Decoding The News (8-25-24)

01:00 Hate Comments About Gus Walz, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=157131
14:00 Tucker Carlson – The FULL Interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H1tjQ-RaZU
15:30 What’s going on with Ken Brown aka Deep Left Jokl? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aALp15nKpUI
26:00 Kamala Harris, LBJ & The Passage Of Power, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=157143
34:30 How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy: IPA Encounters with Batya Ungar-Sargon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P81rbOs0pWc
38:00 Batya Ungar-Sargon got her PhD from UC Berkeley: Her dissertation was Coercive Pleasures: The Force and Form of the Novel 1719-1740, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batya_Ungar-Sargon
54:00 Elliott Blatt joins to talk about Ken Brown aka Deep Left Jokl
1:10:00 News: French authorities arrest Telegram CEO Pavel Durov at a Paris airport, https://apnews.com/article/france-russia-telegram-paris-durov-arrest-63cd8e5663c6b6f3404745866d662954
1:11:00 Andrew Tate’s commentary on the arrest
1:27:50 Civility vs truth
1:29:00 Stephen J. James joins the show to discuss speech crackdown in the UK
1:54:00 ADHD medication such as adderall
2:00:00 SSRIs, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/
2:21:00 Kip joins to talk about SSRIs
3:00:00 The New York Times operated project feels
3:02:00 Kip on the three stages of money
3:29:10 Mainstream media caught in ‘woke stranglehold’: Batya Ungar-Sargon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxzvZ29zaXQ
3:35:30 Wrestlers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestlers_(TV_series)
3:38:30 Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33038128/
3:39:00 Tucker Carlson Explains Why JD Vance is Actually Normal… But Tim Walz is the Weird VP Candidate, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xu7hyxLqeY
3:39:50 17 Ugly Psychology Truths No One Wants To Admit – Adam Lane Smith, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOvSVmx_F-c
3:41:00 Women who have sex on the first date
3:43:00 Trump vs Harris Debate Behaviors. What to watch for, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEIjlhlCT5M
3:50:10 Defining grifting as excessive profiteering, https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus/posts
3:54:00 Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt
3:58:00 Elon Musk, Gad Saad, Jonathan Haidt, James Lindsay and company would have been saner if they had been less adulated
4:01:30 Natcon Squad dissects Democrats, Kamala Harris, https://x.com/NatConTalk/status/1827604928581292536
4:07:25 How to Make Peace With Your Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfCGGMw0yHQ

Transcript.

Podnotes AI summary: Gus Waltz, the 17-year-old son of Democratic VP nominee Tim Watts, had an intense reaction to his father that drew much attention. Gus repeatedly yelled “That’s my dad” during a significant moment. This kind of emotional display naturally prompts reactions from people who often share their thoughts on social media or in conversation.

When witnessing such intense behavior, there are two main ways to respond: casually and reflexively. The casual response involves openly sharing your immediate thoughts—whether you find the reaction beautiful, weird, or over-the-top. However, when dealing with public figures’ children or sensitive situations, it’s often wiser to monitor your behavior carefully and stay silent until understanding what is socially acceptable.

Having ADHD can complicate this balance between natural reactions and considered responses. Medication like Adderall has helped many manage these impulses better by making it easier to figure out appropriate responses.

There’s value in both types of reactions—the spontaneous truth-telling and the disciplined civility—but they come at different social costs. Public figures’ families are often used as props for political gain but also become targets for criticism.

Reflecting on personal experiences helps understand Gus’s reaction better. For instance, seeing a loved one publicly humiliated can provoke strong emotions similar to those Gus displayed.

While criticizing politicians’ children isn’t ideal due to its moral implications, suppressing natural human reactions entirely isn’t always beneficial either. In politics especially, balancing civility with truthfulness is challenging but crucial for honest discourse.

For example, recognizing signs of potential issues in leaders (like suspected substance abuse) could be important for public awareness despite societal pressures towards politeness and restraint.

Ultimately though raw honesty brings humanity into discussions; overly cautious speech might lead us away from necessary truths about our leadership dynamics today!

When my life is going well, I become more extroverted and confident. However, when my life feels like a string of humiliations, I turn introverted and avoid talking to people. This affects how often I do live streams; I’m typically happier and stronger when things are good.

As Kamala Harris rises in the polls, she gets a halo effect that makes her more appealing. Young people have even created their own version of her—less prim and proper but relatable. Despite politicians usually struggling to connect with youth, Harris has been rebranded successfully by them.

Lyndon Johnson’s transformation after JFK’s assassination was drastic. He became less casual in conversation and more controlled in his movements and voice. Winning made him appear composed; losing had made him awkward.

I started reading “How Work Media is Undermining Democracy” which explores media biases during Trump’s era. Contrary to expectations of finding rampant racism in the South, many Americans seemed past racial binaries despite media narratives suggesting deep polarization.

Journalism shifted from a working-class trade to an elite profession over time, causing journalists to lose touch with ordinary people’s struggles while focusing on issues that resonate with affluent liberals instead.

The book “Bad News” highlights this shift using examples such as the disproportionate coverage of Trump-Russia stories compared to pressing issues like opioid addiction or homelessness.

Overall, our drive for status shapes much of our behavior and perspectives—whether through nationalism or professional identity—and influences how we interpret information around us.

That’s why I’ve been feeling off lately. Maybe it’s the change in weather or something, but I need to hide your face because that voice syncs up weirdly.

Anyway, let’s talk about Joe Cole. What’s going on with his hair? You know him; he’s a great guy—intelligent, funny, always the center of attention. He improvises well and has lots of insights.

Meeting him reminded me of my younger days with curious and active friends. Despite his absurd cult leader aspirations, at least he has goals. Better than people with no ambitions who are just boring unless their influence is harmful.

Joe could be an entrepreneur; he’s intelligent but might struggle with tedious tasks. He’s not receptive to advice either. For example, we went hiking near Mt Tam’s outdoor amphitheater where he performed a funny public address spontaneously—he loves being the center of attention.

