June 30, 2021 Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Something awful happens. Do you immediately jump to conspiracy thinking? Or do you first suspect incompetence? I first suspect incompetence (unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary, such as two planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9-11).

I am not an expert on voter fraud but I do like the challenge of reading what the experts say, and then comparing their views with one another and with popular accounts.

I notice that many skeptics of the 2020 election results are seizing on New York City’s latest vote counting problems as evidence that the voter fraud experts quoted in the media are not up to snuff.

A friend says:

It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination. They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent. The fact that 135,000 votes run as a test were maintained in the computerized total and would have remained undiscovered except that Adams started questioning them (and was roundly criticized for doing that) says it all. I am not saying that Trump won the election. All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based. That specific claims of fraud were debunked don’t seem to get anywhere near the issues that occurred in the NYC mayoral election.
You were appropriately skeptical of the Trump claims of fraud, but you have uncritically accepted the assertions of the election integrity’s defenders. Of course that is inconsistent with the attacks on the 2016 results in which Trump won and with the criticisms of computerized voting which Democratic senators raised a year before the 2020 election. The experts you relied on may be right on particular claims by those who challenge the results, but on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong.

When I looked at the most prominent claims for massive voter fraud in the 2020 American elections, I found that all the claims fell apart upon examination. I don’t claim that voter fraud has not played a significant role in American elections, rather, I propose that all arguments that voter fraud has played a large role in recent American elections fall apart upon examination. I’m waiting to read a strong case for massive voter fraud in 2020.

“Voter fraud” means many things to many people. For example, “voter fraud” is often used to describe mistakes that are endemic to all large human enterprises. You show me any activity that is largely staffed by amateurs and involves counting millions of pieces of paper, and you will always find lots of mistakes. Mistakes in processing ballots are not voter fraud. Taking weeks to count votes is not evidence of voter fraud.

It seems to me that there is one definition of voter fraud that makes more sense than the others — that voter fraud is a crime. The recent mistake in the counting of the New York election is not, I believe, a crime. I am unaware of any evidence that the mistaken counting of 135,000 test votes would have remained undiscovered except that Eric Adams challenged the count.

Regarding this: “It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination.” All the expert analyses I have read were responses to allegations of voter fraud that did not add up. I’m not sure what role imagination should have in this type of analysis. If someone imagines ways that voter fraud might be massive, that could be the beginning of a useful investigation, but to say something important, one needs to uncover evidence supporting your imagination. Fantasies about voter fraud in and of themselves and without any supporting evidence have no importance and they need no analysis.

“They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent.” No, they were examining claims of voter fraud in 2020 and finding that these claims fell apart upon examination.

Mail-in balloting is not without precedence in America. Five states do voting exclusively by mail and we don’t have evidence that these states have higher rates of voter fraud. There may be such evidence, but it has not been presented as yet.

“All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based.”

I am unaware of any voter fraud experts who say nothing happened. Instead, they say the allegations that voter fraud happened on a massive scale do not hold up to scrutiny. They say that the evidence does not indicate massive voter fraud.

It shouldn’t be hard to make a case for voter fraud in 2020. Simply point out counties and states where the voter returns were anomalous. I am unaware of such counties and states. In 2018 and 2020, there was a 2% swing against the Republicans in the suburbs. That little swing accounts for the election results in 2018 and 2020.

Regarding “on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong”, I’d just like to see evidence for this claim. Everyone might be wrong on anything. We all have to make judgments based on imperfect information. I find it fun to try to make sense of imperfect information.

I agree with this analysis by Philip Bump of the Washington Post:

This is the first year New York City will use ranked-choice voting to pick its leaders. So far, it isn’t going great.
The Democratic primary election for mayor was held last week, on June 22, with initial results favoring Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams by a healthy margin. But ranked-choice voting means determining the winner of the primary will require several rounds of vote-counting. Each voter was able to pick up to five candidates who they hoped might win. If their preferred candidate is eliminated by being the lowest vote-getter in a round, the voter’s ballot shifts to their next preference down the list, until either the race is down to two candidates or until that voter’s ballot lists no more viable candidates.
For some inexplicable reason, the city’s Board of Elections (BOE) decided on Tuesday to run through how that ranked-choice system would work using the ballots it had received and counted. That tally showed Adams’s lead narrowing — and the second-place slot shifting from lawyer and activist Maya Wiley to former city sanitation director Kathryn Garcia. But while that trial run of ranked-choice voting did reveal generally how the eventual results might shift, it didn’t offer much insight into how that shift might occur, given that there are still more than 124,000 absentee ballots to count. That’s about 10 percent of all the votes cast — an obviously significant number.
Then things got worse. It turns out that the results the city released also included a number of dummy ballots, used to test the system — ballots that should not have been included in the initial count. The mistake was caught soon after the trial-run results were announced, so the Board of Elections ended up pulling its totals and announcing its mistake.
No observer of New York City politics was surprised to learn that the Board of Elections had messed things up. It’s common knowledge the board is at best inept, as a report from the city’s local paper documented in late October. The city’s politics broadly are byzantine and dishonest, often relying on a system of patronage that those in power — generally the system’s beneficiaries — are loath to challenge. It’s an embarrassing situation, but usually one that does its embarrassing thing out of the spotlight of national attention. A mayor’s race in the country’s most populous city, though, tends to draw a spotlight.
It will still be a few weeks before we know who won the primary, given those absentee ballots (which are likely to aid Garcia) need to be counted. But in the meantime, the snafu at the BOE has been seized upon by allies of former president Donald Trump as evidence that elections in Democratic areas are corrupt and dishonest, just as Trump has been claiming for months…
Look, it is obviously the case that there is no connection between reality and Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. For nearly eight months, he and his allies have been trying to claim rampant fraud occurred and they have the evidence to prove it, without actually providing credible evidence and without offering any reason to assume that the claims of rampant fraud are worth taking seriously.
But it is nonetheless worth explaining why this argument is no better.
There is an apt analogy between what happened in New York City on Tuesday and the 2020 election. That error was akin to the miscounted ballots in Michigan’s Antrim County, an error that election administrators quickly caught and corrected. In that case, a change to the ballot wasn’t accounted for properly, so vote tallies were shifted between candidates. It’s as though you announced the order of horses in a race and, at the last second, slotted a new horse in the middle, shifting all the numbers. Suddenly, all the existing bets get wonky — a correctable but embarrassing mistake.
According to the BOE — which, again, is a mess, so assume this might also change — the mistake on Tuesday was similarly technical. It was a thing that should not have happened, but did, and officials announced the mistake and are correcting it. It was not some effort to throw the election. Unlike in Antrim County, these weren’t even intended to be final results! If the idea was to somehow allocate a number of ballots to all the candidates and hope no one would notice, it seems weird to inject them in a preliminary trial run of the results.

