The Guardian: ‘It is obscene’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens blistering essay against social media sanctimony

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Luke Ford

The Guardian article.

From ChimaManda.com:

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

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The “Facts” of El Salvador According to Objective and New Journalism

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Luke Ford

Professor Sandra Braman published in 1984:

Since the 1960s, each side in the debate over new journalism has accused the other of projecting a fictional view of reality. “Objective” journalists attack colleagues they call “new journalists” for distorting facts by refusing to adhere to normative procedure, while the latter accuse all who claim they are objective of inevitably skewing the facts because of biases built into the very procedures objective journalists use.

Both types of narrative, however, clearly fall within a single fact/fiction matrix that has dominated English-language discourse for the past 400 years. Where they have come to differ is in the methods used to discern what is fact, and in the claimed relationship of fact to reality. Objective and new journalism both depend on a notion of “fact” derived from Locke, for whom facts were boundary-defining techniques for loci of consciousness. Since objective and new journalism differ in the nature of the reporting locus of consciousness, they use fact in different ways.

* [John] Locke’s influence upon narrative form began with publication of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 and grew in strength during the following centuries. His powerful theories described the relationship between text and the reality to which text refers. That relationship, Locke decided, turned on fact, a concept that has remained the basis of Western written narrative ever since…

* Facts are statements of simple ideas expressed in language. Once expressed, facts become aural, visual, or physical elements in a world shared with other loci of consciousness. Locke does not claim that facts are concrete, provable, and indisputable ; rather, they are the linguistic products of the interaction of loci of consciousness with their environments-loci that are concerned about their own continued survival, well-being, and growth.

Thus, fact is in essence a technique (Ellul, 1964) used by loci of consciousness for boundary definition. Disputes arise when loci of consciousness with shared contexts disagree about a fact or facts that mark their boundary. Consensual realities are formed when such loci negotiate a definition of fact tenable to all involved parties.
Since some types of loci of consciousness manifest themselves in characteristic narrative forms, a study of the interrelationships between genres may reveal relative characteristics of the reporting loci. Lennard Davis (1983) has argued that the lines distinguishing “fact” from “fiction” shift in response to legal pressures. Legal tools, such as fear of libel suits and treason charges, came to have political utility during the seventeenth century. In that era, “fact” came to be identified with correctness of ideological position, while “false” meant an unacceptable stance.

Over time, such forces first differentiated newspapers and novels out of the fact/fiction matrix, and then further distinguished among types of newspapers.

Thus early story-model newspapers and contemporary new journalism were separated out from the information-model newspapers of objective journalism (Davis, 1983; Schudson, 1978). A public locus of consciousness dominates the latter. The classic example of objective journalism, The New York Times, is linked to the government and multinational corporations; it spreads across the globe and has done so for over a hundred years. Individual loci of consciousness, on the other hand, report in the genre of new journalism.
Both types of journalism use fact as a technique to define the boundaries of the locus of consciousness from which each reports. For each, the facts that are deemed critical are those held essential to its own interests; information from the
multitudinous data of daily experience that is not deemed pertinent to the survival and well-being of the reporting locus of consciousness is ignored or rejected. But the ways in which the two forms of journalism wield fact are quite disparate…

Explanations of new journalism…may be grouped into four perspectives:
( 1 ) New journalism is the appropriate genre to describe a reality that won’t hold its shape. The concept that reality itself has become discontinuous, fragmented, chaotic, and fiction-like was particularly popular during the 1960s, but has continued to have proponents…
(2) The rise of new journalism is due to class-based motives. Class arguments for the appearance of this new literary form range from Marxist (Hollowell,1977; Podhoretz, 1974; Solotaroff, 1974; Wolfe, 1973), to simpler status-oriented approaches (Arlen, 1974; Dorfman, 1974; Schudson, 1978; Tuchman, 1978b), to disputes among literary classes (Schudson, 1978; Wolfe, 1973; Talese, 1974), to economic struggles among writers (Gold, 1974). Kaul (1982) describes the formation of journalists into a new class that plays the charismatic religious role in American society; from this point of view, new journalism would be confessional literature.
(3) New journalism is a response to new mass communication technologies. Proponents of this view include those who see a battle between the printed word and film and video media, as well as those who see journalism itself as part of the technological crisis
(Eason, 1977; Talese, 1974).
(4) New journalism is just a way of grouping together a lot of good writers who happened to come along at the same time…

* Facts that are a part of history describe faits accompli, whereas the events that news facts describe are still subject to effective intervention.

