Alan Jacobs

I just love this by the Rev. Sarah Condon. 

iPadOS has rendered my iPad unusable, with a very strange combination of errors. For instance:

• The screen freezes in many different apps, usually requiring the app to be quit and restarted, sometimes requiring the iPad to be rebooted
• The Smart Keyboard Folio occasionally fails to connect to the iPad
• When the Smart Keyboard Folio connects, sometimes it types in ALL CAPS and cannot be made to stop doing so without a reboot
• All Bluetooth connections are inconsistent and unreliable
• Some iCloud folders will not sync from other devices, even after days

(Strangely enough, while everyone else has been having miseries with Catalina it has worked great for me: in particular, it seems to have fixed the Wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity issues that have plagued my Macs for the past several OS X releases. Go figure.)

At the very heart of the academy we find a series of genres — discursive genres, which are also genres of social interaction — the mastery of which constitutes, more or less, mastery of the academic profession itself. Some of these are universal: that is, they may be found in all academic work. Others are specific to certain disciplines or disciplinary families. Some of them are performed in relation to colleagues, others in relation to students. Here are a few that I, as a professor of humanities, have had to practice:

• the classroom lecture
• the “job talk” lecture
• the invited public lecture
• the short lecture that you give when you’re on a panel at a conference
• the conference-panel discussion
• the “Socratic” seminar discussion
• the symposium based on a paper everyone is supposed to have read
• the peer-reviewed article
• the book review
• the peer-reviewed monograph

Some of these wear, over several decades, better than others. Some I will probably never do again (the peer-reviewed article, the job talk); others I will be doing to the end of my career (the classroom discussion, the monograph). Some I enjoy, some … not so much.

But I have one definitive and unshakeable opinion: I never want to hear, or deliver, another lecture as long as I live.

For one thing, lectures are very, very hard to do well. I’ve surely heard more than a hundred public or semi-public lectures in my life, and only one of them has been excellent: when I was a grad student at UVA I heard Stephen Greenblatt deliver a lecture that later became his famous essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” and it was electrifying. (I was sitting next to one of my professors, and at the end of the talk he leaned over and said to me, sotto voce, “Do you still have your wallet?”) Otherwise they have been not-crushingly-boring at best. And while I work hard to make my lectures vivid and interesting, I am always aware that there are better ways to accomplish what the lecture is supposed to accomplish.

The lecture is an unfortunate holdover from the pre-Gutenberg age. It makes no sense to have me come and talk to you on a subject in circumstances in which I could write something, send it to you, and have you read it and think about it, after which you could bring me to your institution for a conversation. That would be more intellectually productive for everyone concerned. Of course, one might reply that a lecture is not as polished as a finished, publishable essay or article. Indeed: that’s a major reason why lectures aren’t much fun to listen to. Better to embrace the tentative and unfinished character of your thoughts by having a conversation about them instead. 

It is true that fewer people can participate in such a conversation than can attend a lecture. But note the difference between “participate” and “attend.” Certain kinds of intellectual exchange simply do not scale. I truly believe that if, instead of asking me to deliver a lecture at your institution, you asked me to come prepared to talk with four different groups about my published work, or even my work-in-progress, the experience would be better for all of us. (And I would be much more likely to say yes, since I wouldn’t be committing myself to all those hours of lecture-writing — a problem for me, because my conscience won’t allow me to deliver the same lecture repeatedly at different places.) 

Well, one can hope. Or lose hope. But this I am sure of: When I am lying on my deathbed, I shall heave a breath and whisper to whoever is near, “Thank you, Lord. I shall never have to attend, or deliver, another lecture.” 

Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation:

Anxiety and panic over the effects of new technology date back to Socrates, who bemoaned the then new tradition of writing things down for fear it would diminish the power of memory.

Well, it wasn’t Socrates, in was a character in a story he told, but anyway, was he wrong? 

Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson both warned that communal relationships would suffer as industrial societies moved from rural to urban living.

Were they wrong?

Radio, video games and even comic books have all caused consternation.

Was the consternation justified? 

Television was going to bring about the dumbing down of America.

Did it? 

This is encouraging by Adam Silver. Maybe that NBA League Pass is not out of the question after all?

