WTF FT?

Is it not possible that the FT management, like that of so many other media firms, is displaying fascist sympathies? When I look at the response to Trump in the US media, it is clear that their management is sympathetic to him and his cause. I think of David Neiwert’s Alt-America (and you should read it, if you haven’t.) One of thing Neiwert makes clear that much of the US media has been concealing and sympathetically reporting on fascist groups.

Has the rot got to the FT? Or was it rotten all along?

A certain argument for Trump’s position against immigrants from shithole countries invited Bannon to speak at the University of Chicago. I think he and the usual suspects (such as Jerry Coyne, once of UC,) have defended the need for undergraduates to pierce Bannon’s rhetorical armor in person. It is of course an absolutely essential aspect of free speech that those who own the venues have the freedom to identify who counts as a serious speaker. So, the FT is living up the highest standards of free speech in a liberal society, no?

Bannon is known for a fact to have been promoted by the wealthy (specifically, the Mercer family.) How could it possibly be unexpected that a news journal serving the wealthy (which FT is,) find Bannon a serious figure?

Lurking underneath is the issue of who precisely is turning towards the right, who is getting tired of the old customary notions of democracy. It is an article of faith among the refined that it is the crude masses, whose common vulgarity ensured the election of Trump by overwhelming acclaim. The love for Bannon stems I think from exactly the same place as the love for Trump, the owners.

The number one factor in the selection of Trump by the Electoral College was the multibillion dollar subsidization of his campaign by the mass media. Trump got a free ride on all his shady business dealings. And just like Reagan his relentless mendacity was always ignored in favor of servile repetition on a mass scale of things the news media knew were nonsense, rather than being the signal to ignore him.

The thing that people want to forget is, if Trump had been touting the abolition of the Federal Reserve or something uncongenial, for instance, or ideas otherwise unsuitable for the owners, the news media would have noticed how ad purchasers were suddenly aware that maybe they weren’t perhaps reputable enough to do business with? Trump’s abortive presidential bid when he was perhaps the biggest birther around illustrates nicely how it gets done. He didn’t get the free publicity then, because the times weren’t right.

It’s the ruling class that’s turning even further to the right. Their employees at FT and the University of Chicago dutifully follow. And the disgruntled employees who don’t get with the program should expect to be treated like disgruntled employees everywhere.

What the FT needs is balance. They should get Rachel Maddow to reminisce about her great good friend, that Architect of News, Roger Ailes. Or perhaps they could host, “Get Real!” with Katha Pollitt!

Bannon must have some money socked away…he was an investment banker and VP at Goldman Sachs.

Not to mention residuals from Seinfeld.

This is not a free speech issue. This is an issue of giving a mainstrean media platform to a right wing, fascist, racist, nutjob. They’re on notice from me. They lose my subscription and all my respect if they run with this.

The intelligentsia has always over-estimated its ability to not be swayed by propaganda. It thinks propaganda only works on stupid people. How wrong it is. Propaganda works best on those who think they are impervious, and just interested in ‘a good argument’.

How would the intelligentsia recognise it as propaganda in the first place given this apparent hypersusceptibility to it?

They lose my subscription and all my respect if they run with this.

Where were you planning on getting your news in the absence of the FT? It strikes me as irreplaceable.

”Where were you planning on getting your news in the absence of the FT? It strikes me as irreplaceable.”

not as irreplaceable as John Oliver – I mean John Oliver -(and ”Georges”) are completely irreplaceable if you are interested in being a good ”Financial Timer” – or you eat French Toast -(and eggs over easy) at George’s in the morning and sit next to somebody’s who look like Bankers and then you listen to them and you learn everything you need to know and then you need no FT at all…

@13 Yes. Henry’s timely reposting of the collapse of the left in Italy is worth noting.

One excellent reason for including Bannon (who strikes me as more buffoon, than danger) is to remind head-in-the-sand leftists that Corbyn and Sanders are correct – there remains a substantial sub-set of voters who are in favor of nation state controls over immigration, investments, taxation, and markets. There is no Bannon of the left almost anywhere and because there isn’t, economic nationalism and protectionism has become the banner of the right. Workers notice.

