This episode of Reply All is really an insightful and deeply humane effort to understand what is going on within a fairly wild and hostile political scene that is nevertheless full of real human beings.

Shared Article from Gimlet Media: Reply All

#182. State of Panic

A mystery roils Florida political Twitter: could it be that the governor’s new press secretary is running bots against her political opponents? Emma…

Emmanuel Dzotsi @ gimletmedia.com

EMMANUEL: Darius told me that the surefire way to know if an account is a bot or not is to just DM the account. So I DMed good ol’ DeepThroat, asked them, Are you a bot? And they got back me, told me they were real. . . . I was feeling a little bit like an idiot. But Darius said it totally made sense that really anyone — me, the people in Florida, you — might think accounts like DeepThroat’s were bots.

Maybe it’s even easier for us to think that.

Like we’ve all been hearing for years about how our elections have been impacted by foreign interference, about how disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the internet and ensnaring seemingly reasonable people, and to Darius, that’s exactly why bots have become the perfect boogieman.

DARIUS: I mean, I think it’s a classic moral panic. Just like people think that there’s a massive increase in crime all the time, even when you look at the numbers and the crime numbers have been going down in many places. It’s an easy out. It’s an easy way to point at some nefarious Other, like the bot makers and like, oh–they’re the reason democracy is failing.

EMMANUEL: Obviously, I can’t definitively rule out whether Christina is using bots. But the more I looked into Christina Pushaw herself, the more I became convinced that bots don’t explain her effectiveness in Florida. . . . Here’s my theory — I think Christina is someone with a very specific skill, a skill that any natural politician has. She has this knack for noticing people who otherwise are invisible to the rest of us on Twitter. . . .

— Ep. 182, State of Panic
Reply All, 16 December 2021.

• Michael Kazin, The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left, Dissent (Spring 2012)
• Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements, Dissent (Spring 2012) (in praise of horizontalidad and in criticism of Kazin)
• David Marcus, The Horizontalists, Dissent (Fall 2012) (one cheer for horizontalidad and Sitrin, one jeer for an aging and vertically inclined Left, and a lot of boringly predictable Leftist guff about large-scale institutions, larger structural vision and a silly moral panic^[1] at the bogeyman of aspirations — oh dear! — dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right)
• Andrew Flood, An anarchist critique of horizontalism, Anarchist Writers (2 May 2014), the somewhat predictable anarcho-syndicalist perspective on Occupy, Kazin, Sitrin, Marcus, class analysis, life, the universe and everything. Along the way some brief and interesting notes on relations between mass movements, revolutionary movements, information technology and the effect of a press that has been infinitely digitally dispersed, etc.
• Andrew Flood, Turnips, hammers & the square – why workplace occupations have faded (7 May 2014), more of much the same, with some look at precursors to 2011, and a landscape of globalized economic complexity.

1. ^[1][18-Jun-2020: Formerly moral painc; typographical error corrected. –RG]↩

Shared Article from The Brooklyn Rail

Against Theory

A simulacrum of philosophy has risen in university departments all over the world: theory, fake philosophy for non-philosophers.

brooklynrail.org

A simulacrum of philosophy has risen in university departments all over the world: theory, fake philosophy for non-philosophers . . . a sort of collective thinking, of a koine, well-known to anyone who teaches in a field of the humanities at a university: a mix of ideas and phrases . . . blended into one melting pot, in varying doses and combinations. . . . Formed in a DIY fashion inside a limited thematic agenda–power, gender, desire, the subject and the multitudes, the dominated-dominating couple–theory is defined and recognized mainly by its pragmatic use. Those who cultivate it, coming from other disciplinary sectors–mostly comparative literature, art theory and criticism, and cultural studies–seek to justify their own research inside a wider and more "committed" framework, that is programmatically turned towards the challenge of the present. . . .

Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the reader, a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read. Exactly for that reason, it functions as a common language and a ground for transdisciplinary aggregation. Those who teach risky subjects such as aesthetics and political philosophy have begun to worry a long time ago. . . . The main weakness of theory is the loss of all the specific attributes, which have allowed to define philosophy in its different traditions: it does not have the rigor, the clarity, the solidity of definitions and argumentations, which characterizes the practice from a formal viewpoint; it does not have the ability to raise truly defamiliarizing questions, and, above all, it does not have a taste for a passionate search for truth. Not only does theory not exceed the doxa, but it produces a second level thereof. Therefrom comes the paradox of a radical gesture, which becomes a habitus, conformist and predictable.

–Barbara Carnevali, Against Theory,
The Brooklyn Rail, 1-Sep-2016

It’s time for some winter weather here in East Alabama; time also for winter holidays. Since I’ve been off-duty from classes, I’ve taken some time to get away for a little while from the reading I have to do, and on to some of the reading that I’ve wanted to do; also some preparatory writing for the comments that I’m slated to deliver at next month’s Molinari Society session at APA Eastern Division in Baltimore. (We’ll be talking about the rights of refugees; and of immigration more broadly.) I have a novel to read that I’ve just started in on and some long-simmering tech projects I’ve been getting caught back up with. And as always I am trying to keep in practice with my Portuguese, Spanish and German.

If this is a time for catching up, it is a time also for Shamelessness. Happy Sunday to all, and I hope you know what to do: What have you been up to lately? Got anything big coming up? Anything you've been working on? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.