How Do You Get Away With Writing Something Like This?

Some days I think I am not cynical enough. An item from the Washington Post, by a man named Ed Rogers, runs as follows:

FBI Director James Comey has made two recent speeches where he warns us there is an emerging trend of police officers standing down or demonstrating reluctance to engage criminals because they are worried about sparking a situation similar to the riots in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore. Comey’s comments do not fit the Obama administration’s narrative on crime, and drew criticism from civil rights activists, law enforcement unions and the White House. Well, what do these groups have in common?  That’s easy — they’re almost all Democrats, and they may be going down a slippery slope of promoting policies that have the effect of being pro-crime and anti-gun at the same time. Calling Democrats “pro-crime” may sound a tad harsh, but if you are for inhibiting police activity, causing fewer arrests and making mass releases from prison, what else would you call it? The politics of this issue are not fully formed, but if the Democrats don’t watch it, they run the risk of being the “pro-crime” party in the United States. 

Now, I always like to assume that people I disagree with are operating in good faith; that they are generally decent instead of malicious, and not trying to distort or propagandize but merely seeing things through a different lens. And so my instinct, with something like this, is to start to patiently explain why it’s wrong. The FBI director has said, without any evidence (he has “a sense”), that Black Lives Matter is causing the crime rate to rise. Ed Rogers quotes the FBI director as if his hunch is factual, then dismisses all criticism because the people making it are Democrats rather than because they’re actually wrong on the facts. Then, using his assumption that crime is increasing because of criminal justice reformers, which he still has no evidence for, Rogers concludes that Democrats are now a pro-crime party. (Note the way he dismisses police objections to the FBI Director’s suggestion: police = “law enforcement unions”; somehow police unions are now members of the radical pro-crime left!)

Oh, but Jesus, why bother? Why even bother? I could spend 10,000 words carefully unweaving and analyzing Rogers’s falsehoods. But what could possibly persuade someone who thinks his opponents are literally in favor of crimes, i.e. that Democrats like to see people get raped and robbed? That would make all Democrats basically callous monsters, which I think Rogers might even say they were. You can’t have a sensible discussion with someone like that; I’m willing to assume that he’s operating in good faith, but he’s assuming that my side wants people to be victimized by crime. 

Sometimes, when I read stuff like this, and get angry about it, my friends ask me why I pay any attention to it. “I mean, yeah, what do you expect?” they say.

“Well, this was in the Washington Post! That’s a major national newspaper!” I reply.  “What kind of editor publishes an assertion like ‘democrats have caused crime to go up and are pro-crimes’ and demands no factual support?”

“Yeah,” says my cynical friend. “I guess I don’t really have as much respect for the Washington Post as you do. And I don’t really spend much of my time thinking about what some right-wing dick said about Democrats.”

Look, my friend is right. I shouldn’t get exercised over this. The problem is that I am desperate to assume that the extreme cynical perspective, which is that even our major national newspapers will print any old shit, and that people on the right are often not sincere disagreers but manipulative fabricators, is not true. I really don’t want to accept that conclusion, because I think it’s cheap, and I think it’s very easy to dismiss your opponent by just scoffing “You’re not serious” than actually engaging with the substance of what they have to say.

But I’ve looked at the substance of what Ed Rogers has to say. He’s deliberately misstating what motivates criminal justice reformers, and he’s attempting to convince his readers that something he has no evidence for is true. His editor bears equal responsibility, for allowing someone to repeat such an outrageous claim without any documentation.

I don’t mean to be a cynic. I really don’t want to be one. I want to clearly and carefully dissect arguments, because people on the right say that leftists argue with emotion rather than logic, and dismiss them as evil without hearing them out. But I heard them out on this. And I saw no logic, no substance. Just an unproven assertion, and then denunciation and innuendo. I saw a person who is a high-ranking political commentator telling me that I like crime, for no reason other than that I think police should be slightly more disinclined to shoot black men in the forehead. What kind of dishonesty is this? How can I be expected to engage in sober-minded political discussion when this is the level we’re at? How can I keep myself from coming to the conclusion that people like Ed Rogers are operating in bad faith, and are shameless propagandists wilfully opposed to the truth? I can’t think of a way. The evidence is clear, and though I’m loath to admit it, people on the right really often are manipulative fabricators, and the media really will just print any old shit.


