Concerning the latest wave of demonstrations, Martin Gurri writes,
In a real sense, the digital environment represents the triumph of the image over the printed word. Because it provides the illusion of immediacy, the visual is viscerally persuasive: not surprisingly, the web-savvy public has learned to deploy images to powerful political effect. A photo of Mohamed Bouazizi burning alive sparked the protests in Tunisia that inaugurated the Arab Spring in 2011. As I write, we are flooded with images from dozens of U.S. cities in turmoil, a visual argument about the fragility of government control.
Read the whole essay.
Speaking of the power of the visual, the fact that Congresspersons consider themselves above the law has been an open secret for as long as I can remember. So if Nancy Pelosi’s visit to a hair salon had merely been reported in print, I suspect that it would not gotten much traction. But with the video. . .
Sorry, expecting anyone not be to get their hair done in spite of lockdowns for months on end, does not make sense to me, perhaps because I’ve been able to cut my own hair for years. But not everyone can cut their own hair! I know, hair washing is a different matter but most professionals generally expect plenty of services from others that I normally tend to for myself, regardless of pandemic circumstance. Still: Is there some unspoken and uneconomic alternative that I am not aware of because of my relative isolation as an older citizen? In short, what are people (regardless of political persuasion) now expected to do, if they can’t cut their own hair and no one else in their family (or perhaps a friend) is willing or able to do so for them? Likewise I would not have understood the outrage had it been a Republican who was caught in a barber shop or other hair establishment. I am not trying to be argumentative, I have been curious about this for quite some time.
Who was it? I think Ted Cruz was photographed on a plane, maskless, basically giving the finger. It was a story for a day.
What makes the story is the hypocrisy. Someone who is against mask mandates not wearing a mask isn’t a story. Someone who is against people going to salons going to a salon is a story. ( I don’t know if that applies in this case)
Hypocrisy, really? Thats a thing still?
Alright.
Pelosi: masks today, make tomorrow and masks forever…except when I’m being entrapped in an elaborate scheme by a small business salon owner.
Cruz: I’m against masks…
See the difference?
Also, how has beautiful Texas done vs. California over the past few months? One is still stuck in lockdowns while the how been out for several months.
Lastly, not implying that masks are good or bad on net. I have no clue. But, these masks seem to be the least intrusive form of hygiene theater that I’ve seen…I say go for it!!!
It’s not about haircuts.
The bigger issue is why set everyone for public shaming if we don’t have to.
I’m somewhat certain that this is the entire point of the exercise:
1) openly shame those that you disagree with your hygiene theater protocols so that you can signal to yourself and others how morally superior your group is vs. theirs.
2) ignore the irrational hygiene theater on a personal level because to do otherwise is completely inconvenient. Send a few texts and enter through the backdoor and just hope that no one is paying close attention….problem solved.
Maybe I’m wrong, but all of this seems like 1930s prohibition hypocrisy all over again.
Covid is the third leading cause of death in the US currently. Not an apocalypse, but not nothing. It’s more likely to kill you than anything except heart disease or cancer. Masks are cheap, easy to use, and significantly, though not perfectly, protective. To me, wearing a mask seems like a good idea – low downside, significant potential upside. We have laws mandating seatbelts, and at this point traffic is killing fewer people than covid.
@Jay
“To me, wearing a mask seems like a good idea – low downside, significant potential upside.”
Completely agree. The least intrusive measure.
We ended lockdowns here in TX, but with masks. Seems like the most reasonable compromise to me vs. CA and NY.
You haven’t seen 4 year olds being asked to wear masks on a playground in 100 degree heat with barely anyone around. Or watched your friend that installs solar panels on roofs by himself have to wear a mask on a hot roof with panel heat blazing in his face all summer for no goddamn reason.
Let people decide when masks make sense and when they don’t. Don’t force it on them. Reasonable people will amen the right decision 90% of the time in order to get 90% of the benefits of masks.
One strange thing to note is that barbershops and hair salons are open in lots of states in the US. Even in states like NC, that have a Democratic governor. Maybe it is a Southern thing.