* The twentieth century public locus of consciousness in general believes that the notion of objectivity is valid. From this perspective, facts are “out there,” independent of the observing locus of consciousness. Schudson ( 1978) points out that this viewpoint defines ethical responsibility as separating facts from values, where by “values” Schudson means preferences for how the world should be. For Flippen, the newsman is a “neutral observer,” whose “impact on the outcomes of political controversy, it assumes, is nonexistent.”

* Facts for public loci of consciousness are determined by procedures that depend upon organizational descriptions of reality-a fact is so because someone (bureaucratically reliable) has said it is so. These facts are sharply limned, categorizable, and easily processed. They are valid because they are based on the bureaucratic manifestations of dominant policy decisions…

* Fact is a powerful boundary-defining technique for public loci of consciousness, for its own narrative expression, objective journalism, plays several key roles in sustenance of those bureaucracies themselves. These procedures are at the same time protective-Tuchman notes that newspapers “invoke” objectivity the way peasants use garlic to ward off evil spirits (Tuchman, 1972, p. 660)-and nutritive.

The procedures of objectivity are believed to steer a newspaper clear of libel while meeting its metabolic needs for consumption and digestion of set quantities of material regularly, continuously, and in a timely manner. The sources of information for a public locus of consciousness are as a consequence almost exclusively bureaucratic. The result is a moral division of labor: Reporters aren’t allowed to know what their sources will not or do not tell them…

* The space boundaries of facts as used by public loci of consciousness are delineated by the rounds of bureaucracies and the geographic limits thus defined-what is commonly described as the beat system. These news sources tend to view capital cities as the center of the universe from which all action flows, and assume that bureaucratic mechanisms are the only possible sources of effective action.

* The time boundaries of fact as determined by the public locus of consciousness are also bureaucratically defined. Thus events are predictable and yield a limited, predetermined set of outcomes; movement of an event from one phase to another signals a news peg (Fishman, 1980; Flippen, 1974).

Reports from a public locus of consciousness claim to be context free. The implicit context, however, derives from the bureaucratic reification of prevailing political, economic, and social thought.

* Individual loci of consciousness of this era also insist that the facts they report are true. But for individual loci of consciousness, ethical responsibility is defined as explicit recognition of the reporter’s role in the shaping of reported facts, both as an actor in the reality being described, and as selector and framer of what is being communicated.

The procedures used by new journalists are idiosyncratic in detail from person to person, based on a method described well by Sontag: “To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.” (1966, p. 7).

Procedures are used to record and interpret the daily sensory experience of the writer. Events become newsworthy when they have an impact upon the reporting locus of consciousness.

* New journalists work out of the human need to make sense out of the rush of experience, and to describe a world to which as a writer he or she can testify. As a boundary-defining technique, fact for an individual locus of consciousness thus demands coherence and places a high value upon the specific. It is concerned about the survival of a single personality. The very act of reporting becomes in and of itself sustenance for the personality. “We tell stories in order to live,” says Joan Didion.
Facts may come from any direction, and source of information, at any time, and whatever one is doing. They are considered valid because of their ground in personal experience.

* Most breaking news in Latin America is of little real significance. This is because in this area the forms-the elections, the drawing up of constitutions, family life, the words used in political doctrine-are highly observed and cherished but often do not mirror the substantive life of the society.

* Procedurally, The New York Times generally followed the methods identified with the narrative form of a public locus of consciousness, objective journalism. Bonner’s routine beat took him through governmental bureaucracies, collecting official statements for translation for the mass audience of the paper. Almost all information sources cited are formal bureaucratic sources in the capital city. In contrast, Didion embodied the methods of a reporter who writes from an individual locus of consciousness. Her procedure can be summarized as an attempt to put herself into as many different situations as possible; her information sources included facts as received by any of her senses from any direction. Though she did use official information sources, they were not considered the most reliable, comments at the corner drugstore were considered as valuable as
governmental pronouncements, if not more so.

The New York Times’ identification of news pegs derives from the passage of bureaucratically recognized events through administrative procedures. Thus the paper focused on such formal events as the March 28 elections and changes in land distribution plans. Didion remarks, however, that phrases such as “land reform” and “the initialization of a democratic political process”; are “so remote in situ as to render them hallucinatory” (1982, p. 38); elsewhere she comments about the importance to everyone of maintaining such symbolic forms for the sake of the United States. For her, attention is focused on the nonexistence of any solid reality and the ubiquitousness of death and terror. What The New York Times limned as the important events in El Salvador, Didion describes as illusory symbols.

