Case Studies in Open and Closed Minds, Advocate, 20/11/2017

I was originally going to talk some more about Gilles Deleuze’s conceptual engineering today. But a fairly viral article in my social network of Newfoundlanders inspired a few new insights about the culture of my home province and the mess it faces.

The wreck of the Charcot in Conception Harbour, Newfoundland.
Certainly not a metaphor for the island's current economic position.
I swear.

James McLeod – who for the last eight years has been a stalwart reporter for The Telegram, the major newspaper for St John’s – probably doesn’t remember meeting me. We shared a few beers in Toronto when I first moved to Ontario, and I was visiting an old friend.

McLeod was just about to move to Newfoundland, a Torontonian going to work in St John’s. He did fantastic work at The Telegram and loved living in St John’s, but he couldn’t stay in the city following its economic downturn.

Newfoundland’s entire economy depended on high oil prices – government revenues depended on stupidly low offshore petroleum well royalty rates, and much of the rural workforce commuted to the Alberta tar sands. As the island has traditionally done, its leaders put all their economic eggs in one volatile, risky basket.

Right now, Newfoundland and Labrador is on the threshold of an even bigger economic crisis than the cod moratorium and the end of much of the inshore fishing industry. And those crises – the oil crash, the massive government debt burden of Muskrat Falls, the massively aging population – will drive a huge migration from NL to the rest of Canada.

What I find most illuminating were the different reactions to McLeod’s article in my social networks. It’s anecdotal evidence of wide social trends, but it displays a depressingly common cross-section of the attitudes about the future of my birthplace.

Solid headshot. The bow tie is pretty cool too.

One friend, when he posted the article, agreed with McLeod that the province was heading for an economic disaster – he was depressed that there seemed to be no way out, but resigned to another outflux of population. He has plenty of experience working around Canada and the rest of the globe, an open, progressive point of view.

Another friend was resigned to the disaster as well, but also expressed an incredible bitterness that any of Newfoundland’s leaders could ever handle it. This friend is a very perceptive man – I remember through the Williams years of the mid-2000s, he was very skeptical of his leadership.

He showed very little of the sad worship of Danny that swept Newfoundland’s culture in those years. There’s a kind of disgust at the province’s leadership – a combination of bitterness, resentfulness, and hopelessness. A loss of faith in any hope or optimism at all. I worry about that.

And another friend – a Facebook connection from having shared some friends and some conferences in the New Democratic Party back in the early 2010s – who expressed what I find to be a very sad and all-too-common attitude.

Go on back to the mainland. No matter all the time you spent here, no matter how much you came to love Newfoundland, no matter how much the island shaped you – if you’re leaving, then good riddance. You were never our friend.

It’s an inward turning. When resentment boils into contempt. When it’s in triumph, it’s the attitude of the Williams partisan – “How does it feel now, mainlander?” When it’s under a weight, it’s the spite of disgust – “Fuck off back to the mainland!”

The rocks will outlast the people.

Turning away, no matter what’s on offer. Whether it’s multiculturalism, true economic diversity, business and trade links, or even just inter-community friendship. Turn away. They’re not one of us. They don’t count – and they never did.

No matter how much McLeod contributed to my home province over the last decade, it’s the feeling that the province owes him nothing. No mainlander is worth respect.

I’m not a mainlander. I live in Toronto, and my spouse is Torontonian. I grew up in Newfoundland. But being Italian, I never really fit in – my name and the fact that I had a large extended family in Quebec made me a foreigner. Even though I was born at the old Grace Hospital in St John’s and lived there until I was 25.

The irony is that I’ve actually written for Cleary’s paper about the political and cultural insularity of Newfoundland’s culture. It wasn't the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador that drove me to build a life elsewhere. It was the insularity of so many popular attitudes that made my more open perspective feel unwelcome.

There was also the feeling that, despite having been born and grown up in St John's, that I never truly belonged, that my Italian heritage and my connections to Quebec kept me from being a real Newfoundlander. Well, if you don't want me, I won't come . . . .

When There’s One More Thing to Clarify, Composing, 31/07/2017

I wasn’t on the blog much, but I actually had a really productive writing weekend. Since I’ve caught up on my marking at the college, I had some time this weekend to get back to that project for the Reply Collective that I was telling you about a while ago.

The blog is, once again, moving on from considerations of Mt Pelerin
Society philosophy, writing, and communications. But those Mt Pelerin
views are seriously unforgettable. This image came from some dude
who lives near there selling his duplex apartment.

So that draft is finished, and I’ll probably give it a polish later this week before sending it up to the editors in Virginia to go in the publishing queue. It’s not as openly experimental as some of my other articles, but I think that’s for the best.

I’ve had my period of playing around, and this is an essay where I wanted to get serious. It’s called “Beyond Socrates: The Philosopher as Creative Craftsperson,” so the topic has a pretty wide scope.

It rides on a few contemporary examples and responds to a half-recent essay by a fellow SERRC member to further develop my philosophical challenge to the philosophical community – Get your conversations out of musty overpriced journals and get them online and into the streets.

Most important to encouraging that profound worldly engagement for philosophy, is writing your conversations in language that’s more accessible to people. I’m not talking about anything so pedestrian (or loaded with the opposition’s meaning) as “dumbing down.” I mean write in the common styles of intelligent discussion that you see in high-quality feature journalism.

Except you’re writing about concepts. Ideas in action through life in society. You’ll find out in more detail soon enough. I’m excited about that one.
• • •

While searching for images to go along with this post, I also discovered
this one of Friedrich Hayek relaxing and having a laugh like an
ordinary human being, instead of staring seriously and portentously
into the camera.

Here’s something else I’m excited about – moving on from writing about Milton Friedman on the blog. I went to Capitalism and Freedom because I was thinking more about how I’ll discuss the dystopian utopia of Earth’s current political, economic, and ecological clusterfuck in Utopias.

