No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 23
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James Wigderson appeared on WTMJ radio’s Steve Scaffidi show, and, as Wigderson’s RightWisconsin reports:
“Tony Evers is definitely the weakest of the Democratic candidates because he has a record of not doing anything that he should be doing as Superintendent of Schools,” Wigderson said. “They’re going to hammer him. They’re going to start hammering him on his inability to take away a teacher’s license that was viewing pornography in the classroom.”
Wigderson also pointed out Evers’ mistake in entertaining the idea of raising the gas tax $1 per gallon.
“Tony Evers stumbled right out of the block when he got asked about gas taxes and he said everything’s on the table when they threw the figure of a dollar at him,” Wigderson said. “His campaign later tried to backtrack on it, but when Tony Evers says sure, a dollar per gallon is on the table, that’s going to haunt him between now and November.”
About the teacher’s license, Rick Esenberg reports:
A recent ad from the Republican Party of Wisconsin goes after Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers for failing to commence revocation proceedings against Andrew Harris, a Middleton-Cross Plains teacher who viewed pornographic images on his school computer. Evers, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, claims he was powerless, going so far as to claim that seeking revocation would have been “breaking the law.”
This last claim is ridiculous. Evers would have broken no law by attempting to revoke Harris’ license. In fact, Evers would have had a plausible argument in support of revocation. He might not have prevailed in court had the decision been challenged, but the argument could have been made. Evers made a choice. He decided not to go after a teacher who had viewed pornographic images on his computer, shared them with at least one other teacher and who was alleged to have made sexual remarks about middle school students. His claim that he had no choice is wrong. Here’s why.
The decision to start a legal proceeding is usually a matter of assessing probabilities. Very often, a legal claim – in this case whether a teacher’s license can be revoked for viewing porn at school – is neither clearly right nor clearly wrong. Evers, who had to decide whether to try to take this teachers’ license, had to decide whether the he had a plausible argument in support of revocation, not whether revocation was clearly required. He could then decide whether the need to get such a teacher out of the classroom was worth the effort. He had to make a choice.
At the time of the Harris incident as now, a teacher’s license could be revoked for ‘immoral conduct.” At the time, however, immoral conduct was defined as “conduct or behavior that is contrary to commonly accepted moral or ethical standards and that endangers the health, safety, welfare or education of any pupil.” After this incident, the legislature changed the law to make clear the viewing pornographic material at school constituted immoral conduct for revocation purposes, the matter was less clear at the time. While no one seems to have doubted that viewing pornographic materials was contrary to commonly accepted moral or ethical standards, the question was whether Harris had endangered “the health, safety, welfare or education of any pupil.”
Evers’ argument seems to be that teachers can engage in immoral conduct on school property as long as it does not directly impact students and students have not seen it and, perhaps, would have been unlikely to see it. Perhaps. But a credible argument can be made that this goes too far. Conduct that presents a risk of discovery or that is incompatible with teaching middle school students might very well be said to “endanger” those students. While prior case law has called into question (although the Supreme Court has not decided) whether a teacher’s license can be revoked simply because he or she has done something away from school that is incompatible with being a good “role model,” behavior at school presents a different level of risk. Imagine – well, you don’t have to because it has happened – teachers who have had sex in an unused classroom after hours. Imagine teachers who convened a clandestine Klan meeting in the teachers’ lounge. Is revocation impossible because no student has happened along?
Although efforts by the Middleton-Cross Plains school district to fire Harris were unsuccessful, Evers’ was free to start revocation proceedings. He might not have been successful, but there was a plausible argument in support of revocation. Evers chose not to proceed. To respond to the Republican Party ad, he ought to defend that choice and not deny that he made it.
Eserberg covers what Evers did (not do). Sam Morateck covers what Evers wants to do:
Following his victory in the Democratic primary for governor [last] Tuesday night, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers made big promises on education but omitted any plans for funding them in his victory speech.
“I will make the largest investment in early childhood education that our state has ever seen,” Evers said. He added, “In my first budget I will finally return to two thirds funding for our public schools.”
Last month Evers announced his education plan which included an additional $600 million dollars in special education funding. The Journal Sentinel noted that Evers’ additional funding request would equal $969 million for special education funding in the next biennial budget, which would be up 163% from the current $369 million.