* In this case study, Raymond Bonner of The New York Times displayed a dual allegiance-he wrote from both his own individual locus of consciousness and from the public locus of consciousness of The New York Times He did so by describing the physical horrors and social and political chaos which were the facts of his own experience as well as the procedural viewpoint of his employer and the Salvadoran and the U.S. governments. In the latter case, however, his reporting revealed the failures of normative bureaucratic processes. With the subsequent removal of Bonner from El Salvador, NYT reporting from that country has reported those bureaucratic processes as successes, adhering completely to the procedures of objective journalism in reports of administrative events (Massing, 1983).

Joan Didion, on the other hand, wrote solely from her own individual locus of consciousness about a society which wouldn’t resolve into a sensible pattern. This report is strengthened by her own history as a new journalist-Didion’s reputation was largely built on her ability to clarify the myriad ambiguities of the 1960s. The keynote of her writing about El Salvador is terror and the desperation that results from dissolution of tenable social forms.

* The many accusations flung back and forth between objective and new journalists sidetrack and obstruct what should be a reflective and maturing development of narrative form. It cannot be said that creators of narrative within one journalistic genre are telling lies while those within the other are telling the truth. Both are reporting the facts as understood-and needed-by their respective loci of consciousness.

But the public locus is ultimately comprised of distinct human beings; any individual writer may choose from which locus of consciousness to report. The fact determining methods of public and individual loci of consciousness, and their narrative expressions in objective and new journalism, yield quite different versions of reality. In the texts compared here, the objective journalism of The New York Times and Raymond Bonner depicted a society that may be understood by and controlled through normative bureaucratic procedures that appear to be aligned with U.S. interests in El Salvador, even if sometimes those procedures don’t work. The new journalism of Joan Didion, on the other hand, described El Salvador as a perpetual frontier where there appears to be no appropriate role for U.S. involvement.

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The blogosphere and its enemies: the case of oophorectomy

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Luke Ford

Professor Stephen Turner writes in The Sociological Review in 2013:

* The blogosphere is loathed and feared by the press, expert-opinion makers, and representatives of authority generally. Part of this is based on a social theory: that there are implicit and explicit social controls governing professional journalists and
experts that make them responsible to the facts. These controls don’t exist for bloggers or the people who comment on blogs. But blog con1mentary is good at performing a kind of sociology of knowledge that situates speakers and motives, especially in cases of complex professional and administrative decision-making, as well as providing specific factual material that qualifies claims of experts and authorities. In many contexts the co111mentaries are examples of Habermasian demands for justification, to which there here is a response. A major topic in won1en’s health, and on the blogs, is the effects of hysterectomy, especially accompanied by oophorectomy, the removal of (normally healthy) ovaries, Physicians make extreme claims on web pages about the lack of consequences, or their manageability through hormone therapy, which they claim is supported by research. Blog posters, and a blog opposed to hysterectomy generally, claim that there are numerous damaging effects, and deconstruct the claims of experts. Blog posters fill in the claims with personal experiences and analysis of the conduct of physicians and nurses, as well as the n1otives of won1en who deny symptoms, Physicians provide their own critique and analysis of the blogs, to which they attribute great influence. A later meta-analysis and new longitudinal research affirms the bloggers, and explains why much of the research cited by experts is wrong.

* The blogosphere is loathed and feared by the press, expert-opinion makers, and representatives of authority generally. The reasoning is simple, and is part of a long tradition of anti-liberalism that stretches back to Comte, Karl Pearson, and Walter Lippman: uncontrolled public discussion is ‘intellectual anarchy’ and the rantings of the ignorant. Part of this is based on a social theory: that there are implicit and explicit social controls governing professional journalists and experts that make them responsible to the facts. These controls don’t exist for bloggers or the people who comment on blogs. To the extent that their form of public discussion supplants the professional class of journalists and challenges the authority of experts we trade ‘a dictatorship of experts’ for ‘a dictatorship of idiots’, according to Andrew Keen (2008: 35).

While it is true that the topics your mother told you to avoid at dinner – religion and politics (and especially core political ideologies) – remain as dividers in blog commentaries, the actual content of bogs contains much more. Especially in cases of complex professional and administrative decisionmaking, blog commentary is good at performing a kind of folk sociology of knowledge that analyses the interests and motives of participants in discussion, experts and lay observers alike. Blog comments on newspaper articles and columnists are especially effective detectors of bias. But commentary also provides specific factual material that qualifies the claims of experts and authorities, including testimony from actual personal experiences. Blog commenters often also have specialized knowledge and experience that bears on the issues, that is, technical knowledge or knowledge of normal procedures that journalists do not have and can access only with difficulty through the maze of spokespersons, official representatives, executives, and experts that present themselves professionally as explainers.

