According to Rockhill, an unabashed revolutionary Marxist, during the Cold War the CIA groomed anti-Soviet, self-identified “Marxists” from the Frankfurt School (including Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse), funding their scholarship and bringing some of them to the US to teach at elite American universities. The point was to influence a movement in Western European and North American Marxism that would shift its focus from class conflict to culture and turn it into a theory and criticism factory, thereby draining it of its anti-capitalist power and removing it as a threat to the capitalist imperialist political order that created the CIA for exactly such purposes. Rockhill classifies these scholars and more recent ones like Michel Foucault and Slavoj Zizek into the “compatible” left because it has no interest in altering the power structure. Rather, it fits comfortably into it. (Horkheimer, considered one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, for example, would eventually shock lefties by defending the Vietnam War as a bulwark against Red China!)
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has never been part of the left. It has always been a party of capital. Any “left” impulse the party has ever had (and probably will ever have) has come only from popular movements outside its infrastructure, which mirrors the national political structure: money on top, people below.
Gray does a superb job of supporting Rockhill as he explains these foundational facts of capitalist empire to her listening audience, sharpening the focus with illustrations from her own experience as a Harvard-trained lawyer and political player/influencer of the left. Rockhill’s book seems clearly to have resonated with her, even excited a sense of hope in her.
But then, nearly a third of the way through the three-hour podcast, Gray reveals a knee-jerk tendency in her approach to conversation that can sometimes undermine the intended irony of her show’s title.
Jokes about decapitation may be lethal to your X/Twitter health.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of months: I am now persona non grata at X/Twitter. It’s kind of a shame, as my Twitter conversations were once a major source of inspiration for this blog. But honestly, I don’t miss being on Twitter much these days. What I used to get from it in the way of stimulating discussions with people I agreed with and (more often) didn’t agree with I now get to some degree on Bluesky. More about that in a bit.
Ever since Elon Musk was forced by a judge to make good on his empty threat to buy Twitter last year, it was clear to me that my time on that platform was marked as doomed. I had no intention of paying for a service that was deteriorating in value for me and millions of other long-time users by the day. But I believed I had as good as, if not a better chance to outlast Musk there. I underestimated his tolerance for being profoundly hated, and my own vulnerability to the consequences of that behavioral quirk.
My tenure at Twitter, which began in August 2008, ended in early September, not long after I “celebrated” my 15th Twitterversary. The beginning of the end was my tweet quoting a news story about Australian multi-millionaire Tim Gurner, who told an audience at a “Property Summit” in Sydney, “‘We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, to 50 percent in my view. We need to see the pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
My response to this heartlessness: “How to get to the front of the line when the guillotines are ready.”
I didn’t think much about this comment, except I’d wished I’d expressed it more elegantly. In fact, because Twitter doesn’t allow non-paying members to edit their tweets (part of Musk’s crude desire to create a class society on Twitter where there formerly wasn’t one), I wasn’t able to change the awkward-sounding “when the guillotines are ready,” to something more like “come the revolution.” I didn’t think it was one of my better tweets, let’s just say.
A couple of mornings later, after a couple of days of my usual sorts of posts about animals, film and music among retweets of news stories about the UAW strike, I opened my email inbox to find a subject line telling me my X account was suspended. The form message told me a user had reported the guillotine tweet, which had violated the rule against violent speech, and they helpfully provided the rule itself: “You may not threaten, incite, glorify, or express a desire for harm or violence.”
I was more annoyed than shocked by this notification. I wasn’t aware that I had been threatening or inciting violence. I just thought I had made a not very good, even cliché kind of joke, given the long history of similar jokes other lefties and I have made about the fantasy of exacting revenge from the ruling class in this age of severe inequality. Was this glorifying violence? I thought of it more as using the idea of retributive violence as a rhetorical device, to express my anger over the mass violence this privileged Australian rhetorically threatened against people who, unlike him, have to sell their labor in order to shelter and feed their themselves and their families. Did my tweet actually hurt anyone? Apparently it had triggered someone on the right.
Or… I began to think, maybe Twitter was beginning to use artificial intelligence to look for language that violated its rules. Maybe “guillotine” is on the list. In the old pre-Elon days, whenever I reported someone for tweeting hate speech or harassing another person (which was not very often–maybe twice in ten years), it took much longer than a day or two for a decision to be tendered. Now my tweet was being expedited? This has the ring of automation to me.