He reminds me of someone talented yet unable to execute due to laziness or dopamine addiction—a subtle cancer affecting many talented individuals today.

Is Joe connected closely with family or community? He didn’t share much about his origins when asked—it seems like he lacks strong ties which would otherwise check his behavior.

About his hair: it’s another bid for attention rather than transitioning gender-wise. Seems like an accidental style choice turned intentional performance for more noticeability among peers around 25-30 years old compared to younger followers around 21-22 years old who admire him despite questionable actions like attacking Steve Sailer without reading any material first—a lazy move showing poor character judgment similar seen in academics criticizing books unread by them during discussions on shows like Crossfire back then

Cheating culture enabled through internet habits allows skating through college without doing work leading towards unpreparedness later impacting real-world job settings revealing true competence levels over time as observed within larger companies having complex politics versus smaller setups demanding accountability directly influencing one’s success rate overall

Apparently, the COVID booster is most effective for a month or two after you get it. Then it’s moderately effective for another month or two. By nine months, its effect is minimal.

I think I had COVID recently but didn’t lose my sense of taste, which you’re supposed to with COVID. I’m so tired of hearing about it. Many Americans share this sentiment—they’re sick of talking about COVID even though it’s been five years since we first heard about it in 2019.

Seeing people masked up and driving alone makes me feel disconnected from them. It’s frustrating.

On another note, I’ve been invited to a dinner I don’t want to attend. Declining again would likely end that relationship, which might be best since they asked if I’d write postcards for a camera—a task I’m not interested in at all.

I’ve also distanced myself from Joe by insisting he remove his stored items from my apartment yesterday. It feels good to reestablish boundaries.

Now let’s discuss the balance between civility and truth-telling as seen with political figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris versus extreme outbursts by others like Tim Wasongas. Excessive emphasis on civility can prevent us from telling vital truths.

Some liberals believed they were heading towards utopia until bold statements by Trump shocked them into an eight-year state of disbelief.

Moving on, some people arrested in the UK for social media posts made direct threats inciting violence—those arrests are justified. However, there’s concern over lenient sentences given to more severe crimes compared to harsh penalties for speech-related offenses without actual harm caused.

Regarding Andrew Tate: he’s seen as exploiting social media rather than offering positive masculinity lessons despite gaining young male followers who reject self-defeating narratives imposed on them by society’s views on toxic masculinity.

The Me Too movement has affected how men approach women; many now fear being labeled predators and avoid making advances altogether.

In terms of body count preferences among peers: generally lower numbers are preferred due concerns over faithfulness or undesirability linked with higher counts.

Finally addressing mainstream news consumption—it may lead people around by the nose unless they’re discerning enough while alternative sources like Twitter come with their own biases too.

In America, private medicine is cheaper because there’s no market competition in places like Australia or the UK due to lack of private healthcare options. Someone close to me took many months and several thousand dollars through conventional medicine with adult ADHD diagnosis in Australia.

Adderall wears off dramatically after four or five hours compared to Modafinil which lasts around fifteen hours without noticeable fading effects. Another ADHD medication I’m on causes increased waiting time between wanting to pee and being able to pee.

I take Adderall twice daily depending on circumstances—first dose early morning (4-6AM), second dose anywhere between 10AM-2PM based on my schedule needs, especially if I have evening commitments.

Regarding emotional impacts: Straterra deals more with emotional components of ADHD while Adderall focuses more on productivity aspects without significant ill effects aside from withdrawal symptoms after its effect fades out.

Elliott believes natural reactions are better overall but acknowledges some people might need medications under high stress or dangerous situations such as psychotic individuals prone towards violence needing chemical downgrading.

Another friend was on an SSRI but hated how it made him feel. He tried quitting and stayed awake for three days before going back to the medication. It seemed like such a radical intervention, committing someone to a life of being semi-poisoned, which I find terrifying.

I’ve managed my mental and physical health directly, only visiting the hospital once for a broken arm. I’ve been generally healthy and emotionally balanced.

If you had children, would you want them to have your life or something better? I’d want mine to have a more socially well-adjusted life than I’ve had.

Steven agreed that it’s natural to want better for your children. If his kid had ADHD, he might medicate them young because he’s concerned about staying on track after dropping out of competitive sports.

He suggested playing tennis as it offers socialization and exercise benefits while avoiding physical risks associated with fighting sports. Tennis has been his primary form of socialization until he got too old due to injuries from frequent play.

The quality of people who play tennis is usually high—they are often educated, employed winners with good social standing. However, starting out in tennis requires finding partners willing to play regularly.

Posted in America, Censorship, England, Psychiatry, Psychology | Comments Off on Decoding The News (8-25-24)

The Need To Feel Superior

The less superior my real life, the more intensely I’ve felt the need for a hero system that makes me superior.

Growing up as a believing Seventh-Day Adventist, I felt superior to the rest of the world because I was part of the elect.

Largely outside of my religious world was the power of nationalism. I lived in Australia until age 11. Most Aussies seemed to think that if you weren’t an Aussie, you didn’t matter much.

I moved to California at age 11. Americans were more outwardly patriotic than Australians but they enjoyed less social trust and cohesion. Nationalism ran strong in both countries.

By my teens, the fervor of my religious worldview diminished as my sex drive increased. When I was 14, we got a TV for the first time, and I saw on that screen beautiful women and the type of superior physical and social life I wanted. My religious faith grew cold as my selfish desires for attention and pleasure took over.

I began college at age 19 and became exposed to Marxism at age 20, and I played around with Marxism for a couple of years because it gave me the thrill of being in the vanguard. Then I encountered Dennis Prager when I was at UCLA in 1988-1989 and I became convinced that Judaism was the superior life.

My life didn’t consistently align with my best interests until 2016 (I started my first 12-step program in 2012, and by 2016, I was up to five of them). By the time covid hit in 2020, I was in a good place and now I look back and I respect most of my online work from that date on.