Damon Linker writes:

With its massive screw-up in counting and reporting preliminary results in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor, the city’s Board of Elections has managed to vindicate the self-serving and politically corrosive mendacity of Donald Trump.
No, reporting hugely inaccurate preliminary results in the Ranked Choice Voting primary held last week doesn’t demonstrate that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump — or that, as the former president continues to claim, voter fraud was rampant in the swing states that delivered the election to Democrat Joe Biden. But there was always a more sweeping and more dangerous claim underlying those baseless assertions — namely, that American elections in general are corrupt and unreliable, producing untrustworthy results. That’s what Trump alleged during the summer and fall of 2020, before any ballots has been cast or counted. And that’s what the shambolic Democratic primary in New York City has now vindicated.
The primary involved only Democrats. It pioneered the use of RCV in order (supposedly) to deliver fairer, more representative outcomes. The Board of Elections is overseen by bipartisan commissioners. For all of these reasons, last week’s vote should have served as a demonstration of what a clean and corruption-free election looks like. Instead, it’s shown that NYC’s BOE is too incompetent to be trusted with counting the votes. And the shadow of its bungling will haunt whatever results it announces going forward, opening the door to fully justified challenges to the outcome.

From Politico:

NEW YORK — For months, President Donald Trump has made baseless claims of voter fraud, insisted he would only lose an election that was “rigged” and said he is rushing a Supreme Court nominee ahead of a potential legal challenge to the results.
Democrats and published media reports have widely disputed his assertions and officials have promised a valid voting process, despite the unprecedented challenges brought by the pandemic.
Then along came the New York City Board of Elections.
The notoriously dysfunctional entity has given ammo to Trump’s charges by mailing some 100,000 ballots with erroneously marked return envelopes to voters in Brooklyn. The latest screw-up from the bipartisan board — whose members are appointed by local party leaders and approved by the City Council as one of the last vestiges of old-school machine politics — became an immediate talking point for Republicans….
Susan Lerner, of the good government group Common Cause New York, said the president is misrepresenting the issue at stake. Rather than providing an opportunity to cast extra votes for his opponent Joe Biden — as the president has claimed mail-in voting would do — the mix-up in Brooklyn would have the opposite effect by bringing vote totals down if it is not remedied.
“Not only is the info being used in a negative way, it is being misused,” she said. “The problem is not what the White House is making it out to be.”
The sanctity of mail-in ballots is not the only uncertainty facing New York City voters ahead of the momentous presidential election in November. The board hasn’t even instructed voters on how much postage to use for sending their ballots in, according to city and state officials. And last week, Ryan indicated a final count of all the votes may not come until well into December.

A friend says:

The failure of imagination is that as far as I know none of experts considered that test ballots, which may have been entered favoring a particular candidate, were not deleted but added to the legitimate votes. I had no idea that election boards ran test ballots, but experts on elections who claim to know every aspect of elections should have known about it. That’s what I mean by failure of imagination. The biggest experts on election law are Sabato and Hasen, I am unaware that either of these persons considered the possibility..
The issue is not the 2% swing of voters, but if there was such a swing at all. A relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines could account for the swing. Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied. That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method. Most lay persons, including those who follow elections, such as you, have no idea how such a thing can happen and can’t conceive of it, but the experts should. The difference between intelligence and wisdom is that the wise person can foresee consequences that the smart person cannot. The experts have proven themselves with their opinions to be smart, but not wise.

Anyone remotely acquainted with American mail-in ballots knows that voters are sent test ballots. Anyone with voting expertise would know the potential for test ballots to get counted as real ballots (as I understand it, the experts say there is no evidence that this has happened in significant numbers). What happened in New York was a test run of a system never used before. It did not purport to be a final count.

Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen would not rank in the top ten of voter fraud experts, but they do get interviewed a lot in the media, just as Carl Sagan was often interviewed about space, but he had no significance to the discipline of astronomy. Even Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen know about test ballots and they know that there are infinite number of mistakes that vote counters can make. There is no evidence that a “relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines account[ed] for the swing” to the Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Contrary to this assertion, “Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied”, academic studies of claims of voter fraud that I have read do not mention polling.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that a 2% swing in the suburbs against Republicans accounts for the 2018 and 2020 election results.

“That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method.”

There is nothing new in sending Americans test ballots though there is something new in the number of mail-in ballots and test ballots mailed out in 2020. I am unaware of any evidence that either of these produced increased voter fraud in 2020.

A friend says:

I don’t think Trump won the election, but I do think it is possible he won. As you know a swing of under a total of a hundred thousand votes in certain states would have given Trump an electoral college victory. If in a relatively small election with a relatively small turnout in a community that watches its elections closely, you can “inadvertently” add in 135,000 votes, it certainly raises the possibility that the experts you relied on might be wrong… These experts claim to have some sort of superior knowledge about election procedures so that they can opine on whether the election is open to question. If they limited their conclusions by stating that there may be other means of committing fraud which may have occurred which we aren’t considering, that would be one thing. If they specifically said that although registrars testing the machines with test ballots there is no way that could end up skewing election results that would be something else. But if you are relying on them to conclusively state that there was no fraud, that seems to be a big stretch.

You can’t conclusively prove there is no voter fraud. You can conclusively prove that shoddy arguments for massive voter fraud are shoddy.

James Joyner writes:

The drive to make voting easier, which I support, has had the pernicious effect of making it less trustworthy.
Eric Adams seemingly won a plurality of the vote on Election Day. But, of course, Election Day no longer exists. Some people vote early. And a lot of people, effectively, vote late because they can send their absentee ballot in on the last day and we allot an inordinate amount of time for ballots to arrive.
We used to get election results almost immediately. It was rare that we went to bed on Election Day without knowing the outcome of the race. Now, we’re expected to wait days—in this case, an entire month!—for results. Yet, over the same evolution, we have become to getting our information instantaneously.
Even absent malfeasance such as the Republican Party leadership’s attempt to falsely claim the 2020 Presidential election was somehow stolen, partisans are not going to trust a system in which their guy seemingly has the lead and then watch it slowly disappear through a mysterious process in which new votes are found and old ones are thrown out because errors are discovered.
Incompetent administration—as seen here an in the most recent run of the Iowa Caucuses—certainly don’t help. It just feeds the conspiracy theorists.
And the addition of ranked choice voting to this particular contest—which, again, I support in theory—complicates matters further. While there’s no obvious reason why a computer program can’t eliminate the votes for the bottom candidate and reallocate second place votes and so on and so forth, this particular election board somehow didn’t get its act together ahead of time. And, again, it’s feeding the conspiracists.