Some 9 percent of US voters who voted for Trump voted for Obama in previous elections. The great minds almost all reflexively line up behind the candidate of corporate globalism, because ‘ what choice do we really have?’

Sanders presented the better arguments, but was dismissed and betrayed by a corrupt elite totally in the tank for Hillary Clinton. Sanders still presents better arguments, but instead we have a left and a ‘resistance’ unable to see beyond the tweets of Trump.

Macron failed. The French socialists I know are utterly disgusted with corruption of the party they long supported. The end of the world looked a lot closer during the 1950-1992 period to me. The rest has been handbags, as the worldwide mortality figures from war since confirm.

Excising ideas is a poor substitute for engagement and better arguments.

“Look, I get it. No one wants to think they’ve been played. But FT, you’ve been played.”

1. Oh, Lord; thank you, Jesus.

“The intelligentsia has always over-estimated its ability to not be swayed by propaganda. It thinks propaganda only works on stupid people. How wrong it is. Propaganda works best on those who think they are impervious, and just interested in ‘a good argument’.”

2. If you think you haven’t been affected by an ad, you are the one who’s been affected by the ad

“It is an article of faith among the refined that it is the crude masses, whose common vulgarity ensured the election of Trump by overwhelming acclaim. The love for Bannon stems I think from exactly the same place as the love for Trump, the owners.”

3. Unfortunately, by the time these things become truths universally acknowledged, it may be too late.

TM@11

I watched a video of that Bannon interview in Switzerland. It was fairly unremarkable, but a few things stood out to me. The first was Bannon appropriating a leftist critique of how firms like Google and Facebook exploit their users’ labor. That was a bit surprising to see, although it seemed incongruous with the general thrust of Bannon’s other arguments.

The second thing was a phrase Bannon has been trying out lately: replacing the “maximization of shareholder value” with the “maximization of your citizenship’s value.” I’m not even sure what that means (and I doubt Bannon does either, aside from being a catchy phrase and generating applause by contrasting a globalist elite-sounding term with something meant to refer to ordinary people).

@
‘I hope some who oppose Bannon and who have the stature to win a place in the forum step up.’

No worry – as in the US Bannon had deconstructed himself already totally and is just one of these funny Zombies of the past F…face High-Times –
(who is this ”Trump” again?) – and there is sometimes in Europe this taste for US Nostalgia – like handing out one of these old T-Shirts of Woodstock or drinking from old Coca Cola bottles – and who doesn’t like to go to the Zoo and watch some rare animals from time to time – especially if they eat themselves that fast that tomorrow they will be gone…

@J-D 03.14.18 at 3:24 am
@@Anon. 03.13.18 at 4:04 pm
>>The UK jails people for offensive tweets.

>If you can’t name any of these people, you don’t have a reliable source of information on the subject and your assertion should not be believed.

The reaction that I would expect from someone who is genuinely interested in establishing the truth, as opposed to waging a verbal war of attrition under the guise of discussing, is simply to google for ‘uk prison for tweet’ and find, say, this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/can-a-tweet-put-you-in-prison-it-certainly-will-in-the-uk?

Of course one can be prosecuted for tweets – why should this medium be treated differently than say a letter on paper? One of the examples in the link at 24:
“Two Twitter users who threatened Caroline Criado-Perez, a feminist campaigner who successfully agitated for Jane Austen to replace Charles Darwin on the £10 note, were successfully prosecuted for making crude, violent, and sexist threats.” (The article doesn’t report anybody who was actually jailed though, only that they were prosecuted, probably fined).

Freedom of speech is imho inadequately protected in the UK. The libel laws are notorious.

FF, what was being communicated in that exchange with anon and J-D was not the surface meaning but pretty much all implication.

Specifically, what J-D was trying to communicate to anon wasn’t “the events you described never happened” but instead “I think you’re a lazy moron and should fuck off”.

In that case… by taking up anon’s side here what you’re implicatively communicating is support for anon… but anon is a daft moron arguing a daft-moron position [that any legally-enforced speech restrictions are per-se Bad; again, implication]. anon shouldn’t be encouraged, and you should let J-D’s surface errors slide here because they aren’t actually of any importance.