A couple of months ago I told my son that this year, for the first time, I would definitely be buying NBA League Pass. Now? No. I’m not standing on definitive principle; it’s simply that thinking about the league leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The two most important figures in the NBA, Adam Silver and LeBron James, have issued their warnings against the “consequences” of critiquing the Chinese regime. We now know that if Beijing rained bombs onto Hong Kong not one word of criticism would pass the lips of anyone in the NBA. And that’s not easy for me to forget.

Tom Dart: 

Since Berhalter’s appointment was announced last December there have been no results that exceeded expectations against good teams; there is currently no reason to believe that the US would be anything but makeweights at Qatar 2022, should they qualify. And there is a lack of clear evidence that the team is trending in the right direction, despite individual positives such as the continued improvement of the midfielder Weston McKennie. 

Yep.

Let’s all face certain facts about the USMNT:

1. Gregg Berhalter has no ideas. “Bring on Zardes to score a late goal” does not qualify as an idea.  
2. Weston McKennie is a good soccer player. Christian Pulisic is a decent soccer player. Zack Steffen is a fairly promising keeper. Josh Sargent may well be a good soccer player someday. Nobody else on the team is any good at all. (Michael Bradley now has the mobility of a cigar store Indian and should never get another cap for the USMNT.) 
3. None of them, coach or players, cares very much. They are, without exception, going through the motions, without energy or commitment. 
4. We are at least a decade away from the USMNT playing any significant role in world soccer, and even that statement is a gesture of blind faith and hope. Berhalter has to go, and almost the entire crop of current players should go as well. Maybe there are some 12-year-olds out there who will flip the script.

The plan that the national federation established when it hired Jurgen Klinsmann was the right one, even if it didn’t work out the way that everyone had hoped. That plan was to hire a coach who had succeeded at the highest level, who could challenge American players to develop their skills in the most rigorous conditions, and who could oversee a long-term player development program. Nothing short of all that will work. 

So wake me when this country has a soccer team. I won’t be holding my breath.

Also, if you set the over/under on Pulisic-to-the-MLS at 3 years, I’ll take the under.

My buddy Rod Dreher: “If religious liberty is the most important public issue to you — and, as a religious believer, should it not be? — then the Barr speech should be front to mind as you consider voting.” 

The question of whether religious liberty should indeed be “the most important public issue” to me is one I have been wrestling with for the last few years. I’m not convinced it should. 

For instance: Stretch your mind and imagine a POTUS who supports religious liberty but who also pursues reckless, thoughtless, and inconsistent policies both domestically and abroad. Imagine that he is cruel to the helpless, treacherous to longstanding allies, cozy with authoritarian regimes, incapable of sticking with a plan, prone to judge everyone he meets strictly by their willingness to praise and defer to him. Imagine that he is colossally ignorant of domestic and foreign realities alike and yet convinced of his matchless wisdom. 

You might, first, ask whether such a President is a reliable ally of religious freedom. Would he work to guarantee liberty of conscience for those who on religious grounds criticized his own policies? Don’t make me laugh.  

But let’s say he can be counted on. Even so, should religious believers care about their own well-being above that of their neighbors? If, per argumentum, our religious liberty comes at the cost of great suffering for others, is that a deal we should make? Should we place our good ahead of the common good? 

Perhaps believers in different religions will answer this question variously. But I’m not a generic “religious believer,” I’m a Christian, and as far as I can tell I am commanded to sacrifice what’s best for me and choose instead what’s best for my neighbor. And if I fail to do that, why should anyone take my Christian witness seriously? 

Christians remember with praise and gratitude our mothers and fathers in the faith who chose to suffer themselves — and sometimes include their own families in their suffering  — rather than inflict suffering on others. Their example should be in our minds and hearts as we reflect on what we are called to do. 

I wasn’t a huge fan of Kevin Williamson before the whole Atlantic fiasco, but since he has returned to National Review he’s been writing one superb piece after another. Here’s the most recent example. 

A while back I wrote about a scholarly mystery: what appears to have been the sale of certain ancient papyri by someone who had no right to sell them. Now we have an update by the Egypt Exploration Society: 

On 25 June 2019 the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) posted a statement on its website that it was working with the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) to clarify whether any texts from the EES Oxyrhynchus collection had been sold or offered for sale to Hobby Lobby or its agents, and if so, when and by whom. This was in response to the online publication by Dr Brent Nongbri, following its release by Professor Michael Holmes of the MOTB, of a redacted copy of a contract of 17 January 2013 between Professor Dirk Obbink and Hobby Lobby Stores for the sale of six items to Hobby Lobby, including four New Testament fragments probably of EES provenance. This statement reports our findings to date.

