Thursday: Hili dialogue

December 19, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, December 19, 2024, and both National Hard Candy Day and National Oatmeal Muffin Day. Which would you choose: pleasure or health? Here: you can have both. The “boiled sweeties” below, from Wikipedia, are labeled:

Kongen af Danmark (“King of Denmark”) are Danish candies containing anise, sugar and beetroot juice. They were originally invented to persuade the king of Denmark to take the medicine he had been prescribed, as he did not like the anise’s strong flavour.

I guess the medicine was anise rather than beet juice. If you’re a Dane and have tried this, let us know how they are.

Orf3us, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Emo Day (do they still exist?) and not much else. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 19 Wikipedia page..

Da Nooz:

*Speaking of books, as we did yesterday, the NYT lists “62 books ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ guests recommended this year” (archived here), and of course good-book lists are like catnip to me. These are the six I’ve read. Most recommendations are nonfiction and, to be sure, they don’t turn me on.  Of the ones below, I was least keen on “In Praise of Shadows” and “Rosalind Franklin”. I found the former dull, and as for the latter, an engaging biography of Franklin has yet to be written, as I found Maddox’s prose somewhat leaden.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, recommended by Dario Amodei

In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki, recommended by Kyle Chayka

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, recommended by Salman Rushdie

Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox, recommended by Ari Shavit

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, recommended by Jon Stewart

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, recommended by Gia Tolentino

As usual, Rushdie gets it right on the money, and had I read Rushdie “Midnight’s Children” this year, I would have recommended that, as it’s an all-time classic, the Booker of Bookers.

*Over at his Substack, site Yascha Mounk writes “Dear Journalists: Stop trying to save democracy” (subtitle: “Journalists who turn themselves into political activists inadvertently undermine democratic institutions”), arguing that the job of journalists is not social reform, but simply to report the news.  It’s an old message, but one worth repeating. An excerpt (h/t Peter):

All of that [journalistic neutrality] went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist. Faced with what they regarded as a genuine emergency, many younger and more progressive journalists came to believe that they needed to revolutionize their profession’s traditional conception of its mission. Rather than eschewing the spirit of party, they now openly advocated for taking the side of the angels. And far from striving for objectivity, they resolved to offer their readers “moral clarity.” The Washington Post was merely formalizing the emerging consensus when, in February 2017, it adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy.

I have some sympathy for this new self-conception. Democracy really is embattled around the world. And as citizens, we really do have a civic obligation to do what we can to shore up principles like free speech and the rule of law. Democracies need citizens to be engaged—and if some citizens need to adopt an inflated sense of their likely efficacy to keep them going, then let them enjoy their delusion.

But while all of us, including journalists, may have a civic obligation to fight for the preservation of our political system in our role as citizens, it is a category mistake to assume that journalists should place that aspiration at the center of their professional identity. Democracies depend on having a few widely trusted news outlets that can objectively inform the public about current affairs. The trust which citizens have traditionally placed in these outlets was premised on a belief that their journalists are at least striving to present events in an even-handed manner. The moment they recognize that this is no longer the case, that trust is shattered—and any hope of building political life on a basis of shared facts vanishes.

In light of the last four years, I’d go one step further. The aspiration of many journalists to save democracy has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets. It has also deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions—which, ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain.

One example Mounk uses is the media’s criticisms of Kamala Harris–up to the point when Biden anointed her as his successor, whereupon the media fell in line proclaiming what a great candidate she was (how could people fall for that bunk?)  Mounk adds:

In retrospect, the cost of these lies layered upon delusions is painfully clear. If the Harris campaign had reckoned with the fact that she was not on the way to winning the election, they could have taken some rhetorical risks and encouraged her to appear on a much wider range of shows and podcasts. Instead, lulled into a false sense of complacency, they played it “safe.”