[and you should let J-D’s “bad” attitude slide because it’s actually in-context reasonable given the implications and details]

Collin Street @ 28

Forming a tribe?

The obvious (but here lightly pressed) speech suppression effort in the ”homeland”:
Twenty-four states have now passed legislation designed to penalize or prohibit BDS activity.

BDS=Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice, and equality which fends for itself outside the dome of silence erected by mass-market-editing (u.s.a. speaking, freedom-loving seeking)

@TM 03.14.18 at 11:26 am

The issue was whether people have been imprisoned for offensive tweets. I think it’s clear that Anon. meant cases such as these, and it’s also clear that people have, indeed, been imprisoned (arrested or sentenced to prison) in the UK for tweets that can be described as ‘offensive’. What one may discuss is whether the word ‘offensive’ is sufficient to describe the cases in question. One may argue that each of the tweets in question has been an instance of hate speech (or a threat) rather than ‘ordinary’ offensiveness (more or less convincincly depending on the specific case – the one with the ginger coach seems rather weak). One may also argue that people should, indeed, be imprisoned for such hate-speech tweets. In the latter case, one’s preferred definition of hate speech had better be elucidated, because the issue arguably remains thorny in various ways, some of which the article mentions. One may agree or disagree about all of these things, but just saying ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, I don’t believe you, and I won’t bother to check’ is a manifestation of an unconstructive attitude that I have experienced all too often in my own exchanges with J-D.

@Collin Street 03.14.18 at 11:51 am

As for your suggestion that J-D was motivated by the opinion that any penalised tweets were hate speech and that hate speech should be penalised, he could and should have said so instead of disputing the facts themselves. As for your suggestion that, while ostensibly discussing facts, he was actually just saying ‘F**k off’ – that is deceptive (since he didn’t acknowledge it) and generally a noxious practice (factual discussion and mere expressions of hostility or allegiance should be distinguished clearly). Furthermore, one may disagree with Anon., but a ‘F**k off’ response definitely would have been unwarranted. And, finally, you absolutely *can* and *should* disagree with someone on one (possibly more general) issue and simultaneously acknowledge that s/he is factually right about another (possibly more specific) one – or vice versa. ‘Take a side and then always support it in everything, right or wrong, and oppose the other side in everything, right or wrong’ is a very bad principle with a very bad historical track record, and I am strongly opposed to it wherever I encounter it.

It happens that – just yesterday – I was browsing articles about whether/where trolling is a crime. For a friend.

I want to point out that the UK law applies to malicious communications. (But I read part of the law, and the definition of “malicious” seems vague to me – but I think that UK law gives a lot more leeway to vague language than US law does, on average. Giving anon [and his tribe] the benefit of the doubt, he may be upset that he can not determine how offensive he is legally allowed to be, so he can’t push right up against the limit. Like my friend.)

This article tells me that seven people were jailed under that law in 2004. (Twitter was introduced to the public in 2006. That law applies to tweets in the same way that it does for phone calls, letters and such. Tweets make it easy to preserve evidence….)

Bannon is an intellectual manque. (Which doesn’t mean he’s stupid.) That’s one of the most dangerous combinations around, especially when conjoined to right wing politics and a talent for self-promotion. Among other things, it gives him the patina of respectability that the FT demands.

Marc: “Demanding that right-wing voices not be heard…”

It should be obvious that declining to sponsor right-wing voices is not the same thing as demanding that they be silenced, but apparently not…

F. Foundling

The reaction that I would expect from someone who is genuinely interested in establishing the truth, as opposed to waging a verbal war of attrition under the guise of discussing, is simply to google for ‘uk prison for tweet

That would be a relevant response if it was in fact the case that I failed to search for information. But I did search for information, so the response isn’t relevant. Shortly I’ll tell you something about some of what I found.

and find, say, this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/can-a-tweet-put-you-in-prison-it-certainly-will-in-the-uk?