I realized that I wanted to get more material on the ideas of Mt Pelerin libertarianism than I had from looking into Hayek. Friedman’s book – and the responses to my posts from other friends at SERRC – helped me wrap my head around an interesting angle about that libertarianism.

Here’s the short version. The original philosophical texts of Mt Pelerin libertarianism – key examples being Capitalism and Freedom and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom – were (most of the time) very nuanced, well-thought texts. But the modern politics of libertarian right-wing activists are brutal, dogmatic, and significantly meme-based.

Where’s the disconnection? You discover that through media analysis of the online social networking platform. Where’s the connection? It’s in the tells of those popular books, the spots where they reveal a blindness.

It also fits the theme of my last post about my Capaldi Years Doctor
Who book project, that my research recently is mostly about
returning to ideas that I studied a few years ago to update my
perspective.

All the time, it’s a blindness to the systematic and community-level processes that help constitute individual personalities. The individual and his liberty is, ontologically speaking, such a fundamental unit of moral and political analysis for the Mt Pelerin thinkers, that the interdependence of social and individual drifts out of their philosophical view. Same with systematic effects on individual liberty.

I still feel like I’m not quite saying it right. but I’ll get back to it eventually.

After reading Friedman, I switched tack in my research to fill in some more ideas that I wanted to revisit. That’s my uptake of Antonio Gramsci’s ideas. Thanks to some nerdy tweeting from Jeet Heer, I discovered a few Perry Anderson books, and it made for wonderfully pleasurable and productive reading.

I’ll talk more about my engagement with Anderson’s ideas and interpretations over the next couple of weeks. Here’s basically what he helped me clarify.

The integration of ideology and military power in international hegemony. The complexity of the marxist tradition, which absolutely contradicts all the popular discourse about marxism today. Most of that popular discourse is uninformed far-right smears of all progressive politics as “cultural marxism.”

I'm also closer now than I was three years ago to a really detailed
outline of what Utopias will actually cover, so I wanted to clarify
some of the outstanding questions about Gramsci's ideas about
the material possibilities of an activist's life before I put any more
flesh on that manuscript's skeleton.

Well, Anderson’s helped me get another good handle on why this idea is such an incredible misfire and mistake. If anything, I think a better understanding of real marxist traditions – and particularly, practice – can do some real good to shutting down the resurgent fascism of our era.

He also wrote a really good book about caste politics in India, but that’s for another post entirely.
• • •
So I’m going to throw a link to this post up on my Patreon a few hours after it goes live today. Since it works as a general update on my writing projects, and it’s posting on the same week as my patron payouts, I figure it’s a good place to throw it.

If you like hearing about any of these projects, think of pencilling in a couple of bucks each month to support more publications. I’m taking part this year in one really amazing artistic project that could seriously use some Patreon support.

I can’t say anything about it yet, because it’s too early in the production process. The people in charge aren’t me, so I can’t just start yammering on social media yet about its details. But it’s going to be pretty awesome.

That said, its commercial potentials aren’t that great. Which is why I’m blatantly asking for more Patreon support. So if you like sci-fi, and you like the kind of sci-fi I write, and you can spare maybe two dollars each month, hit my Patreon and throw some cash on there.

You'll be helping me produce more super-trippy writing projects. You know you want to do that.

Could You Ever Have Trusted At All? Jamming, 06/03/2017

When I first read the story of Juan Thompson, I wanted to be surprised, but I just couldn’t.

And I'd like to check out her films. They seem interesting – the kinds of
stories that build from where Lena Dunham left us.

One of the voices I came across on Twitter put the point better than I could. The start of Erika Heidewald’s tweet storm is on the right.

I’m writing a longer reflection about this. As someone who puts in time volunteering to put diverse voices and stories into my city’s cultural conversation, I know where I stand in the politics of our generation. The existence of the misogynist left-winger is something I didn’t want to have to face.

But it’s there. Through all the rise of the alt-right – the idea of white genocide going mainstream, daily streams of harassment campaigns across social media – I thought of this sexism as a creature of the reactionary, conservative, nationalist streams of our society.

I knew it wasn’t true. If only from my own experience as a much younger man, I knew the left had plenty of misogyny, sexism, obsession, harassment, and violence against women. Our political goal was to identify and end it, but it doesn’t mean the attitude didn’t persist.

Thompson is an extreme example, and a peculiar outlier. He isn’t just an obsessed ex-boyfriend – he was a fabulist, liar, and con artist for years. His lying to his own bosses about where his sources came from – and that they were even real – was the reason for his dismissal. And he’d lied to The Intercept for years, publishing many different stories that turned out to be utter fabrications.

Juan Thompson may have played a noticeable, if small, role in shaping our political culture. With his lies.

So don’t let this wretch break your spirit. But let his example keep your eye critical. Glenn Greenwald is not a stupid man – Robinson may be a beast, but he was at least smart enough to keep a historically important investigative reporter from catching on to his con for about two years.

I've been skeptical of a lot of Greenwald's reporting for quite a while,
though The Intercept is generally very reliable about dimensions of
American news that doesn't make it into mainstream discussions.

What vulnerability could Thompson have exploited in Greenwald to keep up the charade as long as he did?

Aside from the fact that not every story he wrote was a total concoction of lies and falsehoods, I mean.

I first discovered Glenn Greenwald when everyone else did – when he reported on Edward Snowden’s leaks of secret National Security Agency wiretapping and mass data collection. Greenwald shepherded Snowden’s revelations to the wider world. The notoriety he gained from that not only made his career, it made him a historic figure.

Those were important revelations – that kind of surveillance on a mass scale is a dangerous activity for any government or institution to do, rendering literally billions of people vulnerable in ways we’ve never been before. Yet as I watch Greenwald’s public behaviour in the Trump era, it unnerves me.

