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Category: Conservative Crisis
Ninja FUD in Arizona
Cast your mind back to the closing weeks of 2020 and in the US the right was all aflutter about electoral fraud i.e. not at all coping with losing. I've covered the extent to which US elections are impacted by fraud before and the answer is lots-and-lots-and-none-at-all. The lots are overt and technically legal and come in the form of gerrymandering and voter suppression. It's fraud because it is a systematic effort to distort the results of elections so that people who do not have the support of most eligible voters win elections. All election systems have flaws but if you put your effort into making those flaws worse for your own advantage then I have no issue calling that fraudulent, at least morally if not legally.
Putting that aside, the issue of in-person voter fraud and similar shenanigans is rare in the US, largely focused on local elections and (usually) has little impact. Past coverage of the issue prior to 2020 can be read here:
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/an-actual-case-of-voter-fraud-in-the-us/
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/a-reminder-the-main-kind-of-voter-fraud-is-gop-voter-suppression/
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/a-minor-retraction-on-earlier-voter-fraud-posts/
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/weird-internet-ideas-better-debunkings-on-the-myth-of-in-person-voting-fraud/
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/10/15/weird-internet-ideas-voter-fraud-and-the-dodgy-heritage-foundation-database/
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/10/15/weird-internet-ideas-voter-fraud-in-the-us/
Of course, November 2020 brought fresh claims of voter fraud when Donald Trump was beaten by Joe Biden in the Presidential election. Those claims got quite wild, with all sorts of nonsense from misapplication of Benford's Law to absurd claims about voting machines, a supposed military "raid" in Germany (wholly made up it seems) and at least one Kraken. What was missing at that point was ninjas.
Amid these attempts to deny reality, those states that swung the electoral college numbers in Biden's favour received the most attention. Arizona was one of those states, and within Arizona, the populous Maricopa County was of particular interest because it sits electorally and demographically as a place shifting from Republican to Democratic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maricopa_County,_Arizona
As a consequence of the desire to change reality, Arizona Senate Republicans hired private contractors to conduct an audit of Maricopa County https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_presidential_ballot_audit and things only got stranger from there. The company, calling itself "CyberNinjas" at least added a cyberpunk theme to the process but aside from that, approached the process in a manner that generously could be called "sloppy" https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/observers-of-arizonas-gop-led-election-audit-document-security-breaches-prohibited-items-on-counting-floor/
The audit itself was a bit of a circus but apparently, it was sufficient to convince Donald Trump that it would lead to him being re-instated as US President by August 2021 https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/maggie-haberman-is-right/ (Observant readers will have noticed that Donald Trump was not re-instated as US President last month)
Fast forward to this week. The CyberNinjas report was leaked ahead of its public reveal and surprise, surprise Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Maricopa County…which, of course, we all already knew. https://www.azfamily.com/full-report-cyber-ninjas-results-on-election-audit/pdf_e1967608-1d99-11ec-9f0f-c394f7c3dc5f.html In fact, in the CyberNinja's recount Biden had more votes but…let's face it that's likely an error on their part in some way. This was not a group that inspired confidence.
Of course, the point of the audit was not intended to come up if with a different value than the previous recounts but to either find a 'smoking gun' of electoral shenanigans and failing that just generally cast doubt on the results. That Biden won (again) carries some amusement value but the substantial effort by the GOP was to use the audit report to claim that the results were in some vague way not wholly legitimate. Which, is what they were doing beforehand anyway but now they have spent a lot of money and can do it again.
The GOP spin on the report is a claim that 40 thousand votes, far more than Biden's margin in the county, are somehow dubious. Interestingly, the CyberNinja's report is more equivocal. They do list a whole pile of things but looking at the points in detail reveal a whole pile of vague hand waving. You can read the report here https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/azfamily.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/19/e1967608-1d99-11ec-9f0f-c394f7c3dc5f/614e7177ca92c.pdf.pdf (and archive version here)
So what's this 40K+ that the right is touting? The report breaks down 22 issues and the number of ballots impacted by those issues. The issues are presented with titles and a rating from "Critical" to "Low". The emphasis from the right is on the names of the issues rather than a. the actual numbers and b. what those numbers actually indicate or c. whether those numbers are in any way correct and d. whether they changed the result. The idea is really just to get a figure big enough that Biden's margin in this one county can be called doubtful in some sense, which helps fuel further voter suppression policies.
The single biggest issue highlighted by the report is the ominous-sounding "5.3.1 Mail-in ballots voted from prior address" which is the only issue rated as "Critical" in the report. According to the CyberNinjas, this numbers 23,344 ballots i.e. about half of the supposed 40K. Digging into the details, the issue is primarily people who moved house WITHIN Maricopa County between receiving a mail-in ballot and posting it. Hmmm. OK, sure, not even remotely something indicating mass electoral fraud but possibly in breach of the actual rules…except…it isn't really 23,344 ballots WERE THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, it's just 23,344 were maybe that's what happened.
"Mail-in ballots were cast under voter registration IDs for people that may not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved, and no one with the same last name remained at the address. Through extensive data analysis we have discovered approximately 23,344 votes that may have met this condition."
The 'extensive data analysis was a comparison with a third-party address validation tool of the kind used by companies to validate their direct marketing tools etc. So some proportion of those would be false positives in terms of an actual change of address, even more, would be false positives of a change of address within the window where it would have been a problem. The 'audit' did not actually confirm a single one of these ballots as actually being a problem. Nor did the report in any way connect this issue with any indication of systematic fraud, indeed taking the claim at face value it was eligible voters voting but with not wholly up-to-date details.
In short, it is largely smoke but this one issue bulks up the numbers.
The next highest issue is "5.4.1 More Ballots Returned By Voter Than Received" with 9,041 ballots 'impacted'. Again, the title doesn't describe the actual thing found but the potential inference that could be made from the discrepancy. The idea being with these titles, that either intentional or through sloppy reporting the whole "maybe" aspect of the report gets skipped over.
The actual substance of the figure is where there are discrepancies between the number of ballots sent to a person and the number returned e.g. somebody was sent one mail-in ballot but two were received. Note also "received" not "counted" and the report assumes only one ballot was counted. In addition, the report isn't entirely sure what the figures they have actually indicate, noting:
"NOTE: We've been informed shortly before the release of this report that some of the discrepancies outlined could be due to the protected voter list. This has not been able to be validated at this time, but we thought it was important to disclose this information for accuracy."
But…OK, follow the chains of maybes down the line and there's at least a possibility of some fraction of that 9,041 being people who voted twice (although probably only counted once). Might that impact the results? The report provides a table that breaks down the nine thousand approximately by party registration.
Democrat [sic] Party 34.4%
Republican Party 30.4%
Prefer not to declare 30.1%
Independent 3.7%
Libertarian Party 1.3%
So we are well into fractions or fractions of maybes.
I won't cover every point but the next highest was "5.4.2 VOTERS THAT POTENTIALLY VOTED IN MULTIPLE COUNTIES" with 5,295 votes and this is more of a classic. The CyberNinjas matched first, middle and last names AND year of birth across voter records to find duplicates. They found 10,342 votes out of 2,076,086 votes actually counted in the election.
"Comparing the Maricopa County VMSS Final Voted File to the equivalent files of the other fourteen Arizona counties resulted in 5,047 voters with the same first, middle, last name and birth year, representing 10,342 votes among all the counties. While it is possible for multiple individuals to share all these details, it is not common although the incidence
here (roughly one-third of one percent) may be the rate of commonalities in identifying information between legitimate, separate individual voters especially with common last names."
Yes, it may well be the actual rate of commonalities and if I was paying for this report that ACTUAL rate (or a research-based estimate) is something I'd expect to see in that paragraph. It's unlikely that two people would share all those identifying features in common but also the proportion they found was very small…which is what you would expect. This extensive data analysis discovered that a rare thing was rare.
These three issues by themselves (those rated "High" or "Critical") account for 37,680 of the ballots that the propaganda spin is claiming are in some way evidence of fraud or potential fraud. The report itself makes more moderate claims about those figures and yet even those more moderate claims are poorly substantiated.
The issues with smaller figures have much the same issues. Name matching (e.g. of 282 possibly deceased people) that may or may not be accurate, a lack of clarity on what the figure might indicate and no obvious connection with any kind of systematic fraud.
Even taking the dubious report at face value, the broader narrative of some kind of extensive fraud by the Democratic Party (or the Deep State or satanic cultists or whoever is supposed to be conspiring today) is more disproven by the report than it is supported. A proportion of Arizona residents moving house with a plot to steal an election makes no sense but then none of the conspiratorial plots mooted in the wake of Trump's defeat made any sense.
The details of the report won't matter though. You'll be getting sound bites of 40 thousand bad ballots in Arizona for literally years after this even though the actual report, dodgy as it is, doesn't even support that figure.
Oh, and a little twist in the story. Do you remember Benford's Law? Well if you check the leading digits of the figures in the CyberNinja report (page 5), the most common leading digit is 2 not 1. Of course, given the data there's no reason why you should expect it to follow Benford's law but for all those people who were claiming that any departure from the rule is sure evidence of fraud…well…OK those people don't believe in logical consistency anyway so.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Dunning-Kruger, Politics, Reason Hell, Research, Statistics	12 Comments Sep 26, 2021 7 Minutes
Larry C is stepping up the boogaloo rhetoric
Larry Correia isn't famed for subtlety or nuance in his political analysis but unlike many in his wider circle, he has usually side-stepped some of the more extreme violent rhetoric of the overly-armed right. Things are getting a little too much for him now though and the kind of Civil-War-2 style rhetoric that has been bubbling away on the right (and in his comment section) for years has become a lot more overt.