In many contexts, blog comments are examples of Habermasian challenges to provide justification. A rough sort of civility is enforced, and the course of the exchanges exposes the ‘idiots’ and ideologues, or they expose themselves. There is even an argot for this, identifying certain contributors as ‘trolls’, for example. Instead of a dictatorship of idiots, the discussion becomes a large schoolhouse in which opinion is tested, questioned and moderated. It has a special role in relation to expertise, particularly by supplying personal experience that conflicts with, specifies in detail, or balances the blanket assertions made by experts.

The emergence of the blogosphere, which I will define for this paper as the world of web pages, often linked, that allow for reader response and commentary, has produced a response by critics that has focused especially on the problem of expertise,
and on the relation of traditional journalism to expertise. According to the critics, the rise of the blogosphere has produced a degradation of public discourse. The gold standard of public discourse is the professional work of journalists and commentators functioning as opinion leaders. Their work facilitates public discussion by providing ready-made correct or competent summary views for those who do not have the time and competence to construct opinions on their own, or to survey the range of competent opinion and fact on their own. The blogosphere, according to this view, lacks the professional standards that make this work of facilitation possible, and tends, in a kind of Gresham’s Law, to drive out competent discussion. The blogosphere distracts the unwary consumer of opinion and fact with false, scurrilous, inflammatory, and ideologically laden material. The economic problems of the media, together with the din of the blogosphere, threaten the quality of public discourse, and indeed have actively degraded it, by diminishing the role of the professional channels of public opinion formation and creation.

* …we all depend on others for what we know, other than for the most simple forms of knowledge. The relations we have with our sources of knowledge, the others on which we depend, are structured in various ways, some explicit but mostly hidden. We can become aware of the limitations of the sources of knowledge on which we depend, but this is not easy to do. We can, however, recognize that particular ways we come to know have biases, or are prone to particular kinds of knowledge failure or knowledge risk.

It makes sense to characterize groups, such as physicians, in terms of the individual and collective biases they have, and to contrast these with the cognitive biases of others, and the biases introduced by collective devices, such as the information sharing devices of the blogosphere. Science has its own much discussed biases. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996) was a discussion of the way science was biased- against new infor1nation, which was anomalous, and the way that scientists processed new information of this kind. Ulrich Beck, similarly, charged scientists with a reluctance to recognize risks (1992). These are examples of attempts to characterize the heuristics by which opinion is formed.

Although people do not explicitly theorize the problem in this way, there is a kind of folk sociology of knowledge that people think in terms of that makes similar distinctions. They think of professions, such as medicine, as having certain cognitive biases, and of the individuals in the profession as having biases as well. Medical science and clinical medical practice, for example, each have their own cognitive biases.

* Hysterectomies are one of the most common operations for women — 22 million have been done in the US; 454,000 a year. It is the second most comn1only performed non-obstetrical surgery in the US, after cataract surgery, and the economic mainstay of gynaecology as a’ specialty. The numbers are similar in the UK and Eui’ope, with some variation, mostly in the direction of fewer operations. Up to 40,000 hysterectomy operations are carried out by the NHS on women in the UK every year and up to 75,000 in the UK as a whole. This figure means that one in five women in the US and Europe will have a hysterectomy at some point in their life. It is what is termed ‘elective surgery’; this n1eans that in most cases it is a choice rather than an emergency procedure. It is rarely performed for reasons of saving life…

Despite the ubiquity of the operation, there are major conflicts between ‘experts’ and the public over the effects of hysterectomy, especially on sexuality. The differences are stark…

Premature death is a strong indicator of general health. Here the evidence is strong. ‘Oophorectomy increased the risk of death from all causes (HR, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.03-1.21)’ (Shuster et al., 20 l 0), and there. was not a significant difference in risk by age at the time of oophorectomy. One of the major arguments for oophorectomy is
that removing the ovaries eliminates the risk of ovarian cancer. But it is a relatively rare cancer, and the lifetime risk of dying of invasive ovarian cancer is
about l in 95 in the US (Ovarian Cancer Alliance, 2012). The risk of premature
death from oophorectomy, in contrast, is 1 in 24…

* The experts were wrong in many ways, and their errors were errors of omission closely associated with these biases. They failed to deal with the long-term effects of oophorectomy because they did not observe it clinically, and perhaps as a consequence, and as a consequence of the difficulty of long-term prospective studies, did not research it. Randomized trials, because of their short duration, would not detect the long-term consequences of oophorectomy, which greatly exceed the levels of
normal menopause. The reliance on these problematic studies is an example of confirmation bias. And the fact that the knowledge of these increased risks has had little impact on practice fits with other suspicions about the biases of practitioners: their conservatism and reliance on traditional means and biases
resulting from their self-interest.