As for the two-thirds funding promise, Dr. Will Flanders of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty said it would cost state government $1.5 billion.
So how would these monumental increases to education be paid for? According to his school finance reform plan, all these historic increases in funding will somehow be offset by the decline in local school property taxes and the elimination of the School Levy Tax Credit (SLTC).
“This plan holds the line on property taxes,” Evers’ plan said. “In the first year of the plan, gross statewide school property taxes are estimated to decrease by more than 18% – more than when the state instituted the two-thirds funding commitment in the 1990s. In net terms (i.e. when the impact of the SLTC is considered), net statewide school property taxes are estimated to be held at 0%.”
Media Trackers spoke with Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC) Director of Health & Human Resources Policy Chris Reader, who was skeptical on Evers’ plan. He pointed out that funding for his plan may compromise important reforms such as the manufacturer and agriculture tax credit, which has helped attract employers to Wisconsin.
“You certainly cannot fund education by putting more taxes onto businesses and homeowners, which if we would eliminate a tax credit for property owners that’s what would happen,” Reader said. “You also cannot fund education by taxing employers more by eliminating important reforms from recent years like the manufacturer and agriculture tax credit which have helped pull employers into our state, and that’s another area he wants to eliminate.”
Reader said Evers’ increased spending on education will have to come from somewhere.
“We have record investment in education right now in Wisconsin and that’s a good thing,” Reader said, “You can’t just continue to put huge sums of money into it just to one up your opponents without it raising taxes somewhere. Whether it’s going to raise property taxes or income taxes on employers, it will result in increased taxes, unless he highlights what other programs around the state he wants cut.”
Ever’s additionally told WISC-TV he would “absolutely” repeal Act 10 if elected governor, which the MacIver Institute estimated to have saved school districts $3.2 billion in benefits costs since it’s passage in 2011. While Evers also promises to raise funding for healthcare and transportation, his promises leaves one to wonder at where all this money is going to come from.
In case Evers is unable to do math, eliminating a property tax credit does not cut property taxes. Eliminating a property tax credit increases property taxes.
Meanwhile, this might be old news, but as far as I know Evers has not repudiated what he said back in December to Wisconsin Public Radio:
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers is calling for stricter gun laws in Wisconsin in the wake of Sunday’s deadly shooting in Las Vegas.
Evers said Tuesday he would support more rigorous background checks for gun buyers, a state gun owners registry, and a ban on an accessory that helps semi-automatic guns perform more like automatic weapons.
“We just have to have some honest conversations,” Evers said. “And I think now is an appropriate time. I think we can grieve and also think about the future.”
Evers, who has been the state schools superintendent since 2009, has also said he opposes a bill in the Legislature that would allow concealed weapons on school grounds.
Care to guess how long gun rights survive in this state if Evers becomes governor and Democrats take over both houses of the Legislature?
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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo opened his mouth, inserted his foot, and fell on his face when he informed an audience on Manhattan’s Lower East Side last Wednesday that “America was never that great.” An eruption of withering headlines and social-media jabs predictably ensued, and Cuomo quickly scuttled away from his comment, saying that his words had been “inartful.”
“Of course America is great and of course America has always been great,” Cuomo told reporters on Friday. “No one questions that.”
Actually, among progressive leftists, a lot of people question it. Anyone who’s ever read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — a left-wing bestseller that for years was required reading in countless high school and college history courses — is familiar with the narrative of America as a nation of oppression, exploitation, genocide, racism, imperialism, and capitalist villainy. Cuomo’s “never that great” crack, made as he was winding up a speech that focused heavily on Donald Trump, was presumably an attempt to pander to the kind of voters who embrace the negative view of US history.
Clearly that was the way Cynthia Nixon, the left-wing actress who is challenging Cuomo for the gubernatorial nomination in the New York Democratic primary, took it. She mocked Cuomo’s gaffe as “just another example of Andrew Cuomo trying to figure out what a progressive sounds like and missing by a mile.”