Now note, as per his former Sad Puppy ally Sarah Hoyt, these kinds of comments are framed not in terms that his followers or the broader American right SHOULD take to arms because they can't cope with a Democrat in office, but rather that the current administration is in some way so provocative that it is driving them over some sort of mental edge that makes violence inevitable. Somehow the free-will rugged individualists have a sudden and dangerous loss of agency in the presence of things like public-health measures.
So Correia's specific advice is more bunker-down than take-to-the-streets.
"And then some of you will ask, but Correia, what's your solution? Lol. What solution? Shit's probably going to get weirder. My solution? Buy ammo and food storage. Make friends with your neighbors and be useful to your community. Don't live anywhere run by democrats."
https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/09/10/this-week-in-politics-its-all-bullshit-and-were-fucked/ and archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20210910171417/https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/09/10/this-week-in-politics-its-all-bullshit-and-were-fucked/
And later in the comments he clarifies that he is not advocating for a civil war…sort of:
"If you think I'm "advocating" for a civil war, you're one dumb motherfucker. I'm warning morons like you what is inevitably coming if you don't apply the brakes.
I don't want a civil war. Sadly dumbfucks like you get a vote too."
https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/09/10/this-week-in-politics-its-all-bullshit-and-were-fucked/#comment-105482
He's not advocating for civil war but… Well, the guy is a writer I guess. The body of the post is more ranty and stream of consciousness than usual, mixing in a big list of grievances from the masks, vaccine mandates, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the January 6 insurrection and a truly wild idea that nobody faced any legal consequences from any of the violence in US cities surrounding Black Lives Matter protests.
"As our elected leaders continue to suck and fail, I expect to see a lot more civil disobedience happen. This isn't a shocker. The left has already made it very clear that the rules don't apply to them. The left burns, loots, murders, whatever. It all gets a pass. The right gets slightly uppity and it's a world ending crisis that requires the full might of the federal government to come crashing down on their heads and 24/7 news coverage for months and special commissions and anybody who tangentially agrees with those uppity types needs to be driven from society for their extremist ways."
Correia concludes his post with:
"And for the fools cheering this madness on, we have this system for a reason. We have laws for a reason. We create laws the way we do for a reason. The founding fathers weren't stupid. They were smarter than you idiots. Quit trying to gut or destroy every protection they put in place. That shit is there to protect you. But these stupid motherfuckers are not going to quit pushing until a critical mass of Americans just says fuck it and go full on Rwandan machete party."
The shift in government this year has heightened this kind of rhetoric on the right and obviously, we've seen the reversal of support for Trump saying he was ending US troop deployment in Afghanistan to Biden actually ending US troop deployment in Afghanistan. However, during the Trump years, this kind of sense of an encroaching tipping point/psychological-political crisis on the right only increased. Correia's claim here that it is the left (as he sees it) being in government that is somehow pushing (right-wing) Americans into a blind range is undermined by the fact that the intensity of these kinds of comments increased on the right during the Trump years. It would coalesce on different topics obviously, for example here's the relatively mild-mannered Brad Torgersen in 2019 after the death of Jeffery Epstein:
"When the dam bursts, I expect lampposts to be decorated from one end of America to the other. Money can't protect you when the proles no longer fear jail, nor the cops, nor repercussions. When all there is, is rage at the latest, greatest double-standard and abuse of power."
https://www.facebook.com/brad.torgersen/posts/3786463118046560?comment_id=3786505944708944&reply_comment_id=3786517568041115
One of the dangers of focusing on the kookiest aspects of phenomena like Qanon among these communities is missing how the framing and themes seep into the wider discourse. Neither, Larry C. nor Brad T. ever directly fell down either the Qanon or Pizzagate rabbit holes but through the Trump years, the idea that a nebulous Democratic Party/leftwing/big tech "establishment" was really in power and Trump was struggling against them, was an unspoken premise. For example, above Correia refers to the violence in American cities during 2020 as "The left burns, loots, murders, whatever. It all gets a pass." Gets a pass from whom? And how? There's not an answer there because if he were to try to unpack the idea then he would either find he was wrong or he would need to construct an elaborate conspiracy theory (or adopt an existing one).
The Qanon-lite framing bubbles up elsewhere in Correia's rant as well:
"Best case scenario is the opposition party finds its spine and actually fights for something. That might stall the doomsday clock a bit. Realistically? They'll screw it up. Or win (depending on how "fortified" the mid-term election is) and squander it as usual. Note however, I'm not saying the two parties are morally equivalent. That's for cowards. Republicans suck, but the DNC as currently constituted is pure Satanic evil incarnate."
That's hyperbole but it's a specific choice of words also.
I don't think Larry Correia is going to take to the barricades any time soon but he will continue to push this idea that political violence against the Democratic party or against the left is something that they have brought upon themselves. The dangers of such rhetoric are obvious.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Politics, Puppies	92 Comments Sep 12, 2021 Sep 13, 2021 4 Minutes
Narrative reversal
It has never been hard to reconcile this blog covering both science-fiction stories and the toxic weirdness of far-right extremists because both involve counter-factual storytelling. The difference is like the difference between a stage magician whose act involves an agreement between performer and audience to suspend belief and a con artist who uses misdirection and spectacle to deceive. Both the stage magician and the SFF author are also held to higher standards of consistency and elegance in maintaining the audience's illusions.
Inevitably, I'll be circling back to the January 6 2021 US Capitol Riot, in which Trump supporters stormed the US legislature to prevent the certification of the 2020 Presidential Election. The riot successfully delayed the vote but only for a time and did not usher in a Trump second term as predicted by QANON supporters.
At the time, there were three kinds of reactions I was seeing on the right:
Muted condemnation from some people
Praise and excitement
Claims that riot was being orchestrated by ANTIFA or the "Deep Sate" to some degree
The last dot point had actually been a common position the day before the protest. There was an expectation that there might be violence or police confrontations and commenters were claiming in advance that if there was any trouble it would be caused by left-wing agent provocateurs.
On the day itself, there was a duel between the bottom two narratives as people tried to sort out which of the two stories was the right one. Was the weirdly costumed "Q-Shaman" (the shirtless man with the tattoos and the horned furry helmet) an obvious infiltrator or a heroic symbol of the Q movement? [Spoilers: he was definitely part of the Q contingent].
Both Sarah Hoyt and Vox Day settled on the second dot point at the time. In particular, Day had been calling for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act as a means to seize power and saw the use of force as a legitimate response. He was also widely predicting that, despite everything, Trump would be inaugurated president before the end of January.
You can read contemporary reactions from Day here: https://archive.is/ZR2Oi and here: https://archive.is/4N7V7
Quotes include:
"The President orders his troops to stand down… presumably because their job is done. The certification was stopped and the Congress has been rounded up and secured."
"President Trump's silence so far suggests a major announcement is coming tonight. And I have to admit, this is already the greatest thing I have seen or heard since the Miracle on Ice in 1980."
"Listening to Anderson Cooper's voice shake as he tries to explain why it was right for blacks and gays to protest but wrong for the DC protestors to take over the Capital building is hysterical. You can hear the fear in the voices of the CNN commentators. They are TERRIFIED that Trump is crossing the Rubicon."
Fast forward to June 17 2021 and I am sure you will all be shocked to learn that Day is now firmly in the "false flag" camp. Promoting a story from RT.com (aka "Russia Today") which itself links to Tucker Carlson/Fox News, as well as an even more obscure right-wing news outlet, Day is advancing the theory that the whole riot was engineered by the FBI. The speculation arose from court documents which (according to the articles) show a number of unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators in the cases laid against protestors who have been prosecuted. The assumption being that these unnamed people are FBI agents who had infiltrated far-right groups such as The Proud Boys. It's speculation and of course, it's not impossible but from thin facts to speculation to the conclusion that the FBI organised the riot to discredit the right requires several unsupported leaps. https://archive.ph/3k3y3
The particular theory is not my focus though. What is interesting is the shift. In January 2021 (at least prior to Joe Biden's inauguration and the complete absence of Trump staging a military coup) Day regarded the Capitol riot as a blow against the Deep State/Democrats/"elites"/SJWs/writers who put romance elements in science fiction novels/sundry other enemies. Now, he's pushing the claim that the whole thing, even down to booking hotel rooms and flights, was a cunning Deep State plan.
"The false flags are getting a little more sophisticated. This is why Boomer-style mass demonstrations are such a bad idea. Whether the organization is suborned like the Tea Party or false-flagged like the Capital Hill fake riot, the probabilities lie with the situation being very different than the participants imagine."
https://archive.ph/3k3y3
Anyway, Day has a message for everybody:
"Never take an Internet tough guy at face value, especially not when he's publicly preaching violence against the government."
Hey! For once I agree!
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Dunning-Kruger, Politics	20 Comments Jun 18, 2021 3 Minutes
Gamestop etc and the Alt-Right
The term "Alt-Right" has gone out of fashion largely because there is increasingly little differentiation between the US right in general and the section that promotes extreme & far-fetched ideas via internet communities and social media. I still find it a handy term though, partly because for everybody else when we think of "conservative" we think "pro-business and pro-capitalism". Whereas, the modern right's relationship with those ideas are more akin to the stance of some right wing political movements in the first half of the twentieth century i.e. often critical of established interest while being overtly hostile to left-wing movements and reform of capitalism. The question as to why the modern right's stance on capitalism resembles that of, say, 1930s fascist movements is an exercise I'll leave to the reader*.
