Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 224

extremists

Erasmus:

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is concerned about extremism, and with good reason—but not quite (or not only) in the way you might think. The focus of a briefing paper issued by the commission, an advisory body appointed by Congress and the White House to monitor liberty of conscience, is not on violent extremism as such. Rather it is concerned with the way that sloppy charges of “extremism” are used ever more often by authoritarian regimes to clamp down hard on almost any religious group which, for some reason, they don’t like. China, Russia and Tajikistan are mentioned as examples. 

One might add to that list Québec. As I have said before, the logic here is very simple. 

Buruma reflects

One question that Ian Buruma has never faced — not when he ran Jian Ghomeshi’s essay, not when he gave interviews in response to the protests, and not in this reflection: Why, when women accuse a man of sexual misconduct, is the man’s story the one worth telling? Throughout this essay he talks about accused men, many accused men, he thinks we should hear from. Not once — not once — does he consider the stories that might be told by the women who claim to have been assaulted. Those women simply do not appear on his mental map.

taxonomies

If you’re a writer for the Economist: the people to the left of you are socialists, and the people to the right of you are “alt-right” or “far right” (the terms are interchangeable).

If you’re an AOC worshipper or you feel the Bern: anyone to the immediate right of you is a neoliberal and anyone farther in that direction is “alt-right” or “far right” (again, interchangeable terms).

If you’re a Fox News watcher: the people just to the left of you are liberals pretending to be centrists; the people to the left of them are socialists pretending to be liberals; the people to the left of them are communists pretending to be socialists.

getting a new Mac up and running

Things I do when I get a new Mac, more or less in order:

install Homebrew
use Homebrew to install pandoc
install BBedit
install MacTex
type this into the terminal: defaults write com.barebones.bbedit FullScreenWindowsHogScreen -bool NO
type this into the terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true (followed by killall Dock)
enable Night Shift
install TextExpander
install Alfred
install Hazeover
install Hazel

Everything else can wait; once I have the above in place — plus of course syncing all my existing TextExpander snippets — I can do almost everything I really need to do on a computer, with maximum focus and speed. 

intersections

Re: “intersectionality”: Intersections can diminish as well as intensify. Take Kamala Harris as an example. A woman and a minority (a Jamaican father and an Indian mother): the intersection of these theoretically increases her cultural marginalization. But wait: both of her parents were also academics at elite universities, first as students and later as faculty and researchers. Such an economic and cultural placement forms a vector that, intersecting with others, diminishes Harris’s marginalization. (One could go into her story in more detail: for instance, her parents divorced when she was quite young — that adds another vector of social force that should be accounted for. One could also go into anyone else’s story in such detail, if one is interested in a full accounting of a person’s social placement. A big “If,” these days.)

People who fancy themselves theorists of intersectionality are only interested in intensifications: intensifications whether of privilege (white + male + heterosexual) or of marginalization (black + female + homosexual). The diminishments are just as real; but they’re not as useful. At least for those who, while they may like their gender identities on a spectrum, like their political narratives binary.

the right side

Ben Shapiro’s book, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, relies heavily on the Miltonian conceit that the use of Reason alone, absent God’s moral law and universal will, dooms us to live in the abyss. And, like Milton, Shapiro’s attempt to demonstrate that secular civilization needs to rekindle the Judeo-Christian teachings upon which it is based, inadvertently shows us why we were right to leave them behind in the first place.

— Jared Marcel Pollan. “We.”

when political prophecy fails

In his column today, Ross Douthat writes:

A good many members of the opposition to Donald Trump — a mix of serious journalists, cable television hosts, pop culture personalities, erstwhile government officials, professional activists and politicians — have been invested in what appears to be exactly the kind of conspiracy-laced alternative reality that they believed themselves to be resisting.

With the apparent “no collusion” conclusion to the Robert Mueller investigation, there will now be a retreat from this alternative reality to more defensible terrain — the terrain where Trump is a sordid figure who admires despots and surrounded himself with hacks and two-bit crooks while his campaign was buoyed by a foreign power’s hack of his opponent.

Will there be “a retreat from this alternative reality”? I don’t see why there would be, or why Ross thinks there will be. Similarly, listening on my morning walk to the National Review Editors podcast, I heard all the members of that distinguished panel agree that the release of the Mueller report will be very bad news for, a big black eye for, the media, and I thought: Really?

I mean, I’m sure a handful — more likely, a hand half-full — of journalists and media talking heads will say they got ahead of the story, but I’d be shocked if it were more than that. More likely scenario: the Rachel Maddows and Jonathan Chaits and Stacey Abramses of the world

(1) will say “We won’t really know anything until we see the full Mueller report”;

and if the entire report isn’t released

(2) will insist that whatever has been redacted contains the key to the whole mystery, and that it remains overwhelmingly likely that Trump and his entourage are guilty of collusion with the Russians and other high crimes and misdemeanors;

and if the entire report is released

(3a) will find something, anything, in it that, they insist, confirms their worst suspicions,

or, if the full report gives them nothing,

(3b) will say that Mueller was scared into silence or is part of the con.