In fairness to Cuomo, his “never that great” barb was inartful (“Adjective. Awkwardly expressed; impolitic; ill-phrased; inexpedient; clumsy”). He was caught up in criticizing Trump, he wanted to take a slap at the president’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, and it came out as a maladroit denial of American greatness. Cuomo has no one to blame but himself for his phrasing, and he can expect to have it thrown in his face from now until Election Day. Still, as anyone with public speaking experience knows, the words don’t always land the way they were intended.
Had Cuomo said “America has never been as great as it should be” or “America was never perfect” or even “Donald Trump knows nothing about making America great,” there would have been no tumult over his speech. Better still, he could have celebrated American greatness and criticized Trump by doing what he has often done and what Trump never does: crediting America and its blessings for his success, not his own brilliance . That’s what he belatedly said in his mea culpa on Friday: “My family is evidence of American greatness,” Cuomo told reporters. “My grandparents came to this country as poor immigrants and their son became governor and his son became governor. That’s never been a question.”
Cuomo’s father, the late Governor Mario Cuomo, handled the theme much more — well, artfully. At the Democratic National Convention in 1984, the elder Cuomo delivered a keynote address in which he challenged Ronald Reagan’s upbeat description of the United States. He spoke to the delegates assembled in San Francisco:
Ten days ago, President Reagan . . . said, “Why, this country is a shining city on a hill.” And the president is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.
But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city’s splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.
In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.
In fact, Mr. President, you ought to know that this nation is more “A Tale of Two Cities” than it is just “A Shining City on a Hill.”
Overall, Mario Cuomo’s words were bleaker by far than his son’s 34 years later. But they weren’t regarded as a damaging gaffe because, before he began the critique, he made a point of agreeing with Reagan’s basic premise: “The president is right. In many ways, we are a shining city on a hill.”
Nor did Mario Cuomo wait two days to invoke his own family’s climb from poverty to power as an illustration of what American greatness makes possible. Unlike his son, he made it his keynote’s peroration:
I watched a small man with thick calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.
I learned about our kind of democracy from my father. And I learned about our obligation to each other from him and from my mother. They asked only for a chance to work and to make the world better for their children, and they asked to be protected in those moments when they would not be able to protect themselves. This nation and this nation’s government did that for them.
And that they were able to build a family and live in dignity and see one of their children go from behind their little grocery store in South Jamaica on the other side of the tracks where he was born, to occupy the highest seat, in the greatest State, in the greatest nation, in the only world we would know, is an ineffably beautiful tribute to the democratic process.
Ineffably beautiful, indeed. When it comes to Democratic Party eloquence, Andrew Cuomo is not in his father’s league.
Just as, when it comes Republican Party eloquence, Trump is not in Reagan’s league.
To no one’s surprise, the president jumped last week on Cuomo’s blunder.
“How does a politician, Cuomo, known for pushing people and businesses out of his state, not to mention having the highest taxes in the U.S., survive making the statement, WE’RE NOT GOING TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, IT WAS NEVER THAT GREAT?” he tweeted early Friday morning. A few hours later came another tweet: “Wow! Big pushback on Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York for his really dumb statement about America’s lack of greatness.”
Trump’s tiresome jibes are par for the course. They are also ironic, since he, more than anyone in American political life today, has been a fervent exponent of the America’s-not-that-great outlook.
For years, Trump has insisted that America is losing on all fronts — duped and ripped off by foreign governments, laughed at by the world, beset by incompetence, stripped of jobs and wealth and manufacturing capacity.
America’s lack of greatness was the theme of Trump’s announcement speech when he jumped into the 2016 presidential race (“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems” . . . “we as a country are getting weaker” . . . “Sadly, the American dream is dead”). It was the theme of his acceptance speech at the Republican convention (“Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another”). And it was the theme of his inaugural address (“Mothers and children trapped in poverty” . . . “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” . . . “this American carnage”).
Nineteen months into his presidency, Trump claims that he has made America great again, the result of his own supposed genius and managerial skill. But it is silly to suggest that the greatness of the United States is a quality that can be flipped on, like current from a switch, as long as the right electrician — er, politician — occupies the White House. At no point has Trump ever shown the least understanding of the real nature of American greatness, or of its revolutionary roots, or of the singular American ideals that have enabled it repeatedly to surmount its flaws and failures.