The Childish Christine Fair and the Necessity of Advocates

Christine Fair is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, has worked for the United Nations, has an extensive publication record, and has been quoted in major news outlets around the world. It is fair to describe her, I think, as a serious public intellectual and a member of the academic and policy elite.

Prof. Fair is therefore extremely useful as a case study in just how childish, unpleasant, biased, and ignorant one can be while retaining significant influence and respectability, as well as a major academic post.

Let’s examine the facts, in order to determine whether my characterization of Prof. Fair is true. First, let’s start with a debate Prof. Fair had on the Al Jazeera television network with civil liberties activist and national security journalist Glenn Greenwald. In the debate, Mr. Greenwald took the position that United States drone strikes in Pakistan cause more harm than good, while Prof. Fair took the opposite position.

The debate did not go well. Personally, I attribute this in large part to Prof. Fair’s insistence on repeatedly interrupting each of the two other participants and refusing to wait until it was her turn to speak, but you should watch it yourself and make an independent evaluation. Let me transcribe a significant excerpt from the debate, so that we may examine and critique it together. It is long, but I think it’s a hell of a lot of (exasperating) fun. [I have tried to capture everything people said, but there was a significant amount of crosstalk.]

HOST: What do the leaked documents published by the Intercept tell us that’s new, that in your view strengthens the case against drones?

GLENN GREENWALD: What they do primarily is confirm what the people who live in the regions where the drones have been killing people have been saying, which is that far more often than not they’re killing people not who are the targets but who are actually innocent. [Our source has indicated that] 9 out of 10 of the people are not the targets. And you’ve heard this from people in Afghanist and and Pakistan continuously, you’ve heard this from researchers and scientists and other people who have studied it, that the reason we’re constantly turning more people into terrorists than we’re actually killing is because the anger and rage from these innocent victims is what causes people to then want to bring violence to the United States.

HOST: Christine Fair, you’ve called drones “the most successful tool the United States and Pakistan have to eliminate dangerous militants, but if 9 out of 10 drones strikes are not getting the people they’re supposed to, how is that successful?

PROF. FAIR: Actually, I’m going to push back on several things Glenn said. Many of the statements he just made are not empirically buttressed, many of the people who write about this actually haven’t been to Pakistan where the drones are actually used, and so you actually have this problem: we don’t know who was targeted and we don’t know who was actually killed. And I’m actually going to argue that this actually isn’t knowable with the tools that have been used thus far. [The conclusion of the journalist who has studied this in the most empirically defensible way is that] according to the locals themselves, about 90% of those killed were militants. So we have a big difference between those who are based in Lahore, the cosmopolitan elites, who view drones as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty and all the legal issues that get raised, but when you talk to the people who live in the proximity of the militants, they actually have a very different story.


HOST: Let Glenn respond.

GLENN GREENWALD: There’s actually a person who lives in the region, [Malala Yousafzai] who happens to be the winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize,

PROF. FAIR: Who doesn’t know anything about FATA.

GLENN GREENWALD: She actually went to the White House…

PROF. FAIR: She knows nothing about FATA.

GLENN GREENWALD: …and spoke with President Obama, and what she said was not “Thank you so much for using drones to kill the militants who put a bullet into my head and are trying to suppress the rights of girls,” what she said in her statement is “I expressed my concern that drones are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. It’s the same conclusion from the NYU-Stanford study, and the lead reporter on the story in The Intercept on drones is Jeremy Scahill who has spent many years in all of the regions in which drones are used, including Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia…

PROF. FAIR: He’s not spent any time in Pakistan. This is fictional nonsense.

GLENN GREENWALD: He made a film that was nominated for an Academy Award. He wrote a 600-page book called Dirty Wars. There is abundant evidence that drones are killing innocent…

PROF. FAIR: No, there’s not.

GLENN GREENWALD: …people, you have to be pathological to deny it at this point.