The irony is palpable. At each step, the mainstream media was careful not to emphasize facts which might make it harder for Democrats to beat Trump. But at each step, this created a bubble of “elite misinformation” that made it impossible for Democrats to make the hard strategic choices they needed to win the election. The cognitive costs of partisanship in the media are high—in this case, arguably sufficiently high to have gotten Trump reelected.

*The House Ethics Commitee report on the investigation of Matt Gaetz is now going to be released. Gaetz, nominated by Trump to be Attorney General, withdrew when the weight of opprobrium became too great (see the charges below), and then resigned his House seat, which he’s not going to try to keep. Instead, he’s becoming an anchor on a conservative news channel (not Fox):

The House Ethics Committee secretly voted this month to release an investigative report into the conduct of former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The panel’s vote, which was reported earlier by CNN, paved the way for the release of the report after House members cast the final votes of the Congress this week and have left Washington to return to their districts, two of the people said.

It is an abrupt turnabout for the panel, which had previously declined to release the report. It came less than two weeks after House Republicans banded together to block a Democratic move on the floor to force the release of the report, instead returning the matter to the Ethics Committee for further consideration.

The haggling on Capitol Hill over the report intensified after President-elect Donald J. Trump announced last month that he had chosen Mr. Gaetz to lead the Justice Department, prompting anger and concern among members of both parties on Capitol Hill who were aware of serious allegations against him.

Since the spring of 2021, the Ethics Committee had been investigating Mr. Gaetz over an array of accusations, including that he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use and accepted gifts that violated House rules.

Mr. Gaetz has denied the charges.

On Wednesday, he decried the news of the report’s impending release and noted that he had already been investigated by the Justice Department, which brought no charges against him.

“The Biden/Garland DOJ spent years reviewing allegations that I committed various crimes. I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on the social media site X.

The Justice Department made the decision not to prosecute Mr. Gaetz after investigators concluded they could not make a strong enough case against him in court, in part because of a concern that some potential witnesses might not have stood up well under cross-examination, according to people familiar with the case who spoke about it at the time on the condition of anonymity.

In his post on Wednesday, Mr. Gaetz denied some of the central allegations against him, including that he had paid an underage girl for sex and solicited prostitutes, dismissing them as a distortion of youthful indiscretions.

*I’ve been disappointed with my Bluesky experience: it’s too “progressive” and too “nice” for my tastes, and it’s hard to find something amusing that is not too anodyne to reproduce here. Jesse Singal, however, found hatred when he started posting on that site, hatred documented in a new Free Press piece, “Jesse Singal: Bluesky has a death threat problem.” (The subtitle is “It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.”)

Recently, like a lot of journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”

While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.

This was a mistake.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.

But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Here’s one example of an exchange—before Singal even joined the site!

And a thread after he joined (Singal’s complaints yielded no action by moderators. I thought the place was supposed to be free of this stuff.):

Singal documents a lot of that hatred, which is real. The thing is, the hatred on Bluesky comes from progressives or those on the far left, and that’s okay there. On Twitter, the hatred came from all sides, and that’s the way I prefer it. One thing is for sure, Singal doesn’t deserve this opprobrium, and though it’s free speech, it reflects my own experience that Bluesky is a place where you demonstrate your virtue (hatred against those who violate progressive dogma is still virtue) or show pictures of cats. To me, that’s what Facebook is for!

*I guess I was naive, but I thought that Freedom of Information requests were free. I should have realized that somebody has to pay for going through the documents to find requested ones. This amount, however, as reported by the Free Press, is absurd:

Elizabeth Clair, the mother of a seventh grader in suburban Detroit, wanted to find out whether her local school district had mended its ways after it lost a lawsuit for improperly tracking disgruntled parents. Instead, she’s the one who learned a lesson: Prying information out of local governments can be very expensive—and state transparency laws don’t always help.

Back in 2022, the Rochester Community School District settled a lawsuit for nearly $200,000 with another mom who accused the district of keeping a “dossier” on parents critical of Covid lockdowns. Clair said she wanted to know what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents. So she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation.