A good tool for analyzing commentators and the world is noting what makes people feel important. What are the likely incentives driving people? After we meet our basic needs, our most intense drive is for status, noted Tom Wolfe.

July 5, 2016, Nieman StoryBoard published:

Wolfe’s refinement was what he calls the “statusphere.” Everyone isn’t directly competing for status with everyone else; rather, they pursue status within a distinct sphere — and regard their own statusphere as the best of all.

“That has more or less been my system of approaching any subject,” Wolfe says. “For instance, ‘The Right Stuff’ is not a book about space, it’s a book about status competition among pilots.”

Today, no less than in Wolfe’s grad-school days, the lure of what Weber termed “status honor” is all around us. If anything, the age of the Internet has opened up frontiers of status competition undreamed-of half a century ago. Thanks to social media, people edit — sorry, “curate” — versions of their lives to friends and strangers and compete for a dopamine-releasing tally of “likes.” And did Victorian England have anything on modern social media in its capacity for enforcing social conformism through shaming?

Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Nanny Mafia”: “Nannies have a higher standing than a nursemaid, since they have the power to impose discipline and manners on the child. But they have a lower standing than a governess, in that they undertake no real education. But mainly, in Europe and the United States, they have become a symbol of the parents’ status. First of all, parents who have nannies to look after the children have to have money. That is one thing. And parents who have nannies lead their own lives. This gives them more status even in front of their children. They don’t have to appear in the ridiculous role of martyred, harried creatures, forever ill-kempt and ill-humored, waiting on the children like servants.”

Liah Greenfeld wrote in 2018:

The world nationalism made

German nationalism, which eventually took the form of National Socialism, was a collectivistic nationalism, but it belonged to the collectivistic and ethnic type of nationalism. In the framework of ethnic nationalism, membership in the nation is a matter of blood, which can neither be acquired if one is not born into it, nor lost if one is; in other words, nationality is race. This type of nationalism, which is fundamentally racism (sometimes called ethnic chauvinism), is the form in which racism has appeared in the modern era, and it develops when the envisioned national community has a relatively poor record of cultural achievement.

By the time German nationalism began to develop, the German cultural record was—disturbingly for the nationalists—rather undistinguished. Secular literature in German—drama, poetry, philosophy, science—barely appeared before the late eighteenth century. This was the reason why German nationalism pointed to the intangibles of blood and soil as the proof of German virtues and stressed the superficiality of visible achievement in France, Britain, and especially among the Jews. (This was also the reason for the insistence of Nazi ideologists in the twentieth century, despite it being contrary to all evidence, that German culture dated back fifteen hundred years.) This cultural underachievement of the community is recognized by the very members of the elite who import nationalism, leading to the development of a sense of inferiority among them, which becomes a central ingredient of the national consciousness. This sense of inferiority results in the specific psychological dynamics of existential envy (ressentiment), which in turn makes the nation that is formed very aggressive—always feeling threatened in its dignity, and eager to blame outsiders, whose superior achievements its spokesmen envy, for its woes.

While Germany represents the paradigmatic example of collectivistic and ethnic nationalism, perhaps its most salient example nowadays is nationalism in various Muslim countries. From the moment that national consciousness in the Muslim world was born, a sense of cultural inferiority has plagued, in particular, the Arab elites, especially vis-à-vis the achievements of the Jewish settlement that became the state of Israel. Although most of the Arab states were created by Western powers who never colonized their territories (ruled prior to 1918 by the Ottoman Empire, which privileged its Muslim coreligionists above all of its other subjects), the resentment of Arab nationalists toward the equally secular Jews was first expressed as a general sentiment against colonialism or imperialism—that is, against the West. (Since Lenin’s day, at least, colonialism was considered a characteristically Western, first-world crime.)

Liah Greenfeld writes in her 2016 book on nationalism:

* The worth of the nation—the psychological gratification afforded by national identity and therefore its importance—is related to the experience of dignity by wide and ever widening sectors of humanity. The remarkable quality of national identity—and also its essential quality—is that it guarantees status with dignity to every member of whatever is defined as the national community. It is this quality that recommended nationalism to European (and later other) elites whose status was threatened or
who were prevented from achieving the status they aspired to, that ensured the spread of nationalism throughout the world in the last two centuries, and that explains its staying power in the face of material interests that often pull in the other direction.

In the early days of nationalism, different elite groups, exposed to nationalist ideas, reacted dissimilarly to them, in accordance with the relative ability of nationalism to aid them in their status-maintaining and status-aggrandizing pursuits. An example is furnished by the nobility in various German lands who as late as the 1800s remained indifferent to the appeal of nationalism, embracing it rather reluctantly during the Wars of Liberation.

* Among non-noble intellectuals, the second of the two elite groups that were responsible for the initial establishment of nationalism in Europe, the idea of the nation also had to compete with other status-bestowing frameworks. As long as other identities appeared to promise more dignity, the nation failed to captivate them and secure their commitments. French philosophes were above particularistic self-content. Voltaire wrote that “a philosopher has no patrie and belongs to no faction,” and that “every man
is born with a natural right to choose his patrie for himself.”1 Abbe Raynal believed that “the patrie of a great man is the universe.”2 Great men, explained Duclos, “men of merit, whatever the nation of their origin, form one nation among themselves. They are free from the puerile national vanity. They leave it to the vulgar, to those who, having no personal glory, have to content themselves with the glory of their countrymen.” …So long as one could reasonably hope to become world famous (and French philosophes in the mid-eighteenth century still had a reasonable chance of that), it was foolish to limit oneself to a small part of the world. And if one was confident in one’s superiority and felt assured of recognition, one had no need for shared dignity of a nation. In fact, one had no need for nation at all, a republic of letters was enough.

