Jailed for a Tweet?

Over the past couple of days, Conservative MP Louise Mensch has publicised a series of violent, sexually abusive, misogynist tweets she’s gotten from troglodytes on Twitter who don’t agree with her opinions on the parliamentary report regarding News Corp.  Instead of disagreeing with her on the merits of her argument, they’ve called her every foul, sexist and derogatory name in the book and insist they want to “strangle her” as well as “hit [her] in the face with a hammer.”

Mensch says she doesn’t blame the social platform, but rather its users.  It’s a fair point, but these incidents do sometimes lead one to question the wisdom of allowing everyone to broadcast their thoughts about everything at any time is the best idea in the world.  If Twitter has shown us anything, it’s that there are a lot of stupid, mean people out there who like to broadcast their ignorant thoughts in badly spelled diatribes.

But it turns out that it is in fact illegal to be an sexist jerk on Twitter.  Stuart Hyde, the Chief Constable of Cumbria Police, says, “We are taking people to court. People do need to understand that while this is a social media it’s also a media with responsibilities and if you are going to act illegally using social media expect to face the full consequences of the law.”  If you spout racist or sexist abuse at somebody, you could be charged under the Communications Act 2003 or the Malicious Communications Act of 1988.

People have actually faced jail for abusive tweets.  A blogger named “Olly Cromwell” (real name John Graham Kerlen)  is facing up to six months in jail for calling a Bexley local councillor a “c*nt.”  Student Liam Stacey has been jailed for a 56 day sentence for racist Tweets he posted about Bolton footballer Fabrice Muamba.  So it does indeed seem that people are being held legally liable for the silly things they say on Twitter.

But free-speech advocates and civil libertarians have raised a number of very good questions about these sentences.  We can all agree that nobody should have to go through the abuse that Louise Mensch, and others, have.  But can this kind of policing of speech go too far?  Who decides what’s abusive and what isn’t? And is getting the long arm of the law involved the best way to stop people from spouting racist and sexist bigotry in social media?  What lesson are we teaching people like Liam Stacey and John Graham Kerlen?  Are they really going to stop being racist and sexist once they get out of jail?

Social media experts advise brands – some of whom get a lot of abuse on Twitter –how to handle this kind of thing.  It’s an important question we all have to think about, particularly as more of these cases come to light; when social media gets abusive, what’s the most effective way to handle it?  Should we get the fuzz involved, or use ostracism, shame, and embarrassment to get the abusers to stop?

What do you think?

The New McCarthyism

 I’ve noticed a very interesting pattern recently. Whenever I point out serious things that have gone wrong with the Obama administration, like serious corruption, or crony capitalism, or incompetence and malfeasance, or a betrayal of what President Obama campaigned on, I’m inevitably told by his supporters that I am a “paranoid” ex-Fox News employee, and therefore my opinions (or the facts that I bring up) are invalid.

               This strikes me as a direct descendant the Joseph McCarthy school of thought, the kind of raging paranoia and closed-mindedness that leads one to thunder, “I have here in my hand…a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”  It’s the same kind of thing – the denunciation of one’s enemies as the Other; the invocation of an enemy that must be stamped out; the fear that anyone might think differently or have a different point of view.

               I will happily go toe to toe with anyone who has an issue with my work at Fox News Radio. I strove to tell only the truth and the most accurate stories I could. Of course I made them entertaining – that’s my job as a radio producer – but I never lied and I never misinformed my audience. If you have problems with other people at Fox News, blaming me and my work for them is profoundly unfair, just as it would be profoundly unfair to call all MPs crooks because some are, or to smear every News of the World journalist as a phone hacker because some were. It’s fallacious to do so.

               But equally I must point out that I’m not sure Fox News completely deserves its reputation.  CBS News, the New York Times, and NBC News have all had to get rid of employees for lying. The Washington Post had to fire a young journalist for failing to fact-check a juicy story (that turned out not to be true), and has come under fire for smearing Mitt Romney with a story that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny and in any case, against standard journalism practice, made corrections to it without acknowledging the original facts were wrong.  There are many, many, many other instances of legacy media malpractice – and these are the people who purport to do a better job than Fox News? Perhaps they should get their own house in order before criticising a competitor.