I feel like Greenwald’s opposition to the Democratic Party that vilified him and prosecuted Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and other leakers has hardened. In a recent interview with Democracy Now, Greenwald focussed his energy on calling out the Democratic Party leadership for their hypocrisy and worse.

Greenwald cares more about critiquing and somehow dismantling the American intelligence and security agencies who he sees as the biggest threat to democracy. And his position is complicated, because he has, from one important perspective an important point.

The 2016 election was Clinton's to lose from the beginning, and her
margin was small enough – 70-80,000 votes across three states Trump
narrowly won and a huge total popular vote victory – that I can actually
say that the campaign and DNC's arrogance was enough to cost her.
Greenwald is right that the Democratic Party has collapsed – no serious
control of any elected body in the federal government and the
governments of more than half the states. They need to rebuild their
party and I've honestly seen no sign that this is a priority at all.

Because it is very dangerous to empower a country’s intelligence and security agencies to undermine elected leaders. The heads of such agencies have led actual coups in countries around the world, overthrowing elected officials and junking citizens’ democratic rights. So we have to eye them with suspicion.

And we have to hold our elected officials and political party administrators to account in this regard. We can’t have them abiding by policies that give intelligence agencies immense secret powers over the population.

Greenwald is right that this was a serious mistake of Obama’s Presidency, and that Hillary Clinton was an even more aggressive advocate for intelligence agencies’ priorities. But the danger of Donald Trump exists on a totally different vector.

Trump is the figurehead of a white nationalist political movement – American radical racists and nihilists. And he’s the President of the United States.

So democrats in the United States are stuck in a very bad space. It’s immensely dangerous to enable intelligence agencies to undermine and tip elected officials out of office. But it’s also immensely dangerous to have a democratic country’s executive branch run by anti-democratic radicals.

Even the people who seemed like liberators only a few years ago can, at their best, only fall into opposing one of these sides while the other slides away. So was it even worth believing them in the first place?

No Journalists and No PR – Only Content Creators, Composing, 09/12/2015

As well as being an author and a screenwriter, I work in communications, also known as public relations. But I used to work in journalism, and I sometimes do freelance journalism work for a little extra cash when I can. That’s our economy. It’s a hustle.

Films like Spotlight are excellent public relations for
the image of journalism as a profession whose ideal
is the pursuit of truth, accountability, and justice.

The fact that I work both in public relations and journalism might sound a little weird to some of my older colleagues in communications. It might sound weird to some of my communications colleagues who are younger, and for whom PR is their only career. To an older journalist, it might sound like an intense hypocrisy. 

When I worked in journalism, the ethical mantra of the profession was heard frequently, from many corners of conversation. Strive for objectivity, and above all strive for truth. 

While most major journalistic institutions frequently serve their corporate masters, or the elite classes, or the government that intimidates or outright runs it, the ethical ideal will always haunt the profession.

As far as this goes, public relations is an anathema profession. Their job is to promote the messages that their clients want as many people as possible to believe about them, no matter its truth. 

At least, that’s the morally worst possible way to describe the profession, and the way to describe the morally worst public relations people. Like the PR pro working at a big agency, who’ll move from working on a retainer for an organization like the Sierra Club to a file for the Energy East pipeline without a second thought to any possible conflicts between those clients. Just doing my job.

I’ve met older folks in PR who presume that journalists are all out to get the PR pro and the companies they work for. I’ve read PR pros’ articles complaining about “smug journos” who can barely articulate their point without betraying their own pathetic egotism.

The thing is, journalism isn’t a special profession. There are duties of ethical practice that many people rely on, since the power of the media to shape public opinion and culture is immense. And public relations is powerful too. PR pros at the apex of the profession represent and manage the reputations of the world’s most powerful corporations.

Matthew Gwyther, of Management Today. Reading
his opinion piece, I can't help but think that he may
have missed the parody of the Smug Journo
Twitter feed. Unless his tone of naked rage was
itself a parody of the thin skin he accused
journalists of having, as his post was mostly a
litany of petty insults about having a bigger
salary and a better job than a lot of journalists.

Engineers, for example, have a similar power in society. They literally build the structures we live in, work in, and travel in every day. They have a considerable ethical duty of best practice, but no one considers engineers smug. At least not for this reason. 

Though Gwyther’s article, linked above, had a solid place in his cheek, he seemed to miss an important aspect of his most condescending point. Yes, PR professionals who work in decently-sized agencies or corporations tend to make more money than the average journalist.

But not everyone who chooses communications for their career gets these positions right away. Although it’s a business designation in a field that’s necessary for all businesses, full employment is a thing of the past. Journalists and communicators suffer the same problems: a growing supply of labour in a shrinking or stagnant job market.

Journalists and communicators, the working stiffs going contract to contract, are starting our careers with neither title. Instead, we’re content creators. 

There are quite a few negative aspects to this. From the journalist’s side, there’s the pressure to produce clickbait to drive clickthrough and advertising revenue, above actually informing people and provoking them to think.

The communicators likewise forget about engaging their audience, building deep identification, a fandom, or any dedication to their brand or company. “Engaging content” is too vague an idea to give any indication of what standard of quality a creator should strive for, aside from ‘good enough to get a clickthrough or a follow.’

But one positive aspect of all media producers having to start their careers as ‘content creators’ is that the antagonism and hostility between communicators and journalists are disappearing. 

Young journalists know the life of the company person without the self-deceit of their noble illusion. And young communicators find themselves writing journalism as often as PR copy.

I came across an angry tweet the other day. “Journalists hate the word "content" because they want to believe that journalism is a special snowflake.” More smugness from someone who doesn’t realize that the vacuousness of employing someone for a purpose so vague as “Make us some content” actually results in terrible content. 