Meanwhile, people of all kinds of politics have been paying attention to the Reddit-led antics on the stockmarket, where a kind of internet-rebellion has done some severe damage to dodgy hedge funds. There are numerous explainers out there but will go with Cory Doctorow's:
There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory – at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.
1/ pic.twitter.com/n9oBXu3MJW
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 28, 2021
Although the morals and motivations of both parties may be complex, it really isn't hard to pick sides here. People (rightly) are cheering on the Reddit-rebels and enjoying the misfortune of the hedge funds.
When the app that many of the people where using to trade the stock clamped down on the sale of Gamestop stock, there was a political pushback from both major political parties.
This is unacceptable.
We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp's decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.
As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I'd support a hearing if necessary. https://t.co/4Qyrolgzyt
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 28, 2021
Ted Cruz in turn said he supported AOC's tweet, which led to a different back-and-forth when she pointed out his complicity in the death threats against her.
More widely on the internet, the right wing voices I keep an eye on generally take the same position of cheering on the Reddit-led stock-trading rebels. This isn't surprising because events share some (but not all) of the features of the kind of internet based actions that the alt-right have either fostered, attached themselves to or taken over in the past:
It features individual action coordinated within internet communities
It exploits vulnerabilities in existing systems that assume that individuals (rather than institutions) will only participate as discrete individuals (i.e. not act in a coordinated way for other motives)
It can be cast in terms of ordinary people versus shadowy elites
It doesn't and cannot lead to any kind of positive systemic reform
It does not seek to aid or improve the lot of marginalised people
It is those latter points that prevent the conflict from being to inherently left-wing in a way that would lead right-wing voices to flip the other way and start denouncing the Redditors as terrorists or cultural Marxists etc. Similarly, the final dot-point is what distinguishes this from an ACTUAL right wing internet insurgency. While Gamergate and the Puppy campaigns share many of the points above, those campaigns actively sought to make the lives of marginalised people worse and were overtly anti-left in nature (although they attempted to portray themselves as having a more neutral agenda e.g. "ethics in journalism".)
Put another way, the r/wallstreetbets actions are NOT "Gamergate but with stocks" but do share enough similarities that the Gamergate-right are not just supportive of it but positively excited about it and regard it as a thing which is "theirs". Like watching a necker-cube, a small shift of perspective allows us to see the same events as something that people on the left can support. There's not a paradox there nor is it a case of left and alt-right finding common ground or the beginning of a kind of red-brown alliance. Left and right are looking at different things here.
What's the difference? For the left the premise that "Wall Street sucks" is not news. The stock market is just one of the more obvious ways in which we live in a system with entrenched power for the wealthy and laws that help support that. The means with how that has come about are known and people have been documenting them for a couple of hundred years at least. It is a systemic problem and hence the system needs either mild-reform (liberalism), substantial reform (social-democracy) or needs to be torn down and utterly replaced (revolutionary communism). It's not a conspiracy, it's not a surprise, and nor is it even the worst part of the current economic status-quo.
For the alt-right none of the above is viewed as correct. They see the initial events as capitalism working as it should and then the "elites" stepping in and rigging the game. The literal term "elites" has wide currency and is a free floating concept. For the more openly neo-Nazi groups they equate the term with Jewish people. For the overlapping Qanon cultists, it is the shadowy groups trafficking children and engaging in cannibalistic anti-ageing rituals. Across the board on the right, the "elites" are blamed for all social change that the right reacts against. So everything from science fiction books not having enough rockets on the cover, to Star Wars having to many women in it, to trans-rights, Black Lives Matter or fossil-fuel reduction targets. So, when the government takes action to stop the stock market tanking, then for the right that is the same "elites" (as in they think it is quite literally the same people) who are rolling out Covid vaccines or are using "they/them" pronouns on their Twitter profiles.
For an example, here is Brian "Dragon Award Winner" Niemeier:
"Taken together, those breadcrumbs form a trail leading to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The GameStop squeeze threatens big donors and the Treasury Secretary, so Biden Intervened."
https://www.brianniemeier.com/2021/01/biden-intervened.html
(Also, note the grift element at the end!)
Again, note – yes, the Biden administration almost certainly is intervening or is going to intervene but again, the core reason being that the stockmarket is systemically bad. A government can't not intervene because wobbling the table can't be allowed when the whole economy depends on a very expensive house of cards. The Trump administration would have intervened as well — the difference is that the alt-right would have characterised that as the "swamp" or the "deep state" acting against Trump's wishes. The characters would have shifted but the narrative would have been the same.
The right-hand side of politics can't adopt the answer of "systemic inequalities lead to dysfunctional societies" and hence when things aren't working out the answer becomes "evil people are making the good system work badly". They take as axiomatic that there must be hierarchy with better people at the top who are rightly rich and powerful, so when facts show the people at the top are just flawed people muddling through and acting in petty or short-sighted ways, they conclude that their must be a conspiracy. For a given individual, the "conspiracy" may not start as an anti-Semitic one but they trend that way. In short Nazis will be looking to exploit these events to recruit.
"Hey", I hear you say, "You haven't mentioned Vox Day yet." Good point. He's obviously saying much of what I summarised above i.e. a right-wing extremist trying to put a Gamergate spin on it. However, for readers who have been trying to follow the confusing Patreon litigation, he has also been pointing to the Robinhood app's arbitration clause. The "swamp a company with arbitration claims" tactic is another aspect that is something that has been used for progressive causes but which is also being adopted as a right wing tactic. The lawyer involed in the Patreon case (Marc Randazza see this earlier post https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/meanwhile-in-law-virulent-nationalism/ ) is promoting the idea:
If you wrote a negative review of Robinhood, and you were truly one of their customers, file an arbitration against them.
If they had 100,000 filed in one day, they'd tank.
They require arbitration. They wont allow group actions. So, let them get consumed by piranhas! https://t.co/YVCePWFWg5
— Marc J. Randazza (@marcorandazza) January 30, 2021
Note that losing these kinds of mass actions is not necessarily a failure for the wider objective of the right. As was seen with Gamergate, some people get dragged into the initial enthusiasm and then drop out when everything fizzles out. For others, losing helps feed the radicalism. It's the same coping mechanism we all watched with the recent election. A person takes in all the propaganda of inevitable victory to the point that they are absolutely certain of the outcome. The outcome then doesn't happen. Response? Somebody must have cheated! Reality intruding into the confabulated ideas leads to some people holding onto those ideas more strongly. This is particularly true when those ideas already contain a narrative of shadowy nefarious people working against the individual personally.
TL:DR The Gamestop story is not "Gamergate but with stocks" but the far right will attempt to exploit it to recruit and radicalise.
*Hint: it's because they are just an updated version of those same movements.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Rabids	24 Comments Jan 31, 2021 Jan 31, 2021 6 Minutes
Further Annals of Libertarians Discovering Capitalism Sucks
I alluded to Larry Correia's feelings being hurt by the action of Apple, Google and Amazon against conservative social media service Parler. As a reminder, Parler as well a being a privacy-data nightmare had such weak moderation processes that it was beset with issues with threats of violence.
Larry, who has been tirelessly pushing electoral fraud conspiracy theories since last November is rushing to the defence of Parler.
"Now comes the part where leftists suddenly love free enterprise and companies being able to do whatever they want… Okay, can all the small businesses open? Nope. Only companies that benefit leftist orthodoxy get to do what they want, and if you disagree with this double standard, obviously you hate–the leftist has to look at the printed word and try to sound it out–cap e tall ism?"
https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/01/11/bow-before-appgooglezon/
The "leftist orthodoxy" in question being "don't murder Mike Pence" which…well I know I agree with that principle but I would not want to be too bold in claiming everybody I know on the left agrees with that on principle. I know for a fact that "let's not overthrow the government" isn't exactly against leftist orthodoxy. The principle on the left is more "we know that there are legal consequences for asking for people to break the law because we have a basic understanding of the nature of law, politics and common sense"
Larry goes on to explain:
"In principle I'm usually in favor of letting businesses do whatever they want. You know what else I'm usually against in principle? Bombing Japan. Yet strangely, after Pearl Harbor, circumstances changed, and things which were previously disagreeable become necessary. Go figure."
True, all out war is a circumstance in which normal rules of interaction between nations are suspended. Which…well…isn't that an argument in favour of big tech clamping down hard on a platform being used to encourage the over throw of your country's constitution? To be fair, you don't visit Larry's Facebook page for clear thinking.
"So basically, if Home Depot and a cabal of every building supply store in the country wants to ban an entire class of citizens, that's fine, just grow your own trees, cut them down, and shape them into lumber yourself. Oh… except once you've put in the labor and grown the trees, then the saw companies say no chainsaws for you either. I guess you should just build your own chainsaws from scratch."
Their should be a word for this — "suspended epiphany". I've lost count of how many times I've seen people online walk up to an idea and get close enough to see the generalisation and realise that their core beliefs are just fundamentally misguided and then…well, just not take that step.
"Like I skimmed the comments to this post yesterday, and it was as expected. HUR DUR YOU SAID NO BAKE CAKE! Oh yeah… That's totally the same thing. Because remember that time the entire baking industry colluded to deny bread to all gay people, and when the free market responded and somebody opened an LGBT bakery the powerful oven industry stepped in to shut them down… You fucking dopes."