Posted in New York, Voter Fraud | Comments Off

The Politics Of The Word And The Politics Of The Eye

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner wrote in 2003:

* Weltanschauung is a term that best fits commonalities of opinion and belief that are the product of words, and particularly printed words, and even more particularly, printed words used in connection with a particular set of social technologies. Weltanschauungen are a product of the information technology of the 19th century, particularly of newspapers, a technology marked by its lack of reliance on images, and therefore on seeing.

Contemporary politics, however, is a politics of the eye. The politics of the eye is different from the politics of the word: images work in different ways than words; they make claims on our primordial sense of solidarity that words do not make. Our own political world is increasingly a world of images, or more broadly of virtual experiences, often partly constituted by images. I give some examples of this, suggest some ways in which the politics of the word and the eye interact, and, rather than to propose a theory of the eye, plead for the irreducibility of the eye to the word, and reject attempts to ‘theorize the eye’ as a new ideological formation or worldview.

* ‘If the embryo is held to be a fetus, then it becomes socially permissible for women to subordinate their reproductive roles to other roles, particularly in the paid labor force’; holding an embryo to be a person ‘is to make a social statement that pregnancy is valuable and that women should subordinate other parts of their lives to that central aspect of their social and biological selves’ (1984: 8). A decision about the status of the embryo ‘enhances the resources held by one group and devalues the resources held by the other’.

* A worldview is erected on a base of interest. The interests, however, are not material interests, but are ‘deeper, broader, and more subtle. People see in the abortion issue a simultaneously pragmatic, symbolic, and emotional representation of states of social reality – states that they find reassuring or threatening’ (Luker, 1984: 7). Different people find different things reassuring or threatening, and the interests in this dispute are essentially in seeing their lives valued. Thus people with different kinds of lives are differentially threatened or reassured by different beliefs about the status of embryos. Their interest is in a belief that validates them, reassures them about the kinds of lives they have chosen…

* The totalitarians, as Carl Schmitt so nicely pointed out, caused trouble for parliamentary democracy while they were still ‘parties’ competing in a nominally liberal political system because they created a world in which a totalizing social experience was supplied by a party. Everything from automobile clubs to childcare was available in party-specific forms. These efforts were designed to protect party members from intellectual contamination. The striking similarity to the present is in the reemergence of what might be called viewpoint-specific social institutions of this kind in common with niche politics: gay traffic violation schools in California and feminist daycare facilities. But these are hardly comparable. The social insulation of niche identities is incomplete; the attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the world and its events is feeble. Instead, a comfort zone is enforced, and a slant on salient issues is precariously constructed.

Party papers were unable to make a transition to the postwar period in Europe without making very substantial concessions to the machinery of the production of world events, events which were the product of state actions which were themselves increasingly didactic, actions designed to serve as ideological object lessons. States thus usurped the ideological functions of parties and newspapers, but by replacing acts needing interpretation with acts that carried their own interpretations. But state action was typically accompanied by images that gave the lie to the intended meanings. The sheer availability of images of burning Buddhist monks in Vietnam, for example, made it impossible for defenders of the war to give a convincing interpretation of the events of Vietnam. The power of images has a technological base, closely related first to the rise of photojournalism and second to the rise of television. The availability of these media proved to be a powerful equalizer in a sense that the opponents of a dominant mode of representation need only to produce an arresting image to undermine interpretation. The production of ideology or worldviews is curiously weak in the face of these images. Anything that requires talk, concentration, belief, and so forth as both fascist and communist ideology did, and which their paler imitations in the Cold War period also did, cannot compete cognitively with the sheer visual impact of a tank running down a Chinese student in Tian an Men Square or a monk immolating himself. These images, however, do very little to create ideologies, much less worldviews.

* The movement in the United States for the protection of legalized abortion has concerned itself with the suppression of images of fetuses, knowing that the images are a potentially powerful means of undermining its own accounts of such questions as when does life start. Yet images are not merely corrosive of ideology. They are in a complex way a surrogate for ideology. It would be too reductive to say that the ideology of a Clinton or Thatcher was constructed on visual images and visual expressions woven together to provide justification for policies, a set of definitions of enemies and victims, and so forth. Visual images obviously are only part of the story. But it is less implausible to suggest that the constructions that politicians and ideologists provide in an age of visualization (and perhaps more importantly of emotional immediacy) are driven by the images (and the demand for emotional immediacy that the images provide).

* Statecraft is essentially constrained by these images; worldviews are rendered fragile by them. The show trials of Stalin, one suspects, could not have taken place on television. The ordinary humanity of the individuals involved could be made to vanish in print; seeing the faces of the victims would have sufficed to delegitimate the process. Even Milosevic can appear as a sympathetic person, and indeed has come to seem more complex and perhaps even to seem justified as a result of his televised trial.

* The problem for would-be hegemonic worldviews is this uncontrollability of images and the potential that images have for disrupting and undermining the sympathies and dissympathies on which worldviews in some sense rest. Images do not always work in predictable ways when they engage our sympathies, and they do not always engage our sympathies in a single direction. The repeated picturing of the horrors of the Oklahoma City bombing represent an image that could have gone either way. It broke against the militia movement and the mentality it represented, allowing them to be stigmatized, just as the very compelling, images of the government destroying the Koresh complex failed to produce sympathy for the authorities. All these failures result from the uncontrollability of images, the uncontrollability that needs to be understood at the level of the emotional roots of solidarity. The politics of the eye produces its own characteristic forms of solidarity and its own novel political possibilities, because it produces new possibilities of solidarity.

* The kinds of thin ideologies that it is possible to construct today are dependent on these vividly emotional contents, particularly of suffering and victimhood and the capacities of empathetic identification that are invoked by these images.

* All politics, all worldviews, have an emotional, solidaristic core. The emotional core is often, in a sense of injury, a sense of justice denied, a sense of right, an agonistic sense. Rudolph von Ihering taught this lesson many years ago in his greatly influential 19th century work The Struggle for Law (1915). The motive force for the evolution of law was in the recognition of injury and the consequent demand for rights to protect against the injury. This is a model with limitations, but fundamentally useful, in that the process of formulating demands of recognition begins at an inchoate and emotionally chaotic level in which contradictions, such as contradictions between explicit ruling doctrine and felt realities, are most strongly felt. Obviously the pinch of these contradictions happens at a particular point, most strongly in the experiences of a particular marginalized group whose response to the order may well be largely visceral and unintellectualized.

Gradually these hurts acquire ideologists. The technology of the word is spread by them to others whose sympathies could be engaged. Solidarity, beyond the solidarity of the face-to-face world, was closely bound up with ideology, or with shared identities that depended on print. It is no accident that modern nationalism followed print and is characteristically associated with national literatures. There is no sharp line between the literary and visual production of sympathy and solidarity. The production of sympathy itself is often a matter of the creation of intermediate images, images or ideas that do something to transcend the gap between those with whom we have face-to-face and intimate relations and those we do not.