…German intellectuals remained faithful to their cosmopolitan ideals long after their French brethren had abandoned theirs. Nicolai considered German nationalism “a political monstrosity”;4 Schiller claimed to have given up his fatherland in exchange “for the great world” and wrote “as a citizen of the world.”5 Fichte was a principled cosmopolitan as late as 1799… Nationalism did not appeal to German intellectuals prior to the Napoleonic campaign because they were the only group interested in the redistribution of prestige in society, and without the support of the nobility and the bureaucracy, they lacked the means to enforce it. To insist on such a redistribution (implied in the idea of the nation) in this situation would have only invited ridicule and damaged the chances of social advancement which some of them had. It was more satisfying to dream that one was an equal member of a community of intellectuals…

* Most of our experiences, however, are not experiences of physical or biological realities, but of the social reality. This reality is also constituted by our experiences, but we don’t experience it through our bodily senses, we experience it through, or in, our minds. Most of our empirical reality, in other words, is neither material nor organic, it is mental.

* While all other animal species, irrespective of the level of development and place on the evolutionary tree, essentially transmit their ways of life genetically, we overwhelmingly transmit our ways of life through symbols.

* No human group of any duration, and no individual, unless severely handicapped or (as an infant) undeveloped mentally, can live without an identity. Having an identity is a psychological imperative and, therefore, a sociological constant… An identity defines the position of its individual or group bearer in a more or less extensive sphere of the social world that is relevant for this bearer, and serves as a map or blueprint for this sphere…

* [P]opulations homogeneous as to any particular such characteristic do not necessarily share the same identity and consciousness: medieval peasants and lords in Europe, though all Christians, did not share an identity—peasants identifying as peasants and lords identifying as lords—and, beyond all doubt, thought differently. To return to language, they did not speak the same language… identities were estate-based… there were no ethnic identities before nationalism…

* Language, above everything else, is the medium of thinking, thinking representing the explicitly symbolic component of our consciousness, the explicitly symbolic mental process… traffic lights well may be the most efficient system of communication among humans… To capture symbolic experiences (experiences produced by the specifically human, cultural environment) language is necessary; only it can incorporate them into reality. A stable sphere of new experiences presupposes the annexation to human existence of a new sphere of meaning which only language can create, the emergence of a new semantic space. Therefore, while one can imagine a social current without the participation of language, institutionalization without language is impossible. Any social order starts with the creation of a new vocabulary, and this is demonstrated by every case of nationalism…

* collectivistic nationalisms are more likely to engage in aggressive warfare than individualistic nationalisms… Collectivistic nationalisms, by contrast, are forms of particularism, whether perceived in geopolitical, cultural (in the sense of acquired culture), or presumably inherent, ethnic terms. The borderline between “us” and “them” is relatively clear… collectivistic nationalisms are articulated by small elite groups… To achieve the solidarity of this larger population, made of diverse strands, they tend (though not invariably) to blame their misfortunes not on agencies within the nation, whom they would as a result alienate, but on those outside it. If they do blame internal elements, they define these as agents acting on behalf of or in collusion with hostile foreigners. Thus, from their perspective, the nation is from the start united in common hatred.

* During war, ethnic nationalism is more conducive to brutality in relation to the enemy population than civic nationalism. This is so because civic nationalism, even when particularistic, still treats humanity as one, fundamentally homogeneous entity.

Posted in Nationalism, Personal | Comments Off on The Need To Feel Superior

Diversity Increases Daily Friction

Gerald Stone was born in the USA but after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he moved his family to Australia where he had a long distinguished career in journalism. He launched Australia’s 60 Minutes program and then ended up back in the USA for a few years working for Fox. In his terrific 2011 book, Say It With Feeling: Megastars, Media Tsars, Trailblazing TV: Memoirs of a Prime Time Warrior (one of the ways I splurged on myself during Covid was to buy this hardcover), Stone wrote:

“Americans put a lot of time and effort into food. Back in Sydney, if I were holding an urgent production meeting that ran over, I would call for some chicken or ham-and-cheese sandwiches and not expect to hear a murmer of dissent. In New York in a similar situation the entire meeting would grind to a halt as a selection of menus from the nearest fast-food stores was passed around to ponder — one person to order Mexican, another Chinese…”

The more diverse your society, the more friction you’ll have in your transactions. Bill Saporito writes in the New York Times today:

There Are a Bazillion Possible Starbucks Orders — and It’s Killing the Company

You’re already in line at Starbucks — having failed to order by app — when you spot one of them. That dude who is looking down not at a cellphone but at the Post-it note that holds the orders of his office mates. Which is confirming that you are going to be late for that next meeting, because this person plans to order six coffee beverages, each of which involves some combination of tall venti grande double-pump, one to four shots of espresso, half-caf, oat milk, nonfat milk, soy milk, milk milk, whipped cream, syrup, brown sugar, white sugar, no sugar and mocha drizzle, from the pike position with two and a half twists.

Even ordering via app has issues. There’s often a crowd waiting at the bar end because Gen Z, which tends to prefer anything but human interface, has overwhelmed the baristas with the same orders-of-magnitude drinks. Starbucks says there are more than 170,000 possible drink combinations available, but outside estimates have put the number at more than 300 billion. And the person in front of you always seems to be ordering 100 million of them.

If the degree of difficulty in a typical Starbucks order now seems to be Olympian, so are its troubles.

Posted in America, Australia | Comments Off on Diversity Increases Daily Friction

Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

Whatever you think of her politics, Batya Ungar-Sargon, like Molly Jong-Fast, is a lovely person with extraordinary levels of empathy. I struggled with chronic fatigue from age 22 to 55 and not many people reacted with empathy. Batya did. I criticized her on Twitter around 2017. She then sent me a DM and she wanted to know about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then I kept criticizing her on Twitter and she blocked me. I might have been a troll (the truth is, I was serving up tweets sent to me by a friend who could not afford to send the tweets himself). That her initial reaction was to engage me on a humane level speaks well of her.

When you watch Batya’s interviews on Youtube, you get a sense of her graciousness and good cheer.

