Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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The Shape of Censorship

Anomaly UK writes about some potential alternatives to the virtual news stands / watering holes that are Twitter and Facebook.

Back in 2012, I looked at the concept of peer-to-peer blogging. It is definitely time to revisit
the environment.

Back then, the main threat I was concerned with was state action directed against service providers being used for copyright infringement. Since then, my political views have become more extreme, while the intolerance of the mainstream left has escalated alarmingly, and so the main threat today is censorship by service providers, based on their own politics or pressure from users and/or advertisers.

Actually publishing content has become easier, due to cheap virtualised hosting and fast residential broadband, making a few megabytes of data available is not likely to be a problem. The difficult bit is reaching an audience. The demise of Bloglines and then Google Reader has been either a cause or a symptom of the decline of RSS, and the main channels for reaching an audience today are facebook and twitter. I don’t actually use facebook, so for me twitter is the vital battleground. If you can build up a following linked to a twitter ID, you can move your content hosting around and followers will barely be aware it’s moved. Last week’s Chuck Johnson affair defines the situation we face. We require a robust alternative to twitter—not urgently but ideally within a 12–24 month timeframe.

From an economic perspective, at least, you would expect the impetus for this sort of censorship to come from nonstate actors in advance of such actions by the state itself.

The state, after all, has an institutional interest — and its administrators have a limited personal interest — in protecting tax revenues. If people begin to feel that the state has lost legitimacy and that it no longer guarantees their rights or interests, they may become uncooperative when it comes to generating revenue for that state. This is one of the reasons as to why governments like that of Greece have trouble keeping regular operations going.

If we look at the American government like a corporation, we see one with a relatively secure position over its own territory, which is losing some measure of its influence internationally.

While the American bureaucracy is, generally speaking, leftist, that doesn’t mean that it’s immune from attacks from other leftists trying to drive the country further to the left.

With the suspension of Chuck Johnson at GotNews, we see the asymmetry between the left and the right when it comes to the media. Chuck is essentially a ‘right wing journalist.’ The person whom he was trying to expose — left activist DeRay Mckesson —  was able to curb some traffic to Johnson’s site by getting him banned from Twitter.

That’s Twitter’s prereogative, of whom they decide to permit or forbid to use their service in any way.

From the Times’ account of Mckesson:

One protester was DeRay Mckesson, a 29-year-old former school administrator who has spent much of the past nine months attending and catalyzing such protests, from Ferguson, Mo., last summer and fall, to New York City and Milwaukee in December, to North Charleston, S.C., in April. Mckesson, who is from Baltimore, had returned to his hometown not long after Gray’s death to join the protests. Now he stood in his usual pose — his slender back straight as a ramrod, phone held in front of angular face, camera lens pointed directly ahead.

Naturally, it’d be interesting to find out more about this, since that sounds a lot like the incitement of violent riots which have done enormous amounts of damage to both people and property throughout the US. The Times portrays him as heroic, even though it tangentially connects his ‘activism’ to the murders of two policemen in New York City.

It’s important not to count too much on ‘social media’ or the ‘internet’ as an equalizer in politics. It’s not. It’s just another political tool. Many tools which appear to be decentralized actually aren’t. In the case of Twitter, everything routs through the service that they run, and they can and do ban people for arbitrary reasons.

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Why Mass Surveillance?

Liberals are apopleptic about mass surveillance, particularly on the part of the US government, but few are all that interested in tracing the reasons why the policy came to be adopted.

Mass surveillance was a conscious choice made that allowed the US to conserve itself as it had been constituted by the New Deal administration, and then altered further by the Johnson administration. Johnson introduced mass immigration. FDR instituted the alphabet agencies which currently govern the country with some electoral public relations decoration. Finally, mass surveillance acts to conserve the American foreign policy tack towards the Middle East set by the Carter administration.

Carter summed up the government’s position in the 1980 State of the Union address thusly:

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

After the 9/11/2001 attacks — mostly conducted by Saudi nationals, motivated by clerics who follow the characteristic Saudi strain of Sunni Islam — the government did everything that it could to avoid making any fundamental changes to itself or altering its strategic direction.