With the help of photographs provided by the MOTB, the EES has so far identified thirteen texts from its collection, twelve on papyrus and one on parchment, all with biblical or related content, which are currently held by the MOTB (see the attached list). These texts were taken without authorisation from the EES, and in most of the thirteen cases the catalogue card and photograph are also missing. Fortunately, the EES has back-up records which enable us to identify missing unpublished texts.

There still seems to be reluctance on the part of EES, and indeed anyone else, to say “Dirk Obbink stole papyri from our collection, sold them, and kept the money for himself” — but by this point it has become difficult to imagine any other explanation. 

The post adds that the EES “is also pursuing identification and recovery of other texts, or parts of texts, which have or may have been illicitly removed from its collection,” so this story may not be over. And the post concludes by saying that the “broader legal issues arising from these findings … are under consideration by all the institutions concerned.” Does that mean that they may not press charges? Perhaps if the offender makes full restitution? 

I’ve been trying to think about Apple’s deep embedding in a corrupt and tyrannical Chinese regime, and what that means for me, for my long-term commitment to Apple’s products. My first approach to the problem was a rough sketch of the issues involved in the use of any technology: 

But as soon as I did this I realized that I was conflating certain categories that might better be kept distinct. For instance, “usefulness”: What makes something useful? A leafblower is useful in the sense that it moves a great many leaves around quickly; but a rake, while it moves those leaves much more slowly, gives its user more exercise without endangering his or her hearing, and those are valuable features. The ideal balance of the different kinds of usefulness will vary from person to person. It drives me nuts when I’m sitting outside and a lawn service shows up at a nearby house: here comes the deafening racket of the leafblowers, which will drive me inside for the next half-hour at least. But those guys are trying to make a living, which the use of rakes would make it considerably harder for them to do. I get that. I hate it, but I get it. 

Or: Linux is useful in the sense that I can do almost any computer-related task on it, but such a task will often be, for me anyway, dramatically more difficult than on more polished systems. So I rank Linux as not especially useful to me. 

The other axis, that of ethics, is even more difficult. Apple’s Chinese entanglements massive compromise the ethical status of the company, and in more than one way. (Which is worse, obedience to the demands of the Chinese government or the exploitation of Chinese labor?) But Apple also deserves some praise for its commitment to privacy and its truly wonderful work in making its computers accessible to a wide range of users. I don’t know how to make an ethics spreadsheet, as it were, that assembles all the relevant factors — including comparisons to the available alternatives — and gives them proper weighting.

In the end, I think most of us make this kind of decision by some kind of sixth sense, an un-unpackable feel for what’s the best, or the least bad, option in the given circumstances. I wonder if that sense is wholly irrational or whether, on some deep and inaccessible level, it’s actually finding a means to weigh what we don’t consciously know how to weigh. 

(Of course, the problem for me in all this is that I am as implicated in Apple’s ecosystem as Apple is implicated in the Chinese economy. If Apple’s policies don’t change, then I hope I will have the courage to buy no more Apple products. My current Apple devices are fairly new, so that leaves me with four years or so to find an alternative. Maybe my fifth time committing to Linux will be the one that finally sticks, but who knows.) 

I thought this day was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Beijing expected it to come so soon either: the Chinese authorities were playing a long game, biding their time and building their power, and I do not think they were relishing an immediate confrontation with Western capitalism. But the Hong Kong protests forced their hand. Beijing clearly perceives these protests as an existential threat, and have decided that the moment has come to go all-in. They have pushed all their chips into the center of the table … and the capitalists immediately folded like a Chinese-made lawn chair. 

NBA officials are bowing and scraping to Beijing and begging forgiveness while trying to tell Americans that they’re not really apologizing. (Adam Silver says he’s not apologizing for Daryl Morey’s exercise of free speech, but then what is he apologizing for?) ESPN/Disney is muzzling its employees. Apple is banning apps that Beijing wants banned, for whatever reason. 