For most of my life, I’ve been in the grips of undiagnosed ADHD and as a result I couldn’t abide by social norms. In the grip of brain chemistry beyond my direct control, I relied on other people to be the better man (examples that come to mind include Jewish Journal of Los Angeles leaders Rob Eshman and David Suissa as well as some of my rabbis). I often knew I was doing this while in the middle of my compulsive trolling. Getting medicated for ADHD in 2023 (adderall) removed 90% of these anti-social instincts.

Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote in this 2021 book:

* [Don] Lemon’s guests were Kirsten Powers, a senior CNN political analyst; Alice Stewart, a CNN commentator playing the supporting role of token Republican; and Stephanie Jones – Rogers, a professor of history at UC Berkeley, whose book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South had been cited in an article on Vox, a liberal opinion site that caters to millennials.
Powers had much to say about Donald Trump’s female supporters. “People will say that they support him for reasons other than his racist language,” she told Lemon. “They’ll say, ‘Well I’m not racist; I just voted for him because I didn’t like Hillary Clinton.’ And I just want to say that that’s not, that doesn’t make you not racist. It actually makes you racist,” Powers explained. “As for why white women do it,” she went on, “I think we have to remember that the white patriarchal system actually benefits white women in a lot of ways.”
Professor Jones – Rogers concurred, tying support for Trump to slavery. “So, as a historian, I explore white women’s economic investments in the institution of slavery,” she said. “And what that has led me to understand is that there’s this broader historical context that we need to keep in mind when we’re looking at white women’s voting patterns today, and as we look at their support — their overwhelming support of Donald Trump.” Lemon jumped in to note that just over half of white women had voted for Trump — hardly what would constitute “overwhelming” support. Jones – Rogers clarified: “What I meant by overwhelming was emotionally overwhelming.”
The sole Republican, Alice Stewart, was briefly allowed to respond, and voiced her resentment at being called racist for her vote for Trump, whom she chose for his policies. But Powers interjected: It’s not just Republican women who have a problem with racism but all white women, indeed, all white people . “Every white person benefits from an inherently racist system that is structurally racist, so we are all part of the problem,” Powers said. Jones – Rogers heartily agreed.

* the belief that America is an unrepentant white – supremacist state that confers power and privilege on white people, which it systematically denies to people of color. Those who hold this view believe an interconnected network of racist institutions infects every level of society, culture, and politics, imprisoning us all in a power binary based on race regardless of our economic circumstances. And the solution, according to those who hold this view, is not to reform institutions that still struggle with racism but to transform the consciousness of everyday Americans until we prioritize race over everything else.
This view is known as “antiracism,” or by the shorthand of being “woke,”…

* For a long time, this view was the province of far – left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, by and large through liberal media outlets like the New York Times , NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post , Vox, CNN, the New Republic , and the Atlantic . Once fringe, the idea that America is an unabated white – supremacist country and that the most important thing about a person is the immutable fact of their race is the defining paradigm of today, the one now favored by white liberals to describe our current moment. And it was when white liberals began espousing this woke narrative that it went from being mainstream to being an obsession; and even, most recently, to being an outright moral panic.

* It began around 2011, the year the New York Times erected its online paywall. It was then that articles mentioning “racism,” “people of color,” “slavery,” or “oppression” started to appear with exponential frequency at the Times , BuzzFeed, Vox, the Washington Post , and NPR, according to sociologists tracking these developments.

* Powers had been the resident liberal at Fox News until CNN poached her in 2016, for a rumored $950,000 yearly salary. But for Powers to traverse the ideological distance from Fox to CNN and take advantage of that nearly million – dollar salary, she had to undergo a woke metamorphosis. In 2015, while still employed by Fox, Powers had written a book called The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech . But in the intervening years, she repented. “I was too dismissive of real concerns by traumatized people and groups who feel marginalized and ignored,” she wrote in a mea culpa in her USA Today column.
Newly reformed as a believer in America as an enduring white – supremacist state, Powers was able to take to CNN and join a Berkeley professor writing for Vox, a left – wing website for highly educated millennials, and another mainstream television host, who were all in total agreement about how racist every white person in America is, especially anyone who voted for Trump…

* Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals.

* …a new breed of reporter — highly educated and socially aspirational — was elevated by JFK, who had worked on the Harvard Crimson , the school’s student newspaper, and treated his fellow Ivy League journalists as kindred spirits, flattering them into being loyal to him. He was so deft at this that reporters would later refer to the presidential candidate as “Jack,” cheering his speeches and singing anti – Nixon songs with Kennedy’s staffers at hotel bars, writes Timothy Crouse in his book about campaign journalism, The Boys on the Bus. 8 “He knew many of them socially, and he was careful to treat them with respect and affection,” Crouse explains. “His Harvard trained advisers spoke in an academic, sophisticated idiom that excluded many of the older reporters but appealed to the new generation.” 9 Their stock in the profession soared.
At the same time, the rise of television meant that there was another better medium for Americans looking for a stenographic account of what had happened on a given day — one that was more immediate, both temporally and sensually. Newspaper owners felt that they could no longer simply tell their readers what had happened; they had to add something, which put a premium on expertise, analysis, and colorful writing. These became staples of newspaper writing and created a demand for reporters with ever more education and expertise, and devalued the work of less educated reporters and editors.
Radio and TV also started to give the news a more national character, breaking down regional barriers by bringing images and newscasters from the major cities into the homes of Americans throughout the nation. What this meant was that influence was concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller, ever more coastal set; the issues that preoccupied editors and producers in New York and Washington were now those that preoccupied the nation at large.
But the thing that really jump – started the status revolution in journalism was the Watergate scandal, and — just as importantly — its treatment in the Hollywood film All the President’s Men . The movie suddenly made journalism seem like a very glamorous endeavor, at its peak a David and Goliath tale where plucky sexpots, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, could bring down the most powerful — and most unpopular — man on the planet. The journalism profession began to draw more ambitious and better educated people than ever before, people who would have otherwise gone into other professions but were drawn to the combination of purpose and fame that journalism now offered.