In large part, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought to protect America’s ‘Persian Gulf interests’ — which are really at least partly independent of the US — at the expense of the interests of Americans. This is a hard pill to swallow, especially for American conservatives, but it becomes easier to understand in the context of the iron law of bureaucracy.

Instead of changing diplomatic relations with Persian Gulf state sponsors of international terrorism — like America’s biggest allies in the region — America deepened its ties with those same state sponsors of international terrorism, while kicking off some strange new jobs programs to try to turn the Middle East democratic, in the same mold as the postwar occupation of Europe, complete with allusions to the Marshall Plan.

Mass surveillance was part of this approach. The theory was that by intercepting the entire planet’s communications for analysis, it could be possible to maintain the jetsetting open borders global society while also providing security against terrorist attacks. Polling showed that Americans were willing to sacrifice their liberties if they thought that it would result in being secure from terror attacks. No one wanted to change anything all that fundamental about strategic alignments, trade policy, or immigration.

Instituting these surveillance programs without resorting to the democratic process allowed the government to give the people what they wanted and asked for, while maintaining the pretense of American liberalism. And that pretense was mostly all that people really wanted. What bothers people more about mass surveillance is less the fact of it, and more that it makes it more challenging to maintain the pretense to liberalism.

The few remaining liberal commentators tend to be far more upset about this than the others, because it disrupts the coherence of the idea of liberalism itself. If America is the last truly liberal country, then what does it say for the ideology if it, also, has dropped into an embarrassing tyranny, in which the most basic parts of the Constitution tend to be flouted even by local branches of the government, to say nothing of the highest offices?

Instead of liberalism being the source of the problem, instead the liberal remnants invent scapegoats — like the Bush administration, the leadership of the NSA, or others — rather than the logic of a system itself that leads to careless governance.

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Millennials Aren’t Likely to Make It

In the world of corporate propaganda, there tends to be a lot of puffery about how important it is for corporations to cater to the changing tastes of the millennial generation — meaning people born between the 1980s and the 2000s.

This is essentially bad information which leads corporations and investors to make bad decisions. Western governments need to massage the bad data about the economic performance of this burgeoning demographic section — particularly of a middle class which is badly burdened by nonproductive debts and uneconomic skillsets. The problems are especially acute in Europe, where high double digit percentages of this generation remain unemployed, despite extremely expensive education certificates certifying how much they ought to be worth.

Part of what makes this generation different is that it’s the first major demographic chunk impacted by mass immigration, both in Europe and the US. Just as school performance data tends to be blamed on bad policy rather than a weakening genetic stock, so does performance in the workplace.

From the perspective of Western states and their institutional friends, it’s important to puff up the future prospects of the future cash streams which will be funding all of those outstanding bonds — quantitative easing nonwithstanding. It’s important to look at labor force participation data rather than unemployment — because students don’t count as ‘unemployed.’ By those measures, young people are working less, while their elders are spending more time in the workforce.

Pundits will tend to portray marriage rates as more of an outmoded measure of morals, but it’s the institution that actually allows societies to replenish themselves. To the extent that Europeans have, by and large, become enervated, and are unwilling to follow these patterns, is the extent to which these countries are burning themselves out. There’s a big complex of pseudo-cameralist thought at the think tanks and in the big publishers dedicated to promoting a narrative that this will all work out, given that we all ‘muddle through’ and that ‘unorthodox monetary policy’ winds up delivering results which it never has.

The other notion is that European countries can somehow magically replace the core demographics who aren’t reproducing with immigrants from the third world.

There is a sort of millennarian hope that a new magical education policy will be developed which will ‘close the gap,’ despite no evidence that this will happen, and indeed decades of evidence to the contrary — that, owing to genetic differences, there is no replacement for over a thousand years of divergent evolution, that there is no teaching method which can correct for genetic differences between populations.

This isn’t a generation that’s all that likely to take off in the way that these states need them to take off. It has some people who can be salvaged. It’s important to counter the false story that these people will somehow start producing enough cash to cover the public debt loads which have been foisted upon them, because avoiding the happy-talk sooner will help us solve these problems sooner.

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