PROF. FAIR: I guess all Muslim countries and all Muslim polities and all Muslim legal systems are the same to you. I actually bring nuance to this.

HOST: Well, Christine, let me put some nuance to you. The British government did polling in Pakistan’s tribal areas a few years ago. This is the British government on CIA drone strikes. They found, in the tribal areas, 59% of the public in 2010 said they were never justified. That went up to 63% in 2011. So the polling doesn’t quite support what you’re saying.

PROF. FAIR: No, no, actually, do you understand how polling… I actually do a lot of polling in Pakistan. What you find is that a lot of people don’t answer the question at all.

HOST: But the ones who do.

PROF. FAIR: Well, you’re missing the science of this. This is called “social desirability bias.” So, I’m going to argue that it’s very difficult to do this well because the person doesn’t know the person doing the survey work. Now, I also want to go back to the NYU report. I’m pro-choice. If Planned Parenthood did a study that talked about the benefits of abortion, we would immediately call the nonsense flag on that report. The NYU/Stanford study was supported, facilitated, in every way, shape, or form, by FFR [Foundation for Fundamental Rights] and Reprieve, which is an advocacy group avowedly against drones. They did not include any of the pro-drone voices.

HOST: The British government, though, are not an adovacy group against drones. So you dismissed the British government.

PROF. FAIR: No, no, what I’m saying, and again the nuance may not be appreciated here. Polling work in conflict areas is very difficult to elicit the truth because the person does not know whether the survey person in question is CIA, ISI, or a miltiant.

HOST: So are you saying we can’t know?

PROF. FAIR: I’m telling you we can’t know, but I want to go to the point of Ababil.

HOST: Very briefly.

PROF. FAIR: It is a very brief point, because this speaks to how some people view the drones which are very different from people like Glenn Greenwald.

HOST: Okay.

PROF. FAIR: You’re familiar with Surah Al-Fil in the Koran, where an army of elephants attacked the Ka’aba…

HOST: I’m worried this isn’t going to be brief.

PROF. FAIR: I’m going to tell you how brief it is. You should know the Koran, I’m presuming. Surah Al-Fil. So, the black swallows who dropped stones to repel the elephant army that was attacking Ka’aba, those who live in proximity to the terrorists, they call drones Ababil. So this is a voice that you folks try to exclude.

HOST: Glenn Greenwald, you’re not being nuanced.

GLENN GREENWALD: This is just rank propaganda at this point.

PROF. FAIR: [interrupting] It’s not rank propaganda!

GLENN GREENWALD: You have this mountain of evidence…

PROF FAIR: [interrupting] You don’t know data!

GLENN GREENWALD: …Are you capable of remaining quiet while other people speak?

HOST: Christine, let Glenn…

PROF. FAIR: [continuing to speak] Are you capable of even being truthful and using data?

HOST: Christine, let Glenn make his point and then I’ll…

GLENN GREENWALD: There is this mountain of evidence, you have…

PROF. FAIR: There’s no mountain of evidence!

HOST: Hold on! Christine, let Glenn make his point.

GLENN GREENWALD: You have the NYU-Stanford study.

PROF. FAIR: Which is not a study, it’s advocacy.

GLENN GREENWALD: You have the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

PROF. FAIR: Advocacy.

GLENN GREENWALD: You have the documents that were just provided to us by this source.

PROF. FAIR: Which is Afghanistan, not Pakistan.

GLENN GREENWALD: You have the statement of the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner…

PROF. FAIR: A 16-year-old girl!

HOST: Hold on, hold on, you’re not letting Glenn make his point.

PROF FAIR: Because he’s a liar. He’s a liar.

HOST: He’s quoting reports! You can respond to the reports when…

PROF. FAIR: These are not evidence, these are advocacy.

Continue reading

One Wonderful Thing About America

I’m down on America a fair amount of the time. But one thing I love about it is that you don’t get things in the news like this item out of Britain, in which the novelist Martin Amis calls the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn “undereducated,” saying:

He is undereducated. Which is one way of putting it. His schooling dried up when he was 18, at which point he had two E-grade A-levels to his name; he started a course at North London Polytechnic, true, where he immersed himself in trade union studies but dropped our after a year. And that was that.’