* Already by 1980, American journalists had tightened into an elite caste, as a survey by three social scientists revealed. S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter found that by that time journalism had undergone a “rapid rise to social prominence.” What was once a source of upward mobility for high school grads had morphed into an elite profession for the highly educated. 17 Surveying a random sample of journalists from America’s leading national media (the New York Times; the Washington Post; the Wall Street Journal; TIME; Newsweek; U.S. News & World Report; and the three commercial TV networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC), the scientists discovered that journalists were in fact one of the best – educated groups in America; 93 percent of those they surveyed had college degrees, and the majority had graduate degrees, too. Just one in five reported having fathers with what the researchers called “low – status jobs.” And their salaries in 1986 put leading journalists solidly in the upper middle class, with those at the top making much, much more and even taking on the status of celebrities. 18
The sociologists also found that in 1980, 90 percent of journalists were prochoice, compared to 31 percent of the public, 19 and 80 percent supported affirmative action for black Americans, compared to 57 percent of the nation. Just 26 percent of journalists had voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election, and 86 percent said they seldom or never went to religious services.

* In 1984, 26 percent of journalists voted for Ronald Reagan; by 2014, just 7 percent of journalists identified as Republican. 26 By 2015, 96 percent of journalists who made donations to a political campaign contributed to Hillary Clinton. 27 When researchers from Arizona State University and Texas A&M University surveyed business journalists from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg News , Associated Press, Forbes, New York Times , Reuters, and Washington Post in 2018, they found that just 4 percent had conservative political views.

* Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt gave this shift the justification it needed: By reporting his invented accusations of communism, reporters were amplifying his charges. The lesson many (liberal) journalists learned from the episode was that it was important not just to report the facts but to interpret them. That this interpretation would inevitably have a liberal bent was not the goal so much as it was a byproduct of their sociological makeup.

* When the Los Angeles Times wanted to compete with the New York Times , hoping to gain national prestige, its top editors knew what they had to do: switch from being conservative to being liberal. As Nick Williams, the editor in chief of the L.A. Times , put it, “Newspaper prestige, not always but usually, is a function of liberal estimation. Most intellectuals are liberal, and editorial prestige depends on what intellectuals judge it to be.”

* A scathing critique of the New York Times ran in Harper’s Magazine in 1977, arguing that the Times ignored what was going on in the Bronx and spent its time on “goldplated goblets and $90 brass candlesticks” because “neither Bergdorf Goodman nor Cartier has anything to say to welfare mothers in the south Bronx.” The obsession with white, well – off, upscale readers, “people of influence and affluence,” meant that newspapers began to expand into the suburbs rather than having anything to do with the working – class residents of their own cities. As the editor in chief of the L.A. Times put it bluntly, “We don’t sell any papers in Watts.” And as is always the case, this question of who newspapers were selling to influenced what they were writing about. Asked why his paper failed at covering communities of color, Otis Chandler, the publisher of the L.A. Times , said, “We couldn’t get the advertising to support that, because the mass black audience and the Chicano audience do not have the purchasing power that our stores require to spend additional money in the Times.”

* To make sure advertisers knew who their readers were — and to signal to readers who their readers were — the media stopped talking about the working class, stopped addressing their issues, and stopped representing their lives. Labor coverage, which used to be robust, was phased out…

* Thus, in the 1960s, two more magazines cropped up specifically for the purpose of promoting class through taste: the New York Review of Books and New York magazine. These publications were explicitly designed to, by turns, stoke and allay the class anxieties of urban college grads living in fear of not knowing what the book of the moment is, or where the right place to eat is, or what wine to order, thereby losing their claim to elite status. And, of course, it was all aspirational: You had to make sure people felt there was somewhere they were still excluded from, so they would buy the next issue.

* Just 29 percent of Limbaugh’s audience and 24 percent of the Fox News audience had graduated from college. Fifty – four percent of daytime talk show listeners had only a high school degree or less.

* Conservative talk radio is the perfect companion for long – haul drives across the floor, or if you’re a car mechanic working under the hoods of cars all day long. Back in the day, factory workers on the Lower East Side would appoint one of their ranks as the reader. The readers would read aloud from Yiddish newspapers, and sometimes poetry and novels, to the millions of Jewish immigrants rolling cigarettes and sewing shirtwaists sixteen hours a day. Today, working – class Americans have talk radio and, increasingly, YouTube and podcasts to keep their minds occupied while they labor at jobs that don’t allow them to sit at a desk scrolling through social media posts of twenty – nine cats having a worse day than they are.

* conservative outlets identified the abandoned working – class masses as a ready – made market. And the mainstream media made it easy. Rush Limbaugh portrayed the media as arrogant lefties, an out – of – touch elite, and his approach worked because, at least in part, it was true. “In effect, Limbaugh was filling the gap that was left when the mainstream media dropped the working – class audience,” writes Martin. “It was a relatively easy turn to make mainstream media the bogeyman; it had, after all, turned its back on the working class in favor of more – upscale citizens.”

* Fox News is not making anyone conservative. It is conservative because it caters to the working class — a working class long abandoned by the liberal press.