When all you ask for is some content, all you're asking for is something to read or watch that meets the merest minimum standard of distracting a person from their current task to put an ad in front of their face. 

When you ask only for content, you're putting the creative elements of media to the service of ads. But you can only produce truly great content (like Breaking Bad) when you consider the ads in the service of the content itself.

Directionless, empty content. The imperative to “make good content” separates us from what we’re actually doing in a way that “make entertainment,” “make journalism,” or “make art” doesn’t.

Public Relations Problems: If the Naysayers Are Right, Composing, 01/09/2015

I labelled this post Composing because, ultimately, it's about a creative act: building a public relations plan, which includes research, strategy, countless contingencies, and dealing with a crisis. 

Some folks might consider it a little presumptuous of me to write an opinion like this about one of the biggest companies in the world, but a professional should have professional opinions. That's ultimately what this post is, the opinion of a young professional in communications, watching a crisis unfold in one of the richest corporations in the world, who can’t help but think something's been missed.

Amazon was already known for overworking its
warehouse employees as well.

I’m talking about the mess that Amazon found itself in, after the New York Times exposé by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of their everyday office culture. This article is just over two weeks old. It blew up all over the internet, one of the most popular and discussed investigative articles they've done in a long time. 

If you haven’t read it, it’s incredibly long, so I’ll give you the shortest possible version. What they discovered was that Amazon's corporate culture is apparently so competitive and intense in its constant, competitive striving for excellence, that they've created a stressful living hell of continual pressure, fear, and bizarrely productive creativity. They’ve normalized overwork to the threshold of collapse.

That was the message of the Times’ article. There was some pretty serious corporate response. All of these responses were basically inadequate because they never addressed the foundation of the damning article. Here's a representative sample of three that I came across online in the weeks after the Times piece dropped.

Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to employees setting out the goals of the company, and assuring everyone that such an arch-corporate techno-Dickensian nightmare would never be a company where he could work himself.

A high ranking manager, assuring us all that he wasn't writing at the request or orders of the company, wrote a piece on LinkedIn likewise defending the company. Nick Ciubotariu’s core message was that Kantor and Streitfeld were blinded by their confirmation bias, looking only for former employees who had bad experiences with the company.

Ciubotariu also called attention to the Amazon management principle that you should Have the Backbone to Disagree and Commit. This was a core concept of the Times piece, as they found many examples of employees who would articulate this principle by ruthlessly and aggressively attacking the ideas of others to probe them for the smallest problem.

Jeff Bezos is one of America's most intense CEOs.

He, however, was confident that this phenomenon rarely if ever happened because the principle itself makes clear that all disagreement and critical discussion should be respectful.

The other piece was an analysis of Amazon’s public relations failures in the aftermath of the article’s publication. Maura Fitzgerald is a public relations consultant who analyzed the mistakes Amazon made in handling Kantor and Streitfeld’s investigation in the first place. 

Basically, her advice consists in making sure the company's leader, Bezos himself, would be available to reporters to correct any errors or personally rebut any accusations that the reporters’ other interview subjects levelled at him or the company.

All of these are inadequate, because they don’t take account of one important group that Kantor and Streitfeld’s piece hinged upon: aggrieved ex-employees.

Just because an employee is aggrieved, feels she's been done wrong, doesn't mean that grievance has no basis. In that case, the company itself has a moral obligation, as a human organization, to accommodate or at least negotiate the grievances of former employees it has driven away. 

Public relations should facilitate this process and display it to the wider population, for the sake of transparency to its customer base. The testimony of the ex-employees is a problem, and managing a problem means making sure it goes away, never to return. The most certain way to achieve that is actually fixing the problem.

After all, Amazon’s customer base includes significant chunks of humanity.

It doesn't matter what Bezos says when a chorus of former employees speak up about the conditions on the ground in the lower-level divisions that drove them out. This goes for his own statement, and whatever hypothetical rebuttal he would have given in Fitzgerald’s imagination. 

Being a company chief means you get reports from all over the organization, and you see its large-scale development. You don't see what life is like for the average mid or lower-level worker. The view from the top usually can't see the bottom in detail.

In my communications training, we were taught that the default spokesperson for any major issue is the CEO or some equivalent company leader. Public relations people learn to trust your company's CEO. The general public does not trust CEOs.

Ciubortariu’s response smacked too much of his own confirmation bias, the refusal to believe that anything was really wrong. He discounts the credibility of the reporters and the aggrieved employees simply because of their conclusion. When met with a criticism, he attacks the critics, refuting point by point.

He doesn't even refute that well. Take the line about respectful disagreement. Just because a general rule for company governance includes the word respectful, this doesn't mean that everyone behaves that way, or even understands that their aggression is disrespectful.

I once knew a prof, for example, who considered himself very respectful in talking with students, so it was clearly their fault that they almost always left his office crying.

If a group of former employees emerge and reveal what appear to be widespread problems in a company, the best response is to take their accusations seriously, find out if they're true, and act to repair them. If we treat aggrieved ex-employees as dissenters to be discredited and silenced, we may ignore real problems, and let them fester further.

Too often we can forget that crisis communications isn’t just about making the problem go away. It should be the public voice of the repair process that makes sure the problem doesn’t re-emerge later in an even worse form.

The Dirty Fighting of Canadian Politics, Jamming, 01/07/2015

There are days when I feel like I want to just walk into the communications office of an organization I support and start work immediately. I’m exactly the kind of person that a political party should hire if they want to avoid the cultural corruption of office and the accompanying growth of yes-men (of all genders and gender identities) without authentic principles.

I will, when I see it, always call bullshit.

The word of a notable sleazebucket is no reason for me
to abandon my belief that Mulcair is a man of principle.