Becky, you gave great arguments for why hair salons should not have been forced to close, or at least have been allowed to open much sooner. It’s too bad that Nancy Pelosi herself, as the highest ranking Democrat in government and the highest ranking Californian politician, wasn’t trying to convince her fellow California Democrats to allow the salons to open. That’s the hypocrisy.
Even after being caught by what she calls a “setup”, Pelosi has still not said (as far as I know) that salons in CA should be allowed to open now or, if they are allowed open now, that they should have been allowed to open sooner.
Yes, videos are important but they don’t explain the protests that Guerri writes about.
He starts with some questions based on the assumption that Floyd was brutally killed, a crime that has yet to be adjudicated. He considers three pieces to explain the puzzle that Floyd’s brutal killing had received global attention and triggered massive calls to action. The first piece relates to the persuasive power of the press and social media (he calls it the information sphere, a distraction). Guerri ignores the grotesque, intentional misinformation delivered by those that control the press and social media. Forget about videos and focus on the controllers.
The second piece refers to the mind-set of the protesters. But who are these protesters? I think Guerri has never been in a large protest. All large protests require at least coordination and often cooperation. Schelling’s focal points are sufficient for small meetings but not for large protests. The technology of coordination and cooperation has changed and reduced the cost of organizing large protests (or at least the simultaneity of regular protests), but they are still needed. Guerri’s paragraph about violence confirms the importance of coordination and cooperation. The protests are not the spontaneous response of some people (a tiny minority of the millions that have misperceptions caused by the intentional misinformation in the U.S., and the few thousands that participated in other countries).
The third piece refers to the behavior of elected officials, in particular to their collapse. He ignores the collusion of state governors and city majors with the protesters. These Democrat officials were not accommodating them because of their right to protest. They were making sure that protestors were denouncing Trump and promising protection in the case that Trump was to send troops. Just review the speeches of those governors and majors. Guerri quotes Andrew Cuomo, the failed governor that didn’t do anything to stop his comrade De Blasio from supporting riots and the looting of NYC! And why does Guerri mention Putin and Trump together?
Sorry, Arnold. Guerri should continue writing about some other revolutions.
“So if Nancy Pelosi’s visit to a hair salon had merely been reported in print, I suspect that it would not gotten much traction.”
Here is a possible counter example. A different infamous haircut (circa 1993):
https://apnews.com/f13de329074e4faf649629e45268d505
Am I the only one feeling nostalgic?
It’s not the hair cut per se that bothers me. It’s her response to being caught. “I was set up,” is a feeble excuse for a veteran politician. I’m surprised she wasn’t aware of the rules in her hometown and she didn’t sense that it could be a setup (why her long time beautician would want to set her up is curious too). It wouldn’t have been much of a story if she admitted she was wrong and asked forgiveness or said so what. Didn’t a lot of people give the secret knock and passcode to get their haircut during the lockdown? (For the record I looked like I was back in the 70’s or 80’s.)
Somewhat similarly, when the Black female, second term mayor of Rochester NY claims that systematic racism is responsible for killing the man in that city, it also sounds like an excuse.
She knows the rules as does everyone else in California. The savvy, including my parents and sister, who are based in in California, know the official rules and they know how to go underground to work around them…instead of going through the front door at the hair or nail salon, they merely enter through the backdoor and everything is normal from there. This is all just hygiene theater like prohibition was in the 30s.
“How did a local instance of apparent police inhumanity expand, with vertiginous speed, into a street revolt that has absorbed the attention of the country and the world?”
Question asked and answered. If you are pushing the “inhumane” narrative maybe it expands?
The elites force fed the public the rushed judgment that the police killed Floyd even though the toxicology reports showed potentially fatal levels of opioids in his blood stream. The elites, though, all sang together from the same sheet of music?
Why?
To demonstrate that they can still manipulate important segments of the population? Perhaps to boost advertising rates for the election campaign? By winning an election while spending relatively little on advertising, Trump threatened future revenues. When the data become available it will be interesting to see the trends rates and volume of political advertising spending.
