BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-07-16 Fr
First:
This is, I think, 100% correct:
Ken White: ’1. The First Amendment and Section 230 let private companies like Twitter and Facebook choose how to moderate their sites. 2. American free speech rights are exceptional and protect a very large amount of speech many of us would agree is dangerous or harmful. That broad protection helps insulate speech from political and ideological urges to censor. 3. But the government has a leadership function as well as a governing one. Part of leadership is praising good behavior and condemning bad behavior, in hopes that people will do the right thing, without the coercion of law. 4. Facebook has a right to make money off of this alarming and deadly disinformation. But that doesn’t make it the right thing to do. Just as Americans have the right to say poisonous and ugly things to each other, that doesn’t make it right. 5. When Facebook is exercising its right to profit off of deadly propaganda about COVID, it’s doing the wrong moral thing. It’s being a bad citizen. The First Amendment protects it from coercion, but not from criticism—yours and ours. 6. We call on Facebook to reconsider its stance. We’ve identified common anti-scientific propaganda that puts lives at risk. Facebook can continue to profit off of it. But it can choose not to. We call on Facebook to do the right thing—for Americans and their lives.
LINK: <https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1416132396034846720>
One Video:
Lex Fridman: Paul Krugman: Economics of Innovation, Automation, Safety Nets & UBI <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQepiqSWvg>
Very Briefly Noted:
The Policy Impacts Library <https://policyimpacts.org/policy-impacts-library>
James Tobin: _Money & Income: Post Hoc Ergo Procter Hoc? <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/tobin-1970-money-income.pdf>
Brian Deese: The Biden White House Plan for a New US Industrial Policy: ‘Below is National Economic Council Director Brian Deese’s speech on US industrial policy as prepared for delivery at the Atlantic Council on June 23, 2021… <https://portside.org/2021-06-26/biden-white-house-plan-new-us-industrial-policy>
Anicca Harriot: ‘Academic writing is wild because you’ll read four articles just to write one sentence. Anyway, here’s a thread of resources. <https://twitter.com/13adh13/status/1406664117147123715>…
Connected Papers: This outputs a network graphic, list of titles and abstracts of the most relevant prior and derivative research papers. https://www.connectedpapers.com…
The Scholarcy plug-in for Chrome…. Pin it to your browser, open a paper, hit the button and it outputs a summary of the most important points. https://www.scholarcy.com…
The Speechify app/Chrome plug-in…. It has a really natural sounding voice, especially for an AI. http://speechify.com…
Scite which pulls related citations and… get this… the CONTEXT https://scite.ai…
Paragraphs:
Charles Kindleberger: The World in Depression, 1929–1939: ’The explanation of this book is that the 1929 depression was so wide, so deep and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and United States unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it in three particulars: (a) maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods; (b) providing counter-cyclical long-term lending; and (c) discounting in crisis. The shocks to the system from the overproduction of certain primary products such as wheat; from the 1927 reduction of interest rates in the United States (if it was one); from the halt of lending to Germany in 1928; or from the stock-market crash of 1929 were not so great. Shocks of similar magnitude had been handled in the stock-market break in the spring of 1920 and the 1927 recession in the United States. The world economic system was unstable unless some country stabilized it, as Britain had done in the nineteenth century and up to 1913. In 1929, the British couldn’t and the United States wouldn’t…
Matthew Boudway: Eric Hobsbawm, 1917 - 2012: ‘Hobsbawm described himself as a “Tory communist”…. Hobsbawm… found much of the Sixties counterculture decadent and, at best, counterproductive…. Hobsbawm also became an object lesson in the dangers of ideological devotion. His passion for justice drew him into a cause that would require him to excuse… many injustices…. A lot of Western Communists abandoned ship after the Soviet crackdown on Hungary in 1956. Not Hobsbawm. Nor did he quit after the tanks rolled into Prague…. He famously claimed that if the Soviet Union had succeeded in creating a true communist society, it would have been worth the deaths of the twenty million people who perished under Stalin…. Self-sacrifice wasn’t the only kind of sacrifice that socialism might require…. He was…, a man who had subordinated everything to a single hope. He would admit that this hope had been disappointed, but he would not renounce it. To do so would have been to renounce himselfs…
LINK: <https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/eric-hobsbawm-1917-2012>
William Faulkner: Intruder in the Dust : ‘It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim…
LINK: <https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1121143-intruder-in-the-dust>
Nathan Andrew: Jing Huang, Factionalism in Chinese Communist Politics: ‘Huang offers a convincing new narrative of CCP political history from 1935 to about 1987, built around the idea of what he calls the Yan’an Round Table…. The lack of any civilian control over the military below the level of the functionally autonomous Central Military Commission sustained the need for a top leader to bridge the two domains of power, and the top leader’s authority in turn depended on maintaining this military-civilian gap. Anyone who tried to do a good job in some functional area (like the economy) by co-operating with other administrators, found himself violating Mao’s power interest in keeping the system fractionalised, and was therefore likely to be purged. Anyone whom Mao chose as a successor, and who therefore began to accumulate power across bureaucratic systems or factions, threatened Mao’s interests and had to be purged…. Late in his life Mao was surrounded by leaders lacking deep roots in either the military or the Party bureaucracy…
LINK: https://www.cefc.com.hk/article/jing-huang-factionalism-in-chinese-communist-politics/>
Scott Alexander: Book Review: How Asia Works: ‘ Studwell’s guide to good economic policy…. 1. Land Reform… taking farmland away from landlords and giving it to peasant farmers…. 2. Industrial Policy and Finance…. Financial hubs… good work if you can get it…. “High-value agricultural producers”… Denmark and New Zealand…. They also don’t scale…. Third, manufacturing, eg everyone else…. In addition to domestic competition, these governments enforced “export discipline”. In order to keep their government perks (and sometimes in order to keep existing at all), companies needed to sell a certain amount of units abroad…. Aren’t there good free-market arguments against tariffs and government intervention in the economy? The key counterargument is that developing country industries aren’t just about profit. They’re about learning…. 3. Finance… is really a corollary of the industrial policy section. Developing country financial systems need to support industrial policy by preferentially offering great loans to industrial learning projects…
LINK: <https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works>
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Ken is a (sincere and personable) priest of a particular holiness -- holiness being that which must not be questioned -- that the civil power MUST NOT act to constrain speech, because this is too much power and cannot be vested in anything without the costs exceeding the benefits.
