Links to Consider, 1/18
Dan Williams on Misinformation Studies; Jeffery Tyler Syck on humanistic conservatism; The WSJ on the Fed's latest gift to banks; Musa Al-Gharbi on antisemitism
The influence of misinformation studies is rooted in its reputation as a scientific field composed of experts generating scientific findings. For example, researchers measure people’s amount of exposure to misinformation, sometimes to several decimal places; they make generalisations about misinformation (e.g., that it is associated with “fingerprints”) and people’s “susceptibility” to it (e.g., that conservatives are more susceptible to misinformation than liberals); and they quantify the effects of interventions designed to combat misinformation.
He argues that clearly false statements do not receive sufficient circulation to constitute a major problem. The focus of analysis then shifts to misleading content, meaning content that is not blatantly false but is presented in a manipulative way.
it is misguided - inappropriate, even - to pretend to scientifically measure people’s amount of exposure to misleading content, their “susceptibility” to it, or what percentage of the informational ecosystem is constituted by it. And it is extremely misguided to delegate the task of determining which true claims are nevertheless misleading to a class of misinformation experts.
…misleading information is not just widespread; it is so widespread that the concept loses all scientific value.
The problem of epistemology—deciding what to believe—is not straightforward. As we discussed in our Zoom recently, each of us individually is biased. It seems that we have to rely on institutions to sort things out. Jonathan Rauch talks about the Constitution of Knowledge. David Brin refers to Disputation Arenas.
Fusionists aim to preserve a constitutional order built upon freedom from government, while National Conservatives hope to steadfastly maintain unique cultural traditions. By contrast, Humanist Conservativism does not primarily mean preserving capitalism or tradition. For the humanist, conservatism means preserving the diverse daily practices of human existence. At the most basic level it means ensuring that fathers and sons can enjoy an afternoon fishing with one another, that mothers and daughters can bond over a good book together, that a local community can gather at a town festival or church, or simply relish the company of others despite their differences. All of this requires shielding people’s lives from the intrusion of partisan divisions stoked by radical activists, from the tyranny of bloated governments, and from unfettered private companies.
The phrase “unfettered private companies” shows a misunderstanding of economics that is widespread. Private companies are not “unfettered,” because they must compete with other private companies. You can talk about a market being unfettered, but it is erroneous to speak of an individual company as unfettered.
Even in the absence of government regulation, private companies are regulated by competition. You can argue whether competition works out the way you would like, and whether government regulation works better. Speaking as someone in the fusionist camp, I would say that the assumption that government regulation will work as intended is at least as dangerous as the assumption of “perfect” competition in markets.
Also, Syck credits Donald Trump as representing National Conservatives. I think that National Conservatives want to claim Trump as their own, but his appeal is to an honor culture, not to a broadly popular National Conservative ideology.
For the WSJ, David Benoit and Eric Wallerstein write,
The rate banks pay to use the program, BTFP for short, is tied to future interest-rate expectations. Now that investors have priced in a series of rate cuts later this year, banks are able to pocket the difference between what they pay to borrow the funds and what they can earn from parking the funds at the central bank as overnight deposits.
…While the Fed offers financing below 5% through its rescue program, it is currently paying banks 5.4% on parked reserve balances.
Walter Bagehot famously said that in a crisis the central bank should lend freely, at a penalty rate. Under the Bank Term Funding Program, the Fed lends freely at a subsidy rate. The WSJ article never mentions who ends up footing the bill for this gift to banks. Of course, it is the taxpayer.
The dramatic change in relative sympathies (reflected in the first chart in this series) seems to be driven not by anti-Israel animus but, rather, increased sympathy for Palestinians over the last decade. This trend seems to have been kicked off by the 2014 Israeli-initiated war in Gaza, which occurred during a period of heightened concern about the fate of the marginalized and disadvantaged among highly-educated white liberals.
He offers a lot of data suggesting that actual Jew-hatred has not increased on the left. You can quibble with some of his analysis, but also realize that any Jewish non-profit that wants to raise money is going to overstate the existence of antisemitism.