This has all gone better for Beijing than CCP officials probably dared hope, but in fact they held the strongest hand. Tim Cook, who got his job as Apple CEO after spending years proving that he was a wizard of the supply chain, knows better than anyone that China has a stranglehold on Apple’s supply chain, and it would take years or even decades to loosen that hold. I don’t know how much revenue the NBA gets from China, but even if it’s far less than they get in this country, that Chinese revenue can be cut off altogether in an instant; by contrast, not one American NBA fan in ten thousand will care enough about what happens in China to stop buying jerseys and tickets and League Pass. 

If nothing else, this whole shameful display should put an end, once and for all, to the ridiculous idea that there is some natural and intrinsic connection between democracy and capitalism. There very obviously ain’t. When shareholders and the bottom line are not benefitted by democracy, then democracy gets flushed down the toilet. American big business has firmly decided for a totalitarian regime and against people who want democratic freedoms. The business of America really is business after all. 

But here’s an interesting question: How woke will our woke capitalists remain if an emboldened Chinese regime starts to rail against moral perversion in the form of homosexuals and trans people? 

UPDATE: This: 

“Believe me, the China situation bothers me. . . . But at the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my owners to make money,” then–NBA commissioner David Stern said in a 2006 interview. He may not have known then where his allegiance to the bottom line would lead the league and the game he helped to grow.

To hear him tell it then, Stern was intent on turning the NBA into an exporter of American values. Under his leadership, the league began its “Basketball Without Borders” program, which initially sent NBA players to run basketball camps in geopolitically tense parts of the world. “NBACares” television spots dominated game breaks. “We’re going to keep right on showing them,” Stern told Sports Illustrated when asked about public annoyance with the frequency of the ads. “Because social responsibility is extremely important to us.”

You know it was an article of faith for Stern that “make money” and “social responsibility” could never come into irreconcilable conflict with each other. No doubt Adam Silver and Tim Cook have been similarly catechized. But their religion is in vain, so what will they do? They’ll keep making money and tell themselves that they are also socially responsible, no matter what happens on the ground. For faith is the evidence of things not seen. 

UPDATE 2: Paul Farmer, in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, on WLs (White Liberals): “I love WLs to death, they’re on our side. But WL’s think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves.” (More about Farmer, on related themes, here.) 

Adam Silver is standing by NBA employees’ free speech rights, though he doesn’t sound happy about it. “Daryl Morey, as general manager of the Houston Rockets, enjoys that right [to speak his political views] as one of our employees. What I also tried to suggest is that I understand there are consequences from his freedom of speech and we will have to live with those consequences." He also made sure to emphasize how deeply he “sympathizes” with Chinese companies that angry.

Let’s be clear about what Silver sympathizes with. A Chinese broadcasting company replied to Silver’s statement thus: “We’re strongly dissatisfied and oppose Adam Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right to freedom of expression. We believe that any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability are not within the scope of freedom of speech.” That is, people who are citizens of countries other than China, who speak while in their own countries, should be governed not by the laws of those countries but by the preferences of China. That is the view that Adam Silver sympathizes with. 

UPDATE: Ben Thompson makes a rather obvious point, though one I had neglected: The statement by Daryl Morey that so profoundly offended Chinese officials was made on Twitter — which is banned in China. Thompson continues by demonstrating how Chinese censorship works on TikTok, and near the end of the post writes, 

The government response is also critical: I already argued that CFIUS should revisit TikTok’s acquisition of Music.ly; the current skepticism around all Chinese investment in the United States should be continued if not increased. Attempts by China to leverage market access into self-censorship by U.S. companies should also be treated as trade violations that are subject to retaliation. Make no mistake, what happened to the NBA this weekend is nothing new: similar pressure has befallen multiple U.S. companies, often about content that is outside of China’s borders (Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example, being listed in drop-down menus for hotels or airlines).

John Lanchester:

First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were ‘harmonised’ – in other words, deleted overnight. Then a conference was called for ‘Big Vs’, people with well-followed verified accounts, analogous to Twitter’s blue tick. At the conference, the newly formed Cyberspace Administration of China reminded the assembled big shots about their ‘social responsibility’ to the ‘interests of the state’ and ‘core socialist values’. Two weeks later, on 23 August 2013, the prominent investor and Weibo activist Charles Xue was arrested. He turned up shortly afterwards in a Chinese Central Television interview from his prison cell, weeping and apologising for his irresponsibility and vanity.

