Month: March 2021

Here's the latest in woke outrage, Netherlands edition:

The acclaimed author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has pulled out of translating Amanda Gorman’s poetry ["The Hill We Climb, read at Joe Biden's inauguration] into Dutch, after their publisher was criticised for picking a writer for the role who was not also Black.

....Journalist and activist Janice Deul led critics with a piece in Volkskrant asking why Meulenhoff had not chosen a translator who was, like Gorman, a “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”.

“An incomprehensible choice, in my view and that of many others who expressed their pain, frustration, anger and disappointment via social media,” wrote Deul. “Isn’t it — to say the least — a missed opportunity to [have hired] Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for this job? They are white, nonbinary, have no experience in this field, but according to Meulenhoff are still the ‘dream translator’?”

But wait:

Meulenhoff said it was Rijneveld’s decision to resign, and that Gorman, who is 22, had selected the 29-year-old herself, as a fellow young writer who had also come to fame early.

Come on, folks. Enough's enough. Are we now to believe that Gorman herself should not be allowed the agency to choose a translator of her choice for her own poetry?

Here's an interesting demonstration of the power of black and white. The top photo is a picture of the Green Church, near Mammoth Lakes, with the White Mountains in the background. It's a so-so image, and mostly radiates a sense of calmness and silence.

Then I decided to render it in high-contrast black and white. Now it looks more like a church you might find in a Stephen King novel, producing mostly a sense that some kind of festering evil is lurking within ready to tear anyone who enters into tiny little shreds. Fascinating, no?

This ought to be pretty obvious, but I feel like maybe I should point it out in plain language. It's common to claim that today's Republican Party is "anti-democracy," but if you've been conned into believing that Democrats stole the 2020 election—that is, if you really, truly believe it—then it's Democrats who are anti-democracy and Republicans who are fighting to restore democracy.

Needless to say, I don't believe this and there's no evidence that it's true. But a small number of conservative leaders from Donald Trump down have convinced millions of rank-and-file Republicans that it's true. These leaders may themselves be anti-democracy, but the rank-and-file almost certainly isn't.

This is not a trivial point. As with so many other things, we should continue fighting the conservative elites who push this stuff but we shouldn't assume that Republican voters in general are beyond redemption. They aren't. They're just in the grip of a media-political complex that uses them for its own cynical ends. With the right message and a little bit of empathy many of them can be persuaded to abandon the right-wing grifters who are using them.

Here's a headline from today's Wall Street Journal:

Is Inflation a Risk? Not Now, but Some See Danger Ahead

You've probably seen variations of this dozens of times in the past few months even though all the evidence suggests that inflation is well under control. But here's a headline you'll never see:

Is Unemployment a Risk? Not Now, but Some See Danger Ahead

Here's a question for the class: Why is the top headline so common but the bottom one so rare? Hmmm?

It has become right-wing conventional wisdom that the January 6 insurrection was not the work of Trump supporters but of antifa and BLM agitators. The New York Times reports that this all started with a tweet from a right-wing radio host named Michael Brown:

Only 13,000 people follow Mr. Brown on Twitter, but his tweet caught the attention of another conservative pundit: Todd Herman, who was guest-hosting Rush Limbaugh’s national radio program. Minutes later, he repeated Mr. Brown’s baseless claim to Mr. Limbaugh’s throngs of listeners: “It’s probably not Trump supporters who would do that. Antifa, BLM, that’s what they do. Right?”

....By day’s end, Laura Ingraham and Sarah Palin had shared it with millions of Fox News viewers, and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters “were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”

This is a good example of how social media works. Its direct reach in this case was tiny: 13,000 followers is nothing, and they probably shared the tweet mostly with other true believers who are already so far down the rabbit hole that they hardly matter.

But social media also acts as a kind of laboratory for more conventional media. Most of the really outrageous stuff stays buried in the nether regions of Facebook and Reddit, but occasionally one of the big guns decides to amplify a likely looking conspiracy theory. This time it was Rush Limbaugh's program, followed quickly by Fox News. From there it took on a life of its own.

That's how this stuff works. There are exceptions here and there, but for the most part there's surprisingly little evidence that social media has very much real-world impact on political views. It becomes important only when something that's swirling around the fever swamps gets picked up by media figures with truly vast audiences. This usually means Fox News, where it reaches millions of people and acquires the patina of reliability. After all, a news program wouldn't lie about something like this, would it?

By itself, social media isn't generally all that harmful. Its conspiracy theories mostly get shared within a bubble of other true believers and never make it to the outside world. It's only when something gets picked up by Fox News that it takes on a life of its own. This is why we should worry less about Facebook and more about the real threat to democracy. That's Fox News, and it always has been.

This weekend brought good news. Vaccination rates still haven't returned to the old trendline—which just goes to show the danger of drawing a trendline from early data—but they have recovered from last week's dismal performance. In all, we had three consecutive days above 2 million shots and a record 2.45 million shots on Sunday.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 28. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.