Today’s bullshit: Martin Patriquin’s recent article in MacLean’s about how the Conservative Party courted Thomas Mulcair in 2007 to advise them on environmental issues and eventually run as a candidate in Quebec. Mulcair had just left the provincial Liberal government of Jean Charest over environmental issues, and he was being courted by the New Democrats, the Conservatives, and a large private law firm.

It was already common knowledge that Mulcair turned down the Conservatives to join the New Democrats, even though they were (in popular perception at least) a complete non-entity in Quebec politics. The narrative of Mulcair becoming a beachhead MP in Montréal who led the organizing effort that saw the orange sweep of the province in 2011 is central to the NDP’s cultural myth-building for their current leader.

Patriquin's article breaks from the established narrative by claiming that Mulcair only turned down the Conservatives because they wouldn’t pay him enough. The Conservatives could offer only $180,000 salary, and Mulcair asked for $300,000. So says Patriquin’s source.

That source was Dimitri Soudas.

Some background, to explain why this makes me call bullshit.

Some of Jim Prentice's remarks before and after he lost
Alberta's election to Rachel Notley's NDP showed that
he actually couldn't conceive of the (relatively)
progressive left provincial party as a real threat.

It's no secret to anyone who reads my blog that I don’t support Stephen Harper, and that I hope Canada has a New Democrat federal government by the end of this year. As recent polls show, I’m not exactly alone here. 

With this in mind, I’m fascinated to see how the lines of attack between our three main parties will shape up. One thing I notice about the Conservative way of thinking is that they seem weak on confronting the NDP, pouring more of their efforts into attacking Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party, their traditional arch-enemy. 

I think this is a cultural problem among Conservatives and conservatives in Canada: because their social circles include few if any people who support the NDP and their own culture considers the NDP a laughingstock of hippies and communists, it’s genuinely difficult for them to understand why anyone would even conceive of the New Democrats as a serious political party at all. 

With this Conservative cognitive block, the Liberal Party is the most threatening to the NDP. They’re used to advertising against the NDP, which often takes anti-right-wing support from the Liberal fold. So their publicity machine can easily understand that the NDP can be a danger to them, especially now that the Liberals no longer hold the advantage of being Canada's "natural governing party." 

The main NDP narrative against the Liberals is that they're a party without true principle. The fight against Bill C51, the “anti-terror” legislation that stamps on many Canadians’ civil rights, is the perfect focus for this narrative. The Liberals supported it when C51 was popular, as the national mood was still trembling from Michael Zehaf-Bibeau's attack on the Parliament buildings. 

Mulcair's NDP took a principled stand against C51, and as the unsavoury details of the bill entered the public conversation, benefited from their uncompromising stance. The NDP is the party of principle, the Liberal the party of poll trackers, self-interested functionaries who desire state power for power’s sake alone.

I do enjoy it when nationally prominent people notice what I have to
say, even when they're just responding to a Twitter rant. This is
what I like about Twitter: if you have something worth saying, it
can be very rewarding.

Speaking of which, Dimitri Soudas, a reject from the top echelons of the Conservative Party for corruption: using the power of his office as the party’s Executive Director to advance the parliamentary career of his spouse Eve Adams. 

Adams tried to parachute herself into the nomination for a safer Conservative seat, the redistricted Oakville-North Burlington, after her own Mississauga district's new borders made it more of a battleground. The Conservative Party forbade her from running for any seat in 2015 because of the nomination shenanigans. She crossed the floor to Trudeau's party, and was parachuted to the Liberal nomination in a north Toronto district. 

Soudas became an operative for the federal Liberal Party after Adams became their most notorious Toronto candidate. At the time, it was suspected that he’d take his valuable knowledge and secrets from his Conservative career to use against them. But it seems the Liberals are also using his knowledge against the NDP, since the smear that Mulcair only cared about money when choosing his political allegiance came from what he told Patriquin.

Soudas and Adams are two figures in Canadian politics who suit each other well, because their primary reason to advance their careers is the advancement of their own careers. Soudas' abuse of his office and Adams’ nominations shenanigans, as well as their easy pass to the Liberal Party show that what they care about most in politics is themselves. 

Dimitri Soudas hasn't done much to establish a reputation
as someone whose word we can trust to be truthful.

So it would make sense that Soudas would interpret Mulcair’s dealbreaker in his negotiations with the Conservatives as the salary, rather than the party’s firm opposition to greenhouse gas reduction and environmental protection. The whole reason Mulcair was a free agent in the first place was because the Charest government set aside parts of Mount Orford provincial park for condo development (a contract for Quebec’s entirely corruption-free construction industry).

Mulcair burned his bridges with Charest’s government and the Quebec Liberal Party because of his environmentalist principles. Soudas, as a man incapable of making a decision on any principle other than egoistic self-interest, would never be able to understand that.

Happy Canada Day, everyone.

Giving Up on Objectivity, Jamming, 13/03/2015

I came across a curious video on Twitter the other day, an interview on FOX Business between anchor Deirdre Bolton and Stewart Baker, a former general counsel to the NSA. It’s the typical FOX softball interview with someone saying sort of insane things about the government’s right to spy on American companies in the name of national security, except for a few points. 

Essentially what state surveillance agencies do all the
time. Just replace the toilet with a smartphone.

You can find it at the FOX News website, but I prefer you to watch it at this link, where I originally discovered it through Twitter, for reasons that will be clear by the end of the post. Here’s a brief run-down. Baker advocates that the American government’s spy agencies should have the right to monitor iPhone transmissions all over the United States and the world because ISIS members have communicated using iPhones.

Baker seems to be going on a tour lately to convince people that it’s wrong to want privacy from the American government’s secret surveillance. And that it’s wrong for large American companies to care about maintaining the privacy of their customers. I find it increasingly sad that the fears of some of the world’s more paranoid encryption nuts are coming true.

But we know all this already. The American government is spying on its citizens. This isn’t news.