Martin Luther King, like other American visionaries, understood that the key to American greatness lies not in its perfection, but in its quest to become more perfect.
America’s finest leaders have always recognized that the nation’s greatness is aspirational . The founders enshrined in the Declaration of Independence a standard that no people has ever fully lived up to — “all men are created equal” — not as a false boast about the imperfect society around them but as a commitment to strive toward a more perfect society in the future. Indeed, those words — “more perfect” — are in the opening line of the Constitution, which sets out America’s overarching goal as being “to form a more perfect Union.”
For nearly two and half centuries, the United States has tried to measure up to its founders’ principles — to make good, in Martin Luther King’s phrase, on the “promissory note” to which every American is an heir. Of course it has never achieved perfect success, or anything close to it. Yet when has any nation, bestriding the world as America does, cared so much about being better than it is? What great power has ever devoted so much emotional energy to holding itself accountable for falling short of its foundational values? Where besides America do ordinary citizens pour so much of their wealth into philanthropy? Which military titan has sacrificed so much blood to liberate captive peoples elsewhere? And why, of all nations on earth, has the United States been the one to which dreamers and strivers, refugees and the persecuted, have surged in such numbers?
Compared with a make-believe world in which all other countries are paradigms of virtue and decency, the United States is grievously flawed and always will be. Next to a fantasy portrait of universal prosperity, perfect safety, and unmarred joy, life in this country will always be a picture of “American carnage.”
In the universe as it really is, however, America is as great a nation as the world has ever seen. Trump, a geyser of braggadocio, has no sense of what American greatness really means. Neither does Cuomo, who confuses greatness with perfection and advances neither.
Fortunately, the key to making America great was never entrusted to American politicians. If it were, the United States could never have become what, despite its embarrassing present leadership, it indisputably is: the world’s greatest nation.
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Today in 1964, the Supremes reached number one by wondering …
Today in 1968, the Beatles briefly broke up when Ringo Starr quit during recording of their “White Album.” Starr rejoined the group Sept. 3, but in the meantime the remaining trio recorded “Back in the USSR” with Paul McCartney on drums and John Lennon on bass:
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This month marks the two-year anniversary of one of the most important articles ever written on journalism. On Aug. 7, 2016, after Donald Trump formally secured the Republican nomination and the general election was underway, New York Times media columnist James Rutenberg began with a question:
“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
Under the Times’ traditional standards, the right answer is that you wouldn’t be allowed to cover any candidate you were so biased against. But that’s not the answer Rutenberg gave.
Instead, quoting an editor who called Hillary Clinton “normal” and Trump “abnormal,” Rutenberg suggested “normal standards” didn’t apply. He admitted that “balance has been on vacation” since Trump began to campaign and ended by declaring that it is “journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment.”
I wrote then that the article was a failed attempt to justify the lopsided anti-Trump coverage in the Times and other news organizations. It was indeed that — and more, for it also served as a dog whistle for anti-Trump journalists, telling them it was acceptable to reveal their biases. After all, history would judge them.
Weeks later, Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, told an interviewer the Rutenberg article “nailed” his thinking and convinced him that the struggle for fairness was over.
“I think that Trump has ended that struggle,” Baquet boasted. “I think we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.”
Because the Times is the liberal media’s bell cow, the floodgates were flung open to routinely call Trump a liar, a racist and a traitor. Standards of fairness were trashed as nearly every prominent news organization demonized Trump and effectively endorsed Clinton. This open partisanship was a disgraceful chapter in the history of American journalism.
Yet the shocking failure of that effort produced no change in behavior. After the briefest of mea culpas for failing to see even the possibility of a Trump victory, the warped coverage continued and became the media wing of the resistance movement.
Which is how we arrived at the latest low moment in journalism. This one involved the more than 300 newspapers (including The Post) that followed The Boston Globe and, especially his accusation that they are “the enemy of the people.”
The high-minded among the media mob insisted they were joining together to protect the First Amendment and freedom of the press. In fact, the effort looked, smelled and felt like self-interest and rank partisanship masquerading as principle.
True to their habit, most of the papers expressed contempt for the president and some extended that contempt to his supporters.
Nancy Ancrum, the editorial-page editor of The Miami Herald, told Fox News her paper joined the effort without any hope of changing the minds of Trump supporters because “they are just too far gone.”