               I think the thing I find most interesting about the “You worked for Fox News, therefore your opinion is invalid” jibe is just how intellectually incurious it is.  The people who use it on me are the same kind of people who used to criticise President George W. Bush for his intellectual closed-mindedness, so it’s quite intriguing that they employ the very tactics they accuse him of – prejudice, lack of understanding, and lack of empathy.  The danger of prejudice against someone because of where they used to work or their political beliefs is that prejudiced people miss a chance to move human knowledge forward.  Galileo disagreed with prevailing public opinion, as did Marx and Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology.  I of course wouldn’t class myself in the same category, or even the same solar system as these intellectual giants, but my point is that if we just look to popular opinion, the sum total of our knowledge won’t grow. We have to look outside what we already know and believe to expand our minds.

               John Milton argued, in the Aeropagitica, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” We should not be afraid to debate and discuss knowledge, wherever it comes from and wherever it may lead.  Prejudice and fear won’t bring us to the truth – reason and honest debate will. Don’t fear Fox News if you don’t like it; doing so diminishes your mind and ultimately your cause.

Demand Better

October 20, 2009 - Source: Mario Tama/Getty Images North America

Shana Pearlman, author of The Palin Effect: Money, Sex and Class in the New American Politics, doesn’t want government to be awarded to the highest bidder. In order to avoid that happening, we must demand better.

Last week, in compliance with the Federal Election Committee, the Obama campaign revealed its Q1 fundraisers.  Among the top bundlers, raising more than $500,000, was Jon Corzine, the former governor and senator from New Jersey, former head of Goldman Sachs, and currently under federal and congressional investigation because of the disappearance of more than a billion dollars of client funds while he was chief executive at collapsed financial firm MF Global.

Corzine is being investigated by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department because of the missing funds; Corzine has testified before Congress that he doesn’t know where the missing money is, but a witness has testified that indeed Corzine was aware that MF Global illegally transferred client money to cover the company’s debts.

The investigations are ongoing, and will no doubt take some time to untangle.  But it is utterly extraordinary that Corzine is still allowed to fundraise for the Obama administration while that same administration is investigating him for wrongdoing.  It is a profound conflict of interest.  Corzine is a very successful fundraiser; will the Justice Department and the SEC find themselves under pressure from Obama’s campaign to go easy on the former financier because he kept the dollars rolling in?  Corzine is raising money from the very people who the SEC and Justice Department are regulating; what is he promising them? What have they promised him if he delivers the money?  Allowing Corzine to fundraise for an administration that is investigating him is corrupt, and it is wrong.

If you’re wondering why the bankers get away with all the money while the rest of the world is plunged in worldwide recession, this is why; bankers bankroll the organisations that are meant to hold them accountable, which means they are able to get away with just about anything. I have a lawyer friend who often says that justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done. If we are going to let the government regulate healthcare, food production, energy, and more, we must be able to trust that it will regulate wrongdoers and look out for our best interests.  We’ve seen that the Obama administration has given preferential treatment to its donors already; with big donors getting more access, more federal funds, and even escaping federal prosecution despite violating federal rules, this kind of crony capitalism means that it’s the people with money and connections who benefit from federal largesse, whereas the rest of us are left out in the cold.  It’s corrupt, it’s immoral, Obama told us he wasn’t going to conduct business in Washington this way, and it was a lie.

So I can hear you ask, “What do I do? You want me to support Romney, he’s crazy and I would never vote Republican!” I’m sorry, but that’s weak. That’s a copout. If not voting Republican is your excuse for putting up with corruption and poor governance, then you are part of the problem. If you care about corporatism, if you care about not making this government by and for the rich, if you want to avoid American plutocracy, then you have to let your government, even if it’s populated by adorable Democrats that you once loved, know that this is not acceptable behaviour.  You have to make them listen to you, like the Republicans now have to listen to the Tea Party.