What interests me is a particular, almost throwaway, comment of Baker’s to disparage the source of the information that Bolton was interviewing him about: that the CIA had been attempting to hack Apple’s iPhones for years. It came from Edward Snowden and The Intercept, which Baker said was an “ideologically motivated” media organization. 

Baker said that on the FOX Business network. The irony was obvious. The tweet where I first saw it appeared in the feed of Glenn Greenwald, who I follow on Twitter as a source of generally solid dissident journalism* and an interesting person. Like it or not, he is a historic figure in journalism already.

World-historical journalist Glenn Greenwald.

* Naturally, I don’t agree with everything he says. But he’s a perfect barometer of the modern left. In general, everything he writes, links, and tweets criticizing the American surveillance state is wonderful and illuminating. But I find that he gives something of a soft ride to Iran and anti-Israel militant groups. The left, however, should never enforce total unity of thought on all its members. It goes against the entire idea of liberation.

Bolton’s response was more illuminating than a FOX anchor had any right to be: sarcasm. “Stewart, you're talking about editorial judgment! Believe me, that’s a scandal.” Baker spoke as though being ideologically motivated would automatically discredit The Intercept, meaning that they aren’t trustworthy. 

I’ve spoken before of how the concept of objectivity as an ideal for journalism arose as a public image for papers like the New York Times. They strove for objectivity in reporting to distinguish themselves from a more nakedly ideological, sensationalist newspaper media environment in a manner that would earn public trust. General public trust in the objectivity of their reporting would secure the New York Times a reliable revenue base through subscription. 

That’s not to say that the ideal of objectivity was necessarily always a lie. The New York Times and the papers that followed the subscription model used a less sensationalistic, more objective tone of writing and approach to journalism to support their public image as objective. The most foolproof way to appear in a particular manner is actually to do it. 

But an editorial director is always a person, and so comes with presumptions about what is politically reasonable and what is more or less important news. And such people will hire similar people to work with them. Unless hiring a token figure with different moral and political attitudes, usually to appear more objective in the social context of the time. 

I find it very disheartening that even the most insanely
paranoid cryptanalysis junkie of Neal Stephenson's
body of work has turned out to be pretty much right
about the dangers of government surveillance.

Bolton understood something that’s always been true about the media environment. Editorial judgment is the process of ideologically motivating a media organization, or really any organization that produces content or does anything. Our ideologies are our frameworks for our moral and political beliefs. They’re our beliefs about what is reasonable to believe. In that sense, ideology is inescapable, and any editorial judgment is an exercise of ideology.

We know this, generally, as a culture. Though we often take a nihilistic attitude: if the total objectivity that the New York Times convinced me to believe in (so I'd buy a Times subscription) isn’t true, then I guess there can’t be any objectivity.

Maybe not literally, but there can still be what we used to use the language of objectivity to achieve: trustworthy, rationally considered, well-researched journalism. Journalism that doesn’t openly proselytize for a particular ideology, to create a shared mass ideology among its viewers such that they all see the world in a single, simple way.

Such mass ideology is called dogma. Its self-destructive effects are why societies need heretics, to keep these totalizing forces of uniformity at bay. If everyone thinks the same way and does the same thing, and such action was a mistake, there won’t be anyone left to think again. Dogma must be fought because it damages our capacity for social adaptation. 

Finding a Productive Western Left in the Fight Against ISIS, Advocate, 21/02/2015

Ordinary Western people are in a weird position today. Most middle and lower class people today struggle for success. Most of us aim for a relatively dignified life, stuck in an economic system that makes growing demands on us, which leads so many of us to live our lives on credit. 

Our governments’ economic policies tend increasingly to let working people’s salaries stagnate in the face of overall growth in productivity. The rich grow richer, and the rest struggle to maintain the same standards of the previous generation. This is the central political issue of my generation of Western people, the rallying cry of the Occupy movement whose political reverberations are still being felt, and will continue for decades.

But these problems are nothing compared to the horrors people face in the definitive wars of our generation. These include violent conflicts in Sudan, Mali, the Congo, and Kenya over political power and oil and mineral wealth. I refer to Vladimir Putin’s Great Game style imperial games in Ukraine and other bordering countries. I also think of the Islamist uprisings in Nigeria and Pakistan. 

From an RT report of ISIS mass murders in Tikrit.

The most terrifying political violence on Earth to me is the genocidal wave of Islamic State, a Millenarian movement whose goal is to immolate the Middle East, kill hundreds of millions of people, and bring about Allah’s Earth-destroying fire.

I read with rapt attention Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic exploring the theological foundations of Islamic State as a social enterprise. It seems to have been the most read piece of journalism on this movement, and captures much of what mainstream discourse has so far ignored. The movement is, in Wood’s words, a cult with an army of hundreds of thousands, and a military arsenal raided (or given) from the region’s most brutal dictators, forged in the shameful moral wasteland of Camp Bucca, where the United States army brutally tortured captured anti-occupation militants in Iraq. Wood's analogy is that it as if Jim Jones or David Koresh actually had the firepower and global support to raze a continent to the ground.

Westerners have thought about Al Qaeda as the paradigm of Islamic fundamentalist terror movements for so long (and the social trauma of Sept 11 was so scarring) that it’s hard for us to see how a similarly inspired movement could act differently. Their eye isn’t on the West primarily, but on building a doctrinaire, prophetic Islam on Earth, a society that strictly enforces a comprehensive social morality on the model of Mohammad’s era, as well as providing for all the physical and spiritual needs of its people. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s caliphate is supposed to become a society of perfect spiritual and social conformity in which there is no poverty, homelessness, or suffering that is not a punishment for crime or apostasy.

Islamic State is of a piece with the Edenic dreams of fundamentalist Christians who work to enforce total conformity to their religious and social beliefs, while hastening the End of Days and Christ’s Earthly dominion. Al-Baghdadi and his followers simply admit that their apocalypse is built on the slaughter of millions.