* There’s a Talmudic concept of hefker that refers to a thing that’s been abandoned and is no one’s responsibility. It comes up in the discussion of whether you can keep something you find on the ground or if you’re bound to return it to its owner. If the item is clearly hefker — abandoned — the Talmud suggests you can claim it as your own. The media signaled that the working class was hefker…

* There was another equally important way that the Times was successfully imitating Facebook. In 2018, high on the success of the Trump era, the Data Science Group at the Times launched Project Feels, designed to help understand and predict the emotional impact of the paper’s articles. The group asked twelve hundred readers to rate how articles made them feel, giving them a series of options that included boredom, hate, interest, fear, hope, love, and happiness. These readers were young and well educated — the target audience of many advertisers. What they found was perhaps not surprising: Emotions drive engagement. “Across the board, articles that were top in emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not,” the team reported. They then took that information to the Times ’s Advertising and Marketing Services department to perform an ad – effectiveness campaign. Their conclusion? “Readers’ emotional response to articles is useful for predicting advertising engagement.” 34
To monetize the insight, the Data Science Group then created an artificial intelligence machine – learning algorithm to predict which emotions future articles would evoke. The New York Times now sells this insight to advertisers, which can choose from eighteen emotions, seven motivations, and one hundred topics they want the reader to be feeling or thinking about when they encounter an ad. “By identifying connections between content and emotion, we’ve successfully driven ad engagement 6X more effectively than IAB benchmarks,” the Times’s Advertising website proudly declares. 35 “Brands can target ads to specific articles we predict will evoke particular emotions in our readers,” it pitches. “Brands have the opportunity to target ads to articles we predict will motivate our readers to take a particular action.” 36 As of April 2019, Project Feels had generated fifty campaigns, more than thirty million impressions, and strong revenue results. 37 The Project Feels impresarios insist that their insights are produced “without coordination with the newsroom” and that their findings “will never impact our news report or other editorial decisions.” 38 And yet, the Times’s own executive editor, Dean Baquet, admitted that he is deeply involved in the business side of journalism. “I think of myself as primarily the executive editor whose job it is to ensure the quality and the integrity of the report,” he told Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka at Recode’s Code/ Media conference in September of 2015. He went on:
“But I also think of myself as somebody whose job it is to preserve the New York Times which means I do think about advertising, I do think about the New York Times as a business. That does not mean that I drop the wall and sell ads. But it does mean that I think about the whole of the enterprise.”
But the truth is, the business side doesn’t need to control editorial for it to have the intended effect. The emotions driving journalists toward fame are the same ones driving people to share articles on Facebook. Journalists know what kinds of stories do well on social media, and every journalist does their darndest to get their work read as widely as possible. The incentives of journalists are so neatly aligned with those of Project Feels that they almost don’t need to coordinate; a quick glance through the New York Times is proof that, at least when it comes to Trump, there’s a perfect alignment between the two.
But this new emotion – driven, sensationalist approach to journalism at the Times isn’t just a canny appropriation of Face – book’s business model. It’s also a return to the sensationalism of a bygone era — and a complete reversal of where the newspaper once positioned itself on that question. One hundred and fifty years ago, Joseph Pulitzer and, prior to him, Benjamin Day were derided for their sensationalist approach to journalism that sought to directly access the emotions of their poor and working – class readers. The New York Times was founded as a reaction to that sensationalism, seeking a more staid approach to attract a more affluent readership. So it’s more than a little ironic to see the paper embracing the sensationalist approach it once derided, with one important difference: Where Day and Pulitzer appealed to the sensations of the poor and working classes, the Times’s revamped sensationalism today is designed to prick the emotions of the rich.
If you want to know what makes America’s educated liberal elites emotional, you only have to open the New York Times to find out.

* Unlike with the narrative about Russia, the white supremacy narrative took time to develop. In the immediate aftermath of the election, books like J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash soared to the top of the best seller list as blindsided liberals sought to understand how people could have cast a vote for Trump. And for a brief period at the end of 2016, a window opened up in which the American mainstream seemed like it might truly grapple with the question of class. But these attempts to understand how so many of their fellow Americans could think so differently from them — and how the media could have gotten the story so wrong — quickly disappeared in favor of an easier explanation: Trump’s voters were all racist.

* Trump failed to motivate whites to turn out in 2016, and also that he did not win a larger share of the whites who did turn out than Mitt Romney had. And he did better with Hispanics and Asians than Romney had; in fact, Trump won the largest share of the black vote of any Republican since 2004. These are all trends that would continue a steep upward trajectory in 2020.

* “If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro – Clinton county — odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro – Clinton counties.” 56 Journalists at America’s leading publications just did not know any Trump supporters socially, making it very easy to caricature and misrepresent them. And when New York Times reporters ventured into Trump country, they inevitably found some reason to tar the people they interviewed as racist.

* A Harvard CAPS – Harris poll found that 85 percent of black Americans want less immigration. 64 This shouldn’t surprise us: A 2010 study concluded that when it comes to immigration, “no racial or ethnic group has benefited less or been harmed more than the nation’s African American community.”

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The Secret Life of John le Carre

Adam Sisman writes in this 2023 book:

* David claimed that these extramarital relationships were ‘impulsive, driven, short – lived affairs . . . often meaningless in themselves’, but while that might be true of some of them, others appear to have been much more serious and long – lasting. He needed to be loved, and at times seems to have believed himself to have been in love, at least in the moment. He told several women that he was willing to leave his wife for them. Of course he did not do so. Whether this was a tactic, or whether he meant it at the time, is an open question. Perhaps he was not really capable of love.

* Jane told herself that ‘nobody can have all of David’. He flattered her that her input was important to his work, but he said the same to other women too. Each in turn became his ‘muse’. His writing pal James Kennaway advised David that he would need a different woman for each book, advice David appears to have taken to heart. Thus Liese Deniz inspired The Honourable Schoolboy , Verity Mosley and Janet Lee Stevens The Little Drummer Girl , Sue Dawson A Perfect Spy , the Italian journalist The Russia House , Susan Anderson The Tailor of Panama and to some extent Our Game also, Yvette Pierpaoli The Constant Gardener , and so on.