Such TV interviews have become a staple feature of the CCP’s internet crackdown, helped by a new law, passed in September 2013, which threatens three years in prison to anyone who shares a rumour that ‘upsets social order’ and is shared five hundred times or clicked on five thousand times. For people with Weibo followings well into the millions, the law effectively banned the posting of anything even potentially controversial. ‘Ever since, Weibo has been dead as a politically relevant medium,’ Griffiths writes. ‘Once, debate had raged there: sometimes wild, often polemical, clever if you were lucky – but always lively. Today, it’s as silent as the grave.’ Weibo continues to grow, mind you; it’s just that it’s now the usual entertainment news and celebrity bollocks.

And:

Put all this together. Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs. Increasingly, policing in Xinjiang has an algorithmic basis. A superb piece of reporting by Christian Shepherd in the Financial Times recently told the story of Yalqun Rozi, who has ended up in a re-education camp for publishing Uighur textbooks in an attempt to preserve the language. One of his crimes was using too high a percentage of Uighur words. The system allows a maximum of 30 per cent from minority language sources; Rozi had used 60 per cent Uighur, and ‘China’ had appeared only four times in 200,000 words. Uighurs get into trouble for attending mosque too often or too fervently, or for naming their children Mohammed, or for fasting during Ramadan. There are about 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang: 1.5 million of them have either spent time in a re-education camp or are in one right now.

To which Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA:

Actual quote: “We are dealing with a complex set of issues. And I will just add that the fact that we have apologized to fans in China is not inconsistent with supporting someone’s right to have a point of view.” A point of view — your opinion, man — the opinion that the people of Hong Kong have the right to demand democracy and that the Chinese communist government is determined at all costs to deny it to them — which Silver is quite explicitly disavowing by apologizing to the fans in China. The NBA loves it when their people are politically vocal, until being politically vocal costs the NBA money. Then they claim, as the owner of the Houston Rockets has, not to be political.

It’s interesting how little coverage of this issue there is on ESPN, and no editorializing — in text, anyway: maybe the on-air personalities are being more assertive. But my guess is that ESPN and the NBA are joined at the hip here, and are trying to figure out which way to jump. My second guess is that they’ll back the totalitarian Chinese regime.

And my third guess is this: The time will come when no major American media will tell the truth about what the Chinese government does, and my over/under on the moment when perfect silence has been achieved is five years.

UPDATE: Here’s what the NBA posted on Weibo: “We feel greatly disappointed at Houston Rockets’ GM Daryl Morey’s inappropriate speech, which is regrettable.” Remember that “inappropriate speech,” in full, was: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

UPDATE 2: Since I posted this earlier today I have been browsing through the Twitter feeds of the major NBA reporters. Crickets. Not an opinion in sight, and these people have opinions about everything. There are two factors at work here, I think. The first is simple greed: NBA exhibition games are coming up in China, ESPN is sending crews there, there’s money to be had both in the near and in the far term. But the other factor is something I wrote about a lot in How to Think: Scott Alexander’s extremely useful categories of the Ingroup, the Outgroup, and the Fargroup. To people who run the NBA, how North Carolina portions out its public restrooms is A Matter of Vital Importance, because those Jesusland weirdos are the Outgroup. But the Chinese government persecuting and killing Uighurs? Whatever, man. Who am I to judge?

UPDATE 3: Brian Phillips:

There’s nothing edifying about any of this, except to the extent that it’s a useful reminder of where we are. We’re in a world where global capital feels perfectly comfortable teaming up with communist autocrats against democracy activists, as long as it keeps the cash registers dinging. Generally speaking, the hypocrisy of sports owners feels more depressing than the hypocrisy of other tycoon varietals, because sports owners represent a product that you’d like to believe has a meaning surpassing commerce. This is especially true about the NBA, because the NBA is so proud of its social conscience, or at least it was before its social conscience started threatening to cost it money.

For the most part, though, you’ll never be surprised if you assume that the devotion of sports owners to their own self-interest, and of sports leagues to their owners’ self-interest, is absolute. The NBA wants you to see it as politically progressive to the precise extent that your seeing it as progressive helps the bottom line and no further. Tilman Fertitta, the Rockets’ owner, occasionally goes on CNBC to praise Donald Trump, from whom he bought an Atlantic City casino in 2011, and to say things like “Obamacare does not work.” He has no problem then turning around and declaring that the Rockets are a “non-political organization” to make nice with China, because what he means by “non-political organization” is that he thinks hundred-dollar bills are nice, and also fuck you.