Supporting this suspicion, when I followed the suggestion in the email to file an appeal, no sooner had I left the “courtroom” on Twitter’s site than I received another form email:
Hello,
Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account @ChristofPierson.
Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.
Your account has been suspended and will not be restored due to violations of the X Rules, specifically our rules around: Violating our rules against violent speech.
Thanks, X
Thank me for my patience? I can do waiting five seconds in my sleep. No, there was no “review” of my appeal. None at all. In a just world, I would be able to sue X for lying about having an actual appeal process that it obviously doesn’t actually have. Fortunately for Musk, this is not a just world; I am not the only person on Bluesky who was recently defenestrated from Xitter (as the locals at Bluesky call it) for joking about punitive decapitation for enemies of working people.
If you want proof of the lack of justice in the Xitter universe, just take a look at this report on X’s influence on the Dublin riots earlier this month.
As the Associated Press reported in October, experts who study disinformation have said that X has deteriorated under Musk to the point that it’s not merely failing to detect and remove misinformation, but is favoring posts by accounts that pay for the platform’s blue-check subscription service, regardless of who’s running them.
Crucially, according to Culloty, with respect to the violence in Dublin, the core group of far-right accounts suspected of inciting the violence had previously been removed from the platform for violating the company’s safety policies, but were reinstated following Musk’s takeover of the company.
“They were able to move back to X and a lot of people who had been banned were able to come back,” she said. “It’s notable that there are more people not trying to conceal their identity [in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover.] So they now feel quite comfortable making these incendiary statements.”
In the aftermath of the riots, other prominent figures from the right-wing of American politics have pushed a conspiratorial, anti-immigration narrative on X in an attempt to vindicate the violence in Ireland.
Is vindicating violence (or plotting it) different from glorifying (or joking about) it? In Musk’s universe, apparently it is, especially if the violence in question is against immigrants rather than billionaire’s.
I’m long over X, but even though I’ve found an ersatz community of Twitter refugees on Bluesky, it’s obviously not the same as what Twitter once was, which was great. Musk clearly has no feel for what made Twitter unique, and sometimes central to the multiform global conversation: it was once and for many years a free (meaning gratis) platform where anyone with internet access could join in and have a chance at equality with the “blue checks” (verified accounts of news organizations, companies and well-known persons) when that term meant something more than “paying customers.”
Bluesky is free to join, but like X, it isn’t accessible to everyone. You need to be invited to join. And until recently, you had to be a member to even look at the content. The beta version of Bluesky’sy visible-to-all version does not yet match the experience of users, who can see not only a skeet (Bluesky’s version of a tweet) but also all the responses to it. But at least it’s something. One of the best things about pre-Musk Twitter, before Musk stupidly put tight restrictions on the amount of views non-paying members and non-members are afforded, was the universal accessibility that made it possible for Twitter users’ posts to be viewed by anyone inside or out of Twitter. Now that once vital social media world is being sequestered behind paywalls, its vitality and significance to the world just a memory. One of the rare worthwhile technological pleasures of this already tired and degraded twenty-first century, down the Xitter.
In response to the recent publication of Elizabeth Winkler’s lively and thought-provoking Shakespeare Is a Woman and Other Heresies, which is, among other things, a powerful book-length argument for academic freedom in English departments, Slate.com published a review by staff writer Isaac Butler labeling Winkler’s book “Shakespeare Trutherism” and urging a supposedly long-overdue full stop to Shakespearean authorship studies. Or, as the title of Butler’s review grumbles, It Is Long Past Time to Retire the Oldest, Dumbest Debate in Literary History.
The reason the debate may actually be the dumbest is because one side argues the way this title and the review itself argue, pretending there’s nothing to debate. Unfortunately for the intellectually curious, the truly dumb (read, willfully incurious) side comprises the academic gatekeepers. Doubting “the Bard” is a surefire way to avoid hiring or career advancement in traditional English departments and publishing houses. But the authorship of the Shakespeare canon is far from being a settled matter. The deeper scholars outside the academy dig into the question, the shakier the orthodox case inside looks.