Its very effectiveness works against it as a political weapon, simply because the demands that it places on our sympathies are so varied, unrelenting, and contradictory. Yet this I think is the key to the present state of the emotional core of politics. What is difficult to grasp is the existential situation of functioning in a world in which constant and contradictory demands are placed on one’s sympathy. But one can identify some features of this situation. The first is that the person subjected to these varied solidaristic appeals becomes a consumer rather than a simple ‘sharer’ of worldviews.

In the United States, it was traditional for candidates to eat ethnic food, wear bits of ethnic costume, and the like. Clinton, in contrast, told the people he spoke to that he felt their pain – not a mere generalized pain, but the specific pain of a form of shared experience of victimization. This is telling. The virtual recreation of experience, of sympathetic identification, is extraordinarily effective with experiences of injustice and victimhood. The Anita Hill testimony, for example, brought forth a complex response – a thin sense of solidaristic identity over sexist workplace slights which the male Senatorial questioners of Hill ‘did not get’, in the language of the time, but also a thicker, more nuanced sense of identity among black males, many of whom saw Hill along with those who testified in support of her as representative of the traditional enemies of black males, something that the women’s movement did not get.’

* The politics of the word provides very little comfort against the flood of images demanding our sympathies. Ideological politics seems phoney, inadequate, and emotionally dishonest. The production of ideology or of ‘word’ politics can adapt to the demands of this market, but typically survives by marketing to niches…

* The politics of the eye is a solvent of worldviews. It is also an engine of tolerance, tolerance dictated by the sympathetic pull of the various images that arise in the flood of images constitutes the politics of the eye.

* The visual representations of the act itself [9-11] were also widely distributed in the Islamic world, and produced, or illuminated, a kind of thin, nonideological solidarity. Spontaneous demonstrations with the demonstrators holding up reproductions of Bin Laden’s image took place, and T-shirts were sold with his picture. The ideological unreadability of this solidarity was its most striking feature. Although there is a large and confusing Islamist literature, and Bin Laden was an ideologist of the return to the Caliphate, this had little or no connection to the sense of solidarity in the Islamic world. The solidaristic sense was based on a much more visual sense of revenge, outrage, and pride at having bloodied the nose of those who had failed to give Islam the deference it was due.

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Subtleties Of Thought

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner wrote in 2001:

* ‘Presentism’ is a term that covers a multitude of not very well defined sins, but its main meaning is this: texts may be read in a variety of ways, and a text that is read as though it were a text written in the present and responding to present day concerns and present day distinctions is ‘presentist.’ Authors of these classic texts, as historical agents, of course did not intend to say these things, and indeed may not have been in a position, owing to the lack of the network of relevant concepts, to have even formed intentions of the kind necessary to hold the views that presentist readings attribute to them. Very often the classic text is primarily an attempt to persuade certain contemporaries, in pursuit of particular tactical ends. So the question of what they actually intended and what, in this ‘historical’ sense, the text meant is a separate question from the question of what can be made out of the text in the way of a present-day argument, problem, or position.

* What is of interest about Hobbes, to put it bluntly, is what thinkers like David Gauthier abstract out the great mish-mash of Hobbesian arguments (1986).

* Let me quote from Serres and Wood’s standard text on diplomatic protocol on the reasons for the use of French as the language of diplomacy: ‘that it has qualities of clarity, precision and firmness not found in English, the latter being too often elliptic and its construction and vocabulary lacking conciseness, thus resulting in a looser version of the same text’.

Posted in History, Stephen Turner | Comments Off

The New Power Elite (6-29-21)

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 The New Power Elite: Inequality, Politics, and Greed, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140693
03:00 Milo’s conversation with Roosh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m0t1d8sh9w
06:00 The New Power Elite: Inequality, Politics and Greed, https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Elite-Inequality-Sociology/dp/1783087870
15:00 Milo sounds less gay
16:00 When Experts Are Wrong, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140707
18:00 Expert Failure by Roger Koppl, https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Cambridge-Studies-Economics-Society-ebook/dp/B07951H4R3/
25:00 Balancing the power of expertise, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140670
50:00 Colin Liddell joins, https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/
51:00 We discuss race and soccer
52:00 Colin’s Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/ColinLiddell3
56:30 John McAfee
58:50 Cyber currencies
59:45 Does Joe Biden have agency?
1:02:00 When Richard Spencer visited Tokyo in 2016
1:05:30 Tokyo Trial, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Trial_(miniseries)
1:06:00 Has Japan come to terms with WWII?
1:10:00 Japan will host the OIympics, https://twitter.com/ColinLiddell3/status/1407581919060111365
1:15:00 Japan’s emperor, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_of_Japan
1:21:20 China
1:22:30 Lab leak hypothesis
1:29:40 Lauren Southern, https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2021/06/whos-who-in-dissident-right-lauren.html
1:32:00 Secession – USA v China
1:34:30 British politics
1:38:10 Boris Johnson
1:41:10 The Great Replacement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
1:42:30 F. Roger Devlin, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140326
1:45:00 Jack Donovan, https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2012/05/the-origins-of-manliness.html
1:50:30 Tucker Carlson
1:52:00 Military historian JFC Fuller, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._F._C._Fuller
2:21:50 Tucker Carlson on illegal immigration

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Depoliticizing Power

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner wrote in 1989:

Carl Schmitt’s renovated Hobbesianism, with its insistence on the antithesis between authority and truth contained in the Hobbist slogan auctoritas, non veritas facit legem, (law is decided by authority, not by truth) provides the dialectical counterpoint to any attempt at the reduction of the political to the non-political. For Hobbes and Schmitt, one might say, discussion is always an illusion or an instrument of authority, not its basis. The conflict between these theoretical extremes is sharpened by political history, the taint that Schmitt’s brief political role as ‘Crown jurist’ of National Socialism brought to his ideas.

Neither extreme has prevailed either in practice or in theory. The concept of the political has not collapsed into a concept of the rational settling of conflicts, either in political theory or practice, and the liberal ideal of government by discussion has not come to be seen as fundamentally incoherent and as irrelevant to practice. Indeed, on the level of ideas the model of political rationality and the ideal of discussion are perhaps more secure today than is the concept of scientific rationality.

At least it is an ideal to which persons with very diverse orientations appeal as an unproblematic point of reference. This messy intellectual history, and especially its intersection with actual politics, needs to be kept in mind: no formulation on the extension of the terms ‘power’ and ‘politics’, or of the oppositions and contraries of these terms, is innocent.

