‘LAURA INGRAHAM IS THE NEW BILL O’REILLY’ AND OTHER ASSAULTS ON OUR FREEDOMS

Man, this is turning into a series.

Yesterday I mentioned the Laura Ingraham boycott that kicked off after she tweeted about David Hogg being rejected by four universities and that’s why we shouldn’t have gun control. Or something.

One of the inevitable results of the boycott is that some conservatives are wringing their hands over free speech and “dangerous precedents” – Laura Ingraham is being punished for expressing a right-wing opinion, conservative Americans being bullied into silence by the likes of David Hogg, whose agenda (and the agenda of the Liberal Elite Deep State Media in general that gives Hogg an unlimited platform) is clear: criticize anything David Hogg says and you will be punished.

Yeah, well. About that:

1. We went through this with Bill O’Reilly and Sean “Smash Yr Keurig” Hannity last year, and Glenn Beck before him seven years ago. Granted, in O’Reilly’s case the boycott was inspired by his offscreen treatment of women, not anything he said on air (although of course any Fox fan will tell you of COURSE it was about what he said because liberals lie about everything the end). But Beck’s case was certainly speech-related, as was Hannity’s.

In all of those cases, the same argument came up – boycotts are a violation of the 1A in spirit if not in law, and are being used to shut up opposing voices.

2. On the other hand, that didn’t stop Hannity fans from boycotting Keurig for boycotting Hannity, of course. (There’s an interesting dynamic there – liberals tell Keurig, “We’ll boycott you if you keep sponsoring this show,” and conservatives are telling Keurig, “We’ll boycott you if you STOP sponsoring this show.” Wheeee!)

In fact, conservatives tend to rather enjoy boycotting companies and people for supporting political positions they disagree with or (lately) criticizing Trump in any way whatsoever. Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom’s, Target, Kellogg’s, the NFL, Beyoncé, the Dixie Chicks, etc and so on.

So it’s disingenuous for conservatives to complain that the Ingraham boycott punishes free speech when their own boycotts seek a similar objective.

3. In any case, I don’t see David Hogg’s boycott in and of itself as a “dangerous precedent” – that precedent has existed for a long time. If there’s a danger at all, it’s the use of internet mob justice that social media has basically normalized. That’s a discussion we need to have, but it goes well beyond targeting companies or commentators for speech offenses.

4. Having said that, in this specific case, I don’t particularly blame him, given the context in which it happened. Remember that he didn’t call for an ad boycott because of Ingraham’s opinions about guns or because she disagrees with his. He did it because she participated in slandering him with a personal attack that had nothing to do with those issues, and she did that in the context of other conservative pundits, websites and politicians (to include the White House) also attacking him, Emma Gonzales and others on a personal level to discredit, intimidate and bully them. So I can't really fault him for pushing back.

5. As for the conservative dithering over the free speech implications – i.e. we’re not allowed to criticize David Hogg – the problem with that argument is that by “free speech” they mean “the freedom to say whatever the hell I want without consequences of any kind at all, to include criticizing what I say”. Which isn’t how the 1A works. It’s not even really how speech works.

Speech always has consequences, even if the consequence is criticism (constructive or otherwise). This is especially true when that speech is provocative, offensive, controversial, slanderous or libelous. Ingraham has made a good living being provocative, offensive, controversial, and generally using her show as a bully pulpit to express anger and outrage at the opposition. She has a 1A right to do that, but she and her fans can’t reasonably expect the targets of her outrage to not respond, especially if they think what she’s saying is uncivil, untrue or unfair. And it’s not censorship for them to do so, no matter what Bill O'Reilly says.

No one’s right to free speech entitles them to sponsorship or employment in a media organization. (We all have a right to free speech, but we don’t have the right to a newspaper column or a one-hour slot on cable TV news.) Also, the sponsors aren’t there to support her right to say what she says. They’re there to sell stuff – if they think her speech is hampering that goal, or making them look bad to the other people they're trying to sell stuff to, they’re going to bail.

6. Here’s something to consider too – these corporations would rather sell stuff to both sides, but they’ve also got brands and reputations to maintain, and evidently many of them have realized they can’t be neutral in their sponsorship decisions for these kinds of situations. They’ve got to choose a side, and the smart decision is to pick the side that’s winning, at least in the polls. Given how major advertisers have bailed on the NRA and some high-profile conservative demagogues, you can perhaps get an idea of who they think is winning that particular culture war.

Is that censorship? Maybe it used to be. Advertisers have always voted with their feet in broadcast media if a program was too controversial or offensive, and fear of such a walkout usually ensured that networks kept the programming bland. That was a big deal when we only had three TV networks. Now that we have so many other outlets and platforms for people to speak their mind, it’s less of an issue, although of course we could get into a whole sidebar here about how too much choice actually censors voices by denying them a centralized audience, etc.

7. Anyway, all the dithering about David Hogg’s Ingraham boycott as a danger to free speech doesn’t really wash with me. A boycott doesn't mean you’ll lose yr job (see: Hannity), and Hogg, Gonzales et al never said yr not allowed to express support for guns or the NRA or whatever. They’re saying, “We will not put up with personal attacks that distract from this debate, and if you can’t play by that simple rule, we’re going to push back.”