A few weeks later, she heard back from the district’s FOIA coordinator: Her request had been granted. All she had to do was pay $33,103,232.56. That’s right. More than $33 million.

The district explained that it would take an employee 717,000 hours at a rate of over $46 per hour to review the 21,514,288 emails related to her request.

“It’s just absurd,” Clair, a financial analyst for a local automotive company, told The Free Press. “For one person making, like, $83,000 a year, it would take them, like, 400 years to fulfill that FOIA request.”

. . . . “As taxpayers in the community, as parents who send our kids and entrust our children to these institutions every day, I think everything should be transparent,” Clair said. “I fail to understand why this district puts up such a fight against us.”

“It just leads me to think,” she continued, “what are they hiding?”

Remind me never to file a FOIA request.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Gaia Weiss, who is the daughter of Andrzej’s niece, paid a surprise visit to Dobrzyn and paid her due to the Princess. Gaia is a French actress and starred in, among other things, Vikings.

Hili: You haven’t been here for such a long time.
Gaia: I know but I always remember you.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie było cię tak długo.
Gaia: Wiem, ale zawsze o tobie pamiętam.

*******************

From The Dodo Pet:

From Meow:

From Jesus of the Day: a cat uses fake snow in a fancy store:

From Masih. Read this poor guy’s tortuous road to capital punishment. In the end, he was just “a member of an opposition party”:

From Roz, a must-see:

Rowling is always good for a chuckle:

Simon sent some practical advice from Larry the Cat, though Larry’s forgotten that Coynezaa is also a week away:

Christmas Eve is a week away – time to put on a display of good behaviour for Father Christmas

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T23:44:56.412Z

From Malcolm, a cat teddy:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted:

A 13-year-old Hungarian boy and his little sister were gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-19T11:26:16.733Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, an excellent scratch:

All I want for Christmas is a #wombat sat on a grass tussock having a scratch.#WombatWednesday #fieldwork #Tasmania #MammalWatching #WildOz #wombats

— Jack Ashby (@jackdashby.bsky.social) 2024-12-18T08:30:42.119Z

A moggy is flummoxed by snow:

Ando’s first time seeing snow fall. #cat #kitten #snow

— Osha Davidson (@oshadavidson.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T17:13:34.613Z

31 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I call BS on the Rochester Community School District’s claim regarding the cost of the freedom of information request. As a software developer, I know from actual experience that it would take a few hours to create a program to connect to the District’s mail server and scan emails for a specific word or phrase. I’ve written that kind of program myself. And whilst the program would take days, perhaps weeks, to examine 22 million emails, that wouldn’t count as billable hours of human labour.

    1. Sorry David. Wrote my comment 2 before seeing this reply. But I still think that not all institutions are set up to simply carry out an automated process and there is always the pesky vetting of selected documents. Btw, certainly I believe 33M to be BS.

      1. You’re 100% correct about the need for a human to redact personal or sensitive information from the filtered emails, but one would hope the number of emails requiring human attention was far, far smaller than 22 million!

        1. Yep. That number was bs. Likely a superintendent whose board is not committed to public service and the law

    2. As was noted in the article, the statement that an employee spent 717,000 hours on it is a complete lie. It’s not physically possible to do that in “a few weeks”.

      Other things that would worry me about this include the implication that this employee had access to and read all the emails in the district’s mail servers. This would normally be classified as a serious breach of security.

      1. I believe that this was an estimate of the time it would take…the work would not start until the amount was paid by the requestor. Nobody has looked at anything yet.

        Clearly as other commentators have noted, the estimate of the time and cost is a ridiculous one designed to protect this local government from actually carrying out the request.

  2. A lovely moment between Hili and Gaia.

    Regarding FOIA requests to public institutions: forget about the $33M in this alleged instance but they ARE costly both in direct dollars to pay an employee to carry them out, and in opportunity costs of the institution’s real mission that would otherwise be being carried out by that (those) employee(s). Even if the majority of this labor intensive activity is carried out by autofiltering of e-mails for the word in question, the process and access to the email archive must be done by a skilled technician and, perhaps most labor intensive, any identified documents would need reading for possible redaction of non-pertinent individual’s names and personal information. When I saw this article, I thought it pertained to school curriculum which is generally a matter of public record, can be found online at a public site, and monitored by attending board workshops and meetings where actions are always approved with a public vote.