Posted in Carl Schmitt, Stephen Turner | Comments Off

When Experts Are Wrong

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Luke Ford

Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan said: “…(ADHD) is an invention. Every child who’s not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: “It’s ADHD; here’s Ritalin.” In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million (ADHD-diagnosed) kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis.”

Stephen Turner writes a 2019 book review of the 2018 book Expert Failure by economist Roger Koppl:

* Education reform has been on the public agenda for more than a century. Educational research, as Ellen Condliffe Lagemann has shown, has been a succession of fads (Lagemann 2000). This gap never closed.

* Normal academic research, research not driven by a willing buyer with a policy agenda, is not exempt from these
problems. As Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, writes, “[M]uch of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” (2015, p. 1380)

Horton adds a comment about markets: “Can bad scientific practices be fixed?” Not without changing the market. “Part of the problem is that no one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative” (2015, p. 1380).

One facilitator of this turn to darkness has been the abuse of statistics, acknowledged by the American Statistical Association (Wasserstein and Lazar 2016-and publicized in recent discussions of p-hacking and in connection with the reproducibility crisis. The issues are very basic. P values are conventionally used to certify a research finding as a fact. This convention, and its abuse, is a major source of the reproducibility crisis in psychology. A recent suggestion (Benjamin et al. 2018) to raise the level of significance from 0.05 to 0.005 would cause whole fields to come close to disappearing — and this would certainly include the fields of evidence-based policy. And the p-value issue just scratches the surface of the problems, which extend to virtually every area in which statistics are used, and in which the small manipulation of assumptions can produce radically different results.

One such problem is this: research subjects and goals are not randomly distributed. People are looking for and attempting to establish particular results. As John Iaonnidis has pointed out, the effect of this is to make the expert consensus little more than a measure of bias (2005). And obviously this bias is often politically motivated bias. The existence of this kind of bias, which often occurs when topics are intentionally under-researched, is admitted even by Brookings, whose reputation for impartiality is itself questionable.

“Psychologists, sociologists, and educational researchers have devoted far less attention to the black-white test score gap over the past quarter-century than they should have. Cowed by the hostile reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the status of the black family and to Arthur Jensen’s 1969 article arguing that racial differences in test performance were likely to be partly innate, most social scientists have chosen safer topics and hoped the problem would go away.” (Jencks and Phillips 1998)

There are many other topics that are no-go zones. And there is even a philosophical literature defending the practice of avoiding research on topics that lead in the wrong political direction (Kitcher, 2000, pp. 193-97). This kind of politically motivated self-censorship more or less assures that there will be massive error.

* “Error” is a problematic notion in this context, because judgments about error also rests, so to speak, on turtles that go all the way down. There is no perch outside of opinion on which we can rest our judgments. It is, as Michael Oakeshott would say, platforms, that go all the way down (1975, pp. 9, 27, 34). Our beliefs about the world rest on research that relies on experimental and statistical conventions. These in turn rest on other opinions, other consensuses. What we take to be true about the world depends on what someone decided to fund. The science, and the expertise we have, is the product of “the world,” but it is the world as disclosed by past decisions to disclose it and disclose it in a particular way. The “ways” are necessarily limited in ways that are unknown to us. The path we took could have been different. And had we taken a different path, we might have been in a position to see what the limitations of the path we took were. If we did not invest in that path, we might not ever be in that position. It is pleasing to think that the truth will out, eventually. But turtles can live a long time. And science is as entangled in problematic decision processes as the state.

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The New Power Elite: Inequality, Politics, and Greed

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner reviews this 2018 book:

* There is a well-established folk theory about elites, shared, more or less, by the elites and the non-elite. Here is a quotation of Larry Summers, a member of the elite by any criteria: “There are two kinds of politicians,” he said: “insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.”

Along with this folk theory comes a suspicion that the elite operates according to the ethic Alasdair Macintyre once described as “the morality of the public-school prefect. Its principal virtues are loyalty to the group and the cultivation of a corresponding feeling that there are really no limits to what you may do to outsiders.”

Given the ubiquity of this image of the political world, and the visibility and power of elites, one would think that elites would be a major focus of scholarship and debate as well as teaching, if only to debunk the folk theory. It has not been, and indeed one observes a kind of denial about elites in academic circles…

* Combining elite studies with economics is also now crucial, not merely because of the power of business leaders, but because of the relation between the goals of business and the ideological commitments to globalism and universalism that are shared with the rest of the elite, including, and perhaps especially, the academic elite.

* the problem that elites face in staying in control in the face of the fact that they are a tiny minority whose interests, especially interests in the distribution of wealth, are opposed to those of the rest of society. They continue in power because they can ally with other classes, typically the middle class, to create institutions that have the effect of redistributing wealth in ways that benefit the allied class.

* the old strategies of class alliance no longer work, together with the new fact of a novel and emerging kind of elite power held by corporations and bankers: the power to disinvest in whole countries, holding the nominal political leaders hostage. The two facts are connected. The power that economic actors can exert over states severs them from their former class alliances, and sets their former allies against them.

* The core problem is elite stability: the risks are elite stagnation through closure and elite factional conflict. These are endemic problems for elites. They are faced with a generic difficulty that is a constant threat to elite cohesion. Different elite factions, like different classes, benefit or are harmed differentially by the redistributive institutional arrangements that are set up to assure the alliance between the elite and a sufficiently large nonelite class to create stability. These alliances need to be maintained and are costly.

Maintaining the appropriate balances between elites and their non-elite allies is a difficult task which will also inevitably divide elites themselves. The historical winner among the possible arrangements has been, until recently at least, an alliance between the elite and the middle class, and especially the upper middle class. What’s in it for the middle classes? As SET put it, the elites “make society safe for profit” (209). Stable property rights, protection, and the freedom to do business in a predictable legal environment without onerous taxation is pretty much the formula, or has been. The elite also makes some room for members of this class to enter. The middle classes, in turn, deal with and mollify the lower classes, producing stability.

* The elite, however, can make this alliance with the lower classes as well, and has more to offer: the wealth of the middle class. There is always the possibility of what in the Obama era in the United States was called an “upstairs downstairs” alliance between the elite or factions of the elite and the lower classes against the interests of the middle classes. That fact helps keep the middle class in line. And this omnipresent possibility of new alliance with the elite produces an odd dynamic in relation to democracy. On the surface, there should be a conflict between elites and democracy. An oligarchy, after all, has to live in fear of being overthrown. But an elite, if it is functioning properly, benefits from democratization, precisely because it provides more alliance possibilities for the elite. It extends the number of people who benefit from the actions of the elite, and who will support it. And it reduces the reliance of the elite on a single class. Democratization enables playing groups off against one another, while retaining elite cohesion.

* So why are elites in trouble now? Why is there populism in advanced societies? Globalization, meaning the mobility of money and production together with relatively free trade and border-crossing financialization, are enormously beneficial to the elite, producing more inequality and “losers” in formerly closed or favorably situated national markets. It also gives new power to corporations over states.