That article does not provide adequate support for the assertion made by Anon. (which is what I was questioning), because it does not provide confirmation of even a single instance in which somebody was jailed for tweeting, which is all the more striking because it does refer to one case in which, although they don’t mention this detail, two people actually were sent to prison for tweeting (although that case also does not substantiate Anon.’s position; I’ll get to that later). Why do you brandish it so triumphantly?
TM

Of course one can be prosecuted for tweets – why should this medium be treated differently than say a letter on paper? One of the examples in the link at 24:
“Two Twitter users who threatened Caroline Criado-Perez, a feminist campaigner who successfully agitated for Jane Austen to replace Charles Darwin on the £10 note, were successfully prosecuted for making crude, violent, and sexist threats.” (The article doesn’t report anybody who was actually jailed though, only that they were prosecuted, probably fined).

As a matter of fact, Isabella Sorley and John Nimmo were jailed; that’s part of what I found out when I searched for information, as mentioned above. Why couldn’t Anon. cite that fact? Why did F. Foundling not cite it either? Why did the article F. Foundling linked to mention the case (and, mysteriously, the name of one of the defendants but not the other) and not mention the penalty imposed?

Here are a couple of reports that give more details of the case (but with less editorial comment from the reporters):
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-and-john-nimmo-jailed-for-abusing-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criado-9083829.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-25886026

If you don’t fancy either of those sources, it is easy to find dozens more by using the defendants’ surnames (Sorley and Nimmo) as search terms. Here is the official record of what the judge had to say at sentencing:
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/r-v-nimmo-and-sorley.pdf
And here is a report of interviews with the two defendants, the year afterwards:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/isabella-sorley-john-nimmo-interview?utm_term=.yhn2peAJM9#.ohnVxAZekG

If you read that last one you will find it reported that both Isabella Sorley and John Nimmo consider the sentences imposed on them harsh; but they both reject the idea that their right to free speech was violated. Here’s part of a direct quote attributed to Sorley:

“Threats are wrong. There’s a difference between free speech and threats. Free speech, if you’re just going to moan about something, if you said ‘people deserve cancer’, that’s free speech.
“But as soon as you talk at someone and say ‘you deserve cancer’, that’s different. Threats and free speech are completely different. I know a few people say this is a free speech issue but it’s not – threats have always been wrong, no matter if it’s on social media or it’s face to face.

Collin Street

FF, what was being communicated in that exchange with anon and J-D was not the surface meaning but pretty much all implication.

Specifically, what J-D was trying to communicate to anon wasn’t “the events you described never happened” but instead “I think you’re a lazy moron and should fuck off”.

No; for more than one reason.

For one thing, I make an effort to avoid using the word ‘moron’. I have seen people advance an argument, with some merit, that casual dismissive use of the word, because of its historical associations, contributes to perpetuating an unfair stigma against people with intellectual disabilities. I don’t need the word for casual use anyway, given that the language offers such a rich profusion of alternatives: bonehead, buffoon, crackbrain, dolt, dope, dullard, fool, lackwit, ninny, numbskull …’

For another thing, I am reasonably confident that when I was writing my comment the idea that Anon. was a dullard or a fool did not cross my mind; the thought I remember crossing my mind was ‘Do you believe everything you’re told?’. And that really was connected with something I would have liked to communicate not only to Anon. but also to other people who might be reading the comment: that people can be too ready to believe what they’re told without questioning it. I thought (based on my own experience of many discussions) it was very highly likely, but not certain, that Anon. was placing more reliance on a source of information than it merited. If I was wrong about that, Anon. (or somebody else) could have produced the kind of reliable information I was questioning the existence of and I would have learned something; but if nobody could produce that information, I would feel justified in my doubt, and I wanted other participants in the discussion to share that experience.

I could go on at some length about my specific reasons for doubt in this case, but I fear it would be tedious.

F. Foundling has obligingly cited a source that illustrates my general point: the article quotes the Staffordshire Police and Crime Commissioner on the subject of what he’s going to encourage police to do and then editorialises: ‘we can only presume that it would involve jail time’. Just because you happen to share a journalist’s presumptions does not justify citing those presumptions as fact.