Imagine that — 63 million Americans are written off because they disagree with the media elite’s politics. Echoes of Clinton’s “deplorables” comment ring loud and clear.
I agree that Trump is wrong to call the media the “enemy of the people” and wish he would stick to less inflammatory words. His favorite charge of “fake news” makes his point well enough without any hint that he favors retribution on individual journalists.
But I am also concerned that media leaders refuse to see their destructive role in the war with the president. Few show any remorse over how the relentlessly hostile coverage of Trump is damaging the nation and changing journalism for the worse.
One obvious consequence is increased political polarization, with many media outlets making it their mission to denounce Trump from first page to last, day in and day out. Studies show 90 percent of TV news coverage is negative and the Times, Washington Post and CNN, among others, appear addicted to Trump hatred as if it is a narcotic.
This lack of balance permits little or no coverage of any of his achievements. How many people, for example, know about the employment records shattered by the jobs boom unleashed by Trump’s policies?
Black unemployment stands at 5.9 percent, the lowest rate on record. For Latinos, it is 4.5 percent, also the lowest on record. For women, it’s the lowest rate in 65 years and for young people, it’s the lowest since 1966.
Those statistics mean millions of people are getting their shot at the American dream. How can that not be newsworthy?
Rest assured that if Barack Obama had achieved those milestones, they and he would have been celebrated to the high heavens.
Yet when it comes to Trump, nothing is ever good. Having decided he is unfit to be president, most news groups act as propagandists, ignoring or distorting facts that contradict their view of him.
While media manipulation hurts Trump’s popularity, there is a second, ironic impact: The skewed coverage is doing even more damage to public trust in the media itself.
A Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of 1,440 panelists earlier this year found adults estimating that “62 percent of the news they read in newspapers, see on television or hear on the radio is biased” and that 44 percent of “news” is inaccurate.
Separately, Axios and SurveyMonkey polled nearly 4,000 adults in June and found that 70 percent believe mainline news organizations report as news things “they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading.”
Among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, an astonishing 92 percent harbor that distrust, as do 53 percent of Democrats.
And get this: Two-thirds of those who believe there is rampant false news say it usually happens because journalists “have an agenda.” Clearly, the distrust is not limited to Trump supporters.
These numbers reflect an urgent crisis of confidence in the press. And it’s getting worse.
A Gallup survey three years ago found that 40 percent trusted the media; two years ago, the trust meter declined by 8 points, to 32 percent. Now even that low bar looks like the good old days.
Yet instead of soberly examining their conduct, most in the media ratchet up the vitriol, apparently believing that screaming louder and longer will lead the public to hate Trump as much as they do.
But as the surveys show, their bias is a boomerang. With media behavior undermining public trust more than anything Trump says or does, a return to traditional standards of fairness and a separation of news from opinion are essential.
Jeff Jacoby adds:
Last week more than 400 newspapers nationwide responded to a call by The Boston Globe to publish editorials in defense of freedom of the press, and to explain why the news media, far from being, in President Trump’s malicious phrase, the “enemy of the people,” is one of the foremost guarantors of the people’s liberty.
I’ve written about Trump and the press before, both to caution against an anti-Trump feeding frenzy and to warn of the danger in a presidential war against the press . Here I want to focus on something else — the notion, especially widespread on the right these days, that freedom of the press is for “unbiased” news coverage, not for journalism that is unfair or hostile to the president.
An Ipsos poll taken earlier this month found that 26% of Americans — and 43% of Republicans — believe that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” In a Quinnipiac poll , also released this month, 26% of voters agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the people.” Among Republicans, an actual majority, 51%, agreed with that statement.
It is hard to overstate how radically un-American such views are. Public disenchantment with the press, and complaints by officials that the press treats them unfairly, are as old as the press itself. But whatever people think of the media, the question of their right to publish what they please was settled when the First Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1791: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .”
Nothing in the language of the Amendment makes freedom of the press contingent on objectivity, or popularity, or public approval. Such a condition would never have occurred to the Constitution’s framers, because the press in their day was anything but (to coin a phrase) fair and balanced. Newspapers made no pretense of detachment — quite the opposite.