* The only real threat to elite power is elite factional conflict. Given the sea of discontent, it is possible for an elite faction to ally with a discontented non-elite group. And, if there has been a period of stability in which the practice of managing these conflicts in the interest of the elite has fallen into disuse there are concerns, from the point of view of the elite, over the ability to manage intra-elite conflict. But there are no looming conflicts of this kind. The folk theory of the elite, in short, is true. But the new power elite, global and globalist, is an elite freed of its former bonds to the rest of society. The new bonds are elusive. A key finding of this book is that democracy, which was once a way of holding elites accountable, has become, in the new world of globalization, a means of keeping elites in power by dividing their domestic enemies.

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Life After Academia With Historian Lisa Munro (6-28-21)

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Historian Lisa Munro, https://www.lisamunro.net/blog-1/2018/7/1/failures-of-imagination-post-phd-edition
01:00 Leaving Academia: Loss Grief and Healing, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140408
04:30 Lisa is an adoptee, https://twitter.com/llmunro
08:30 Lisa was 38 before she knew her biological parents
22:00 Education promotes conformism
27:00 Education as indoctrination
28:20 Education fads
36:00 Early feelings of rejection set you up for self-sabotage
38:00 Feeling worthy of prosperity
40:00 I’ll show ’em! https://www.lukeford.net/luke_ford/bio/l1.html
41:00 Compulsive need to prove, https://www.underearnersanonymous.org/about-ua/symptoms-of-underearning/
45:00 The high price of university learning
46:00 The intellectual life won’t pay for itself
47:00 Beyond the Academic Ethic by Stephen Turner, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140392
54:00 When Lisa went viral in 2015
55:30 What Lisa got from her doctorate in History
1:02:00 Lisa lives in Mexico
1:03:00 What Lisa learned from therapy
1:09:00 American identity and the lack of fatalism
1:10:30 Lisa on American identity
1:11:00 Americans are direct
1:12:00 The American dream
1:13:00 Lisa’s doctorate was on cultural relations between Guatemalans and Americans in the 1930s
1:15:00 Mexicans vs Guatemalans
1:18:00 Guatemala, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala
1:24:00 Writer’s block
1:37:00 Symptoms of underearning, https://www.underearnersanonymous.org/about-ua/symptoms-of-underearning/
1:40:00 Lisa loves the series, The Expanse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series)
1:43:00 Navigating friendships with people more and less successful
1:44:30 Lisa is a writer
1:46:00 Image management for the writer
1:51:00 Anthropologist heroes
2:00:00 Orals

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The Four Types Of Politics

Posted on June 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes about models for balancing the power of expertise:

* “High politics” is the politics of leaders. It involves agonistic decision making, and, more generally, decision making in the face of inadequacies of comprehension, typically, it is decision making in the face of opponents whose actions create uncertainty as the product of lack of reliable information or sources. This can be distinguished from politics in the sense of the politics of representation, and especially democratic representation, the politics of formal or informal roles of speaking and acting for some particular group. or. as is ordinarily the case, a faction or subgroup of a group. Complaints about the intrusion of politics into policymaking often refer to the intrusion of this kind of politics of factional representation. A third kind of politics is bureaucratic: this is the use of bureaucratic discretion by state officials, which may be for idealistic goals, to enhance their own power, protect turf, serve the interests of some constituency, encourage cooperation or agreement among stakeholders, or to protect themselves from popular protest or political interference by elected officials. A fourth kind involves protest and disruption, typically by formal or informal NGOs focused on a single issue or decision.

High politics is the place where the familiar language of “the political” is least prone to obliteration. Yet it is also a setting that places particular, and extraordinary, demands on knowledge. Leaders typically act in situations of uncertainty and incomplete information, typically of conflict, when the intentions of their enemies and the reality of the situation are unknown, and in which, and this is perhaps the most important feature, there is relevant information, for example, secret information, which is open to question with respect to its reliability. In these cases, the leaders must necessarily rely on their assessments of the knowledge claims of others and of their veracity, competence, and the adequacy of their understanding of the situation. High politics, in short, is about situations of conflict or of seriously consequential decision-making in which the participants have neither the leisure nor the capacity to wait before acting, necessarily involving epistemic judgments of the knowledge at hand. High politics in this sense is not restricted to the classical situations of warfare and diplomatic strategy.

* Experts, in particular, have usually played a small role in the kinds of political and biographical narratives that traditionally serve as a basis for our understanding of the nature of politics. Discussions of the decision making of leaders themselves have typically focused on the agonistic aspects of politics, the calculations that leaders make in relation to adversaries and rivals. This is understandable. The choices and tactical and strategic decisions of adversaries and rivals are the largest of the uncertainty with which decision makers in politics are compelled to cope. Experts have not played a starring role in these narratives, or been treated as adversaries simply because, though there are interesting exceptions, they usually are not themselves rivals to power nor do they possess means of altering the contingencies faced by the leader. To paraphrase Napoleon’s famous remark on the Pope, they have no battalions. Experts traditionally have played an opposite and less dramatic role. The reliance on experts by politicians is designed to reduce uncertainties or answer questions about what possibilities are open to the adversaries and to the political figure, leaving the decision making to the leaders themselves.

* The committee calculated correctly about the problem of a congressional inquiry: the success of the bomb in ending the war precluded the questions that failure would have produced. This was the dog that didn’t bark – but it was very much part of the story. Byrnes anticipated the kind of. Congressional inquiry that might have followed a decision to hold the bomb in reserve and chance an invasion. A large and highly motivated group of families of the troops who would have perished in the invasion would have asked whether the decision makers had the blood of these soldiers and marines on their hands. The risk of very high casualties was impossible to rule out. If the families of the dead were told that the decision had been made because a group of scientists involved in the development of the bomb were squeamish about its use, or that they were willing to use it against Hitler, but not Japan, the political consequences would have been enormous. The question “who lost China?” poisoned the political debate for a generation, and that was a large part of Lyndon Johnson’s motivation in the Viet Nam war to avoid a similar question. The political consequences were, moreover, “democratic.” The leadership knew that the representatives had the power to hold them responsible: the fallout that they wished to avoid was from their own citizens, and from the elected representatives who would be sure to exploit the inevitable questions to advance their own careers. Thus the decision was a paradigm case of democratic accountability.

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LAT: ‘Cops’ creator John Langley dies during road race in Mexico

Posted on June 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times June 29, 2021: “In the Academy interview four years earlier, Mr. Langley addressed criticism about race in “Cops” by saying that while 60 to 70 percent of street crime was “caused by people of color,” he had made sure that most of the criminals seen on the show were white, to avoid “negative stereotyping,” he said, and because most of the show’s audience was white.”