Amis isn’t the only one to criticize Corbyn’s educational background, with the Spectator lamenting the fact that Corbyn’s cabinet has many members from universities other than Oxford and Cambridge:

Under Corbyn, the Labour party — once the clever party — has had a brain transplant. It’s out with the Oxbridge and Harvard graduates with first-class degrees; in with the red-brick university graduates. Or, in Corbyn’s case, a non-graduate. Corbyn got two Es at A-level at Adams’ Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire. He did a year of trade union studies at the North London Polytechnic before dropping out… Let’s not be snobbish. Those universities [Hull, Sussex, etc.] are good. But it isn’t snobbery to point out that they aren’t as good as Oxford or Cambridge — second and fourth respectively in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, published last week. Hull is 401st equal. Jeremy Corbyn’s alma mater, now London Metropolitan University, doesn’t make the 800-strong list… [D]o we want our top politicians to be drawn from the lower ranks of academia? Labour was traditionally the intellectuals’ party. The late Denis Healey got a double first in Greats at Balliol, the brainiacs’ Oxford college. Harold Wilson got an outstanding first in PPE at Jesus College, Oxford, with alphas on every paper. Wilson became a lecturer at New College and a research fellow at University College.

Look at this rubbish! As the late Christopher Hitchens once so graphically put it, I couldn’t eat enough to vomit enough. (Here’s another one from the Telegraph, which posits that Jeremy Corbyn is “too thick” to be Prime Minister and laments that he didn’t go to Oxford like Martin Amis.)

Now, say what you will about America, but this kind of overt class snobbery is just not displayed here. (We can note with amusement that the Spectator insists it is would never be snobbish, by patronizingly acknowledging that non-Oxbridge universities can be “good,” before immediately posing the question of whether politicians should be drawn from the “lower ranks” of academia.)

Of course, in the U.S. it’s no less true that the graduates elite schools dominate the government. But it’s much less acceptable to announce some kind of principle that only the graduates of certain wealthy schools should be allowed into governmental office. In fact, it’s often taken as a point of pride that somebody “dropped out of school at age 9” or whatever, and then worked their way to some position. And people like George Bush are ridiculed for being thumpingly stupid despite having attended elite schools. I think there’s just a certain lack of conflation of “schooling” with “education” here. Many of our most respected intellects (Lincoln, Mark Twain, etc.) were relatively unschooled, and there is simply a much greater respect for autodidacts and the self-made here. As I say, it’s a bit of a lie, since we give lip service to equal opportunity and then simply reward the children of the elite. Nevertheless! At least the value we nominally hold would be sound if we acted upon it.

I really can’t believe that major newspapers in Britain can print this stuff. But then again, Britain is still a monarchy, still a country of bewigged jurists like “Lord Justice Laws.” In many ways, it still hasn’t escaped its feudal past. So there are still plenty of people there who believe failing your exams makes you a fool, instead of just making you someone who hates school because it’s a soul-killing conformity-factory of neverending mindless tedium. Elements of the British public have a hard time understanding this, because Britain itself as a country is, by many measures, a soul-killing comformity factory of neverending mindless tedium. It’s also a place where rank snobbery and class prejudice can be passed off as serious political commentary, and where somehow people who pride themselves on their superior intellects can spectacularly fail to see the shallow irrationality of their own elitist arguments.

I hereby swear not to write anything else about Jeremy Corbyn for a reasonable amount of time. 

How to Select Your Statistic to Reinforce Your Political Bias

This article in the British Evening Standard is a fascinating lesson in how to manipulate statistics to serve a political bias. The article is about the head of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, who is extremely controversial because of his far-left socialist politics. A large portion of the narrative around Corbyn in the conservative British press has been that he is supposedly “too radical” for the country. The argument conservatives make is that by selecting Jeremy Corbyn as leader, the Labour party has discredited itself with mainstream voters and committed electoral suicide.

The Evening Standard article offers a headline that appears to offer hard data to support this conclusion. The headline reads: Dump Jeremy Corbyn before election, say 42% of voters, and the article indeed gives poll results showing that 42% of surveyed adults believed the Labour party should get rid of Corbyn. The first paragraph of the article also reports, accurately, that only 31% of people disagreed, meaning that more people think Jeremy Corbyn should go than stay.