He is correct that it is not the same thing. The difference is that women, people of colour in the USA, gay men, lesbians, trans people, disabled people and a whole host of other people who have faced systemic and overt prejudice for years and years genuinely HAVE faced the situation where the individual "freedom" for business to discriminate that conservatives & libertarians have championed, has been so widespread that it the outcome was the same as massive collusion by business to exclude, discriminate and denigrate them. It's exactly what people have been trying to explain to you for years and what you have so tirelessly scoffed and scorned them about.
Ownership of commerce is political power. That is either true or it isn't. If it isn't then Larry has no complaint. If it is then…well the question is one of whether these big corporations are using that power for good or ill and for that we can't ignore WHAT was going on with Parler.
Hey Larry! Don't you know that the "evil corporation" is a boring cliche of SJW message fiction? You should because you literally told us:
"The hoighty-toighty literati snobs prefer heavy handed, ham fisted, message fiction. (show picture of sci-fi readers giving up in frustration as they read yet another award winning book where evil corporations, right wing religious fanatics, and a thinly veiled Dick Cheney have raped the Earth until all the polar bears have died and the plot consists entirely of academic hipster douchebags sitting around and talking about their feelings) "
https://monsterhunternation.com/2013/01/16/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo-part-2-a-very-special-message/
You also were opposed to any limits on big tech in 2014
"– "We believe that the Internet shouldn't be rigged to benefit big corporations, and that means real net neutrality."
Wrap your brain around that hypocritical bullshit. We must protect the internet from evil corporations? What about the NSA reading all our stuff? What about the government deciding what can and can't be said, and Progressive senators trying to pass "Kill Switches"? I'm not a fan of Google, but Google can't send a SWAT team to my house to kill me."
https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/07/21/elizabeth-warrens-11-commandments/
It is a bit late in the day for Larry to discover that Elizabeth Warren had a point but it is noticeable that the step big tech took that tipped Larry over the edge was them clamping down on speech aimed at inciting violence to over throw an election.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Dunning-Kruger, Economics, Puppies	39 Comments Jan 12, 2021 Jan 27, 2021 4 Minutes
A novel repercussion
The right-leaning social network Parler is facing an uncertain future after being removed first from the Apple app store and then from Google and finally by being denied cloud services by Amazon. The stated reason is the poor level of comment moderation which has led to large numbers of violent threats and incitement on the service, particularly in relation to the January 6 violent attack on US constitutional processes. However, even before recent events, the weak moderation problems were causing issues for the platform:
"The surge of #sexytrumpgirl posts highlighted a broader dilemma for Parler: The site's lax moderation policies, in keeping with its claims to being a bastion of free speech, could make it a magnet for pornographers, escort services and online sex merchants using hashtags targeting conservatives, such as #keepamericasexy and #milfsfortrump2020."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/02/parler-pornography-problem/
However, the action against Parler is being framed by the many on the right as part of an active suppression of conservative views. Former Sad Puppy leaders, Larry Correia and Brad R Torgersen have waded in. Brad making yet another bold attempt to unwittingly murder irony:
"Larry Correia's excellent take (this morning) on Big Prog Tech's attack on Parler got me to thinking about how so much of what's transpiring in America right now, is the result of lies. Or rather, people unmooring themselves from the idea that there is an objective truth."
https://www.facebook.com/brad.torgersen/posts/5585072674852253
The calls are coming for conservatives to boycott companies that they regard as being anti-conservative. Sad Puppy Sarah Hoyt has been promoting this ideas using the slogan "Not One Red Cent" for some time.
Ah, yeah but about that plan…What's one of those companies listed above? Amazon? Oh…oops…
"However, since last night, this has TRULY become an emergency, not because of what Amazon will do or won't do to ebook fiction (more on that) but because a core of my readers will now refuse to buy from Amazon under any circumstances, which means that I'm going to lose a lot of my income (and Amazon won't give a flying fig. But I get your outrage, I understand, and yet you'll only hurt the writers, UNTIL WE HAVE AN ALTERNATIVE.)"
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/01/10/vignettes-by-luke-mary-catelli-and-nother-mike-and-book-promo-and-some-blather-by-sarah/
Ouch! Capitalism sucks apparently! It's almost like there is an issue with the guy who owns the means of production being an unaccountable man with enough money to ski down huge piles of coins like Scrooge McDuck (details here).
"Otherwise I'm going to ask you NOT to carry on this boycott. We right-leaning-indies are going to lose half our sales. That'll hurt Amazon, sure. Kind of. PROBABLY honestly at the rounding error level. But it will KILL us indie writers who have a contingent of conservative fans."
So there you go, not one red cent apart from any red cents where a proportion of the red cent might go to Sarah Hoyt.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Debarkle, Puppies	56 Comments Jan 11, 2021 Jan 12, 2021 2 Minutes
Starting February: Debarkle
I've been mulling over for some time (years tbh) writing a history of the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards. A few things have put me off doing so. Two of the obstacles is any account needs at least some treatment of RaceFail and of the Requires Hate story and they are rabbit holes of controversy (but there are ways through that I think). However, one issue is an end point. In terms of Larry Correia's frustration at not getting an award, the 2016 Dragon Award ceremony, which also saw Vox Day's Castalia House getting its participation trophies, is an obvious place to stop. You can finish a story there and say "and the puppies went away and had their own awards". It is unsatisfying and misleading though.
The appeal with finishing the story there is the main action of the Puppy Debarkle ends there with things petering out with the collapse of Sad Puppies 5 and the process reforms blunting the impact of Rabid Puppies 3 the following year. However, the point of writing about the Debarkle is the wider context. Fandom has had its fair share of squabbles, kerfuffles and scandals but what makes the Debarkle interesting in particular is the connection with wider events. The Sad Puppies presented their unexpected fannish-insurrection as primarily a question of aesthetics, as Larry Correia stated in his first attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards, this was an attempt to frustrate the "literati". Contrariwise, the opposition to the Puppies contended that they were a politically reactionary movement.
It is this second issue that frames any discussion. It's not a difficult proposition to demonstrate, that the Puppies were a politically reactionary movement motivated by a dislike of the left in general and the advocacy for women and people of colour and LGBQTI people more specifically. By late 2016 the Puppies of all stripes were barely pretending otherwise and, of course, Vox Day's Rabid Puppies never pretended otherwise. But a more open question is whether the process of the Debarkle radicalised the Puppies or whether a growing social rift in America (and beyond) was radicalising them regardless?
I don't know the answer to that question but it is the kind of question I could get a better answer to if I attempt this. Of course, placing the Puppies in the context of the politics also gives a point in time to look back from and say "how did we get here?" That point looks very much like January 6 2021.
Take, for example, this artefact of current right wing discourse in the wake of the attempted putsch in America's capitol:
"Apparently Sarah Hoyt is the only non-cuck at Instapundit."
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2021/01/give-girl-her-props.html
Or, looking in a different direction, imagine being a future historian and trying to explain all the context to this tweet:
the tingler that keeps ringing more and more true with every passing day on this timeline https://t.co/noP0wUOFPM pic.twitter.com/j2nLNycU2U
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) January 6, 2021
Neither GamerGate nor the Debarkle by themselves explain events and both were shaped by social forces that were hard to see. Yet, rather like the tracks made by invisible particles in a bubble chamber, the revealed shifts in attitudes and changing political coalitions that were also leading up to changes on a bigger scale. Within a short time, political upsets in the US and UK (Trump becoming the Republican Party POTUS nominee and the Brexit referendum) saw right-wing, populist, anti-rational positions taking hold of national policy. Where they motivated by the same thing as the Puppy movements? We can debate that but the Puppies generally thought so (Brexit more than Trump oddly).
Five years after peak-Puppy, in the hell year that was 2020 notable figures in the Debarkle were pushing firstly covid-19 conspiracies, followed by attempts to mobilise anti-lockdown protests, followed by anti-mask wearing propaganda, followed by anti-vaccine propaganda. In the wake of Donald Trump's election defeat, chief Sad Puppy Larry Correia was a notable booster of "steal" conspiracy theories and his posts on the topic were widely shared in conservative circles. Meanwhile, since late 2017, Vox Day was an early adopter and promoter of "QANON" the free-floating anti-rational meta-conspiracy theory and also an early advocate in 2020 of the need for Trump to seize power by force to ensure a second term.
The Debarkle (in particular peak Debarkle in 2015) presaged events in a microcosm but also later events clarify questions. At the time, it was an open question as to how politically extreme many of the Sad Puppy leaders where, there even people who attempted apparently good-faith arguments that Vox Day somehow wasn't that extreme. Supporters of the Sad Puppies would often point to Sarah Hoyt (a woman and an immigrant to the US from a non-anglophone country) as clear evidence that the Sad Puppies were neither sexist or racist. I believe that even at the time the evidence demonstrated that their argument was flawed but with 2020 hindsight, the manner in which Hoyt refers to the VP-elect of the USA Kamala Harris is a much simpler refutation of the idea that she somehow is immune to sexism and racism.