I could have written, instead, ‘Where are you getting that story from?’, but then Anon. might never have responded. It would have been more satisfying if Anon. had responded; but Anon. is under no obligation to respond to my questions and is entitled to find better uses of time. So I didn’t want to leave the discussion with just a question hanging; I wanted to make my provisional conclusion explicit. If somebody wanted to challenge it, fine; the discussion might lead somewhere; but if nobody wanted to challenge it, it wouldn’t be left unstated.
F. Foundling

The issue was whether people have been imprisoned for offensive tweets. I think it’s clear that Anon. meant cases such as these, and it’s also clear that people have, indeed, been imprisoned (arrested or sentenced to prison)

If Anon. had meant ‘has people arrested’, Anon. could have written ‘has people arrested’. Anon. wrote ‘jails people’. If I told people I had been jailed and it subsequently turned out that I had only been arrested, it would be fair to say I had misrepresented the facts.

in the UK for tweets that can be described as ‘offensive’.

Describing repeated threats of violent death as ‘offensive’ would be like describing the Second World War as ‘a period of unpleasantness’; it’s not strictly inaccurate but it could easily be grossly misleading. Many of the things that people can be sent to jail for can be described as offensive, because they are offensive. Murder is offensive; fraud is offensive; demanding money with menaces is offensive; you can be sent to jail for all of those, and therefore it is strictly accurate to say that people can be sent to jail for behaving in an offensive way, but it’s grossly misleading. There is no evidence that you can be sent to jail in the UK solely for saying something–or tweeting something–at which somebody took offence. If you look at what the judge had to say in the judgement I linked to above, you will see that he had a good deal more to justify his decision to impose a jail sentence than simply the taking of offence (although it would be surprising if offence were not taken in the circumstances).

One may agree or disagree about all of these things, but just saying ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, I don’t believe you, and I won’t bother to check’ is a manifestation of an unconstructive attitude that I have experienced all too often in my own exchanges with J-D.

Well, that would be one way of describing the situation, but another way of describing it is that I am not disposed to do all your homework for you. Did Anon. do any fact-checking? We may never know. We can observe now that once you made a modicum of effort, I have reciprocated. If you dislike being challenged by me to provide substantiation for your assertions, then one possible solution would be for you to check for substantiation of your assertions before advancing them.

@Collin Street 03.14.18 at 11:51 am

As for your suggestion that J-D was motivated by the opinion that any penalised tweets were hate speech and that hate speech should be penalised, he could and should have said so instead of disputing the facts themselves.

If Collin Street had made that suggestion, it would have been inaccurate; I hadn’t thought at all about ‘hate speech’. But then, Collin Street did not make that suggestion, and did not refer at all to ‘hate speech’. You were the one who brought up that idea; I don’t know why.

‘Take a side and then always support it in everything, right or wrong, and oppose the other side in everything, right or wrong’ is a very bad principle with a very bad historical track record, and I am strongly opposed to it wherever I encounter it.

It’s not clear to me how this is supposed to be relevant. I am not aware that in my contributions here I have selected some of the other commenters as being ‘on my side’ and therefore uniformly supported them, nor that I have uniformly opposed other commenters because I have selected them as being ‘on the other side’. Who’s supposed to be on my side and who on the other side in this analysis?

I would have read and addressed J-D’s gigantic response above (and Street’s before it), but I was suddenly seized by the strong feeling that this is not a thing that I should be doing without being paid for it. It just feels too much like work, and not of the most pleasant type. Accordingly, I hereby humbly retract all of my criticisms, surrender and bow before the power of J-D’s arguments in the gigantic comment, regardless of what they are. Long exchanges are just not my thing.

F. Foundling
There is of course absolutely no reason why you should do the work to deal with a long response if you don’t want to; I make this comment to add that the main reason I did the work of making a long comment was because you previously objected to my making a short comment and not doing work.

Marc

Demanding that right-wing voices not be heard is a good deal weaker than demonstrating that their ideas have no substance.

That would be a relevant response if people were demanding that right-wing voices not be heard; but nobody is making that demand, so it isn’t.