But look at the chart reporting the statistics, for these are not the only numbers we have. There, we see that in a poll taken last summer during the tenure of Jeremy Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, 49% of people believed Miliband should go, versus 30% that he should stay. Now, consider the fact that British conservatives believed Ed Miliband lost the election because he was “too far to the left.” These commentators, who include Tony Blair, believed that if Miliband was too far left for the country, then Corbyn was way too far left, hence the argument that a Corbyn leadership would take the party off a cliff.

But what the poll results in the Evening Standard show is that fewer voters want to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn than wanted to get rid of Ed Miliband. One could just as easily write an article with the same poll results using the headline “Corbyn already outstrips Miliband in popularity,” and write an article about how, despite having been in office only a month, Jeremy Corbyn has already managed to have more voters want to keep him than Ed Miliband, completely destroying the narrative that he’s more fringe than Miliband was.

The real place the bias of the Evening Standard shows, though, is in the way it reports the 42% statistic instead of the same poll’s measure of the satisfaction ratings for Jeremy Corbyn and Prime Minister David Cameron. As you can see in the chart, the poll asked whether people were “satisfied” with the way each was doing his job. For David Cameron, 42% were satisfied versus 51% dissatisfied. For Jeremy Corbyn, 37% were satisfied versus 39% dissatisfied. For both men, then, more people are dissatisfied than satisfied. But the chart shows that David Cameron has a favorability rating of -9%, while Jeremy Corbyn has a favorability rating of -2%. Cameron’s ratio of dissatisfied people to satisfied people is far higher than Corbyn’s.

These poll results are actually extremely encouraging for Corbyn. More than half the country thinks David Cameron is doing a bad job, while only 39% of the country thinks Corbyn is! Look at how many more people were undecided on Corbyn than on Cameron. 24% of people didn’t say satisfied or unsatisfied. That means that Corbyn has a huge opportunity to win people over who haven’t made their minds up about him yet. Cameron, on the other hand, faces the challenge of trying to recapture the opinions of the more than half the country that thinks he is doing a bad job.

Setting aside the fact that these numbers are actually hopeful for Corbyn, they certainly should make us far more cautious about concluding that Corbyn is some fringe radical who has turned off the entire electorate. That’s just clearly untrue. In fact, he’s viewed more favorably than David Cameron.

So what we can see here is the biased selection of statistics in action. The Evening Standard, a conservative newspaper, intentionally tries to manipulate its readers into thinking things are going worse for Corbyn than they are. They put the damaging statistics at the front, and bury the positive ones, because by doing this they can pretend that the “too radical” argument is correct, when it is in fact incorrect by their very own measures. This is propaganda, not journalism.

Note that I don’t think the headline should be “Corbyn’s favorability ratings exceed Cameron’s” either; choosing the pro-Labour statistic is just as bad. The balanced headline would say something like “Corbyn viewed less negatively than Cameron, but 42% of voters still want him to go.” But of course, that’s still a bit pro-Conservative, because that 42% is really pretty meaningless without context. Note that it’s a general poll of adults, not a poll of Labour supporters. So of course that 42% is probably going to be made up of a majority of Conservative voters. Some of those will want Corbyn to stay (because they think he’s unelectable) and some of them will want him to go (because he’s a socialist), but it’s really hard to give meaning to the 42% without more in-depth data. Probably shouldn’t report it as a headline no matter what.

(By the way, the Evening Standard is not alone in selectively reporting poll results to make them appear less favorable to Corbyn than they actually are. Richard Seymour has a breakdown of a similarly manipulative exercise that took place in the Independent last month, who reported that Jeremy Corbyn had “lost a fifth of Labour voters” without mentioning that many more people were likely to enter the Labour party because of Corbyn than leave it.)

Dream Diary: “Mailer”







Nope, Still Not Socialism













The Dumbest Email I Have Ever Received













Why I Am Not The Khmer Rouge







Nobody Believes In The Rule of Law











