Links to Consider, 5/13
Matt Taibbi on legacy media's new rules; Joe Lonsdale on policy for homelessness; Scott Locklin on management consultants; Lionel Shriver on prestige diagnoses; Freddie deBoer on Jordan Neely
Newly uncovered documents show the war-gamed, choreographed response to the New York Post piece in October, 2020 — which included temporary suppression by those tech platforms Twitter and Facebook — may have been part of a broader plan to re-think basic journalistic standards in general, beyond just the one incident.
none of the media or academic figures involved with this story commented for the record, but one tabletop attendee who asked not to be named did defend the decision, saying: “It was just arguing for discretion over whatever sells,” adding, “The race to the bottom is what got us 2016.”
The mood among media titans after Trump’s election was one of self-flagellation and a determination to reform. But what they came up with as reforms comes across as stopping all pretense of being referees and just putting on the D jersey, full stop.
In many cases, homeless “charities” are politically involved activist organizations that bully leaders so they can mop up money via contracts. In extreme cases, they use money intended to help the homeless to fund protests against new legislative approaches like ours.
“Approaches like ours” refers to this model legislation.
Essentially the management consultant tells higher management what they want to hear by doing an end run around middle management bureaucracy. At best they may add value by asking people in the trenches what they think: something that could be done by proactive management. At worst they just regurgitate some bullshit they read in HBR.
Pointer from Niccolo Soldo. Management consultants and middle managers are natural enemies in the corporate jungle. If you find a middle manager who disagrees with Locklin’s long rant, let me know.
When I worked at Freddie Mac, I had fans who would say, “Why do they waste so much money on McKinsey? They should just listen to Arnold.”
If I had to guess, I would say that management consulting exists for the same reason that Big Firms are Sluggish. For a well-established business, making decisions in ambiguous situations is stressful. Ambiguity is to a senior executive what cockroaches are to graduate student living quarters. Calling McKinsey is like calling the landlord to ask for an exterminator. It makes you feel like you are doing something about the problem, even though you never really get rid of it.
as a prestige diagnosis, anorexia has been replaced. With trans.
…Both neuroses are clearly communicable.
…eating disorders and transgenderism on a mass scale are recent inventions. Collectively, we made these dire maladies up.
Pointer from Ed West. I made a similar point in a comment on a Richard Hanania post, in which I said that it is now high status among affluent high school students to be LGBT.
“Prestige diagnosis” deserves to be a meme as much as “luxury beliefs.” I am leaning toward a model in which there exists a p factor, which is a propensity for mental disorders, which gets expressed in different ways depending on social trends.
Well, here’s some moral simplicity of my own: mental illness is bad. People who have mental illness aren’t bad. But mental illness is bad. On the societal level it causes unspeakable harm. Mental illness ruined Jordan Neely’s life. He occupied the same reality where teenagers cosplay severe illness on TikTok for clout because we lack the integrity and courage as a society to acknowledge that mental illness is just bad. Many progressive people have decided that support for those with mental illness must entail insisting that mental illness makes you quirky and fun or else some kind of enlightened sage. They think they can be allies to the sick without acknowledging their sickness. And it is far past time that we disabuse them of that notion.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/opinion/jordan-neely-subway-death.html
John McWhorter wrote about the subway and mental illness.
While of course attacking the Marine (I didn't see the video but I assume he was trying to do his best to make the situation better) John basically says this idea that people in the city have to surrender to violent mental patients is absurd and its time to stop with that nonsense.
I'll make my own stance pretty straightforward. I just don't have any empathy for people who engage in violence and harassment over and over. I don't care if they are mentally ill. If you've got a rap sheet that long you've stopped deserving human sympathy. I favor flogging to try to straighten these types out and if they either can't or won't respond to that either incarceration/commitment or execution. I'm fine with telling the 1% worst of our citizens that they can shape up or stop having "human rights". The rest of us have a right not to be victimized.
It's amazing to me that we had a national freak out over a violent black criminal getting chocked to death and here we are three years later with the same thing happening, but most seem to acknowledge that its the only way to handle violent people who won't comply if you don't want to surrender to them (with a bunch of "somehow somewhere we need some government programs" thrown in for moral cover).
Had the laptop belonged to Eric Trump and not Hunter Biden, it would have been front page news every day for the last 3 weeks of the campaign in 2020, and everyone with an ounce of honesty in their hearts knows this to be true.
The news media has always been partisan- it used to be that newspapers themselves were explicitly aligned with one of the two major parties, often identified in the paper's name. Broadcast media news was supposed to be different because the government had explicit power to regulate who got to use the limited radio spectrum, so you ended up with the "Fairness Doctrine", and maybe it worked for a while in the early years, but by the time I was a teenager in the 1980s, it was obvious that that the people running the major networks were mostly Democrats, as was radio at the time. I can remember watching the election coverage of 1980 as the returns came in showing Reagan was going to win a landslide victory- the dourness of the news journalists that night was hilarious to see.
A good part of this is probably due to the migration of Republicans out of the cities that occurred after WWII- all major newspapers, radio stations, and television stations are centered in the large cities of every state- the cities themselves became deeply blue and concentrated, and Republican newspapers died, and the Democrat ones started dropping the explicit connections to the party and pretended to be non-partisan for political advantage. What we are seeing with the internet platforms is what it would have looked like in the 1920s if pulp paper producers and ink companies had banded together in a cartel to not sell paper and to Republican publishers.