The incredible price of running a Presidential election has poisoned American politics to the point that any administration cannot be trusted to regulate American industry as it needs those dollars to win. That’s not a position we want our government to be in. The intellectual leaders of Occupy Wall Street, like Matt Renner of Truthout, have done some serious thinking about how to decouple politics from corporate money; it’s time for all of us who want government to function for us, not against us, to start taking these ideas seriously.

I know it’s not easy to accept that the people for whom we all had such affection 3 years ago could betray the principles they ran on.  But if we don’t want government to go to the highest bidder, we have to demand more of our leaders, whoever they are. I’m an optimist; I believe that if we work to get better government, we will get it.  But we have to do the work first.

photo credit: P…

photo credit: Progressive Soup

OK, so I counted five factual errors in the last 45 minutes of the film. That was the only bit I could watch because I was struggling with my Sky Go (I had to delete the PlayReady folder for it to work. OHHHHH!).  

It’s Game Change told the surprisingly retrograde story of a beautiful airhead spinning out of control of the avuncular men who tried to tell her what to do, resulting in disaster. So much for the feminist movement, eh?

They portrayed Governor Palin as unbelievably stupid. Literally. I mean, it was impossible to believe how stupid she was because she herself had given speeches and interviews about Prime Minister Thatcher, so how could she think that the Queen was the UK leader? Impossible.

But. I am trying to be positive.

The cinematography was excellent. 

 

McCain-Palin Got Game

Photo credit: Slate.com

I wasn’t going to talk about Game Change until later in the month, as its original Sky Atlantic air date was 26th April. But Sky Atlantic has moved the broadcast date up to this Saturday the 14th, and it’s due to be a barnburner.

At a time when the Obama administration has turned out to be a major disappointment, and with little or no record to run on, the President needs to remind people of the spirit of 2008. What better way to do that than to get blue-state voters nostalgic for the heady days of the “pit bull with lipstick?”

Game Change prepares the battlespace for 2012, and gets disaffected progressives back in the hope-and-change mood, but if you’re expecting it to be an accurate insider perspective on what an incredible thicko Sarah Palin is, you might be disappointed.

The movie is told from Steve Schmidt’s perspective, the campaign manager who some consider responsible for running one of the worst campaigns of all time. Fair enough, nothing wrong with a little CYA if somebody’s willing to pay for it. On the other hand, observers willing to go on the record, like Palin’s foreign policy advisor, says Game Change is utter tosh.

He said, she said…who really knows what happened in the campaign? What we do know is a lot of people have a vested interest in making sure that Sarah Palin looks as stupid as possible–Steve Schmidt being one of them. Like I always say, don’t trust something just because it’s on TV.

Has Aaron Sorkin ruined American politics?

photo credit: Warner Bros.

I’m under a cloud of suspicion amongst my friends, families, and relatives because not only did I used to work for the dreaded Fox News, but I’ve written a book that asserts that maybe Sarah Palin isn’t the enormous thicko that so many progressives would like her to be and that her reputation is a result of expert political marketing that took them for suckers (“You mean she really DIDN’T say ‘I can see Russia from my house?” they wail, and I must reply, “No, no she didn’t”).

But this week my star has fallen further amongst my right-thinking friends because I’ve called out the guru of middle-class twaddle, Aaron Sorkin, as a mediocre merchant of mawkish, overwrought poppycock.  It has nothing to do with Sorkin’s political beliefs; it’s that all of his works are simplistic packages of bombast that don’t understand how humans behave, let alone politics or entertainment.