Esquire magazine has a long article (available online for $1.99 for non-subscribers) in the August issue by Luke Dittrich investigating the claims of Eben Alexander, a so-called “Harvard neurologist” whose book Proof of Heaven purporting to describe his “near death experience” has been on the best-seller lists for almost a year. (I wrote about the Newsweek article that preceded the book last year.) Of course Dittrich was unable to verify or falsify the central claim, that Alexander actually went to heaven while he was in a coma during a bout of bacterial meningitis. However, Dittrich did uncover a number of awkward facts about Alexander’s career as a neurosurgeon, including a history of malpractice suits (five in ten years) that eventually deprived him of his license to practice neurosurgery and which suggested to Dittrich a possible motive for Alexander to write the book besides a reportorial one.
Dittrich comes as close as one could, without access to Alexander’s private thoughts, to showing that the book was a cynical effort to provide a new career — as a prophet! — for a neurosurgeon whose career was being consumed by malpractice suits. He was, Esquire‘s editors write in the deck, “a neurosurgeon with a troubled history and a man in need of reinvention.”
One of Dittrich’s most damning revelations (so to speak) concerns the story of one of Alexander’s own doctors who says, in contradiction of Alexander’s claim that the e. coli bacteria that caused his meningitis also caused his coma, that she chemically induced the coma because Alexander’s involuntary movements made it impossible to operate on him. This would give the lie to Alexander’s contention that his brain had ceased all activity and that he essentially died on the gurney. It would also suggest (though Dittrich doesn’t mention the drug used to induce the coma–one major shortcoming of the Esquire piece) a likely chemical source for Alexander’s ecstatic vision.
Of course, believers will continue to believe, and as evidence of that, you need only look at the comments section on Raeburn’s blog. Continue reading →
In last week’s Room for Debate, the question the New York Times posed was this:
With atheist church services this month in Louisiana and New York, nonbelievers are borrowing some of the rituals of believers: gathering, singing, sermons.
Would it be fruitful for atheists to pray? For believers and others, what is the point of prayer?
I suppose the Times should be applauded for asking a question that seems to take atheism seriously, even if they allowed just one self-identified atheist into this “room ” to answer the question.
The simple answer, from this atheist’s perspective, is a great big fat obvious no. Prayer is by definition something asked of someone (or something), and it seems ludicrous to ask people who don’t believe in the supernatural to close their eyes, put their hands together, bow their heads and concentrate on asking something that might theoretically hear their sublingual thoughts for anything. What is the point? Leave prayer to the believers! Continue reading →
The following is based on a post I made three years ago at MUBI.com, of all places. I happened to be rereading old posts there this morning, and I wanted to put this one down here so I could think more about it. I was in conversation with someone who had asserted that believing in God can be compared to belief in the future, which, even though it doesn’t yet exist, we believe in anyway. I begged to differ with the aptness of the comparison.
I’d love to hear what others think about all this. Please leave a comment below if you’re so moved:
I’m trying to make the joint more reader friendly. I’d appreciate your feedback. Did I take a step in the right direction or go off the deep end?
I’ll tell you what I like about this new look: I think the posts are more readable. It had been bothering me for a long time that the block quotes were low-contrast. It was even difficult for me to read them. With this design, the type is at least a bit larger. I just don’t want it to look too Sally, Dick and Jane, if you know what I mean. You’d tell me if it did, wouldn’t you?
I’m not crazy about the background color. Don’t be surprised if it goes from very dark purple to very light yellow in the click of a mouse. I’m going to tend to want it very light so the text in the margins is readable.
Any other comments you’d care to share, I’d be delighted to entertain.
Here’s just a little taste from 1995 of the late great Texan rockabilly king Ronnie Dawson, with Lisa Pankratz (on drums) and High Noon. If you like country, rock, punk rock, and just plain party music, you’re probably going to love Ronnie Dawson. He began in show biz in his teens, changing his name briefly to Commonwealth Jones in the early 1960s to avoid confusion with another Ron Dawson. He died too young, in 2003. No doubt now he owns the name.
I was reading today’s paper, looking at the obituary of George Jones, when I glanced across at a photo of someone who looked familiar. I realized it was Dean Drummond, an American composer, musician, teacher and acolyte of Harry Partch, whose musical instruments and scores Drummond assembled as founder of the Harry Partch Institute at Montclair State University in New Jersey. I was wondering what an arts piece was doing in the front section of the New York Times, when I realized, shocked, that I was looking at an illustration for Drummond’s obituary. Continue reading →