Trump’s greatest achievements may be demonstrating that you don’t have to buy off the media to win and that outsiders can perform as well as or better than career politicians. Hate the man all you want, but how much worse has he been than any other president? That the elites would hate him is only natural but it also demonstrates the rock-bottom quality of USA elites. Is there a country anywhere with elites as unsophisticated and semi-sentient as those in the USA?
That academics would prefer Biden is natural as well. His rise to stardom, after all, was fueled by speeches plagiarizing obscure sources. And the speech patterns he displays are redolent of rambling incoherence of think tank and journal scribbling. And to the aged scholars encumbering chairs in academia perhaps dementia is all too easily rationalized. So even if there might be someone naive enough out there to believe that some useful perspective might be found in this quarter, no one is surprised if it is not.
It is not the internet or citizen journalists with cell phones that make the problem so much worse in the USA. Other countries have those as well but nowhere is the urban unrest as violent and unhinged as here. The problem is the USA elite is the most vacuous in history. They all march in locked formation and aggravate every social tension. Perhaps in a couple generations when the current elite class has died off a new crop will arise that has something to contribute.
The elites, though, all sang together from the same sheet of music? Why?
The Democratic elites did. After all, a significant fraction of the Democratic party faithful, including most of its elites, are invested in the racism narrative (the “successor ideology”). You can’t lead the Democrats if you mess with one of the party’s major narratives.
But of course there’s an entire opposite set of elites pushing the toxicology report as a counter-narrative. I’ve read the report, and the Republicans seem to be right this time. But if you think that they’re telling the truth because it’s true, rather than because it’s convenient, you probably believe pro wrestling isn’t fixed.
The narrative that police brutality is fundamentally not a major issue is correct.
That is, we have a null hypothesis in policing in that attempts at reform that are outside the usual technocratic measures we already came up with in the last few decades are net negative for human flourishing (hence the crime spikes in 2015 and today where BLM is successful). The successor ideology adds far more heat than light, and is terrible for net human welfare.
I mostly agree, but I can see why urban blacks are upset.
In the ’80s, we had less intrusive policing and much worse crime. Since the ’90s, we’ve had much more intrusive policing and much less crime. The intrusive policing was bound to upset people, especially if they’re young enough to not have experienced the crime. And the truth, which is that police act as if young black males are significantly more dangerous than anyone else because it’s true and they see it constantly, is a bitter pill to swallow.
Thanks to the power of imagery over print, Cuomo can get away with killing a lot of people. He’s been distracting people by crafting the image of a tough and competent leader with heated rhetoric against Trump.
I don’t see anything new or changed in the deployment of images vs. print here.
Images have been used as political propaganda and incitement since there have been images. The Spanish American war was incited by depictions and photographs of the USS Maine blowing up.
The Vietnam War, 9/11, Rodney King riots, etc.
It’s true that the media no longer has such complete control over which images it promotes, but that’s not clearly a bad thing or a good thing.
Sometimes people deploy imagery to attempt to set an agenda. Sometimes its successful and sometimes it’s not. This seems fundamentally unchanged. I’d like to know under what conditions people are more likely to do this, however.
Here Gurri disappoints; he refers to George Floyd’s “brutal killing,” but the medical examiner’s report shows that Floyd died of a massive Fentanyl drug overdose. His respiratory failure was caused by that; on autopsy, his lungs were so filled with fluid that they weighed 3 times normal.
The police procedures were specifically recommended and authorized by the Minneapolis Police Department, whose training materials demonstrate in photos exactly the restraint procedures used for cases of excited delirium from drugs such as Floyd exhibited. This restraint had little or nothing to do with Floyd’s death. The report showed restraint did not impede Floyd’s breathing because there were none of the trauma signs that would be seen with that.
We did not “watch Floyd die with our own eyes;” he died later in the hospital.
So the general public impression of what happened was false, and Gurri has uncritically shared in and perpetuated that impression.