It is, to anyone used to thinking from anything resembling a secular viewpoint, really fucking weird.

One thoughtful critic of Wood’s piece forcefully points out his central conceptual error in understanding Islamic State. Wood talks to a single scholarly expert on Islamic prophetic extremism, and most of his reporting speaks with dedicated adherents to Al-Baghdadi’s goal to build an ideal totalitarian Islamic state on the genocide or enslavement of all those not similarly devoted.

Journalist Murtaza Hussain.

Murtaza Hussain is right to describe Al-Baghdadi’s movement as heresy. All the institutional scholarly institutes of Islam agree that Baghdadi’s movement is a perversion of Islam. His interest in writing his scathing critique of Wood’s piece is clear: in representing the Islamic State movement as a distilled, hyper-extreme essence of Islam more pure than the religion’s actual practice has ever actually been, he lends al-Baghdadi and his followers a legitimacy to represent Islam to non-Muslims that they don’t deserve.

Here’s where I feel awkward as a Western person who is struggling to work out how best to strive against the political and social injustices of my own country. I’m descended from a wide culture that has been responsible for terrifying injustices and violence on the rest of the world through centuries of colonial enterprise. Nearly everyone in the West* has benefited from colonial military-economic exploitation of others, through our having such a higher average standard of living.

* The exceptions are truly destitute people like the homeless of Toronto who have frozen to death on the street this winter, abandoned by everyone to die in worse conditions than we permit to animals and sometimes even treated with the contempt too many of us give to the poor.

But Western people are still fighting struggles of their own against the growth of oligarchy in our power structures. And too many dissident Westerners let this struggle against oligarchy misdirect our energies. It’s how earnest people of the Western left defend Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin, because they fight the West, and these useful idiot leftists associate the West with an immutable colonialism. 

The Caliph speaks for no one.

The Western Idiot Leftists are just as essentialist in their political thinking as any bigot. I want to figure out how to oppose the injustices happening in other cultures without having to absolutely vilify my own culture. Doing so targets my culture, Western culture, with the same essentialism that Wood’s Atlantic article applies to Muslim cultures when he situates Islamic State as the purest Islam. 

Muslim culture is as diverse, fragmented, and filled with as many singularities as its people. Actually more, because further articulations of Islam emerge from the relations of Muslims living their cultures together. Wood wrote in a way that left his article vulnerable to Hussain’s valid objection. Islam, like any human cultural phenomenon, has no essence. Those who already hate Islam and Muslims (people like Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, and countless other bigots around the world) will read Wood’s article and take Al-Baghdadi’s Islam as the essence of Muslim culture. And they will use that belief as further bedrock for their bigotry and hatred.

What constitutes the drive to terror of Islamic State is that its adherents themselves also believe that their genocidal movement is the essence of Islam, just like the bigots of the West.

Objectivity Is IV: What All This Has to Do With Communications, Composing, 20/02/2015

Continued from last post . . . The modern model of journalism grew out of the reaction to the yellow press style of reporting and publishing. Newspapers no longer needed to shout over each other for attention to earn their sales. Instead, they could build a reputation for fair and informative reporting, and let their regular subscribers carry the bulk of their income.

Objectivity was the rule of the new game of newspapers that made their reputation in prestige. Contrast this with the public relations industry, which was still progressing its norms and techniques into territory just slightly more sophisticated than carnival barkers. The conditions were just right for the two industries to crystallize their public images that would sustain for decades. 

Hearst used his corporate newspaper empire to attack
Citizen Kane because he took personally its critique of
him as an egotistical blowhard who would use his
corporate newspaper empire to attack his enemies for
spite. It proved that he was exactly how Welles
depicted his thinly veiled character.

Cracks showed in the pristine reputation of the new objective ideal of journalism from the beginning, starting with the open secret that William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, promoted messages through his newspapers that boosted political ends he favoured. By the 1980s, the fragmentation of media through cable news created the conditions for the niche development of journalism. 

We all knew that, under the mythical veneer of total objectivity, particular publications had always slanted in particular directions either generally or on particular issues. The explosion of media channels, first on television and then on the internet, constituted a positive push in the economic environment for outlets to double down on their ideological biases to corner a loyal audience. Combine this with the economics of the click-through in blog-based media, and we have the modern resurgence of the yellow press. 

Public relations, meanwhile, was becoming corporate communications. Although there was still a great deal of unethical behaviour at the top of the profession, where the largest firms tend to work on behalf of the most dangerous projects, the industry was becoming more prestigious and professional. 

I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that corporate communications was becoming a female-dominated industry, overcoming the dickish egotism that tends to prevail in male-dominated fields. Finesse and nuance were the skills of thought and expression that you needed to advance and progress in corporate communications, no longer bullish competitiveness and the will to dominate.

It was also becoming more complex, adopting the tools of narrative creation that had been perfected in reporting and journalism. But they were adopted to build the images of corporate and community clients, not for any duty to report truths. Truthfulness was still important; outright lying is considered unethical in public relations practice, no matter how many prominent examples you can find among the richest companies. Riches corrupt, after all.

No one could even pretend that Sean Hannity's
softball interviews with Mitt Romney during the 2012
Presidential election approached objective journalism.

But there’s now an honesty to public relations that modern journalism lacks. Even the journalistic institutions that are the most nakedly partisan (the most obvious examples being FOX News and other prominent media brands in the Murdoch conglomerate) pitch themselves as essentially truthful. If a FOX journalist calls himself conservative, he says it’s because his conservative beliefs reflect the truth. The liberal journalist will say the same thing. 

The reputation of journalism as an objective pursuit remains with us, even as almost every instance of objectivity collapses into a partisan venture. This is why, yesterday, I wrote that the concept of objectivity in this context (among pretty much every epistemic context, but that’s for another time) can no longer work, and that we need a virtue of truthfulness instead. 