Let me give you an example.  There’s an episode of Sorkin’s beloved show The West Wing called “The Midterms,” which aired on NBC in the US in December 2000.  In it, Dr. Jacobs, a conservative talk show host is invited to a reception at the White House; when President Bartlett enters the room, she remains seated as her fellow guests stand.  Bartlett notices this, and, aware of her Biblical anti-gay stance, proceeds to destroy her with a number of “facts” from the Bible about ancient practices which earned the same scriptural condemnation as homosexuality. In the show, she is so ashamed and embarrassed that she doesn’t say or do anything, allowing Bartlett to reign triumphant over the field.  In real life, of course, she would be free to rebut the President on the numerous factual errors and problems in his diatribe.  For example, she would correct his statement that according to the Bible, the Washington Redskins should be put to death by touching a football made out of “pigskin” every Sunday by pointing out that American footballs are actually made out of cowhide, a kosher animal.  But this isn’t the real world, it’s SorkinLand, in which progressives are allowed to rabbit on about any old thing they like and their opponents stand dumbstruck by their complete and utter brilliance, and Sorkin fans clap and cheer.

What this means is that Sorkin is actually having a negative effect on American politics and civic dialogue.  An excellent case study is what’s currently happening in the Supreme Court oral arguments about President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act or, as it’s sometimes known, “Obamacare.”  During the first day of argument, the government’s Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, whose job it is to argue on behalf of the President, was widely acknowledged to do a terrible job answering questions from the conservative judges on the Supreme Court bench. It was as though he was totally unprepared for their questions, and in an important sense, he was.

Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler noted that the problem was an “increasing separation of the legal academy from the practice of law — a separation that is greatest in fields, such as constitutional law, that touch on broad questions of public policy… The current Supreme Court has a right-leaning majority, but legal academia leans decidedly to the left… This means that when ideas are floated in the faculty lounge, they may get a far more sympathetic hearing than they would ever receive in court.”  Obama’s lawyers, who all come from legal academia, never had a chance to intellectually engage with arguments against the ACA, and therefore, when presented with those intellectual arguments, were unable to rebut them because theysimply hadn’t thought that way before.  The results, as CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said, were that the first three days of oral argument were “a disaster for the Obama administration.”

If the Supreme Court were to rule that Obama’s healthcare plan is unconstitutional, of course it wouldn’t be Aaron Sorkin’s fault.  But he is a symptom of a sickness in our culture, which is a lack of empathy and intelligent understanding of differing political opinions. University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done research into this phenomenon, and has discovered that conservatives and independents are much better at understanding their political opponents than progressives are.  In fact, those least able to understand their opponents’ arguments described themselves as “very liberal.”  I can’t help but think that a reason for this is because of the prevalence of progressive arguments in popular culture, which are, in SorkinLand, totally undisputed by anyone else.  It’s a nice fantasy, but when Sorkin’s ideas come up against real-world tests, they fail.

Aaron Sorkin’s delighted his fans yet again with the trailer for his new HBO series, Newsroom, about a handsome newsreader who has a political awakening.  He is a moderate Republican who just can’t stand the nutburgers in his own party, but decides to use his political conversion as an opportunity to bully women, whether it’s a conservative college student or his producer, the target of his flying Blackberry.  Despite the fact that this sort of thing was done much better in the excellent movie Network, The Newsroom yet again shows Sorkin’s ideas failing in the real world.  The newsreader, played by Jeff Daniels, echoes American television anchor Keith Olbermann, whose charismatic television personality engaged big audiences and basically created MSNBC as the progressive anchor to Fox News. However, Olbermann got fired from not one, not two, but three TV networks, and has developed a reputation for diva behaviour, bullying his staff, and just generally being a jerk.  Despite the fairytales of SorkinLand, the most correct ideas in the world won’t protect you if you’re a jackass.

So with apologies to my left-leaning friends, I can’t forgive Sorkin.  Not just because he produces terrible television, but because his legacy is our worsening public discourse.  His creation of fantasylands where nobody ever encounters anyone they disagree with is actually making us stupider.  This isn’t a good thing, and I won’t endorse it, no matter how much we all had a crush on Richard Schiff.