As much as I would love to capitalize on all the new readers who found the blog last week*, it’s not going to happen.
I’ve spent most of this week hovering over the hospital bed of my 90-year-old father, trying to figure out whether or not this is his final health crisis.
The whole point of the Sift is that I scour the internet looking for the stories you ought to be reading, I check the facts and the framing of the stories the mainstream media is covering, and I try to provide the kind of perspective and background that intelligent readers are looking for.
There’s no way any of that was going to happen this week. I could probably go through my files of half-written articles and throw some stuff together, but that would be no service to my regular readers and give new readers a poor introduction to what I’m trying to do here.
Maybe next week.
* Last week was the second-most-popular week in weeklysift.com history, with 38,000 views. Most of them were for The Distress of the Privileged.
This week the focus shifted to the Democratic Convention, where Bill Clinton came through big for President Obama, and Obama and Biden did well for themselves. (The pundit class, though, didn’t give Obama much credit, their commentary more-or-less amounting to: “The buildings he leaps at a single bound used to be taller.”)
This week’s Sift will review where the race stands, though I haven’t decided whether that will get its own article or happen in the weekly summary.
I’m trying not to get completely absorbed in the election, so this week’s longest article will step back and look at a larger-scale issue that I’m calling “The Genuine Distress of the Privileged”. What do you do with people who feel persecuted because they are losing their dominance? Whites, men, Christians, English-speakers, heterosexuals … it genuinely stings to be told that there’s something wrong with the attitude you were brought up to have. They don’t think of themselves as hate-filled bigots, so why do people keep calling them that?
The question is: How can we acknowledge their distress without de-railing efforts to deal with the far more serious problems of groups that really are persecuted?
Like last week, this week’s Sift will have only one main article. The rise of Paul Ryan is making me revisit my misspent Objectivist youth in “Ayn, Paul, and Me”.
In the weekly summary, everybody was talking about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. They were also talking about where Eastwood debated the chair — apparently at some kind of Republican get-together in Tampa. I must have missed it.
Oh yeah — it was the Republican National Convention, where we found out that George W. Bush is an un-person. Eight years of recent American history disappeared down the memory hole. Maybe the Democrats will figure out how to dredge them up this week.
Also, the convention raised the stakes in a brewing conflict between the press and the Romney campaign. Politicians have never been known as truth-tellers, but Romney is lying in a no-apologies fact-check-this way that threatens the foundations of political journalism. Journalists are starting to strike back, but it might be too late.
This week’s Sift will have only one main article, plus the usual collection of short notes. The article is “Five Pretty Lies and the Ugly Truths They Hide”. It’s a little long, but each lie is its own digestible chunk, so I hope it won’t be hard to get through.
“Pretty Lies” is my attempt to learn something from the Todd Akin debacle. When you boil it down, here’s what Akin did: He offered a pretty lie — that “legitimate” rape victims don’t get pregnant — to cover up the ugliness of his policies: He wants the government to force raped women to bear children for their rapists.
Once you have that pattern in mind, you see it all over the conservative movement. Fundamentally, conservative policies are cruel, but conservatives want to think of themselves as nice people. The only way to square that circle is with a lie. So pretty lies pop up whenever conservatives gather together: the uninsured can get health care in the ER, racism ended decades ago, tax cuts pay for themselves, and so on.
When you hear stuff like this, it’s easy to get diverted into an argument about facts. But exposing the lie is only half the battle. You also need to understand why the lie is necessary, so that you can shine a light on the ugly truth it’s hiding.
This week everybody was still talking about Paul Ryan, and the Romney campaign tried to muddy the waters by arguing that President Obama — and not Paul Ryan — is the real threat to Medicare.
If you’re not plugged in to the world of untraceable viral emails and fake people calling in to talk-radio shows, you might not realize just how involved the Romney Medicare deception is or how effective it could be. It’s a real lesson in propaganda that I’ll try to unravel in “How Lies Work”.
This week’s other main article is a follow-up to last week’s I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To, which became the second most popular Sift post of 2012. In capturing the buzz about Ryan, I followed the mainstream pundits into a trap: I ignored Ryan’s record as a radical culture warrior.
That’s the mistake the public made with the Tea Party in 2010; we bought their “Taxed Enough Already” schtick and were surprised when their vision of “small government” included forced transvaginal ultrasounds. So like The Who, I’m praying we don’t get fooled again. That’s why this week’s other main article is “Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women”.
The Ryan article should be up in a few minutes, but “How Lies Work” will take a little bit longer.
This weekend, every pundit in the world wrote about Paul Ryan. A lot of it was repetitive and some was drivel, but I sifted through it to pull out ten points you need to understand. That article, “I Read About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To”, takes up most of this week’s Sift.