I think that the larger problem is stupidity and too much sympathy for “victim classes.” Don’t give me a District Attorney who feels sorry for criminals and doesn’t prosecute them. And don’t give me “moderates” who say that Israel has to cave in to the human-shield tactics of Hamas. If you keep blaming Israel for Palestinian civilian deaths, in the long run you will make more civilians suffer, because the bad guys know that they can always hide behind civilians.
Substacks referenced above:
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I'd be more sympathetic to a claim that those who favor a "condemnation-only" approach to the Hamas massacre are "not really antisemitic" and just relatively more sympathetic to the just grievances of Gazans than to arguments that Israel should be allowed to exist, if they would only adopt the same standards for "not really racist", which, duh, they would never, ever do in a million years.
Sure, Jewish non-profits trying to raise money will tend to try to water down the definition of antisemitism to scoop up more marginal cases or by easing the standard of proof to include those instances where people are suspected of intentionally using strategically-evasive code language to conceal support for more hateful intentions. But Olympic Gold for defining hatred down in this and a thousand other and far more egregious ways has got to be what we've got after several generations of sustained effort on the part of progressives to do this to "racist" which is rapidly approaching "all of reality".
I'm not saying two wrongs make a right. I'm saying the same standard must apply to both questions if these people want to be taken seriously instead of dismissed as Jew-hating Hamas apologists.
"What do you think should happen to Hamas besides hurt feelings from condemnations?" - "Um, uh, well, the thing about Jewish colonialism is ... " - "Right, ok then, and what do you think should happen to a white person who kills a black person in unclear circumstances?" - "Oh, capital punishment or at least life in prison without possibility of parole, naturally."
There are numbered lists out there of descriptions ordered in escalating rank of hateful intention towards the members of another group. Everything from "Universalist Saint" to "Active participant in an ongoing, mass scale, explicitly genocidal project" with things like endogamous marriage rules, racial preferences or quotas, segregation, apartheid, X-supremacy, X-nationalism, etc. somewhere in the middle.
What I'm saying is that pro-Hamas folks should tell us where, if one moves up from the bottom of the list in terms of a white person's feelings about black people, it stops being "racism", and then pick that same point for where a pro-Hamas person's feelings about Israeli Jews stops being "antisemitism".
There is no point whatsoever to these discussions is they are just a ritual by which people exchange phony cover stories for a dispute-resolution algorithm consisting of nothing more than deciding in favor of members of groups higher on their personal ranking list.
In the Slow Boring piece, the author notes that:
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Many of the US subgroups with an especially high propensity towards holding antisemitic views or engaging in bias incidents also tend to be politically aligned with the Democratic Party. However, this is not because these subsets of society tend to skew ideologically left. In fact, within the Democratic coalition, non-whites, less educated voters, et al. are especially unlikely to self-identify as “liberal” or “progressive.” They vote Democrat for practical reasons (such as support for social safety nets or government programs) while largely rejecting left cultural ideology — self-identifying as “moderate” or “conservative” instead.
Insofar as people fail to distinguish between constituents’ political and ideological alignments, it can be easy to mistakenly assume that antisemitism in the Democratic coalition must driven by folks internalizing leftist views. In reality, the Democrat-leaning Americans who are most likely to be antisemites are especially likely to be alienated by cultural leftism.
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Short version: "The biggest anti-semites are black and brown people, but they aren't REAL DEMOCRATS, they are just ghetto vote banks we buy off."
There is a kernel of truth here, but it raises the question of what "cultural leftism" is. Someone that thinks Black Lives Matter more than Jewish lives is certainly imbibing some element of cultural leftism. And hating on "privilege" rich people (Jews) is certainly cultural leftism.
Poor brown people are generally less ideologically consistent and they certainly don't buy into the LBGTQ2+ nonsense that the left invented five minutes ago. Practically, they deal with the dysfunctions of crime and illegal immigration too much to have luxury beliefs on those issues. But they have certainly imbibed the RESENTMENT that is at the heart of cultural leftism, so I'd say they have the core of it.
The piece has the same feel as someone at the National Review looking at Trump and going "that's not REAL CONSERVATISM". Whatever the merits of such a statement, it leaves out much.