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The Professor Of Apologies (6-14-21)

Posted on June 14, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 My guest is professor Joshua M. Bentley, https://schieffercollege.tcu.edu/faculty_staff/josh-bentley/
03:00 Talk radio
07:30 The role of radio in Joshua’s childhood
17:00 Not the Best: What Rush Limbaugh’s Apology to Sandra Fluke Reveals about Image Restoration Strategies on Commercial Radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139974
31:25 How Christian is Texas Christian University?
34:00 Getting fired though you have tenure
36:00 The zombie bite theory of information, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130788
40:00 Was Sandra Fluke a private citizen?
43:00 Shifting identification: A theory of apologies and pseudo-apologies, https://lukeford.net/blog/?cat=42901
46:00 Media Matters
51:00 Do we have a true self?
1:02:40 The fundamental attribution error, https://www.simplypsychology.org/fundamental-attribution.html
1:07:40 “If I offended anyone by (X), I sincerely apologize.”
1:11:00 Feeling offended
1:15:00 Apologize in Google NGram Book Viewer
1:17:00 The power of victimhood
1:28:00 Donald Trump and apology theory
1:43:00 When is it important not to apologize?
1:48:00 Nobody denies cancel culture works
1:51:00 Balance theory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_theory
1:55:00 Ethnic/Racial, Religious, and Demographic Predictors of Organ Donor Registration Status, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140045
2:00:00 The Well-Ordered Soul: Happiness and Harmony, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Kkq7xULSo
2:01:40 Is IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT A Bad Thing?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0gF5otEB5Q
2:24:00 Phone condoms
2:25:00 Tucker Carlson on Buckhead and Atlanta
2:27:00 Soaring crime

Posted in Ethics, Joshua M. Bentley | Comments Off on The Professor Of Apologies (6-14-21)

How Porn May Change What We Crave

Posted on June 13, 2021 by Luke Ford

From American Greatness:

In 2007, two researchers tried to do an experiment, initially unrelated to porn, studying sexual arousal in men in general. They tried to induce the subjects’ arousal in a lab setting by showing them video porn, but ran into a (to them) shocking problem: half of the men, who were aged 29 on average, couldn’t get aroused. The horrified researchers eventually identified the problem: they were showing them old-fashioned porn—the researchers presumably were older and less internet-savvy than their subjects.

“Conversations with the subjects reinforced our idea that in some of them a high exposure to erotica seemed to have resulted in a lower responsivity to ‘vanilla sex’ erotica and an increased need for novelty and variation, in some cases combined with a need for very specific types of stimuli in order to get aroused,” they wrote.

Incredibly, porn can even affect our sexual orientation. A 2016 study found that “many men viewed sexually explicit material (SEM) content inconsistent with their stated sexual identity. It was not uncommon for heterosexual-identified men to report viewing SEM containing male same-sex behavior (20.7 percent) and for gay-identified men to report viewing heterosexual behavior in SEM (55.0 percent).” Meanwhile, in its “2018 Year in Review,” PornHub disclosed that “interest in ‘trans’ (aka transgender) porn saw significant gains in 2018, in particular with a 167 percent increase in searches by men and more than 200 percent with visitors over the age of 45 (becoming the fifth most searched terms by those aged 45 to 64).”

When this phenomenon is discussed at all, the prevailing narrative is that these men are repressed and discover their “true” sexual orientation through porn—except that the men report that the attraction goes away when they quit online porn.

This is astonishing. The point is not to try to start a moral panic about the internet turning men gay—the point is that it’s not turning them gay.

But perhaps it’s turning at least some men into something else. Andrea Long Chu is the name of an American transgender writer, who writes with admirable honesty about her gender transition and experience. For example, Chu braved criticism from trans activists by writing in a New York Times essay about the links between her gender transition and chronic depression, and denying that her transition operation will make her happy. In a paper at an academic conference at Columbia, Chu asked: “Did sissy porn make me trans?” Sissy porn is a genre—again, once extremely obscure and inexplicably, suddenly growing into the mainstream—where men dressed like women perform sex acts with men in stereotypically submissive, female roles. Sissy porn is closely related to the genre known as “forced feminization,” which is pretty much just what it sounds like. In a recent book, Chu essentially answers her own question: “Yes.”

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