* ‘People believe what they want to believe,’ wrote David to one of his lovers. ‘ALWAYS.’ He was referring to the ‘revelation’ that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. ‘No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.’
When he wrote that people believed what they wanted to believe about Greene, he might just as well have been writing about himself. People were willing to believe almost anything about him, even if he denied it (especially if he denied it) – for example, that he had once been earmarked as a possible future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more popularly known as MI6). According to David, the Chief himself, Sir Dick White, had told him in a farewell interview that he was highly thought of within the Service; and that, had he remained, he might have been a candidate for the ‘top job’ in due course. This is a suggestion that one former MI6 officer, with a long and distinguished career behind him, described to me as ‘ridiculous’. The idea that anyone with less than four years’ experience in any organisation could be considered as a candidate to run it in due course is, to say the least, unlikely. Yet this is what David wanted us to believe. Perhaps he believed it himself.
The secret history of David’s career in the intelligence services is that it was uneventful. ‘The trouble with David,’ observed one MI6 contemporary who served with him, ‘is that he was never involved in a successful operation.’

* Far from being a distraction, his clandestine affairs became important, perhaps even essential to his writing. And just as infidelity enlivened his real life, so betrayal became the underlying theme of his fiction, the one reflecting the other.

* ‘They fucked us up rotten,’ David wrote to his brother Tony in 2007, when he was sixty – six and Tony two years older. ‘They’ were their parents, Ronnie and Olive, on whom he blamed all his difficulties with love. Ronnie had been ‘disgusting’: rapacious, unprincipled and abusive. He had made himself rich by preying on the vulnerable, swindling old people out of their life savings and other such scams. All his life he maintained a workforce of devoted women whom he regularly discarded and revived, indulging his sexual appetite whenever and wherever he could, even molesting his own children.

* He was still angry with his mother when he wrote to Tony in 2007, though by this time she had been dead nearly twenty years. ‘I was never able to understand – I still can’t even begin to – how you walk out on two sons in the middle of the night, then take the high moral ground.’

* His mother’s desertion left David with a lifelong mistrust of women. In his secret self, women were not to be relied upon, because they would always leave you.

* The trajectory of his affairs was always the same: he would pursue the woman urgently, and then he would lose interest.
The women in le Carré’s fiction are usually seen from a distance, which may help to explain why his novels appeal less to female readers than to male. His women tend to be thin, beautiful and unobtainable: often the possessions of a dangerous enemy, like Roper’s Jed in The Night Manager or Drake Ko’s Liese in The Honourable Schoolboy . They are little more than objects of desire. His more developed female characters are sexless or even grotesque, like Connie Sachs, queen of research at the Circus, described when first encountered as ‘a big woman’, with ‘a low belly like an old man’s’. (Later she becomes a sad old drunk.) Then of course there is Smiley’s wife, Lady Ann, whose most distinguishing characteristic is her absence. Given that David was a serial adulterer, it seems ironic that his most celebrated character should have been a cuckold. George Smiley remains devoted to his aristocratic wife, while she takes lover after lover.

* David believed that his miserable childhood explained his restless search for love.

* …his entire writing career can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with the trauma of his early years.
‘People who have had very unhappy childhoods,’ he once wrote, ‘are pretty good at inventing themselves.’ As a boy he learned to invent, making up stories to entertain, to fantasise, escaping from reality, and to dissemble, adopting one persona to conceal another. As an adult he put these skills to professional use, first as a spy, and then as a novelist. He was a self – made man – not in the usual meaning of that phrase, though he was that too, but in the sense that he put on a show to keep the unhappiness at bay. And when David Cornwell became John le Carré, that was yet another mask to hide behind.
David worried that he had no real feelings, that he was incapable of love, that he was forever pretending.

* His success as a writer of spy fiction enabled him to leave the Service and to live as he pleased; in Ann’s eyes it turned his head. He began one love affair, then another; then embarked on a period of hectic promiscuity that lasted several years. As he would describe it much later, ‘ I was a caged animal, and with the success of my writing the door was opening.’

* He listed the ‘Reasons’ for his philandering:

1 Ever since childhood, a search for elemental creature warmth & love
2 A recognition – at 30 – that I had given my youth away to a marriage that only made me sad
3 An ignorance & suspicion of all women, a never – ending search for love; carnality, self – destruction, reckless despair, hope
4 Depression
5 No self – esteem
6 Fury at the chains of convention
7 Utter loneliness
8 Fury at my own conformity with convention
9 A root fear of women, again

* Whether or not there was anything in Ann’s theory, there was something problematic about David’s relations with other men. If women were a challenge, men were rivals. Several of the women with whom he had affairs were married to friends of his; this might happen by accident once, or even twice; but with David it happened again and again. One might think that friendship with the husband would preclude a sexual interest in the wife, unless it was, perhaps, a way of seducing the friend.

* It was a feature of David’s life that he seemed isolated, with few real friends.

* One of David’s least attractive characteristics was a tendency to disparage the people around him: not just the people he worked with, like his editors, his publishers and his agents; but also other writers, friends, lovers, and even his wife and sons.
As David became older, he nurtured protégés, especially younger men with literary ambitions.

* Jane’s worship made him an idol, and the effect on David of such adulation was not necessarily beneficial. All writers are egotists, but some are more egotistical than others. He became demanding, self – important, and unwilling to accept criticism. He told Nicholas Shakespeare that he could not write in London because of the denigration in the air. Isolated from his peers, he lacked the capacity to see himself as others did. He declined to allow his novels to be submitted for the Booker Prize, as if it was beneath him; and fantasised about winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

* But as long as he kept writing, she could never retire; she felt obliged to continue working until almost the end of her life.
In tolerating her husband’s repeated infidelities, Jane was fulfilling the cliché that when a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy. She had become David’s mistress after she had been discarded by her former boss, George Greenfield. In an act of barely believable selflessness – or masochism – she introduced him to David, and arranged matters so that her ex – lover would become David’s literary agent.

* he was sensitive about his anomalous status: hugely successful commercially, but not awarded the status of a ‘literary’ writer.

* By now in his seventies, he may have lost some of his enthusiasm for the chase. He continued writing up until the end, but it is perhaps not a coincidence that the novels became less interesting and more formulaic. Without a new muse for each book, his inspiration dried up.

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