Capitalism and Free Expression

Curmie was mostly done with this essay prior to learning of yet another school shooting, this one with a death toll of at least 21, about six and a half hours west of Chez Curmie.  That situation is, of course, most on all our minds at the moment.  Going ahead with this post, Curmie admits, is in part an avoidance mechanism, because he just doesn’t want to deal with the fact that the politicians, especially but not exclusively on the right, have prioritized campaign contributions from the NRA above the lives of schoolchildren (and teachers).  I just don’t want to wrap my head around that right now.

A few glimpses at the uneasy alliance between capitalism and free expression: three stories from this month.

#1.  Lufthansa’s Unconscionable Anti-Semitism.  So, apparently a few orthodox Jews refused to wear face masks for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Budapest earlier this month.  Many US Jews started their journey in New York and were changing planes in Frankfurt to continue on to a Budapest flight.  Many if not all of these people were on a pilgrimage to the small town of Bodrogkeresztúr as part of an annual commemoration on the anniversary of the death of Grand Rabbi Yesha Steiner, who died in 1925.

(Curmie has some experience with changing planes in a German airport… with a traveling companion from a country from which, at least at the time, Germany required a visa, even if all you were doing was changing planes.  Not the most fun travel experience in my life.  But I stray…)

We can disagree, Gentle Reader, about whether mask-wearing is a medical necessity, an essentially useless exercise in virtue-signaling, or somewhere in-between, but the fact is that both nations and corporations are free to set their own rules.  Don’t wear a mask; don’t get on the plane. Simple as that.  So Lufthansa staff enforced the rules, and did not allow those passengers to board.  So far, so good, right?

Well, they took the policy a little further than that.  Citing the article linked above:

Lufthansa staff allegedly blocked all passengers who were visibly identifiable as Jewish from boarding their connecting flight, German daily Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung reported.  Local German media reported that the staff excluded those passengers who were recognisable as being Jewish because they were wearing skull caps or had sidelocks.

This would be a German corporation, in Germany, deciding that all Jews, not just those refusing to obey the rules, present a problem to public order and must be quarantined, lest they… well, whatever nefarious thing they might do.  Not the best of looks, there, Lufthansa.

Naturally, whether out of honest conviction or risk minimalization, the highers-up at the airline and the local pols scrambled to apologize.  Lufthansa proclaimed “zero tolerance for racism, antisemitism and discrimination of any type,” and the anti-semitism commissioner for the state of Hesse asserted that “this is discriminatory and not a trivial matter, and all the more reason why the company’s top management should also feel personally responsible for apologising for this incident and taking a clear and unequivocal stand.”

Sure.  Unsurprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League is unconvinced of the sincerity of the corporation: “This non-apology fails to admit fault or identify the banned passengers as Jews. It also refers to them as a group, even though many were strangers. They had one commonality—being visibly Jewish.”

Curmie knows little to nothing about German law—whether there were criminal offenses committed or whether Lufthansa can be sued in a civil case.  But he does know this much: Lufthansa had better do a full-scale investigation culminating in firing the offending employees—at the very least the supervisor who was recorded saying “everyone has to pay” for the handful of Jews who violated the mask order, “it’s Jews coming from JFK…. Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems ... just for this flight.”   If not, they will not only lose all credibility as an ethical corporation, but they will also be lucky to escape with only eight figures of lawsuit payouts.

#2.  Netflix and the Warning Shot.  There’s no one to cheer for in this one.  Netflix, which recently underwent the first quarter of declining subscriptions in a decade, is still flexing its corporate muscles, sending what one headline calls a “warning shot at its woke employees” who objected (for example) to the network’s continued affiliation with Dave Chappelle, whose comedy special those employees regarded as transphobic.

Here are selections from the “Artistic Expression” section of the new corporate culture memo:

Not everyone will like — or agree with — everything on our service….  While every title is different, we approach them based on the same set of principles: we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices….

As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.

Things get a little vexed on the free speech arena here.  Some topics are inherently not funny; others bother only those who need more bran in their diets.  Curmie has never found Chappelle even moderately entertaining, so, not having seen the Offending Object, is ill-positioned to comment on the extent (or existence) of its offensiveness.  But, of course, although the brouhaha seems centered on a single offering—Netflix’s original fare is largely progressive in tone.  Those on the right who cry “Woke” may do their cause little good, but they’re not fundamentally wrong.

Netflix is, above all, a business concern.  They want to make money for their investors and employees alike.  They’re going to buy the programs they think will attract viewers and not the ones they think won’t do so.  That’s the way it works.  If enough people want to see a Dave Chappelle special, it’s going on Netflix.  Same goes for projects like “Don’t Look Up,” another show Curmie hasn’t seen, but which his more conservative friends decry as leftist propaganda.  Perhaps it is; Curmie won’t care unless he’s forced to watch it, and for all the attempts from left and right alike, we aren’t there, yet.

