The Bluestocking, vol 147
The Journalist Who Doesn't Exist
Happy Friday!
This week, I spoke to the Depolarization Project about a subject where I changed my mind: prostitution. A nice quick newsletter today as I’ve been knee-deep in the worst parts of the internet all week, and you don’t need that in your life.
Helen
Looking-Glass Politics (Mercatus)
It would make sense for protesters in, say, Hong Kong to feel anger. They confront a brutal and despotic regime. Yet the insurgents in Hong Kong are famously tidy and polite—it has never occurred to them to burn banks or vandalize monuments in the style of the Yellow Vests of democratic France.
Arnold Kling, to my knowledge, stands virtually alone in suggesting that the tide of political anger need not have matching political causes. He has wondered, instead, whether extreme private emotions have been diverted by the web into the public sphere. Kling brings up an interesting number: 150.
A challenging take on the current outbreak of political anger - that it’s not political at all.
How Joe Biden is Winning (Vox)
After the 2016 election, panicked, wounded Democrats settled on a diagnosis. Trump, for all his mania, bigotry, and chaos, had given angry Americans something to vote for. To stop him, Democrats would need to match force with counter-force, polarization with mobilization. They would need to show as much anger, as much populism, as much wrecking ball energy as he did.
Biden is running — and, for now, winning — by defying that diagnosis. He is executing a careful, quiet campaign focused less on thrilling his partisans than denying Trump the boogeyman he needs to reenergize his base. It’s a campaign that frustrates liberal activists and pundits because it repeatedly, routinely denies them the excitement and collisions that structure modern politics. It’s also, for that reason, a campaign that is frustrating Trump and Fox News, which is why they keep trying to run against Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar instead.
Welcome to 2020, where “don’t run as a culture war loon” is finally beginning to get through to progressives. God, isn’t it depressing that electoral politics is easier as a white man because you’re basically running without an identity?
(Caveat to the “Biden has this sewn up” narrative: one of the few Democrats to warn about Trump last time is similarly alarmed again: “I went to a neighborhood the other day and counted 100 Blue Lives Matter signs.”)
The Plan to Scale Back Government Comms (New Statesman)
But on a more prosaic level, the issue preoccupying mandarins is the proposed reform of government communications: not only the planned move to a televised White House-style press conference, but the arguably more significant plan to cut back communications units across Whitehall.
At the moment, there are around 4,000 communications staff working across more than 20 government departments. The plan is to make individual departments scale back their comms teams to a maximum of 30 people, overseen by four new directors general who will operate centrally. The size of departments varies massively, but the difference is stark: a reduction from an average of 200 people per department, to just 30.
Um, I think I might agree with Dominic Cummings here? Two hundred comms people per government department seems an extraordinary number. Particularly when you consider how hollowed out journalism has become. What if they just had… 150 per department?
Isaac Chotiner interviews Thomas Chatterton Williams (New Yorker)
How do we know the free exchange of ideas is becoming more constricted, as the [Harpers] letter claims?
I’m sure some of your readers on Twitter can already imagine, like, laughing that it’s anecdotal, but I have tons of people who tell me they wouldn’t write certain things, that they wouldn’t say certain things, that they’re not comfortable even entering into a conversation on Black Lives Matter, on Israel, or any of these things, because they didn’t feel that they could even get into a conversation without enormous repercussions that would be detrimental, because they don’t possess the identity that gives them what I would say is the epistemological authority to even weigh in, and so it’s just a land mine. You must possess a particular identity to be able to participate in certain conversations or you face a backlash that comes at you so fast that you can’t even defend yourself against it. It penetrates your workplace.
This is a pretty clear explanation of the debate, and I’m particularly impressed at how TCW handles the “gotcha” question of, oh so how come you support Tucker Carlson’s head writer being fired for racist posts under a pseudonym? “Here’s the thing about cancel culture. It’s not about you violating your employer’s clear rules . . . Being fired for bad performance or for having an alter ego that posts incredibly racist stuff is not cancel culture.”
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Quick Links
“Oliver Taylor, a student at England's University of Birmingham, is a twenty-something with brown eyes, light stubble, and a slightly stiff smile. Online profiles describe him as a coffee lover and politics junkie who was raised in a traditional Jewish home. His half dozen freelance editorials and blog posts reveal an active interest in anti-Semitism and Jewish affairs, with bylines in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel. The catch? Oliver Taylor seems to be an elaborate fiction.” The journalist who doesn’t exist (Reuters).
“The segment was a classic example of The Colbert Report’s sly brand of comedy. Now, though, it carries a new weight. This week, [Roy] Den Hollander was named as the primary suspect in the killing of Daniel Anderl and the wounding of his father, Mark, at their home in New Jersey. The men were the son and the spouse, respectively, of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas; investigators speculate that she had been the true target of the person who entered their home on Sunday, reportedly dressed as a FedEx deliveryman.” (The Atlantic)
“Even though women have always done most of the caregiving, both paid and unpaid, it’s never been just a women’s issue. The pandemic made that undeniable. And when Joe Biden presented his new caregiving plan on Tuesday — speaking about his experience as a single father and describing caregiving policies as an economic necessity — he made it explicit.” (New York Times)
Being a Geisha during Coronavirus. (Guardian)
See you next time!