Nor would it be sensible to write about the 2015 side-plot of the infamous Tor Boycott without pointing to Mad Genius blogger and one-time Castalia House author Peter Grant stating in the wake of yesterday's attempt to overthrow the US constitution that: "If I were in D.C. today, I'd be in the Capitol along with the protesters." If you've overtly placed yourself to the right of the leaders of the Republican Party (and for that matter the very right wing current Vice President of the US) and are contemplating civil war because you've fully bought into a stab-in-the-back mythology of stolen victory…well…""extreme right wing to neo-nazi, respectively" was always a very apt description. How much time did we spend dissecting the various political positions that notable Puppies might have in an attempt to tease out the nuance of their politics? It's a lot easier to sum up as "I'm not sure what they thought in 2015 but within five years they'll be demanding the violent overthrow of the government in a far-right putsch."
I'll post more about the structure and the schedule of Debarkle as a blog series. Obviously, and as always, comments and corrections will be more than welcome, indeed expected — particularly as most of you were there at the time and many of you were actively involved in countering the Puppies for years before I stuck my oar in.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, FieldsyFlap, Hugo awards, Puppies, Rabids, Reason Hell, Scrappy Doos, Sexism, Straw Puppy, US-Election2016, Writing	109 Comments Jan 8, 2021 4 Minutes
People may enjoy the figurative aspects of this
I haven't linked to former Sad Puppy outlet Mad Genius Club in a long while and nor have I discussed my compatriot Dave Freer's unusual anecdotes for some time. I am a man of some restraint but when Dave literally loses his shit how can I not link to it?
The background is that he has hinted for some time about a bureaucratic dispute he is having with the local government of Flinders Island, where he lives (off the coast of Tasmania). In today's column he provides the context and well, the punchlines write themselves that I will leave it to readers to pick their preferred ones.
"One of my current one is where the local council with the power vested in them by the state, are protecting my neighbor from our (two people's worth) sewage treatment wastewater. I live on a farm, a long, long way from a neighbor and we are both well above the wastewater outlet. The chance of my wastewater getting to a neighbor… would take a Biblical flood. And beside the fact that the poor fellow would be far too busy building an ark to care – the dilution would be hundreds of billions to one. But that doesn't stop the council extracting hundreds of dollars for doing nothing of any value, and forcing me to spend thousands of dollars to achieve absolutely nothing that I couldn't for five hundred, and harassing the hell out of me. The designer, plumber, the seller of the specialized bits the designer mandated did give some degree of 'value' for their rent (back of an envelope – about the same as trad publishing – where the writer earns around 6-8% on that paperback, and 93-94% go to these other fellows). Of course I don't actually need any of those, and could achieve the same without them, but their services and goods are worth something, just nothing like what I have to pay — because the government mandates I use them, and pure rent-seekers make sure I do."
https://madgeniusclub.com/2021/01/04/besides-wood-chippers/
Yes, poor persecuted Dave is being oppressed by the government who are making the unreasonable demand that he (checks notes) deals with his own faecal matter properly. I…no, no, there are just too many metaphors here to choose.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Dunning-Kruger, Ethics, Puppies, Straw Puppy	30 Comments Jan 5, 2021 2 Minutes
Bonus Straw Pup Poll: More crimes against statistics
I haven't mentioned Larry "former accountant" Correia in my last post. You'll be unsurprised to learn that he is still pushing claims of statistical anomalies that don't amount to anything. I think he'd put a lot of faith in the Texas bid to sue everybody in the Supreme Court but that came to nothing.
The latest claim he is pushing is from here https://web.archive.org/web/20201216091355/https://www.revolver.news/2020/12/statistical-model-indicates-trump-won-landslide/
"The model provides substantial support for the allegation that the outcome of the election was affected by fraud in multiple states. Specifically, the model's predictions match the reported results in all other states, i.e. states where no fraud has been alleged, but predicts Trump won majorities in five disputed states (AZ, GA, NV, PA and WI) and 49.68% of the vote in the sixth (MI). In other words, the reported Biden margin of victory in at least five of the six contested states cannot be explained by any patterns in voter preference consistent with national demographic trends. "
Oh my golly gosh! Well that's it, we should all just pack up and go home! Case closed!
Ah…no. I'll grant there is both some subtlety and brazenness here but the statistical sleight of hand is very basic. It's just a variant on the similar fallacy we've seen elsewhere.
When I saw 'model', I assumed it was going to be one of those wacky predictive models that get rolled out before election day. However (and this is the subtle bit) there is at least the appearance of an attempt at a serious attempt to model state-based voter behaviour using demographic data. That's interesting but I didn't dig very deep into it because their conclusion (above) has almost nothing to do with how good or bad their model is. To see that we need to backtrack a bit.
At issue are six "disputed" states:Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states each had very close elections where Donald Trump lost by a very small margin or at least small enough that they were his best hope of disputing the votes and changing the outcome. The article characterises them as states where fraud has been alleged but in fact Republicans have claimed fraud in many states. These states are special not because of claims of fraud but because the vote is close. That's not even necessarily a cynical move by Trump's legal team — obviously they'd focus on the places were they have the best chance of changing the outcome.
The article goes into great depth about the model and the data. In the end it boils down to two sets of figures for each state (except for Hawaii and Arkansas – for reasons not stated). Every state has an actual share of the vote from Trump and a predicted share of the vote for Trump. The actual and predicted values are close and highly correlated. The article doesn't show it as a scattergram but I've drawn one for you all because what better way is there to look for STATISTICAL ANOMALIES [sound effect of thunder].
The dot in the bottom left is DC and while it is in a sense a statistical anomaly, it's not a surprise and it's also not something the writers of the article care about. In fact they don't care about any of the states that are a bit further away from that very tidy line of best fit. Why not? Because the model is almost irrelevant to their argument.
On the whole the model predicts a slightly higher share of the vote for Trump overall than actually happened. Calculating the difference [actual – predicted] the average is -1.11%-points. Four of the 'disputed' states are all close to this average. Two (Georgia and Arizona) are less close but the most extreme of them (Arizona) is still closer to the mean than Utah (for example).
State predicted actual difference
MI 49.70% 48.60% -1.10%
PA 50.00% 49.50% -0.50%
NV 50.30% 48.80% -1.50%
WI 50.70% 49.70% -1.00%
GA 53.20% 49.90% -3.30%
AZ 54.80% 49.80% -5.00%
In fact, the data AS PRESENTED IN THE ARTICLE is largely unremarkable for the 'disputed' states. Only 11 of the states listed had differences where Trump did better than the model, so it's safe to say that these states (or at least four of them) aren't anomalous at all when judged by the mystery model.
So what's anomaly claimed in the article? Ah! In five of these states the difference in vote share would have been enough to allow Trump to win! WHAT'S THE CHANCE OF THAT!
Yup, it's a statistical version of begging the question.
The model predicted overall (and in most states), a higher vote share for Trump than what he got. However, in most states this did not change the outcome. Which states did it change the outcome? Why, the ones with close votes of course! The "statistical anomaly" is that the chance that states that Trump is disputing with claims of fraud are also those states that in the model he had some chance of losing and then did actually lose. I guess they could argue that Arizona was unlikely given their model (which we have no reason to believe is correct) but even their, it's difference from the model is less than New York, Utah and DC (the two Biden wins had MORE Trump votes than the model predicted!). Unless the writers of the article want to claim Utah was a hotbed of Biden cheating (which makes no sense on any level) then even the most extreme example of the 'disputed' states was well within the degree to which the model failed to predict.
The argument can be paraphrased as "If Trump had had a slightly higher share of the vote overall then he would have won five more swing states." That's true! Trump would have won more states if more people had voted for him but they didn't and he lost.The states he lost were states in that broad zone of swing states.
Here are fourteen states in terms of the actual share of the Trump vote. The "disputed" states are the ones, unsurprisingly on that cusp from 48.5% to 49.9% were Trump might have won if he'd got 1.11%-points more of the share of the vote. That's not a statistical anomaly, it's just arithmetic (again).
VA 46.40% 44.90% -1.50%
ME 47.80% 44.90% -2.90%
MN 47.30% 46.30% -1.00%
NH 48.50% 46.30% -2.20%
MI 49.70% 48.60% -1.10% y
NV 50.30% 48.80% -1.50% y
PA 50.00% 49.50% -0.50% y
WI 50.70% 49.70% -1.00% y
AZ 54.80% 49.80% -5.00% y
GA 53.20% 49.90% -3.30% y
NC 51.60% 50.70% -0.90%
FL 51.60% 51.70% 0.10%
TX 56.40% 52.90% -3.50%
OH 54.00% 54.10% 0.10%
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis, Politics, Puppies	27 Comments Dec 16, 2020 Dec 17, 2020 4 Minutes
The GoP War on the word "statistically"
Some times you just want to put your hand on somebody's shoulder and say in a sad and weary voice: "Just stop, you are embarrassing yourself".
Surrounding the current state of affairs in the US Presidential election are various Trump supporters (including some Trump supporters who claim they aren't Trump supporters) crying "fraud". The evidence they have produced is so thin that they are often retracting bits of it themselves but claiming that the shear volume of BS that they have produced demonstrates that the claims must be true.
Amid that is the word "statistically". Here is an example. An article by "Scott Hounsell" in RedState. It has fewer of the more blatant attempts at fake fraud claims but instead attempts to throw a cloud of suspicion over the election. Note the use of the word "statistically":
"Additionally, turnout in 2016, as a percentage of registered voters, was just 79.80%. This year, the state jumped to a statistically impossible 92.26%, a 12.46% increase over their 2016 numbers. In a state when Democrats statistically lost more voters than Republicans, we are supposed to believe that a 12% increase (largest ever) swung majority to Dems, by a factor that not only overcame the margin by which Trump won the state in 2016 but also erased any gains Republicans had in registration (by losing less) and gave Biden a 20,000 vote lead?"
https://redstate.com/scotthounsell/2020/11/05/excuse-me-while-i-call-bs-n275572
Fair enough, that paragraph does have statistics in it but quite what the writer thinks the word "statistically" is supposed to add (other than BS) is unclear. And "statistically impossible"? What on Earth is "statistically impossible" supposed to mean? I was already getting annoyed with seeing "statistically improbable" being thrown around on dodgy Facebook pages but at least those words made some sense.