It is tempting, of course, to grant at least some sway to the Netflix employees who are legitimately offended by the network’s offerings.  They—at least some of them—do not want to be associated with programming they cannot support.  (Others, let’s be real, live to be offended.)  But we’re not talking about a closed system here.  As Netflix’s recent hemorrhaging of subscribers, largely due to competition from Hulu, Disney+, etc., suggests there are other employers out there.  Capitalism as practiced in the US falls well short of a perfect system, but it’s the one we’ve got, and failing to recognize that reality just isn’t a good place from which to start an argument.

#3.  Not content with being censorious asshats (the usual hat-tip to Ken White for the felicitous phrase) in public schools, a gaggle of right-wing pseudo-Christians with a desperate need for increased fiber intake have shifted their focus to Barnes & Noble.  According to a couple of second-division pols looking to boost their images with the yahoo set, the Virginia Beach Circuit Court found “probable cause that the books Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury are obscene to unrestricted viewing by minors.”

Curmie asks you to note, Gentle Reader, that whereas we all make typographical mistakes from time to time, the quotation above is a grammatical and syntactical nightmare.  It was written and posted on Facebook by a lawyer, Tim Anderson, who apparently passed law school without making a stop at 6th grade English on the way.  (He mentions “parent consent” later in the same post.)  More to the point, it hasn’t been corrected in the ensuing week, suggesting that he believes what he has written makes any damned sense.  The one thing that is clear is the not-so-veiled threat to file (or encourage others to file) nuisance suits like this all over the state: “Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools.”  Oh, jolly.

Barnes and Noble is hardly Curmie’s favorite store, but they responded with the only logical statement: that they carry “thousands of books whose subject matter some may find offensive…. We ask that our customers respect our responsibility to offer this breadth of reading materials, and respect also that, while they chose not to purchase many of these themselves, they may be of interest to others.”

An important point is made in an article on the Book Riot site: and not merely that “Neither book fits the definition of obscene and neither book is pornography.”  Rather, they note that “As a private business, they are not only allowed to sell what they wish to sell, but they are under no obligation by anyone to move materials out of their facilities. Further, no private business like the bookseller would simply ‘supply’ books to the school district.”

The books in question, by the way, are (of course) recommended by the American Library Association as being of particular interest to… you guessed it: teens.  And, of course, there’s little that will do more to stimulate the adolescent mind into curiosity than the allure of delicious naughtiness.  As the recent soar in sales for Maus after it was banned by a Tennessee school board demonstrates, the adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity seems at least as true as ever. 

But, easy as it is to make fun of the Bible-thumping hordes who seek to ban books they haven’t even skimmed, it’s also true that there are such things as legitimate concerns… they just don’t seem to be applicable here.  What is available to the general public—books, movies, whatever—ought only to be off limits if there is real consensus, not if just the wackadoodle puritans don’t like it.  Requiring a text for classes is a different standard, but simply having teens (or anyone) have access to material is essential to a society that is actually free.

What we’re seeing isn’t a dystopian novel—not 1984 nor Fahrenheit 451—but it does seem like the first chapter of a prequel to those books, and that is quite scary enough.

Two Stories That Weren't. Sort of.

Two stories that caught my attention this week turned out to be wrong. Sort of. Both involve confirmation bias of a sort, but I’d argue that I wasn’t a complete idiot to have been deceived.

The first story came out of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. USA Today reported that Jews in that city of nearly a million residents (and another million in the metropolitan area) had received a leaflet demanding that they “register” with local authorities. Here’s the center of Oren Dorrell’s article:

Jews emerging from a synagogue say they were handed leaflets that ordered the city's Jews to provide a list of property they own and pay a registration fee “or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportation and see their assets confiscated,” reported Ynet News, Israel's largest news website, and Ukraine's Donbass news agency….

The leaflet begins “Dear Ukraine citizens of Jewish nationality” and states that all people of Jewish descent over 16 years old must report to the Commissioner for Nationalities in the Donetsk Regional Administration building and “register.”

It says the reason is because the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine supported Bendery Junta, a reference to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement that fought for Ukrainian independence at the end of World War II, “and oppose the pro-Slavic People's Republic of Donetsk,” a name adopted by the militant leadership.

The leaflet then described which documents Jews should provide: “ID and passport are required to register your Jewish religion, religious documents of family members, as well as documents establishing the rights to all real estate property that belongs to you, including vehicles.”

Consequences for non-compliance will result in citizenship being revoked “and you will be forced outside the country with a confiscation of property,” it said. A registration fee of $50 would be required, it said.

The article quotes US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt as calling the leaflets “the real deal,” and Secretary of State John Kerry’s response certainly sounded as if he took the situation seriously. Kerry called the threats “beyond unacceptable” and “grotesque.”

There was a denial on the part of the leader of Donetsk’s pro-Russian movement, Denis Pushilin: he acknowledged the leaflets were published under the name of the organization he heads, but denied any knowledge of their publication or distribution. Still, the situation in Ukraine is anything but stable, and the leaflets aren’t really a whole lot more outrageous than what the Russian government under Vladimir Putin routinely does to gays. Why should it be difficult to believe that a reasonably good-sized splinter group might adopt a different and time-honored bogeyman?