  3. I have to disagree with Mounk. Journalists aren’t just reporters of events—they’re watchdogs for democracy. When an authoritarian president is trying to undermine democratic norms, journalists have a responsibility to do more than just report the news. They need to aggressively inform people about what’s at stake. This isn’t about social activism; it’s about protecting the basic principles of accountability and transparency. If democracy is under attack, staying neutral can end up being complicity.

    1. But the authoritarians can be democratically elected! This is a case of the public getting what they want and deserve.

      1. There is no inherent contradiction in a democracy electing an authoritarian to the job of chief executive. The Constitution says the executive authority of the Government shall be vested in one man, the President, for a term of four years. Whether this man allows the civil service free rein or runs the whole thing autocratically from the Oval Office is a matter of personal style. Whether he listens widely to the “advice” of the Washington Post of from protestors screaming and wailing and arsonizing outside the White House, or ignores them entirely, no matter. Unlike in Parliaments, he doesn’t control the Legislature or trump the Courts.

        The voters may well rationally want an autocratic chief executive as long as he can’t tax without Congress or suspend civil liberties and as long as they can vote him out in four years if they get tired of his style.

    2. If it were the case that an authoritarian president were trying to undermine democratic norms (I’ll leave aside whether or not that applies anywhere at the moment 🙂 ) then reporting that news objectively would be informing people properly.

      What reporters should not do is “curate” the news, taking it upon themselves to decide what they think is good for people to be told.

  4. Does anyone know if the Danish candies are the same as the cube-shaped anise candies in the red wrappers that they used to sell (and still do as far as I know…).

  6. Re Mounk: My preference is for a reporter to report – tell who, what, when, where, et al., then let the reader sift that information for him/herself. If someone wants to be told what to believe, or wants to operate in an echo chamber, they can read something like Pravda or Der Stürmer, depending on which way they lean. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find objective reporting.

  7. My observation, which has also been confirmed by various comments and articles.

    After the election of Donald Trump as US president, the number of Bluesky users skyrocketed. Numerous people, particularly from the progressive left-wing activist spectrum, turned their backs on Twitter/X and switched to Bluesky. They also brought their networks and connections with them and then decided that Bluesky was “their” very own communication platform.

    The mirror image of Twitter/X or TruthSocial, so to speak.

    So these people are now also trying to enforce “their” rules about who has to communicate what, when and how, and they are acting as jury, judge and prosecutor in one role.

    Bluesky was taken by surprise and was simply not prepared for the “takeover”. There is a lack of staff to adequately moderate and control the aggressive Social Justice Warriors. The SJWs have created their own communicative space and are currently exercising their power virtually unhindered. I see this phenomenon particularly in the US. But there are also corresponding advances in German-speaking countries. Here is the English translation of the welcome comment of a German left-wing user and supporter of Antifa.

    Welcome to all new followers 👋

    Please note:
    Bluesky is a left-wing platform.
    We do not discuss with Nazis here, we exclude them.

    Blocking an account interrupts the entire conversation for everyone.
    Use this for right-wing accounts.

    Quote
    Not everyone here is white, blonde, straight and male, there are definitely people for whom a safe space is important, maybe not everyone here wants to discuss democratically.
    This platform is also full of anti-Semitism, racism and transphobia, blocking prevents that.

  8. I read Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” when it came out in 1987. After reading it, I told my wife that it was the best book I had ever read. Since then, however, I have read Victor Hugo’s “Notre-Dame de Paris” (“The Hunchback of Notre Dame”). Consequently, I have since recharacterized Rhodes’s book as the greatest non-fiction book I have ever read. An excellent recommendation.