In 1800, for example, Samuel Morse of Danbury, Conn., publisher of the Sun of Liberty newspaper, readily flaunted his support for Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. He was opposed to the Federalists led by John Adams, and saw no need to hide the fact. “A despicable impartiality I disclaim,” he wrote. “I have a heart and I have a country — to the last I shall ever dedicate the first.”
By that point, the tradition of a freewheeling, no-holds-barred, decidedly partisan press was well-established. On my way to the Globe’s office each day, I pass the spot on Court Street in downtown Boston where James Franklin, the publisher of the New England Courant (and the older brother of Benjamin Franklin), had his printing presses. Franklin’s Courant got into a famous battle in 1721 with the Massachusetts Puritan leader Cotton Mather over the best way to treat smallpox, which was then ravaging the colony.
As Matthew Price wrote in a Globe essay in 2006, “Franklin made hell for Mather with a potent combination of slander and innuendo. Mather shot back that the Courant was a ‘Flagitious and Wicked Paper.’” (That was Puritan-speak for “fake news.”)
My point isn’t that the openly, even brutally, partisan press culture of the 18th and 19th centuries is better or worse than the ideal of journalistic impartiality that began to take hold during the Progressive Era early in the 20th century. It is that when the First Congress and the states enshrined in the First Amendment an adamantine prohibition on “abridging the freedom of . . . the press,” they were protecting the raucous, argumentative, ideological, often vicious journalism of their day. Freedom of the press, like freedom of speech, is meaningless if it only protects decorous messages and inoffensive expression that ruffle nobody’s feathers.
News organizations — and their customers — don’t need the Constitution to shield anodyne, noncontroversial journalism. If newspapers restricted themselves to printing stories that the president liked, what would be the point of newspapers? If Fox News or MSNBC broadcast commentary that challenged no one’s partisan preferences, what would be the point of watching?
“If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1929. “Not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Only people profoundly and alarmingly ignorant of Americans’ constitutional liberties could believe that presidents should have the right to shut down publications “engaged in bad behavior.” The proper term for such “bad behavior” is a free press, and it is among the shining glories of America’s constitutional democracy.
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Science fiction novelist Travis Corcoran won the Libertarian Futurist Society‘s Corcoran Award for his novel The Powers of the Earth. His acceptance speech included:
Eric S Raymond said it best: “Hard SF is the vital heart of the field”. The core of hard science fiction is libertarianism: “ornery and insistent individualism, veneration of the competent man, instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering”.
I agree; science fiction is best when it tells stories about free people using intelligence, skills and hard work to overcome challenges.
This vision of science fiction is under attack by collectivists, and hard SF and libertarian SF are being pushed out of publisher lineups and off of bookstore shelves.
Very well. We have intelligence, we have skills and we’re not afraid of hard work. Let’s rise to this challenge!
The Powers of the Earth is a novel about many things.
It’s a war story about ancaps, uplifted dogs, and AI fighting against government using combat robots, large guns, and kinetic energy weapons.
It’s an engineering story about space travel, open source software, tunnel boring machines, and fintech.
It’s a cyberpunk story about prediction markets, CNC guns, and illegal ROMs.
It’s a story about competent men who build machines, competent women who pilot spaceships, and competent dogs who write code.
It’s a novel that pays homage to Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which in turn pays homage to the American Revolution.
. . . But the historical inspiration for the novel was not, actually, the American Revolution. It’s the founding of the Icelandic Free State almost a thousand years earlier. The difference is subtle, but important.
The American Revolution was an act of secession: one part of a government declaring itself independent and co-equal, and continuing to act as a government. The establishment of the Icelandic Free State is different in two important particulars. First, it did not consist of people challenging an existing government, but of people physically leaving a region governed by a tyrant. And second, the men and women who expatriated themselves from the reign of Harald Fairhair did not create a government – they wanted to flee authoritarianism, not establish their own branch of it!
Thus we get to one of the most important themes of The Powers of the Earth and its sequel, Causes of Separation: the concepts of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. The tri-chotomy was first codified in an essay—titled “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States”—by economist Albert Hirschman in 1970.
An aside: I love that this essay was penned while Americans walked on the moon.