But, for all the seemingly careful sourcing of the article, the situation doesn’t seem to be as dire as we believed. Oh, the leaflets are real enough. But the folks at PolitiFact, who do good research even if their conclusions are often wackadoodly, smelled something fishy. According to their report,

Reporters on the ground quickly found that no one was actually being registered.
PolitiFact exchanged emails with Ari Shapiro, an NPR international correspondent reporting from Donetsk, who said there is a real flier, but it went ignored until the media caught on. Shapiro himself went after the story and shared his reporting with us….
Donetsk chief rabbi Pinchas Vishedski acknowledged the flier’s existence, but called it a provocation, Shapiro reported. U.S. media outlets like Vox and the New Republic have also questioned its validity. A New York Times report from Donetsk said that militants never intended to set up a registry, and the room designated for registering Jews sat empty Thursday.

Even Julia Ioffe’s New Republic article, however, while attributing the story to the “Ukrainian rumor mill,” nonetheless points out the anti-Semitic tendencies by at least some on both sides of the turmoil in eastern Ukraine. She quotes independent Russian journalist Vladimir Fedorin as saying “I think the fliers are fake, but the anti-Maidan crowd is a collection of the hardcore ‘alternative’ variety and criminals, so it’s possible some of them are capable of this.” Indeed, the consensus seems to be that the pamphlets and the masked men who distributed them were, in the words of Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, part of “a series of cynical and politically manipulative uses and accusations of anti-Semitism in Ukraine over the past year.”

In other words, everything about the story is real except the story itself. Anti-semitism exists in a sufficiently significant way—quantitatively and qualitatively—in Ukraine that this kind of stunt could gain traction. And the distribution of the fliers actually happened, and was more than a little creepy. But the people on the ground, foremost among them the overwhelming majority of Donetsk’s Jews, seem pretty much unfazed by the whole affair.

Were Curmie of cynical disposition, he might wonder about the competence of American intelligence forces and/or Secretary Kerry that a little problem was treated like a big one. The press didn’t help, of course, but there’s a difference between a few cranks trying to embarrass the other guy and Holocaust 2.0. It would be nice if the people responsible for knowing the difference actually… you know… knew the difference.

The other story that “got” Curmie this week was a satire piece that seemed credible because yes, those people are that stupid. They just didn’t manifest it in quite this way. Yes, it is true that Texas governor-in-waiting Greg Abbott, whose mental abilities rank somewhere above Louie Gohmert’s and somewhere below those of a butternut squash, does indeed base part of his education policy on the ideas of the even more appallingly moronic Charles Murray.

That would be the Charles Murray who is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “white nationalist,” who argues that it benefits women to be paid less than men, and who said this week that he had found no “evidence” to prove that any woman had been a “significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.” One would have thought that as a self-described libertarian, he might have found a little room in his pantheon for Ayn Rand, at least, if not for Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, George Eliot, Emma Goldman, Hildegarde von Bingen, Julia Kristeva, Susanne Langer, Rosa Luxemburg, Iris Murdoch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or Simone Weil… to name but a few.

But even Murray and Abbott aren’t quite as dim-witted as an article on the satire site Newslo reported. Curmie confesses he skimmed instead of read the article and therefore missed the first “tell”—the line so preposterous that not even a moron could say it with a straight face. Generally, there are at least two per story, so you know something is up with the story when you get to the second one. Missing the first, though, messes up the interpretative process. In this case, that first “tell” was:

“It’s not that I have anything against women. They’re nice enough, but it’s just a physical fact that their brains have developed [notice our tendency to insert “not” into that phrase] to the same degree that men’s brains have developed.

“I’m not a doctor,” he added, “but it may have something to do with their need to develop breasts. The human body can’t do everything.”

And I missed the Newslo banner. Result: I trimmed a couple more IQ points off both Murray and Abbott than they deserved, and trust me, they don’t have a lot to spare. This one is on me, however. I could argue—with reason—that confirmation bias is actually healthy: that treating what some people say with skepticism if not disdain is the only way to survive. Fool me once, blah blah blah. There’s a point at which that’s true, but really, I screwed up. The satire site played by the rules, and I just missed it.

These two stories tell us something about natural skepticism. I actually distrusted the legitimate news story (“legitimate” in the sense of reporting actual facts, however distorted the view might have been) more than the parody piece. I desperately didn’t want to believe it, for one thing, so although I did post a link to the USA Today story on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, I did so with a voice in the back of my head suggesting that there’s more to the story than meets the eye. But I guess the leap from suggesting that there have been no female “significant original thinkers” to asserting that women’s brains are smaller (a well-played homage to the once-prevalent argument concerning racial differences in cranial capacity) just didn’t click as significant. Whether that’s because I’m getting too smug or because yahoos like Abbott and Murray make satire redundant is a tough call.

I’ll try to do better. They won’t.