From the Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2021:

John Langley creator of the long-running TV series “Cops,” has died during a road race in Mexico, a family spokeswoman said.
Langley died in Baja, Mexico, of an apparent heart attack Saturday during the Coast to Coast Ensenada-San Felipe 250 off-road race, family spokeswoman Pam Golum said. He was 78.
“Cops” was among the first reality series on the air when it debuted in 1989, and it would become an institution through 32 seasons. Langley and production partner Malcolm Barbour had shopped the idea for years, and found a home for it on the fledgling Fox network.
The show was famous for following police, including deputies in the Deep South and officers from big city police departments, on long, boring nights in patrol cars or in fevered foot chases.
Its quirks, including its often shirtless suspects and its reggae theme song “Bad Boys,” were frequent fodder for standup comics and were often referenced in films, TV shows and songs.
It ran on Fox until 2013, when Viacom-owned Spike TV, later re-branded as the Paramount Network, picked it up.
It came under criticism for what was considered a slanted, pro-police perspective, and was permanently pulled from the air by Paramount last year during worldwide protests over the killing of George Floyd.

I interviewed John Langley around August 9, 2002:

Producer John Langley is a man’s man. He doesn’t seem to mind much what people think of him. He’s a refreshing change from many of the prissy image-conscious producers I’ve interviewed.

Langley owns a huge production facility on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica. His parking lot is filled with about 40 vehicles.

I believe I was here once before – about eight years ago. In my days as a struggling actor, I participated in a talkshow pilot but the producers pulled me off the show because I was over the top obnoxious.

As I walk down the hallway to John’s office, a blonde woman (who turns out to be his wife of 30 years, Maggie) warns me, ‘If you’re not a smoker, throw your arms up in the air and say you can’t do the interview here. And he’ll take you upstairs.’

I walk into the office, which turns out to be a largely empty stage. I look around and crane my head to the left where I find John, a tall strapping man almost 60 years of age, smoking a smelly cigar.

He asks me if I mind the cigar and I say I don’t, but sure it would be nice to do the interview upstairs, after he takes me on a tour of the facilities.

We walk into an editing bay and it looks like the guy is cutting homosexual porn, but it’s just the TV show Cops, Langley’s most famous production. It debuted in 1989 on Fox, and is about to air its 500th episode.

John and I settle down on adjacent couches in an empty upstairs office. We put our feet up on the table and whinge about lawyers.

Luke: “My sister is a barrister in Australia.”

John: “Well, a barrister is not like a US lawyer.”

Luke: “Barristers have to wear a wig.”

John: “It’s more noble.”

Luke: “There are so many more lawyers here. Yanks are so litigious.”

John: “I was never in a lawsuit in my life until I got into this business, where it is almost inevitable.”

Luke: “People will sue each other and then do business the next day.”

John: “Absolutely.”

Luke: “I would never sue anyone unless it was just over the top. It’s not honorable.”

John: “I wish we had the English [legal] system where loser pays. As long as you don’t have that system, you are going to have a lot of litigious people suing just so they can get an insurance settlement.”

Luke: “Where did you grow up?”

John: “West Los Angeles and Manhattan Beach. My father worked in the aircraft industry. My mother was a housewife. I have two older brothers and a younger sister. None of them are in entertainment.

“I was born June 1, 1944. At one time, I wanted to be an academic. I’ve always been a slow learner. At age 18, in 1961, I joined the Army. I didn’t want to go to college right away. I figured this was a great way to see the world and get laid.

“I went into so-called Army Intelligence. I spent two years, nine months, 29 days, 13 hours, 22 minutes and 14 seconds.”

Luke: “Did you being in Army Intelligence help you get laid?”

John: “Oh sure. I was in Panama for two years. Then I returned home, went back to school, piddled around, worked multiple jobs, and returned to school. I got my BA (English) and MA (Literature/Composition) from Cal State Dominguez and I did PhD work at UC Irvine in the philosophy of aesthetics. It was a movement at the time. I taught at those two schools and I thought I wanted to be a professor.

“In 1971, I finally said enough of this nonsense. I quit because I couldn’t conceive of teaching the same courses year in and year out. I’m a Gemini. I need more stimulation. I loved academia and I loved literature but I burned out on Ivory Tower capitalism.

“I got married and worked for an airline for three years in public relations. It was a great gig but I made no money. I traveled the world. I’ve always been a writer. I published in Film News International. Someone (Steve Friedman) read a screenplay I’d written and asked me to help produce a movie (The Crowley Testament) for Warner Brothers. So I quit my job in 1977. It was a theatrical fictional documentary about a mad scientist named Lucius Crowley.

“Then the guy who bought the project for Warners was fired and the new guy who came in, Robert Shapiro, threw out all the old projects.

“Then I worked for the marketing firm, Producers Creative Services (PCS) , of my future partner Malcom Barber. In 1980, we sold PCs and started a production company. We starved for a couple of years and then we did a documentary about drug addiction called Cocaine Blues.”

Luke: “Was this based on personal experience?”

John: “Oh, there’s been a bit of that. Maybe it was my karmic debt. We had a film deal with somebody and they said, ‘Do something small first just to show that you can do what you say you can do.’ So we did Cocaine Blues, which had been developed for somebody else. In my naivete, I realized that making a film was one thing but selling it was another.

“We entered it in all the film festivals and won some awards. And that’s how I got into television [and conceived the show Cops].

“I wrote a screenplay that sold years later. Then in 1987, I made the Dolph Lundgren: Maximum Potential exercise video. I hired Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary as PAs. Quentin and Roger worked at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, where I live. They were kids, 18-19 years old. We used to discuss film and BS. I loaned him my script for the [1986] film Behind Enemy Lines. He showed me scripts he’d written.

“As a PA, Quentin was always bashing into nightstands and babbling everybody. He’s quite a talker and loves to get into debates about film. My partner would say, ‘Fire that kid. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.’

“Roger came to me once and asked, ‘I want to be a director. I don’t want to be a PA. How do I do that?’ I said, ‘Roger, if you want to be a director, direct. If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be a producer, produce.’ He thought about it and said ok. The next day he came in and said, ‘I quit.’ I said, ‘That’s cool. What are you going to do?’ He said, ‘I’m going to be a writer and a director.'”

According to Imdb.com: Roger Avary “met Quentin Tarantino at a video store they both worked at in the 1980’s. Though Quentin Tarantino received credit, it was actually Avary who conceived the Top-Gun gay reference speech that Tarantino used in Sleep with Me (1994). Avary’s writing contributions to Pulp Fiction (1994) include: 1) A boxer who refuses to throw a fight. 2) A pair of hitmen who accidentally shoot a hostage in the head in the back of a car. (Actually a deleted script idea from True Romance (1993). 3) A boxer who tells his wife they are in danger, and must leave the country.”