And their followers and enablers will cheer them on. In short, I can imagine no circumstances in which the people most committed to the Trump-and-the-Russkies narrative would acknowledge that they got it wrong. And the people who trusted them before will continue to trust them, while the people who didn’t trust them before will continue not to trust them.

Changing your views because you realize you got the facts wrong? Or because you realize that you “theorized in advance of the facts,” as Sherlock Holmes warned you not to do? In American politics today that’s not how it works. To understand why, take some time to read a book — a book I explore fairly extensively in my How to Think — called When Prophecy Fails. It was published in 1956, but it tells you much of what you need to know about how politically invested people behave in 2019.

Apple News vs. RSS

What Michael Tsai says about Apple News is correct:

I continue to find Apple News to be disappointing. It’s like Apple reinvented the RSS reader with less privacy (everything goes through an Apple tracking URL) and a worse user experience (less control over fonts, text that isn’t selectable, no searching within or across stories). So the idea of content that must be accessed from the app — and likely can’t even be opened in Safari — is not attractive to me.

Those are among the reasons I deleted Apple News from my iOS devices — Apple won’t let you delete it from the Mac — some time ago. But I downloaded it again yesterday and signed up for the trial subscription to News+ just to check out developments. I found that the problems Tsai mentions are still there, along with what is for me the single greatest deterrent to using Apple News: Apple’s insistence on feeding you clickbaity stories, especially about celebrities, no matter how many times and in how many ways you try to indicate that you don’t want to see them.

When you sign up for News+, you get a list of suggested magazine content in a sidebar, and can click/tap a Like button to get stuff from that magazine or a not-Like button to … well, to do what? Because when I tapped the not-Like button next to Vanity Fair I still got stories from Vanity Fair in my feed. And I found this to be true of several other magazines as well.

Apple is taking a Facebook-like approach to News: “No, you don’t tell us what you want, we tell you what you want.” So I canceled my subscription after about an hour.

Here’s a cool fact for you all to keep in mind: Guess what you see when you look at your RSS reader? Exactly what you chose to subscribe to. Neither less nor more.

cost-benefit ratios

Now that Apple has announced its next-generation AirPods, I see that I can get a charging pad that will charge the charging case that will charge the earbuds that allow me to play audio on my phone.

It seems to me that we’ve reached a point in consumer electronics at which the cost/benefit ratios are all out of whack. Indeed it is convenient to have wireless earbuds — or it would be if the number of devices that need charging weren’t proliferating. Moreover, the battery life of the AirPods is continually declining, something that can be “fixed” only by buying another set of AirPods. I don’t like the tradeoffs here. When I use my wired earbuds, it’s true that I have to deal with the wire, but it’s also true that they always work. They work on a wide range of devices, and they don’t decline in usability over time. (Though by eliminating the headphone jack from their phones Apple has made it more difficult for people to have one set of [wired] headphones to use in every situation. Which I think is an asshole move.)

Or consider wireless charging of phones: It sounds cool, but because the charging is so slow experts recommend that you keep a wired charger around for when you’re in a hurry. Or, alternatively, you could just not buy a wireless charger and accept the additional eight-tenths of a second it takes to plug your phone into a cord.

A similar logic applies to the “smart home”: when I finally thought about the amount of time that I have spent trying to get smart lightbulbs to work, and then trying to get them up and running again after a power outage, I realized that the infinitesimal savings of time and energy they provided made them a net drain on my life. Get up and flip a switch on the wall! It’s not hard!

And now I’m reading about people who are struggling with the inability to reboot their shoes. It’s not that these products don’t offer benefits, but that the benefits are tiny in comparison to the investment of time/energy/money that you have to make in order to get them and keep them working. I think I’l continue to opt out of most of them.

a legal clarification

Let me expand on something I wrote in yesterday’s post: Copyright law is not relevant to the legal situation of Francis Spufford’s new Narnia novel. What matters is trademark law.

To illustrate: Many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books, including many of his Tarzan books, are now in the public domain. But people are not publishing Tarzan novels. Why not? Because Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. has trademarked “Tarzan” (and several other names) and will sue your pants off if you try to publish a Tarzan book without paying them what they think it’s worth.

Fifteen years from now copyright will expire on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novels and they will come into the public domain. At that point anyone will be able to publish them, just as anyone today can publish a Charles Dickens novel. People will be able to edit and adapt them, making Susan Queen of Narnia and having Peter be the one who turns his back on Aslan, if they want. But they won’t be free to publish new Narnia novels because “Narnia” and its appurtenances are trademarked by C S Lewis PTE, and that won’t change in 2034. It’s possible that C S Lewis PTE will try to use its trademark to prevent, or at least control, publication of public domain books; which might even work, in some court or other.

What happens when copyright law points in one direction and trademark law in another? If Disney holds a trademark on Mickey Mouse but Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, what does that mean for some auteur who wants to incorporate the film into a new film, a new work of art, from which she hopes to make money? As restrictive as copyright can be, it expires; trademarks do not.

These issues have yet to be sorted out in court. But If we want to make books like The Stone Table possible, we need to revise not copyright law but trademark law.