The video with useless for judging the case, because without knowing how hard one is pressing on his neck (impossible to tell in the video) we don’t have a clue if it was a reasonable restraint on a non compliant physically large and historically violent overdose suspect that was resisting arrest. It’s obvious that the cops should walk, or at a minimum see vastly reduced charges compared to what the DA is going for.
And, while Floyd was being restrained , whom had the police called and whom were they waiting for during those 8 minutes?
Hint: rhymes with paramedics.
Gurri might be defaming the police when he untruthfully writes:
“George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman…”
Floyd died later, in the ambulance.
Because his lungs were filling with fluid, because of his Fentanyl overdose plus meth use.
Maybe.
Which experts do you believe?
I don’t believe the knee on his neck for 9 minutes killed him – but I do believe neck restraint was more brutal than needed for restraint of a mostly non-resisting handcuffed man. Who is a big strong guy, and high, and acting erratically, but is handcuffed and not being aggressive against police, tho unwilling to get into the police car. And police protocol said to use that neck hold (already changed!).
The video visual is very very strong, and emotionally dominant. Most people make most of their decisions emotionally, then use their rational thinking to justify it. Because a video image is so real, it is hugely persuasive. Gurri’s first point is right on, and his own description of the death shows his own belief in the video, more than in any later examination results. By experts who might disagree on this case or on whether Epstein killed himself, or not. (Expert disagreement is a point not made but part of the authority breakdown.)
Gurri’s second point is very crucial, the mind sets of the protesters:
They stand ferociously against. They see the present as a nightmare of injustice. That, incidentally, can be true for both the Right and the Left: the Right glorifying America’s past as the greatness from which we have fallen, the Left rejecting that past as a fallen state that pollutes the present.
MAGA is certainly a call to return to prior greatness – where Free Speech, and thinking, was really free. And college professors or writers could say that a person born as a male, with XY genes, can never become a “real woman”. The past polluting the present is a good way to phrase the protest mind-set, being charitable.
No discussion about unfairness, which is inevitable among humans, like beauty or IQ, is different than injustice.
His third point on how bad the elite are is also true, tho he seems to feel he has to start with the top:
President Trump alternated between bluster about shooting looters and bizarre photo ops. The president has been roundly criticized for his actions, but every other elite player in this drama behaved as egregiously.
A better elite criticism would have been to start with the local mayor, then the governor, then the president – going up the chain of command.
A point Gurri doesn’t make, but is part of, becomes how the Dem elites immediately use this as another stick in an attempt to demonize Trump.
The riots were planned in advance, in general, with coordination prepared. Perhaps to be unleashed during the Rep Convention, but ready — and the need for police reform became a spark.
Seldom mentioned is that Trump’s Prison reform was quite popular among many Blacks. I’ll be surprised if Trump gets less than 20% of the Black vote. In 2004, Bush only got about 6% vs rich white Dem Kerry.
For a good Martin Gurri themed story, read this at the MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007931/riot-porn-right-wing-vigilante-propaganda-social-media/
I know academia is far left, but op-eds like that still surprise and disturb me. The author considers the political messaging of NYT+CNN as some sacred truth and video footage of riots that conflicts with that political messaging is heretical.
Also, the MIT Technology Review is clearly engaged in general political punditry with no direct connection to science or technology. I’ve noticed the math, science, and engineering departments at public universities increasingly engaged in partisan political advocacy + messaging. They want the authority of the objectivity of science, but they have no intention of actually being objective.
Thanks for the reference.
Academics are also increasingly engaged in activism and “enforcement” of their views as long as shared by the top administrators. This at a time in which most universities have a large excess supply of academics (yes, the excess differs greatly across the many units of each university). I expect the excesses will be reduced by forcing the retirement or resignation of those not interested in political advocacy or messaging or activism or enforcement.
Your last sentence is 150% right.
the majority of people on Facebook are witnessing a radically different narrative from the one presented to consumers of mainstream media
People still consume mainstream media?
My parents watch network news every night and basically accept its narrative of events.