A shorter second article looks at a subtle way racism and religious prejudice seep into news coverage: The more we learn more about the guy who murdered six people at the Sikh Temple, the more tangled up he is in white supremacism. And yet the media rarely describes him as a “terrorist”, much less a “white terrorist” or a “Christian terrorist”. But it’s hard to imagine that if a dark-skinned Muslim had shot up a Christian church, he would be portrayed as a “troubled young man”. His connection to radical groups and movements would be central to the story, not symptoms of some underlying mental disorder.
I’m pretty much on schedule this morning, so I hope to get everything posted by noon.
I’ve got to be honest: I’m still not entirely sure what’s going to be in today’s Sift. I spent this week in the Midwest managing the affairs of my 90-year-old father and considered canceling the Sift entirely until next week, but on my way home on Saturday I decided there were a few things worth posting. (BTW, those of you who follow my religious writings may feel like you know my Dad. He showed up as a major character here and here. Oh, and also in a political post here.)
This week everybody was mostly talking about same stuff as last week: the Olympics and Mitt Romney’s taxes. And then we got another major shooting, which might be a hate crime. We can’t be sure yet, because the shooter is dead and officials are reluctant to assign a motive prematurely.
The combination of a major automatic-trading malfunction Wednesday and a filibuster of the cybersecurity bill Thursday inspired me to write “The Looming Software Catastrophe”. When there’s a trend that only a major disaster can stop, you can pretty well predict that there will be a major disaster.
The Sift will be back at full strength next Monday.
Today’s weekly summary is going to be called “What Free Market?”, and its quote comes from Barry Lynn’s book Cornered about the effect of hidden monopolies on the economy. It may look like the stores contain a dazzling variety of goods, but often all the brands in a sector are made by one or two companies, and even apparent rivals are likely to have overlapping supply chains. It’s much easier for an enterprising individual to build a better mousetrap than to get it onto the local WalMart’s shelves without selling the idea to some megacorp first.
What’s everybody been talking about this week? The Olympics, obviously, but I can’t improve on the nonstop TV coverage. However, I couldn’t resist joining the cacophony about Chick-fil-A and Romney’s trip to London.
This week’s other article centers on what I’m learning from Lynn’s book. One issue I keep coming back to in the Sift is rising inequality. But all along, I’ve felt like I’ve been missing a piece of the puzzle. The usual explanations — globalization, lobbyists, bailouts, tax cuts for the rich, etc. — all play a part, but I don’t think they fully explain the explosive accumulation of wealth at the very top. Maybe monopoly is that missing puzzle-piece, especially the monopolies and near-monopolies that get between consumers and the people who make or invent the products we buy.
Everybody’s talking about the Dark Knight shooting. That’s getting plenty of coverage without me, so I’ll focus on three reactions: the gun control discussion it re-ignites (somewhat to President Obama’s consternation), the bizarre fantasy that an armed crowd could have taken the shooter down with less loss of life, and the religious-right view that blames such disasters on separation of church and state. (Seriously. And BTW, the victims are in Hell if they weren’t Christians.)
Until the shooting, everybody was still talking about Mitt Romney’s taxes, Republicans manufactured a gaffe by selectively quoting something sensible President Obama said, and Ann Romney may or may not have called us peons “you people”.
But the main articles this week will be about longer-term issues. In spite of things I’ve encouraged you to believe in the past, it looks like Peak Oil isn’t really happening, at least not anytime soon. And I take advantage of the Catholic Church’s Natural Family Planning Awareness Week to look back on the papal encyclical that is causing all the problems.
I’m moving slowly this morning, so the first article (on the papal encyclical) probably won’t show up until about 11 eastern time.
This week’s Sift has three articles, so there won’t be as many short notes as usual. I had planned two:
a discussion of Carne Ross’ new book The Leaderless Revolution, which pairs nicely with what I talked about last week, Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites. Both books are looking at the broad failure of our institutions and finding its roots in the dark side of something we believe in deeply. Hayes targets meritocracy, and Ross attacks the whole notion of representative government. Ross uses his experiences as a British diplomat to argue that the world has become too complicated to turn our responsibilities as citizens over to leaders. He argues instead for a more anarchic, more directly participatory way of addressing our problems. (Yes, Ross is an Occupy Wall Street guy.)
a lighter piece that I think makes an important point: What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism. Discussions about the free market always end up focused on computers, where the market has stimulated better performance for less money. For some reason they never focus on shaving, where a series of phony “revolutions” in technology have justified higher prices for no improvement in performance. In the course of my research, I end up reclaiming the inexpensive tool of my ancestors, the double-edged safety razor. (And since I know someone is going to notice: The bearded picture above is how I look in the winter. In the summer I’m clean-shaven.)
But this week’s news-network buzz about Mitt Romney’s finances and business career was such a perfect illustration of what I was talking about last April (in The Narratives of November) that I just had to comment. So there’s a third article: Believe in America, Mitt.
The shaving article should go up in an hour or so, and I expect the complete Sift to be up roughly noonish on the East Coast.
The Weekly Sift 