of his opponents also seem to see themselves as fighters in an epic battle between good and evil.

I wonder why someone who goes on television in a hot political environment isn't more guarded in the choice of words. How do you let a word like "revenge" slip out? I have to think that Don Jr. is like his father, trusts his instincts, and believes that things will work out best if you let the words flow out spontaneously. People — not all people, but some people — will feel that you're speaking from your heart and are a real person and that even if you're flawed, you're basically a good person or will at least let us see where you are bad. Donald Trump Sr. has said so many things the wrong way, and it sometimes seems incredible that he sails on through, but I think we — many of us, not all of us — have a taste for word salad.

Revenge is one spicy ingredient in a word salad best served cold.

Little things that don't play anymore: Al Franken says he's "a little disappointed" that Chelsea Handler's blouse is not a pajama top.

From last June:



Everything seems so wrong in retrospect.

"An early video sketch of 'Doggie Hamlet,' a site-specific work by the choreographer and performance artist Ann Carlson, has recently become fodder for conservatives intent on eliminating federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts."

"I can’t defend this strangely chopped together video, which undercuts the scope and mysterious splendor of Ms. Carlson’s vision. But as a dance critic, I will fight for Ms. Carlson, a multidisciplinary artist whose work poignantly explores social issues through the lens of performance. Art is subjective to be sure, but judging a three-minute promo without context does no one any favors...."*

Oh, well... why do favors? Here's the video. Judge away!


Ann Carlson - DOGGIE HAMLET, excerpts from Peter W Richards on Vimeo.

It's certainly not mean or unfair to judge an edited version that was made available as a promo. A promo invites judgment in the hope of favorable judgment. I'm not going to assume that more "context" would make it better. As long as the artist controlled the edit, I'm going to presume that what was stripped out was worse.

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* The quoted article is "But Is It Art? In the Case of ‘Doggie Hamlet,’ Yes" by Gia Kourlas (in the NYT).