A libertarian Breitbart?

How did Breitbart get so influential? Can libertarians pull a similar trick (or is it necessarily compromising)? Can the libertarian movement co-opt the anti-establishment sentiment that fuels the Trump campaign? Is there a libertarian version of Breitbart -- an 'in your face' culture warrior media outlet. Maybe Anitwar.com? Reason just doesn't seem angry enough. Is the problem that libertarianism will never find an establishment patron who will encourage its growth, thinking that it can be controlled. Or is the problem that libertarianism can never have the same visceral, thoughtless motivation as the desire for a "strong leader."

The election horserace is not news

Once again, we have descended into election season and the news media will be full of campaign coverage. This is a damaging habit for our society; many important issues will be ignored, and these conversations will reinforce the pernicious attitude that electoral politics are of supreme importance. While many intelligent people have written rants against this sadly predictable shift in attention, I'm thinking that we can do more. I'm thinking that this could be the motivation for a movement to pressure the news media to maintain coverage of broad issues, and not dwell of the idiocy of the campaign. What do you think?

I don't have many ideas right now for how to organize this opposition, aside from writing a letter to my typical news station -- NPR. But I'll give a little outline of how much coverage is appropriate for the campaign.

The first consideration is whether campaign news is useful -- will it affect any of my decisions. I can see two possible uses: helping me decide which candidate (if any) to support; and helping me to anticipate policy changes that may occur over the next five years. However, most of this coverage is useless to the vast majority of people who will be voting for a candidate: either they have already decided, they aren't paying attention, or they will wait to see what the situation is as their own election-day approaches. I'm guessing that the only people who find this information useful are the big donors and party activists who are trying to figure out who has the best shot... but these political junkies will get their news from specialized publications, not mainstream outlets. As for predicting future policies, that's pretty useless at this point: elections are pretty unpredictable, as are the actual policies that will be implemented by the elected candidate. After all, G.W. Bush gave every indication that he was opposed to nation-building ("humble foreign policy" and all), and we saw how his Presidency played out.

So even if this reporting is not useful, it is still news. I'd still like to hear the results from the Iowa caucus, and that Bachmann dropped out. That would take all of 30 seconds to report; it does not justify an hour of "special coverage", plus all-day analysis the next day. Also, it is good to be informed about how our political system works, and so it's good to have an occasional feature story about how political campaigns are waged, but the day-to-day updates are just absurd.

So why do the news agencies focus on the election? Is it because they think it's important? These people do tend to be political junkies. Is it because it is easy? They can collect all their facts from election judges and campaigns (and polling data is common enough). However, I don't see how it's any easier for a talk-show to focus on this issue over any other -- there are plenty of other experts to invite on the show (but maybe political advocates are more eager and polished than non-political experts?). Finally, do they think this is what their audience wants? There are plenty of political junkies out there. This comes down to being a culture war of sorts (without the violence and harassment of the Republican's culture war) -- will news programming be determined by the interests of partisan hacks and those who have succumbed to the cult of the Presidency, or by the rest of us who realize that real life and real change is best found in places other than the campaign trail?

UniLeaks: wikileaks for education

I just came across a new website called UniLeaks, which solicits...

restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance which is in some way connected to higher education, an agency or government body working in partnership with an institution, e.g., a University.

As yet, I do not see the point in creating a system targeted at particular institutions. Maybe this is a way to attract specialists who would be interested in these documents. However, my first suspicion is that this is the work of anti-intellectuals who are digging for any possible dirt on academia.

In part, this is because I can't imagine that they would find particularly interesting documents that are distinctive of universities. The most likely "dirt" will relate to fund-raising, resource allocation, and employee relations -- just like with any large institution. My fear is that these people will be digging for documents like the stolen* emails at the center of Climategate, which they can then pass to the right-wing noise machine for selective quoting.

As I suggested in Privacy and Transparency at the University, this strategy seems to be increasingly common among some political factions. Michael Mann suffered legal harassment as a result of the Climategate brouhaha, and Frances Fox Piven was singled out and demonized by Glenn Beck at the height of his popularity. This may be a strategy of attacking soft targets -- mid-level public figures who will never wield political power and do not have a mass-audience.

With that being said, I am cautiously optimistic about the establishment of UniLeaks. I am deeply interested in maintaining transparency and accountability (but also political independence) among universities. I am also hopeful that the proliferation of Wikileaks-style organizations will help to move these whistle-blower systems into the political mainstream, and reduce the risk of retaliation.

Update: I found an article about UniLeaks in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The rhetoric used by the (Australian) administrator of the site seems to be a mixture of academia-idealist (e.g. students are not clients), and government-accountability (e.g. universities get a lot of state money). Also, some articles noted that this is just one of many specialized WikiLeaks clones.

*I say that these emails were stolen rather than leaked, because a leak requires that someone had legitimate access to the documents being leaked. Since no-one should have had access to the email database at the center of Climategate, that data must have been stolen.

Those reasonable anarchists

It's no secret that I find much value in anarchist writings; particularly in anarchist criticisms of statist ideology and institutions. When I see the clear thinking of such essays, I sometimes wonder how anarchists got the reputation for being unreasonable. Of course, there are less "rational" or "realistic" aspects of anarchism. For instance, anarchists put a lot of effort into dreaming up institutions that will replace the state, and the problems of establishing these institutions may seem insurmountable, making the anarchists into a bunch of dreamers. At the extreme, there are frequent calls of alarm and the repetition of conspiracy theories (aside from those "conspiracies" that have been well documented, even if ignored by most people).

Anyway, even the most extreme and alarmist anarchists are no more wild-eyed than plenty of "respectable" voices in mainstream political debate. Over the past few days, I checked in on the local talk-radio station, and got an earful of conspiracy theory and alarmism from nationally syndicated conservative stars -- Glenn Beck and Michael Savage.

If this type of stuff is respectable these days, then there is no good reason that anarchism shouldn't be mainstream.