A figure by itself is just a figure. If we are talking about the probability of an actual piece of data then "statistically" i.e. within the methodology of the discipline of statistics, we are comparing that figure with some model of the figures — for example an existing distribution derived from a theoretical understanding of the figures and/or past experience. The US election figures are boringly unremarkable. Turn out is up but outcomes aren't very different from 2016. That's the context and that doesn't point towards data being "statistically impossible" but if you are going to invoke the djinn of statistics then you invoke what comes with it. To claim a figure is "statistically improbable" then you need to show that STATISTICALLY i.e. show that when compared to some valid model that the figure would only very rarely appear UNLESS some key assumption about the model was violated (eg massive fraud). Simply saying "statistically" a lot doesn't make a number dubious, that's just magical thinking.
camestrosfelapton	Conservative Crisis	32 Comments Nov 7, 2020 2 Minutes


text:
Category Archives: graduate school
On Knowing If You're Any Good
If you're a writer, you'll live your life not knowing if you're any good. And you'll die not knowing. I think John Berryman said that.
After Phil Levine published his first book of poems, people said, yeah, but can you do it again? Then he did it again. Then they said, yeah, but have you been featured in the New York Times Review of Books? Then he got a review. So they said, yeah, but have you won any major awards? He won several. Then they said, yeah, but we remember you back when you were broke in Detroit. You'll always be a bum.
There is no escape. Nobody from the old neighborhood wants to see you get ahead. It's a law of nature, the Bumfuck Reflexive Property. You can ruin your life if you burn your emotional energy wondering whether they're right. Every moment you spend doing that is a waste. But all writers do it.
Hang around with writers and artists and you realize they've got a particular tangible proficiency at their kind of art. Maybe they were born with it or, more likely, they worked hard at developing what little gift they had into something presentable. The gift, whatever it is, is real and observable. But whether they're mediocre or brilliant, derivative or original, a flash in the pan or someone whose art is set to be preserved in the basement of Cheops, you will never know. More significantly, they will never know.
If you like their work, great. If you don't, you can always recall the time they were broke and living in the projects across from Wayne State. HA. HA. HA. Let's all laugh at the sad clown. Some people and their lousy choices. Am I right? If they were any good people would want to pay them for their work. I mean, that's just common sense.
I suppose it's sad when an artist hasn't learned how to fail (or how to stubbornly and angrily reject failure), when she takes the Bumfuck to bed and makes love to it, when she's covered in despair, when she finds herself thinking about her choices. The rest of us chose to avoid that humiliation early. We were smart and didn't even try. Or if we did, we never let anyone see it and gave up shortly thereafter. And look at us today. We just got back from our annual trip to Florida. It's a good life.
But she has to spend some nights staring at the wall, probing for answers that will never come. Because her friends and family don't know what to tell her, even though they have many strongly held opinions on her work and direction in life. Her teachers didn't know (even the ones who praised her back at clown school). And ultimately, she doesn't know, can't know, even if she wins a Golden Bozo next year and gets to put "Genius" on her resume. She might just be a lucky clown, a clown of the moment, a one clown wonder. How do you ever really, truly know if you're any good?
Genius. Hell, she can barely afford lunch. And so the questions: am I actually a no-talent, deluded ass-clown? Was taking out a loan to go to clown school the worst decision of my life? Should I have listened to my old high-school friend who went straight into an apprenticeship as a waste management professional and who is now debt-free, pumping out the city's shit everyday for a middle-five-figure salary? The dude owns his own house. He loves reminding me how debt-free he is. He loves it.
Can I say the same? Do I love being a clown? I thought I did. But now that I'm out of clown school, I feel so alone. At least back there I had a useful amount of social friction, mutually shared productive spite, the catty competitiveness of nervous art students to hold me up and distract me.
Now I only have these four walls and the dirty mirror over the sink and the constant message that if it doesn't make money, it's a hobby, not a calling. A life spent vacuuming out the municipal sewer, by that definition, would be the Grail Quest. But that tract house and the vacation package in Florida speaks for itself.
How good do I have to be to take clowning seriously, to argue that it is my reason for living and not just a lukewarm pastime that regularly torments me. Sometimes, I wonder what good is—if it is something metaphysical, some hidden imprimatur, some mysterious proof, like divine grace received only through predestination. Do we know it when we see it? Or do we see it because we only know what we've been told?
How much telling is good? How much showing? If I get the emotional effect I want by the last line of my story, does that justify anything I do along the way, any narrative impropriety—like Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," one of the most structurally verfucked stories I have ever seen that nevertheless works? It works because it moves me. Me. Not necessarily you.
What's more, when I get to the end, I know in the way that comes from having spent too much time with fellow ass-clowns, that "Hills Like White Elephants" would have never gotten a pass in clownshop. Poor sad clownbear. Put on your hardhat and gas mask. There's shit pumping needs to be done.
I read the New Yorker and The Paris Review. For clowns, those are basically trade publications. Those clowns really know how to do it. They know what's good, what's right and wrong about art and culture, what should be published, what should be condemned. The people they feature—man, that is some serious clown shit. They really push the clownvelope. In fact, they are so serious at times that their work transcends everyday clowning and enters the Mime Plane. It's a micro universe. All the mimes who ever existed and who ever will exist live there in an eternal limbo that can fit on the head of a pin. And yet it's enormous. Space and time. You know. Like warm bubble-gum.
But I stay away from the mimes, like Alice Mimero and Jonathan Mimezen and Jeffrey Eumimedies and Mimeberto Eco. Their work is—I don't even know how to describe it—it's mysterious. Like pushing the wind or the transparent box or juggling the invisible chainsaws. Somehow, it's supposed to seem dangerous or terrifying. Risky. But when an invisible chainsaw slips, there's only invisible blood. Hard to see. You have to pretend it's there. Mime stuff, you know. Everyone acts like they get it.
And yet they're held up to us as the cultural elite. How does that work? Why are we still encouraged by the Big Six to think of these clowns as mysterious and compelling? I guess only those who put out effort to remain mysterious will continue to be seen that way. And perpetually wrapping yourself in a glamour of mystery is a lie. Because no one is actually that. But we lionize our artists. The publishing industry runs a lion circus. We want to believe they know something we don't when they jump and roar.
Them lions is pathological. All they know is that gazelles are tasty. And us? We don't even know that much.
I might know that shit stinks and pumping it for a living is a bummer. I know I'd give a hundred tract houses and a timeshare in Pensacola not to have that be the substance of my Grail Quest. I'd rather squander my life writing, even if I am a no-talent ass-clown.
But you? I'm not so sure about you. Maybe you're not one of the Cheops Basement All-Stars yet. Maybe you'll always be a bum somewhere in municipal Detroit, freezing in your bloodied clown suit. But I can tell you one thing. You'll never really know if you're any good. And you won't be able to look at others for the answer. They're all a bunch of ass-clowns, too.
All you can do is keep at it, day after day, hoping somebody somewhere sees what you see. All you can do is show up.
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STEM, Scientism, and the Decline of the Humanities – my latest on Splice Today
Read it here: https://www.splicetoday.com/on-campus/stem-scientism-and-the-decline-of-the-humanities
1 Comment	| tags: Creative Writing, humanities, science, scientism, STEM	| posted in Creative Writing, graduate school, MFA, policy, politics, Publishing Industry, Splice Today, the writing life, United States, Writing, writing life, zombie culture
The Voice in the Fire
As I have said many times and in many different ways, graduate study in literature and creative writing is not easy for anyone, even in the most favorable circumstances. There is an inner, emotional, psychological, processual effort that no one talks about and an outer, technical, rhetorical, production effort that everyone takes for granted. Both of these "efforts" are difficult. They must run concurrently and consistently for satisfactory completion of your program. And no one—not advisors or fellow
Philosopher with an Open Book by Salomon Coninck (1645)
students—will have the wherewithal to set aside their own problems in order to help you with yours. You are alone. You are responsible for expressing a universe of ideas in your own voice. You will accept this or fail.
If you pay attention, you will soon come to realize that your path is more or less unique—that you're following a largely self-determined trajectory through the work. It may be partly modeled on someone else's (such as that of a mentor with a strong personality telling you what you should be reading, writing, and thinking), but ultimately you're making your own intellectual path by walking it. This is one of the signature characteristics of higher study in the humanities. It may be a strength.
A large part of this blog is dedicated to exploring these things, to making the implicit explicit for the good of those who feel drawn to the discipline of English studies and / or creative writing. It's clear that I'm critical here of what I often see as hypocrisy and self-serving prevarication in greater academia. But I also disagree with the Libertarian voices currently developing the Don't Go to Graduate School in the Humanities genre of business-oriented success advice. I think, in spite of very practical arguments to the contrary, if you feel called to study, write, and teach, by all means do it. Just don't do it ignorantly and learn how to survive afterward so that you can keep doing it. How this unfolds in your life will be a mystery specific to your becoming.