    1. +1 on the endorsement of Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”. Though it has been a very long time since I read it, when the movie “Oppenheimer” came out and people were stimulated to debate the ethics of the decision to use the bomb, I felt like “please go read this book where all of these arguments have been covered so well” .

    2. +1. Richard Rhodes has written a number of other good books, including “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb”.

      1. I no less heartily and strongly recommend Richard Rhodes’s books you note.

        That said, I was infuriated with him in “Atomic Bomb” when he felt compelled to pointedly reflect on the physical appearance of Hans Bethe. I reasonably assume other readers noticed that. It’s hard not to notice. Why do that? What does it have to do with the subject at hand? Did it somehow make the telling more compelling and less anodyne? (Shades of Kitty Kelly.) As a matter of principle, it seems he is no less obligated to similarly comment on anyone he mentions in his book. He should be no less concerned about his own appearance. Did he need a safe space and coloring books in order to cope with the ordeal of withstanding Bethe’s visage? Was it not sufficient to simply acknowledge and express great appreciation for Bethe’s discovery and elucidation of the mechanism of fusion in stars? Were Rhodes a Good Christian, would he hurl prayers to Heaven seeking a miracle that Bethe be delivered from what supposedly ailed him (and apparently Rhodes)?

  9. I am convinced that Mounk is entirely mistaken in the belief that progressives want to save democracy. It’s almost the exact opposite. Democracy is rule by the People, and it is a core tenet of progressivism that the vast majority of the voting public are (is?) innately racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, homo- and transphobic, xenophobic, etc. ad nauseum (a great recent article on this topic is by Helen Pluckrose:
    https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/16/the-truth-about-woke/ )

    Since the People are so morally defective that they can’t be trusted to arrive at the ‘correct’ beliefs if given neutral (objective) information, progressives actually believe that ‘democratic’ institutions like government, academia, and journalism have a moral duty to LEAD the people to vote for the ‘correct’ progressive policies. It follows that progressive journalists have a ‘moral’ duty to be selective (biased) in what they report, in any case where neutral reporting could influence the voting public to support the wrong policies. (The examples Mounk gives actually all support this view.)

    An inevitable corollary is that any journalists who insist on objectively reporting facts that could lead the public to vote against progressive policies – thereby causing HARM to vulnerable people (non-whites, women, Muslims, trans, etc. etc.) is actually EVIL… Hence the vilification of Jesse Singal.

    1. Agree about the “core tenet of progressivism”. The historian Christopher Lasch got it right 30 years ago.

      “The culture wars… are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of a rational public debate, as to create parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.” (from “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy”).

    2. Agreed. Hence the disdain for “populism”, a term applied to politicians who adopt policies that are popular (isn’t that the whole point of democracy?) but which the “progressive” elite don’t like.

    3. One is reminded of Brecht’s poem that had it in part: “…Would it not be easier
      in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

    4. I agree entirely, Brooke.
      In recent years Lee Jussim (who was at PCC-E’s free speech conference a few years ago at Stamford) has written a lot about left wing authoritarianism.
      Interesting stuff.
      D.A.
      NYC

  10. The video of the cat on the little boy’s bed is a winner! The boy wrestling the cat under the covers, and the cat’s eyes closing at the end—funny and heart-warming.

  11. Re: Mounk

    Quote: “If the Harris campaign had reckoned with the fact that she was not on the way to winning the election, they could have taken some rhetorical risks and encouraged her to appear on a much wider range of shows and podcasts.”

    I don’t think so. She was so incredibly bad at public speaking they reasonably chose to minimize exposure.

    She was a poor candidate who was only picked because Biden in a woke mood promised he’d pick a black woman.

    1. This, and some other parts of the article did read like an attempt to re-write recent history. Harris was pretty bad when made to speak without a script, and she and her campaign studiously avoided doing that. Meanwhile, there were many demands from the news media for her to step up to the mic and be properly interviewed.

  12. FOIA. I was supposed to be paid extra for those thousands of pages I reviewed?!

    ++ to the praises for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”

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