Boycott that,

This is dF

I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (MARCH 2018 EDITION)

I got a lot of reading done this month – or at least more than I expected. Behold!

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of Ursula K Le Guin’s more celebrated books, and I can see why. This one takes place in a future dystopian Portland, Oregon, where George Orr is afraid to sleep because he believes his dreams change reality. He is sent to psychologist and sleep expert William Haber, who quickly finds out that Orr really can change reality with his dreams, and promptly begins to exploit this in the hopes of advancing his career and fixing the world’s problems – with Monkey’s Paw-type consequences. Le Guin’s powers as an author are on full display here, not least of them being her ability to take established SF tropes and make them seem fresh by focusing on very strong characterization and a plot that fully embraces the concept and makes it believable without trying to explain too much. Indeed, how Orr’s gift works is beside the point – for me, the novel is really about how humans are terrible at creating utopias and the hubris of assuming we can control powers we don’t understand (to include our own brains), much less use them responsibly and altruistically. I generally enjoy Le Guin’s books, but this is one of her best works (that I’ve read so far).


The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks by Benedicta Ward

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The “Desert Fathers” were a scattered collective of hermits, monks and ascetics living mainly in the deserts of Egypt around the start of the 3rd century. They were also pioneers of Christian asceticism and monastic life. Between reading Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island and seeing some quotes during Lent, I’ve been hearing a lot about them lately, so I decided to read this collection of various sayings, anecdotes and parables that have been passed down orally through the ages before someone started writing them down in the 5th Century. They’re short and punchy, but they’re not easy – anyone looking for little nuggets of self-help wisdom or snappy quotes is going to be disappointed. Most everything here is rooted in serious Christian faith, so that’s probably a baseline requirement if you’re going to get anything out of it, or even understand the point of many of these – and even then it may depend on how much Biblical or theological study you have under yr belt. The most useful part for me is the historical introduction explaining just who were the Desert Fathers (and Mothers, for there were women ascetics as well) and why they were out in the desert to begin with. So it’s educational, if nothing else.


Hello, Lemuria Hello by Ron Goulart

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third Goulart novel to feature Jake Conger, the semi-former agent of the Wild Talent Division who can turn invisible at will. This time, the plot is a riff on the infamous “Shaver Mystery”, a hoax published as non-fiction by Amazing Stories in the 1940s that claimed a prehistoric race of aliens called the Lemurians were living in deep subterranean caverns and wreaking havoc on the surface, kidnapping people, causing “natural” disasters, etc. Goulart takes that idea and runs with it for laughs – the Lemurians are real, and they are now attempting to take control of Earth after a crackpot conspiracy theorist named PK Stackpole wrote a book exposing their existence. Conger’s mission – find their HQ and stop them. As always, Goulart’s plot has his protagonist hop from one clue to the next, encountering oddball comedy characters on the way. But he also has a lot of satirical meat to work with here in the form of both the Shaver hoax and the kinds of crackpot conspiracies you see in Fortean Times. Some dated un-PC jokes aside, this is one of Goulart’s more fun novels that also features one of his best opening lines: “The assassin came in and ordered waffles.”


A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I generally like Greene, whether he’s writing literary novels or “entertainments” like this noir thriller from 1936, in which an assassin named Raven is paid to kill a government minister that sets the wheels in motion for war across Europe. Discovering his contact Cholmondely has set him up by paying him with stolen bank notes, Raven goes on the run from the police to track down the people who double-crossed him. It’s a great set-up, and the basic story is a well-paced page turner. But it’s also one of those stories that relies a little too much on coincidence to bring the key players together – Raven, Cholmondely and Anne Crowder, the chorus girl that Raven forces into helping him who also just happens to be the fiancé of Mathers, the London detective chasing Raven. It also features Greene’s tendency to get sidetracked by the peccadillos of minor characters who seem to speak in non-sequiturs – which would be okay if they didn’t distract from the main story or feel like padding, but often they do here. Meanwhile, Raven himself is a bit overbaked as the hardened disfigured criminal who never got an even break and runs on pure hate and bitterness. For all that, the novel does display flashes of brilliance here and there. But Greene has does this kind of thing much better, in my opinion.


Slipping: Stories, Essays, & Other Writing by Lauren Beukes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve enjoyed Lauren Beukes’ novels to date, so I was keen to read this, which is her first collection of short stories, essays and non-fiction, although the fiction section accounts for about 70% of the book. The stories are strikingly diverse, although firmly within Beukes’ usual beat – extreme cybernetics, alien biohorror, ghosts, stalkers, serial killers, 419 scams, South African youth subculture, and so on. While most are top-loaded with amazing ideas – a Japanese punk Lolita vs giant monster story that doubles as a tribute to Haruki Murakami, for example – some of them are little more than ideas, with not much story to propel them, although Beukes’ crackling, energetic prose keeps it interesting, and in some cases less really is more.

However, it’s the non-fiction that really stands out for me – Beukes is a sharp journalist and social observer, and her chronicles of her journalism career and her field research for her novels really bring the people and places she encounters to life. And the open letter to her five-year-old daughter on the subject of beauty is both fierce and moving. Overall the book is a good showcase of her writing talent and imagination, but slightly disappointing in that the non-fiction section is so short.

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Leave them wanting more,

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