Corporate communications has an honesty that modern journalism, with its yellow streaks, lacks. A corporate communicator will always admit her agenda, her goals about what she wants her audience to believe. She will admit that there are other ways to think, but that her aim is to convince people of some particular belief for causes and reasons about which she’ll be completely transparent if you ask.

A corporate communicator admits her agenda. In this, she’s truthful.

Objectivity Is III: Truthfulness as a Virtue, Composing, 19/02/2015

Continued from last post . . . So here’s my little philosophy of journalism idea, the four aspects of objectivity. That word isn’t really appropriate for what I describe here, though. The myth of the objective is still too powerful, both in journalists’ culture and in wider society. 

Instead, I’ll call it truthfulness. Objectivity is a specific goal to be achieved, or rather to sit infinitely distant from every human attempt to achieve it, our fixed star in the horizon of our worldly action. Truthfulness isn’t a goal in this sense, or even an ideal. Instead, it’s a virtue, an aspect of a human personality that describes a tendency to behave in particular fashions. And it’s better that we behave truthfully than not.

This post is my tentative definition of truthfulness in communications practice, whether as a reporter, a public relations practitioner, or simply as a broadly defined communications expert. Consider these four aspects as my first, tentative conception of a virtue of truthfulness. Any truthful communication must be fair, adequate to the subject matter, revealing, and comprehensive. 

A panel from Paul Cornell's The Girl Who Loved Doctor
Who, a story that explores the real ethical and political
differences between the world of Doctor Who and ours.

Fairness. The empty platitude version of this idea is “There are two sides to every story.” That’s pathetically underdetermined. Really, there are as many sides to every unfolding story as there are participants (sometimes, more). 

The example I gave at the start of yesterday’s post, that the military dictator deserves equal time to the activists he suppresses, was much too stark a contrast. I chose it as an extreme example to show the limits of fairness.* Fairness is a submission to the moral complexity of the world, an admission that there are rarely heroes and villains. All sides of a conflict, no matter its violence or intensity, can do terrible things and also be upstanding, admirable people. As Paul Cornell once wrote, our everyday world has no monsters to destroy, only immensely difficult problems to solve.

* A note about the concept of reversal in the McLuhans’ Laws of Media. Even here, a principle taken to an extreme expression reverses itself. I may also ask my Hegelian friend B-Rad what this conceptual movement might have to do with Hegel’s concept of aufheben. But that’s a philosophical-historical triangulation for another time.

Adequacy. Reporting is essentially synthesizing empirical observations into an account of what you’ve observed. If you’re going to report your observations truthfully, then what you say has to be adequate to the events and people you’re talking about.

This isn’t the same as total accuracy. We can’t be accurate in any total sense about anything we talk about simply because there’s too much going on. I’ve read some very good journalism lately about the fight in Canada’s parliament over the government’s sloppy new anti-terrorism legislation. Adequate reporting discusses the content of the bill, its possible uses, evaluates the legislation for possible problems and overreach in execution, describes the causes and content of every disputant’s perspective and goal. 

We don't need to know Tom Mulcair's breakfast to
know what pisses him off.

There’s no need to report the menus of all the parliamentarians’ breakfasts on each day of debate. Adequacy requires a genuine accounting for all the relevant facts, which requires discrimination of a situation’s causes.

Revealing. Much of the world is hidden from us. Nothing conspiratorial here. The world is just a murky place where you have to go digging for facts. And the course of people’s daily lives don’t normally bring them into fairly close contact with most of the other seven billion or so humans on Earth. There’s a lot about the world that we don’t know.

Truthful communication should reveal something about the world that most of the people who hear it didn’t know before. One of the best examples in journalism is a lot of the foreign documentary work that VICE has enabled. It has produced some of the best news documentaries that I think I’ve ever seen. I was especially impressed by their coverage of the civil war in South Sudan last winter.

Straight factuality isn’t the only aspect of being revealing either. I think the kind of revelation that Werner Herzog calls ecstatic truth profoundly articulates this principle of truthfulness. His documentaries give you a sense of a phenomenon, the unfolding drama of the world itself, in a way that straight facts and precise accuracy of each piece of information would actually detract from our understanding. 

Consider how his Fata Morgana depicted the horrifying desperation of rural African poverty without ever knowing the names or life stories of any of those people in his film. Or how his Lessons of Darkness gives you a better appreciation for the stark, otherworldly, hellish terror of the 1991 Kuwaiti oil well fires better than any of the journalism of the time, no matter the praise CNN received for their own work.

You need a more poetic way of speaking when you
have to describe the experience of an entire country's
earth literally being set aflame.

Comprehensive. At first glance, you may think that adequacy contradicts this. But the term helps make an important distinction. Adequacy refers to facts, but comprehensiveness is about perspectives themselves. Being comprehensive of an event or situation means including all its constituent narratives, the human stories. 

Here’s an example to illustrate, which I’ll be talking about later on the blog in a different context. I read a fascinating interview with a Syrian dissident named Yassin al-Haj Saleh. He was talking about his disappointment with the Western left because many leftists are blind to the suffering of ordinary Syrians in the region’s current civil war, and under the Assad regime. I’ve seen this myself, talking to fellow self-identified leftists who defend Bashar Assad out of a sense of realpolitik: standing up to Western imperialism and military expansionism requires solidarity with those who oppose them, like Assad.

The nature of their blindness is a lack of comprehensiveness. The only people who factor into such a political analysis are the heads of states and militaries. For all that the left claims to be able the liberation of the people, most of its popular political activism appears rooted in blindness to the affairs of regular folks. 

Now that I have my more conceptual argument laid out, the question remains what exactly all this has to do with communications and brand journalism, which was the original Twitter conversation that sparked this days-long riff of tangents. To be continued . . .