With this in mind, I expose my own values here, my own work, which continues the inner-outer efforts I mention above. The Writing Expedition represents part of my disciplinary "production effort," dedicated to expressing insights on what I have experienced in this field. Moreover, I think "expressing" is the right word because it implies a dichotomy. In order to ex-press something (or "squeeze out" if we want to look at the origin of the word), there must be an interior area where it already exists. An inner world. Often, a hidden world that can make the dominant scientistic discourse of reductive materialism very nervous. Like it or not, the Academy is subject to the dominant political, economic, and aesthetic tropes and discourses of the day; though, academics often find this distasteful and prefer to ignore it.
The ivory tower covered in camouflage.
It is safe to say that the Academy is an ancient type of institution that has survived to the present by appearing to be what society needs it to be in any era. Study the history of higher education in the West and it is easy to notice that the great universities have not existed in spite of what they imagine to be the barbarism and ignorance of the profane, but as a mode of cultural expression, a conglomeration of beliefs and rituals, a matrix of ideas given a particular form in the material world. In other words, the Academy is an extension of culture. It offers a product that society wants and survives by making that product seem relevant. It has always been that way; though the outer wrapper of the product is redesigned again and again to reinforce existing narratives of power and faith. In the rare times it fails to do this: Kent State, May 4, 1970.
As Martin Petersen writes of CIA tradecraft standards (intelligence agencies being very similar to universities), "We have to establish our credibility and usefulness individual by individual, administration by administration. There is no down time when it comes to quality" ("What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 55, No. 1). Without being too cynical, we could easily convince ourselves that establishing credibility and usefulness is one of the ongoing directives of the Academy: we want to matter.
Enter: John, who also wanted to matter.
When I was in graduate school, studying creative writing and rhetoric, John, a friend of mine there who happened to be a gifted poet, went through a kind of nervous breakdown. Since no one knows what a "nervous breakdown" actually is, we can call it that or we can say he went through a season of harsh depression, anxiety, purposelessness, and emotional pain. His wife described it as a "slow-motion train wreck" and they both tried to laugh about it. But it was real and the pain he went through changed his life.
Before you even think it, I should note that this person is not me. Things may have changed for John since then, but what hasn't changed is the high-schoolish competitiveness in our colleagues that has lingered for a long time. Since many of them read this blog, I will only tell the part of his story that everyone already knows. And I will do it for a particular reason. Nevertheless, I hope he forgives me for this and understands what I am trying to say. Knowing him, I think he will.
It started with the birth of his daughter in our second year. John had come to the PhD from a high-paying career in industry, such that he didn't have to take out student loans and could rent a fairly large house (as opposed to the holes most of us were living in). His wife didn't work and they were living off their considerable savings. Still, the pressure was on, partly because John now had a child to think about, but also because had an immense work ethic and he was no fool. He knew, as did we all, that there were very few full-time teaching positions available and that trying to get one (even getting an interview at AWP or MLA) was like playing the Irish sweepstakes.
Nevertheless, John applied himself, wrote good poems, said smart things, and generally did well. He was older, married, and didn't waste his time like the rest of us at the sad graduate school parties or looking for love in all the wrong places. He had a particular energy around him that said, I know the truth and, if I don't know, I'm sure we can discover it together. In short, he seemed like the type who should win the career sweepstakes and become an assistant professor. There should be more people like John in teaching positions. When I think of what it takes to be a great graduate student, I think of him.
But he reached a breaking point, something in his "inner process" that no longer worked the way he thought it should. The reality of being a father had become far more real and compelling than the realities he was creating as a student of English and a poet. His hair turned stark white over the course of a month and he went through a kind of existential fugue, which according to him involved a lot of crying, regret, and hopelessness. Eventually, he dropped out of the program. He moved with his wife and daughter to Arizona to live with his in-laws. And two or three years later re-entered a PhD program at a different university, this time to study British modernism. As far as I know, he's now a professor somewhere in the Midwest and I am sure he is great.
I tell his story here because although it had an ostensibly happy ending, his dark night of the soul is one that most of us experienced on some level at some time in our work. The difference may have been that he suffered from pressures we didn't have, destroying the credibility and usefulness of the Academy for him. I believe this as much as I believe that he also lacked certain essential qualities necessary for running those inner and outer efforts concurrently and consistently, at least the first time around.
The voice in the fire: one hears it or one does not.
A teacher of mine once made an interesting observation about "mystery." The more one seeks out the lacunae in one's life—the numinous moments, the noetic leaps of high strangeness that result in extraordinary creations, realizations, and states of consciousness—the more mystery seems to increase, not decrease. Seek the mysteries and you will find there are more mysterious things in this world than you ever imagined. Or maybe you will find yourself imagining more such things as you learn to accept new ways of knowing.
Conversely, if you let existing modes of expression, accepted narratives, the exoteric rituals of consensus culture (especially those of the Academy) crowd your senses, ways of knowing will become narrower; meaning will become increasingly delimited and rigid; and the dominant cultural discourses (for us, scientism and reductive materialism) will come to seem all-encompassing. This is what I believe happened to John in his first PhD program. His outer effort was strong, but his inner work was obstructed by the anxiety of feeling responsible for his family. I do not fault him for this. However, I think his experience offers us an interesting lesson.
Recall that the "inner effort" is an emotional, psychological process. It therefore partakes of mystery because interiority cannot be completely mapped. This is where the muse, the creative genius, lives. This is where we dream, where we hear that voice speaking to us about who we truly are and how we must express ourselves. It is the place artists go when they produce authentic and original work.
Funny thing about the muse. She gives and she takes. Dedicate your life to a particular mode of expression and you must always try to hear her. Your sense of the numinous will increase exponentially, but you will also have to make sacrifices. As your outer effort must concern itself with "credibility and usefulness," your inner effort must be like a love affair with the mystery inside you, which is what we're talking about when we refer to the inner life of an artist.
Hakim Bey discusses this in The Temporary Autonomous Zone and calls it "sorcery":
The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication–but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind—sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow—priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa—but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature–it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.
Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams–the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink—wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures—rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis—the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
We can just as easily speak of it in terms of embracing a wider spectrum of expression. Viktor Frankl puts it this way: "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible" (Man's Search for Meaning).
The Green Muse by Albert Maignan (1895)
What, then, is the voice in the fire? It's not a degree from Yale, tenure, and a tactless sense of entitlement. It's that unmappable, ineffable interior effort, that numinous guidance system which instructs and inspires us to continue our work. It sustains us through years of advanced study, reveals the mystery inherent in the world (even in something as outwardly mundane as the sight of water), and helps us answer for our lives. If we are responsible practitioners of our art, we will listen to this voice just as carefully as we may express our work-products. If we stop listening and forget the internal process, focusing only on the external product, we will enter the dark night of the soul, which entails a lot of suffering.
This is the meaning of that famous line from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." If this is the life you choose (realizing that you have been chosen to answer for your life this way), I continue to wish the best for you.
Listen. And seek the mysteries.
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Surviving Graduate School in the Humanities: Should You Go and What if You Do?
"Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it." – W. Somerset Maugham
Yesterday, I got an email from a former student asking for advice on whether he should apply to a PhD program in English. This is not the first time someone has asked me this, though I have mostly stopped answering because (1) people must learn for themselves and no one thinks his or her experience will be typical; (2) graduate programs generally present an unconscionably glossy face to prospective students; (3) in order to persevere in an academic career, it is necessary to develop a personal philosophy that allows you to put the work first; and (4) my own experience in academia has been highly atypical.
Still, I consider May 1 to be my 6th anniversary as a PhD in English. This remains, in spite of all my criticisms, one of the greatest (and surprisingly joyful) achievements of my life. So every year around this time, I take a day to reflect on the good as well as the bad—how far I've come and what I've had to overcome as a result of my long years in graduate school.
As part of that, I write this blog post from a place of deep sincerity, responding to the question: should I apply to PhD programs in English?
Graduate school, especially in the arts and humanities, is an existential riddle very few people solve to any degree of satisfaction. Its dimensions are so far-reaching and complex that many years can go by before those who have lived through it get any kind of clarity about what they experienced.
I might have understood a bit more, a little bit sooner, about my situation than most graduate students. As someone who spent a significant amount of time acquiring various academic degrees and certifications, I have always been studying something. I grew up in an academic household, have been incredibly lucky with finding good teaching positions, and have learned to handle "administrative prevarication" in ways that have allowed me to survive. Not everyone has this experience. In fact, my story is an exception to a very unpleasant rule.
Deep-seated career frustration, depression, and even suicide seem to be on the rise for graduate students. This would appear true even if we assumed that 50 years of back-page articles on dysfunctional academia and the perpetual ranting in the higher-ed blogosphere was inherently anecdotal. By 2016, however, we no longer have to wonder. Over the last seven or eight years, we have been getting a clearer sense of how broken graduate education is in the west. William Pannapacker (aka "Thomas H. Benton") writes in "Just Don't Go, Part 2" (2009) that graduate schools
play obfuscatory games with their placement records and rarely give students a realistic sense of what it is like being in graduate school — how it's not all about the "life of the mind" as two years gradually turns into a decade of contracting horizons and growing desperation.
Of course, the lack of accurate information available to students about graduate school is not accidental; it's an essential component of the academic labor system. Even assistant professors, who should know what's going on, encourage their students to go to graduate school because it is professionally risky to do otherwise. One might be seen as "doing a grave disservice to the profession," as one writer said to me in a tone of bureaucratic menace.
But of the many letters I received last month, the majority included some version of "Why did no one tell me?" and "What am I going to do now?"