Roger says about Quentin: “I’ve realised that I can’t hang out with him. I talk with him, and he just sucks stuff from me.”

John: “Quentin finished out as PA on that project, picking up dog turds on Venice Beach and that kind of work. That was their intro to the film biz.

“I produced about eight two-hour Geraldo Rivera primetime television specials. One, called American Vice, featured a live drug bust. One lady sued Gerald because during the live broadcast he said, ‘A lady and her pimp are being…’ She claimed she just happened to be at that guy’s house.

“I was trying to sell Cops at the time. I went to Tribune with it. Back on Cocaine Blues, I accompanied cops on a drug bust. I said, ‘Wow, this is interesting.’ I thought it would be great to do a show with no narrator and no script, from a cop’s point of view. Because it is interesting work. Nobody would buy it.

“Tribune said, ‘We’ll do something with you if you do it with Geraldo.’ I said no, I wanted to do Cops. They said, ‘Well, it’s Geraldo or nothing.’ So I thought about it and said, OK, we’ll meet.’ And then we put together a two-hour special, American Vice, about the drug war.”

Luke: “Did you do the one where he opened Al Capone’s vault?”

John: “No, that was the first one he did. And I think he was chagrined by it because it was a big bust. There was nothing there. Our promise to him was, ‘We’ll guarantee you that your vault won’t be empty. We’ll have all this action and all this investigative look at drugs. We’ll put you undercover and get all this clandestine tape of drug deals. We’ll do live drug busts.’

“The guy at Tribune said, ‘Are you sure we can do that live?’ I said, ‘Of course we can.’ I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do it. We researched it and found technicians who told us how we could do it. We used microwave technology and bounced signals up to helicopters who’d bounce it back down to trucks who’d bounce it up to satellites.”

Luke: “What are people telling you while you try to shop Cops?”

John: “We’ll never do this kind of show. It will be a nightmare legally. You can’t do a show without a host and narrator. You can’t do a show without actors and a script. I had blinders on and I refused to listen to all the rejections. All the networks rejected it. The irony is that once it was picked up by Fox and succeeded, every network wanted to do the same show. All the networks called me back to see if I would do a cop show with them.”

Luke: “How did you finally get Cops on the air?”

John: “Timing. I met with Steve Chao at Fox. His mandate was to do alternative interesting programming. I kept pitching him shows and he rejected all the shows. Finally, I said, ‘You wouldn’t know a good show if it slapped you in the face. Fuck off. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’ And that excited him. ‘No, no, no. One last pitch. Pick one idea that you really like.’

“We’d pitched four ideas: 1- 911, which became Rescue 911. 2 – Most Wanted. 3. Funny home videos. 4. Cops.

“Then he said, ‘Which one of those do you want to do the most?’ And I said Cops. He said fine. We met with Barry Diller. Fox initially ordered 45 episodes a year. We cut back to 36 so that we could have a life. We’re in our 15th season now.”

Luke: “Did that Supreme Court media tag along ruling affect you?”

John: “No. There’s a big misunderstanding about it. The Supreme Court ruled that if somebody accompanies the police on to private property, they are subject to being sued by whoever owns the private company. The case came about because CBS News had accompanied the police on a raid.

“It’s an interesting constitutional issue pitting the Fourth Amendment (against unreasonable search and seizure) and the First Amendment (free speech).

“The ruling got misinterpreted in the media as no more ride-alongs, which is nonsense. For Cops, we always get permission from everybody anyway so it doesn’t matter. We have far more strictures than the news. They can show everything they want.”

Luke: “Why do people sign releases to be on your show?”

John: “Fame.”

Luke: “If you were arrested, would you sign a release?”

John: “Of course I would. I’ve told my children the same. Cops has become part of the pop culture. People who will yell, ‘Get that news camera away from me.’ But when they hear that it is cops, they go, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ And they sign releases. You tell me why. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it is part of the landscape now. It’s cool to be on Cops.”

Luke: “You had that producer who was arrested for drunk driving.”

John: “Yes. He was cashiered from his position because of that. He’s no longer allowed to go into the field. He’s in a purely editorial capacity now.”

Luke: “Your wife works with you.”

John: “Now that the kids are raised, she’s become more active. We’ve produced a couple of films together.

“A few years ago, I started a website Crime.com with the sole purpose of reverse convergence. Right in the middle of the dot com madness, as bubbles are bursting all over, I started an internet company called Crime.com. It was everything you ever wanted to know about crime – information, news, entertainment… I wanted to turn it into a channel. I ended up selling it to USA Networks and being a cofounder of the cable channel, which has yet to launch. And also being responsible for all the original programming.”

Luke: “What’s your reaction to reality programming like Survivor?”

John: “I see it as reality-based gameshows. It’s a distinct genre, apart from reality programming.

“The media need labels. They need categorical imperatives.”

Luke: “What shows have you been working on?”

John: “Not much. I’m picky. I doubt that in television I will ever succeed the impact of Cops. It’s the best idea I’ve had for television entertainment.”

Luke: “Have you had to tone down the violence on Cops?”

John: “No. The interesting thing about television is that you can show all the blood and guts you want. You just have to avoid sex and language. I’ve had some interesting discussions with Standards and Practices [internal network censorship units] over the years. For instance, you can’t say ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘God damn it’ on television. Yet I can show homicide. To me, a murder is far more obscene than language. I always try to push the envelope as far as possible. Not to exploit, but to be as real and as raw as possible because that’s the programming mandate for the show. I wanted to show you reality as you have never seen it. You what to show what a homicide scene is and what a high speed chase is. My purpose is not to show blood and guts. I just want to show reality as unvarnished as possible. Cops is an existential variety show. It is unpredictable and immediate and as real as you can get without being there.

“Often there’s a confusion between the message and the messenger. I am not a cop and I have never had ambitions to be a cop. I’m a child of the ’60s. If you would’ve told me that I was going to do a show about cops, I would’ve said, ‘What am I going to call it? Pigs?’ I just happened to get in an arena that was dramatic and started doing documentary films about it that became so-called reality television. And in doing it, I developed respect for people doing it, like cops, paramedics, firemen. Most of these people are in it for pro-social purposes. By and large, these guys are the good guys.

“When something like 9/11 happens, there’s a great urge for order.”

Luke: “What did you think of the Bush administration’s overtures to Hollywood to play a part in the war on terrorism?”

John: “Deplorable. I am not big on propaganda. The best form of propaganda is an informed populace.”

Luke: “Why have you chosen to specialize in crime?”

John: “Why do I do Cops and not Accountants? Certain professions lend themselves to drama. That’s why there are so many medical, legal and crime dramas.”

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