Hirschman argued that when a vendor or government fails to deliver, people can either remain loyal, can speak out within the system, or can exit the system.
The problem we Americans have in 2018 is that there is no more frontier. Like the engineers in Christopher Priest’s “The Inverted World”, we moved west until we hit an ocean, and that has been our doom.
When there is a frontier, it is impossible to deny that the pie is growing. Want a farm? Go hack one out of the forest. Want a house? Go build one.
Once the frontier is gone, value can still be created ab initio. The pie is not fixed. For the price of a cheap computer you can create a novel or a software package. With a $100 video camera you can be a garage Kubrick. With a free Craigslist ad you can be a dog-walking entrepreneur.
. . . But the closing of the frontier made it easier for the collectivists to argue that the pie is fixed. And—worse yet—it made it impossible for the rest of us to get away.
We’d all love to live in David Friedman’s polycentric legal system, Robert Nozick’s meta-utopia, Moldbug’s patchwork, or Scott Alexander’s archipelago – a place where each of us could live by rules we choose, and people who preferred another set could live by those… but we can’t, and that’s for one reason and one reason alone: the collectivists who can’t bear to let anyone, anywhere, be ungoverned.
Totalitarian ideologies – Nazism, Communism, Islamofascism, Progressivism – all subscribe to the Mussolini quote “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
The Nazi sees any area not under Nazi control as a threat.
The communist sees any area not under communist control as a threat.
The Islamofascist sees any area outside of Dar al Islam as Dar al-Harb—a populace to be subjugated.
Collectivists sees anything not under collectivist control as a threat—and as an opportunity.
A threat, because areas not under collectivist control always work better. It is no accident that just as the Soviets jammed broadcasts from the west, Nazis outlawed American music, Chinese built a Great Firewall, so too do progressives shadow-ban free voices on Twitter and Facebook and expel people from conventions.
An opportunity, because of what totalitarians do when they see a patch of freedom: they try to take it over. “All within, nothing outside”.
When the patch of freedom is a state, we get the long march through the institutions, as outlined by communist Antonio Gramsci and refined by communist Rudi Dutschke. First they become teachers, then they influence the students, then they take over the courts . . . and then it’s not too long until some O’Brien is holding up four fingers to some Winston Smith, crushing out the last of the wrongthink.
When the patch of freedom is a subculture the mechanism is different—it’s discussed in the brilliant essay “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution” by David Chapman.
One core attribute of totalitarians is that they don’t create, they steal. And because they steal, they are both confused by and hate those who do create. As Barrack Obama said “You didn’t build that.” As the internet meme says: “You made this? <pause> I made this.”
Since the first Worldcon in 1939 science fiction has been a libertarian territory under attack from authoritarians. Futurian Donald Wollheim was a communist, and argued that all of science fiction “should actively work for the realization of the . . . world-state as the only . . . justification for their activities”.
Wollheim failed with his takeover in 1939—he was physically removed from Worldcon—but he started a Gramscian long march through the institutions, and it worked. In the current year conventions, editors, and publishing houses are all cordy-cepted. The sociopaths have pushed the geeks out and have taken over the cultural territory.
“You made this? <pause> I made this.”
When the state tries to take your home, they come with guns, and you have to fight them with guns, if at all.
When a subculture tries to take your home, they come with snark and shame and entryism . . . and you fight them by making better art.
The bad news for us libertarians is that the cities we built have fallen. The publishers? Gone. The bookstore shelves? Gone.
But what of it? We have Amazon, we have print on demand, we have Kickstarter.
And, most importantly of all, we have the vital heart, the radiant core of science fiction: we can tell great stories about ornery individualism, about competent men and women using skills and hard work to overcome challenges. This is the one thing the collectivists can never steal from us, because it is antithetical to their nature.
There is not an ocean in front of us, dooming us to captivity—there is only sky. The frontier is still open.
Onward!
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We begin with two forlorn non-music anniversaries. Today in 1897, Oldsmobile began operation, eventually to become a division of General Motors Corp. … but not anymore.
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Gov. Scott Walker said last week that he is likely to start out the gubernatorial race behind.
There has been concern in Republican circles about the larger turnout for Democrats than Republicans in last week’s primary. And Republicans certainly need to get out and get out the vote.