More than a few confessed the depression they experienced in graduate school. Several mentioned thoughts of killing themselves, and — after a decade of reading letters by the thousands on similar themes — I was not surprised at all. It's more than accumulated anecdotes. As Piper Fogg recently presented it in The Chronicle (February 20): "67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health."
These are actual numbers. And the reason Pannapacker remains one of my personal heroes is that his was one of the earliest and most honest voices to talk about the obfuscation that I and my fellow graduate students experienced firsthand. What once sounded like a conspiracy theory, fancifully attempting to explain why an English department could be staffed with 8 tenured faculty members and 38 adjuncts, now looks like reality.
There has (at least since the late 1960s) been a dearth of reliable data for most academic fields correlating graduate student health, subsequent career performance, and program funding. I suspect this is because acquiring such information was as difficult as asking someone to incriminate themselves in court. There is a reason the Fifth Amendment exists. The academic analogue might be labeled, "The Conspiracy of Silence in the Interests of Self-Preservation."
It's not hard to understand that, particularly in academic culture, speaking up at any point may ruin one's already slim job prospects. Moreover, it is unwise to use language like exploitation, depression, long-term poverty, unnavigable bureaucracy, Machiavellian feuding, and misrepresentation when talking about what you experienced for close to a decade as you tried to get a PhD. People will tell you to keep your mouth shut and that's largely good advice, at least from the standpoint of the strategic job search. Unfortunately, it's not so great from the standpoint of mental health.
Maybe your experience was like mine: after two masters degrees, I completed a PhD in just over 3 years. And though I suffered some serious personal tragedies toward the end of my program, I was able to complete my work with a minimum of trouble. Compare that to Zoe Stavri who writes in her blog, Another angry woman, that her PhD program was "so indistinguishable from depression, that I am left wondering whether in fact depression is a feature rather than a bug." Or Audry Watters, now a freelance writer and tech journalist, who received no support or leeway when her husband died in the middle of her PhD in comparative lit. On her website, hackeducation.com, Watters explains why she quit:
I quit because I'd lost the stomach for being part of the institution of higher education — one that wasn't sustaining me intellectually, financially or spiritually; one that wanted me to teach classes for very low wages — as a grad student and then likely as an adjunct faculty member. I quit because I was exhausted and couldn't handle the obstacle course that grad school and the academic job market still required my running through. I quit because I needed to heal from the trauma of watching Anthony die. I quit because far from that so-called Ivory Tower being a place of solace and contemplation, it had become a nightmare of bureaucracy and politics. ("The Real Reason I Dropped Out of a PhD Program")
Historically, what could usually be found (aside from the highly suspect Bowen and Sosa Report in 1989) came from confessions made online by the disappointed and the overlooked—those who no longer had anything to lose, felt they had gotten a raw deal from the academy, and were unwilling to be complicit any longer. Sadly, more of these non-entities exist now than ever before. The upside—if such a word could even be used in this context—is that people like William Pannapacker are telling the truth—at least a version of the truth that teaches survival.
The saddest, most tragic part is that only those who are tough survive. For example, I have survived because I love teaching so much, I'd do it for free and I'm ruthless about avoiding that eventuality. Others, whether through intensive networking or existing connections, survive through a kind of perpetual low-stakes patronage that can be like nepotism or hustling or just an exotic form of luck. But everyone agrees that academia shouldn't be about these things. And, with the exception of Penelope Trunk, everyone agrees that a graduate humanities degree should not require the prospective student to have a trust fund as a prerequisite. As Alex Pang wrote back in 2004:
No one has born the weight of the decade's terrible academic job market more than young Ph.D.s. Caught between a culture that insists they cannot leave academia, a system that doesn't have enough room to allow them to stay, and a sense that Ph.D.s are not suited to nonacademic jobs and nonacademic jobs are unsuitable to Ph.D.s, they have too often found themselves deprived of opportunities and alternatives.
In a highly cited Chronicle of Higher Education column, "Deprogramming from the Academic Cult," Margaret Newhouse mentions a number of unhealthy attitudes typical in this kind of academic culture, ranging from extreme perfectionism to overwhelming peer pressure to unrealistic career expectations. It's useful to read her piece alongside a similar Chronicle post by Pannapacker in which the author summarizes Newhouse's ideas relative to his own career:
Although I am currently a tenure-track professor of English, I realize that nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other highly-qualified Ph.D.'s in the humanities who will never have full-time academic jobs and, as a result, are symbolically dead to the academy. Even after several years, many former graduate students grapple with feelings of shame and failure that, to outsiders, seem completely irrational.
For all its claims to the contrary, graduate education does not seem to enhance the mental freedom of many students, some of whom are psychologically damaged by the experience. As Newhouse suggested—perhaps more rhetorically than seriously—graduate school these days seems to have a lot in common with mind-control cults.
Science writer, Gwen Pearson, also thinks of academia as a cult and writes that the "Alternative Careers in Science" workshop she is regularly asked to give at her university is called "alternative" because "They don't mean becoming a music composer or a patent examiner; they mean getting a job that isn't a professor in academia. Because, to them, anything else IS alternative, and, ergo, inferior."
For many grad students, it seems that there is eventually a "looking glass moment" in which they wonder if they truly are inferior life forms and realize that their sense of self has been inexorably altered as a result of living inside academia. Sometimes this is what you'd want: you have acquired a range of implicit and explicit methodologies for leading an intellectually curious life. But just as often, it can be shattering: you feel unfit to be or do anything other than function as a scholar in a university setting. Most people stop at that stage and grieve for the life they could have had if they hadn't gone into graduate study, for the deep sacrifices they were compelled to make by a broken system, and for the profound opportunity cost involved.
There is an immense amount of unfairness and dishonesty integral to higher education, at least right now in the west. And it goes without saying that reform is needed. But I think Zoe Stavri is correct when she notes that even though it's obvious reform is necessary "none of this will happen, because the problems in our universities are the same as the problems outside of our universities"—which is to say that the entire concept of an "ivory tower" as a refuge from economic and political realities is nothing but a myth:
The thing about PhDs is they are a scam. On paper, they are studying a topic that you love, and becoming an expert in it, and generally contributing to human knowledge. In practice, what actually happens is the university gets a research assistant for three years, to work on a project that they want studied that is in some way related to a thing that interests you (but is actually whatever they could get funding for). The university doesn't have to pay a penny for this research assistant: in fact, they get paid to have you there! I imagine it would be a whole lot easier if everyone just admitted that this is what is happening, but nobody does. And instead, the whole structure gaslights and emotionally blackmails PhD students. It shifts all of the problems we encounter as employees into personal failings: clearly we're not interested enough in this topic that we supposedly chose, and if we cared enough, we'd want to do the work.
If you want to attend graduate school do not dismiss voices like these. Remember, these people—the ones passionately describing what were perhaps life-shattering experiences—are just like you. They love(d) something and want(ed) to be part of it. They are smart, driven, accomplished. And they were cast out of a system as soon as they ceased being functional parts of its hierarchy. By rights, they should be teaching someone like you at some college somewhere. But this is not how things worked out.
Consider further that Pannapacker's hypothetical of what could happen to any (academically successful) PhD after graduation is a point-by-point accurate description of what befell at least two people with whom I went to grad school:
Everyone has told her that "there are always places for good people in academe." She begins to obsess about the possibility of some kind of fatal personal shortcoming. She goes through multiple mock interviews, and takes business classes, learning to present herself for nonacademic positions. But again and again, she is passed over in favor of undergraduates who are no different from people she has taught for years. Maybe, she wonders, there's something about me that makes me unfit for any kind of job.
This goes on for years: sleepless nights, anxiety, escalating and increasingly paralyzing self-doubt, and a host of stress-induced ailments. She has even removed the Ph.D. from her résumé, with some pain, but she lives in dread that interviewers will ask what she has been doing for the last 12 years. (All her old friends are well established by now, some with families, some with what seem to be high-powered careers. She lives in a tiny apartment and struggles to pay off her student loans.) What's left now but entry-level clerical work with her immediate supervisor just three years out of high school?
I write this not to scare you but to open your eyes. Graduate school is wonderful. It is also hard. It can also damage you greatly. You have to be strong, steady, emotionally resilient, and willing to look at your years of study as valuable in themselves. No matter what people say, a PhD in an arts or humanities subject is not likely to be a strategic career move. You do it because you love it and you are too stubborn not to do it. Regrets are inevitable. However, if you love the work more than you love leading any particular lifestyle, you will be able to put the work first. This means before kids, before money, before love, and before the comfortable middle-class life someone else might be enjoying with your same degree.
Am I saying you have to be a poor monk in order to do this? Not necessarily; though, I'm not ruling it out. What I am saying is that the work must come before all other things. If you can have those other things, wonderful. But they are "in addition" not "along with" or "because of." If you think it's impossible to work outside a university setting, read Alex Pang's excellent blog post about this exact possibility. But, above all else, do not assume that you will be paid or even regarded as anything but cheap labor after all your work and sacrifice.
Make the work your refuge. Develop alternate forms of income if necessary after graduating. And always take extraordinary steps to ensure physical health and mental stability. Contrary to popular opinion, academia is not for the weak. And those who "can't do" certainly can't survive in its highly competitive and unforgiving environment.
* Note: If you are just graduating from university with a BA in an arts or humanities field and are wondering about what to do next, this is solid advice: http://chronicle.com/article/What-to-Advise-Unemployed/44491
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