This has not always been the consensus position in the United States; leaving aside wartime censorship, you had the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting.
It's also utterly moot; the Republic has been lost. (Since no later than 2000, when the consensus cared who won, and not that the votes were counted.)
There are a couple-six systemic issues that can be pointed at, where Ken's axiom that there will necessarily and inevitably be a greater cost becomes difficult to support:
1. voter suppression; it's popular, it's widespread, and its advocacy cannot be suppressed because (in this view) the point of the First Amendment is to allow you to say "I own that guy" without penalty.
2. lethal penalties for protest; you can go look at the spate of "suicides" in Ferguson, you can look at the venerable being kicked in the head, you can look at the war crimes (tear gas is a war crime all by itself), and note that whatever right of free expression people supposedly have, it doesn't extend to advocating for anything that might result in meaningful change. (a meaningful change reduces an incumbent's profits.)
3. money is speech, and the ability of an individual to withstand the (vastly) greater force of 24/7 ideological repetition doesn't exist, any more than an individual exists able to juggle thousand kilogramme weights exits.
4. paucity of shame; the idea that shame affects a corporate is risible. The idea that shame affects a techbro billionaire isn't risible, but it's not shame as you would feel for the distress of your neighbour; it's shame at being seen to be soft or moved by anything other than the will to power. The idea that shame affects someone in a condition of ideological reinforcement is risible, too; shame works in a community by being uniform and inescapable. So long as someone can plug in to the id amplifier and be told they are righteous, shame won't work.
5. OODA loops in the permanent emergency; the weather gets worse for the next century no matter what. (Next four, probably; the point is that nothing conceivable keeps the weather from getting worse for the next hundred years.) Agriculture fully breaks; billions migrate. A slow wrangle to consensus absolutely will not work. How do you construct a right to protest or to say what you think during a species-wide exercise in handling multiple interacting emergencies?
6. the dismissal of the public sphere; the great political movement of our age is by the very wealthy who have decided that nothing able to require them to pay taxes is or can be legitimate. If you won't pay your taxes, you're not part of civil society, by definition. Extending civil society's rules to people actively engaged in insurrection -- refusal of taxes is absolutely insurrection, as any medieval monarch could tell you -- which means "to any tech bro billionaire", is obviously folly. It's widely recognized as unjust.
Whatever construction of the First Amendment -- of the generalized rights of free speech, protest, and assembly -- y'all devise, it's got to handle this stuff. What Ken describes is visibly, obviously, not the case. By the witness of the increase in the heap of corpses, COVID corpses, black corpses, native corpses, poor corpses, drowned in floods and succumbed to the heat corpses, all the corpses of the inescapable shouting mammonite consensus, strange to truth, it's failed extensively and widely.
And, yeah, it sounds nice, and hell yeah, exercise of the civil power to suppress insurrection -- that refusal of taxes is absolutely insurrection -- is terrifying.
Absent some civil power able to construct a substitute for agriculture, it remains all moot. Nobody's odds are good, but let's not go for moot. Which means getting through the suppression of the mammonites first.
Section 230 is the "safe harbor" provision that absolves liability for platforms for being responsible for content posted by individuals. media that is fully controlled by the platform does not get that right.
But, once you moderate content, that is editorial control. That should remove the need for 230. But, moderation at scale is impossible. Automated systems don't work. Human moderation is overwhelmed - it can only work at a small scale, as numerous specialty websites and news websites successfully do. FB, Twitter, Youtube, etc cannot moderate effectively because of their scale.
If we want large-scale platforms, then we must accept editorial control is impossible and therefore 230 must be in place. Having said that, there should be a way to actively prevent disinformation and to hold the platform owners figurative feet to the fire. There is far too much evidence that FB, in particular, allows disinformation as curtailing it harms their bottom line. The recent "Dirty Dozen" Covid disinformation providers have been known to FB but they were not stopped. Given the resulting unnecessary deaths, there needs to be some accountability from the company given that this was easily achievable to contain.
Should we be at war in the future, and groups use the FB to disseminate lies that would amount to treason, should not FB be held to account for allowing it, rather than making "true best effort" to censor such content? It may be hard, and it may require hiring a lot more people that cost money, but allowing FB and others to just hide behind 230 and make feeble excuses should be unacceptable in such a situation.