Keep in mind, though, that (1) Democratic turnout may well have included people who intend to vote Republican in November but voted Democrat because of (2) the gubernatorial race and because (3) they intended to vote for whoever won the U.S. Senate Republican primary.
For those who panic about polls three months before an election, read this from last week and this from November 2014.
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Ripon Commonwealth Press publisher Tim Lyke:
You know why Ripon claims to be the actual birthsite of the Republican Party?
The name.
The “Republican” label was suggested to Alvan Bovay by a newspaper editor.
In 1850 Bovay moved with his family from Utica, N.Y., to Ripon, Wis., a community comprised of 13 houses. Under his leadership, “Bovay’s addition” grew as he practiced law, co-founded a college and transformed his tiny town into a major bulwark against the spread of slavery.
In 1852 he returned to New York, where he informed New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley of his plans to start a new party. Excited by his pal’s plans, Greeley recommended Ripon’s movement be dubbed the “Republican” party.
So there you go.
An ink-stained wretch gave a name to the abolitionist party rooted in that little white schoolhouse off Blackburn Street.
Greeley’s role is but a thread in an American tapestry whose fabric is bound by journalists sharing facts and shining lights to make the powerful accountable to the people.
This is as well publicized as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein going door-to-door to ask close-lipped Committee to Re-Elect the President staffers how campaign contributions were ending up in a White House-controlled slush fund.
It’s also as local as our editor Ian Stepleton creating three-ring binders to organize invoices and escrow account disbursement requests he collected to show Ripon taxpayers how their $6 million were frittered away by a Milwaukee attorney to pay his own law firm; analyze Midwest pizza/pasta bars; research Ripon traffic patterns; make a down payment on brew-pub equipment; hire someone to visit the nation’s top spas; and pay two consultants to read books about women’s shopping habits.
Because we have elected an egotist-in-chief who surrounds himself with sycophants reinforcing his belief that rules don’t apply to him personally, professionally or legally, he brands journalists of all stripes who report on his actions as the “enemies of the American people” who are “dangerous and sick” purveyors of “fake news.”
Attacking reporters is a bipartisan sport. Bernie Sanders calls them “corporate media.” Hillary Clinton decries their “shoddy reporting.” And who said, “My instinct is everybody hates [the] media right now?”
Barack Obama.
People who buy ink by the barrel have thick skin.
Many realize that some of their wounds are self inflicted, given the shortened news cycle, the blurring of news reporting and analysis, and their bull-headed inability to admit that bias and error infect their reporting because they are human.
But news consumers?
The day 50+1 percent believe that the press is their adversary is the day a pillar of democracy will topple, flattening the governed under the unchecked weight of those who govern with impunity and immunity.
Washington Post Publisher Ben Bradlee was called names we can’t print when he dared publish the truth about Watergate and later, the U.S. role in expanding the Vietnam War.
I was honored a few years ago to meet this tenacious newspaperman, who history and Hollywood have long since vindicated.
Power corrupts even the best leaders.
That’s why James Madison realized government needed independent voices to check its worst instincts.
If America is at war with that concept, then we deserve whatever authoritarian we elect to unilaterally destroy our Republican party, our nation and our world order.
The press can be fallible, ignorant, sloppy, sensationalistic, exploitative, rude, profane, irresponsible.
And when it falls short, readers and viewers can take it to task by changing channels or letting their subscription lapse.
But when the government falls short, the public may never know it if the press are silenced by a president who divides the nation by stomping on those who refuse to kiss his feet.
Then the new slaves will be the American people.
Where is the next Alvan Bovay who will rise up to free people being enslaved by lies, insults and ignorance?
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Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones released the song that would become their first number one hit, and yet Mick Jagger still claimed …
Today in 1967, the New York Times reported on a method of reducing the noise recording devices make during recording. The inventor, Ray Dolby, had pioneered the process for studio recordings, but the Times story mentioned its potential for home use.
Ray Dolby, by the way, is no known relation to the other Dolby …
Today in 1987, Lindsey Buckingham refused to go out on tour with Fleetwood Mac for its “Tango in the Night” album, perhaps thinking that the road would make him …
The band probably told him …
… but look who came back a few years later:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 