short post about a long article

Read this and then read this.

Pretty impressive, BO, pretty impressive.

barely here

Haven't had much inclination to attend to this blog lately. My attention has been elsewhere.

• I noticed today that the NCAA tournament is starting this week, and apparently Maryland made it in as a 10 seed. I haven't paid any attention to college basketball at all, and have no plans to start. This will be another year where I don't even fill out a bracket.
• I started an experiment recently, and so far the results seem to be very weird. From what I can tell, nothing is turning out like we expected, and some things are going the exact opposite way. Science is weird.
  
• It is weird mostly being around the kinds of people who uncritically support Democrats after a lifetime of mostly being around the kinds of people who uncritically support Republicans. People around here love Obama and love to belittle people who supported Bush or McCain or Palin. My blood-drenched tyrant is better than your blood-drenched tyrant!
• A week from tomorrow I have to give a presentation to 200 students in a 3rd year behavioral ecology class about morality. I ought to be working on that.
• Friday and Saturday were the psychology graduate program's annual recruitment weekend. That means it must have been a year since the last recruitment weekend where I showed up without knowing why I had been invited and somehow talked my way into a lab that wasn't supposed to be accepting any more students. I'm still quite pleased with how things have worked out for me.
  

a quick lesson on media

A discussion about (east coast/large market) bias in sports media broke out on my fantasy basketball message board, so I posted my thoughts on the matter (starting by quoting someone's comment from earlier in the conversation). I thought I'd recycle it here too, what the hell. "A quick lesson on media" I called it.

"espn and all media is a business, they cover whatever they think people will watch."

sometimes they (media folks) pretend that they're objective truth-seekers. then when they're criticized they suddenly become businesses just catering to the demands of their consumers, the ignorant rabble. (the contradiction never seems to bother them.)

why are their customers so ignorant? because the media refuses to inform them. why does the media refuse to inform them? because they don't want to be informed! repeat as needed.

keep in mind what the exact nature of media business is: selling audiences to advertisers. the media serves the interests of its owners. in some cases this is best accomplished by running a story because it will get ratings/sell papers today, to justify higher rates on advertising. in other cases it is best served by pushing information that works to some other end. not many businesses want to buy access to an audience being told about future economic woes. so media coverage of economic issues is biased towards the sunny side, until reality interferes too obviously with this, at which point the story becomes "nobody saw this coming" to cover their own ass.

also note of course that often times the owners of media businesses have a variety of other business interests, in which case media can serve as a propaganda outlet for their larger interests.

same dynamic plays out in sports coverage. follow the money.

constructive solutions: a See For Yourself first?

After publishing this post about my wildest dreams I got an email from a friend:

I think this is the first time I have read the changes you want to see enacted. Some of your points I agree with and some I do not. But I have wondered from time to time what you are actually looking for in a government/society so I was very pleased to read your post. Just wanted to say that.

It was a well-intentioned message, and I appreciated the thought, but I thought he was wrong. I thought I'd been making it pretty clear what I'd like to see.

For example, in the same month as that dreams post I published this lament of the destruction of the Bush years, and I don't think my disgust with basically everything that man did has been any secret. Was it not clear that I'd like to live in a country that doesn't invade other nations based on outrageous lies, destroy millions of lives, torture its captives, and whatever else you want to include as part of the rotten corpse of the Bush legacy?

Also in the same month as the first post, just a few days before it in fact, I wrote that the departing Bush gang were all criminals but will be protected by the rest of the US political class, including Obama. In case it wasn't obvious, if I'm going to live under the rule of a government, I'd like that government to hold its leaders to higher standards of conduct than anyone, rather than the current arrangement of a two-tiered justice system where the full force of the law is brought down on common people while political elites break the law with impunity. I'd like my government to prosecute war criminals for war crimes and to honor the treaties they've signed that obligate them to investigate and prosecute such crimes. Was that not clear before?

And in case it wasn't clear from this post, also in the same month as the others, I'd like my government to display the opposite priorities from the ones criticized. I'd like government to place higher priority on meaningful help for needy people than on endless expansion of the war machine or corporate welfare. Did I not get that message across?

Again, I thought my friend's message was a nice-hearted gesture, especially from someone who has often disagreed with me. But I just find the idea that I've never said want I wanted bizarre.

Maybe I'm sensitive to this issue because I've seen the same idea applied to critics far more eloquent than I am, and I suspect it is yet another way that people have found to dismiss challenges to their perspectives without actually engaging them. "Oh sure, Chomsky is a smart guy, but he's so negative. He never offers constructive solutions, he just criticizes everyone." They can just tune out criticism based on the nonsensical idea that it isn't productive. It seems to me that criticizing terrible actions is highly constructive, and that the solution is obvious: stop doing the terrible stuff. But Chomsky's oh-so-wearisome negativity becomes the first talking point brought up in response to anything he says, drowning out his important message with this distracting bullshit. And by the way, while in some cases people do that as a conscious strategy, I'm sure that many people do it automatically and without realizing it, like a built-in ideological defense mechanism. (It is kind of a version of "poor form." I don't like that guy, so I won't listen to him.)

But instead of speculating about that kind of cognitive dissonance management strategy applying to my friend, I'll gladly adopt a more generous interpretation of his message: that he read my list of dreams as specific policy positions I'd like to see, and that seemed fundamentally different (and more interesting) to him than the criticism of past government actions that he's mostly seen me write. And I guess that's fair enough, at least for the first sentence of his message.

But as for the rest of what he wrote, his confusion about what I'm "looking for in a government/society" confuses me. Maybe I don't really have a good sense of how closely what I've written here keeps up with what is going on in my head. But as I've already mentioned, several of the items on that list had been mentioned in weeks before it, and most of the others in the months before (I assume, but I don't feel like looking it up right now). And all of them seem very straightforward extensions of the general philosophies I routinely express. So maybe he just doesn't pay close attention to my writing, and/or maybe he just didn't pick his words very carefully.

I'll emphasize that I don't mean to give any impression that I'm personally bent out of shape about his comment. I'm not. I read a post at another blog recently about a private email exchange that made me think of several of my own that I've considered writing about, including this one. I chose to go ahead with this one because of its similarity to the broader pattern I've observed where critics of power are dismissed for not providing "constructive solutions" or whatever, and I think that pattern is worthy of comment. So I used this personal example as a launching point for the discussion.