Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Stop The Madness

December 28, 2012 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

While I linked it in my PJMedia piece the other day, I thought it might be useful to rerun my original piece on how freedom of speech is a collective right, from ten years ago, to reopen comments.

I often disagree with Bill O’Reilly, but I want to defend him.

A lot of smart people are bashing him on line, particularly in the blogosphere, but I think that this just proves his point. I think that he’s spot on with this erudite and well-reasoned editorial. This “Internet” is just too powerful.

When the Founders wrote the First Amendment, they could never have conceived a technology that would allow anyone to publish anything at any time, at almost no cost, and have it readable by millions instantaneously.

In fact, inspired by this work, I’m working on a book, tentatively titled “Publishing America: Origins Of The Free-Speech Myth,” in which my thesis is that very few people had access to printing presses in colonial times, and this notion of a long American tradition of a free press and individual freedom of expression is simply propaganda of First Amendment extremists. I’ve painstakingly gone over old probate inventories, and can show statistically that very few homes traditionally had means of printing and, such few as there were, they had mostly fallen into such a state of disrepair as to be useless. Unfortunately, my pet iguana ate all of my notes, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. I’m sure the print nuts will employ their usual ad hominem tactics, and call me a fraud.

Anyway, it’s one thing to have free speech when the most effective means of communicating ideas is with a printing press that few can afford, and has to have the type carefully set by hand, and they have to be printed on expensive paper, and transported no faster than a horse can run, and distributed by walking door to door.

Such a laborious and expensive process as colonial-era printing ensured that potentially dangerous ideas were more thought out, and well edited, and could usually be easily traced to their author. So, given that the investment in publishing was so high, it made it much more likely that only responsible people would be publishing things, and that you wouldn’t have wackos running around spewing crazy or confused, even false or misinformed notions at innocent and naive passers by.

In that environment, it made perfect sense to grant an individual right to print things (to bear presses, as it were), because there was little danger of it getting out of hand.

But surely the Founders never intended for every single citizen to be able to exercise such a right–in their wisdom, they would have known it would lead to chaos and unfettered thought. They couldn’t possibly have imagined the rapid-fire distribution of dangerous ideas made possible by twenty-first-century technology. Why, some people might have even put forth the absurd notion that free speech is the right of everyone.

Had they actually anticipated the possibility that the cost of publishing could drop so dramatically, they would surely have made the First Amendment a much more explicitly collective right (like the Second), in which people would only have a right to free speech in a well-regulated state newspaper.

Let’s be reasonable–of course it’s fine to let people have typewriters, and copiers, as long as they don’t have a paper magazine of more than a quarter-ream capacity, and can’t print more than two pages per minute in high-density color. There are legitimate uses for such things–printing up book reports for school, making PTA meeting notices and party invitations, and the like. We respect the rights of those who wish to indulge in such innocuous, if pointless activities, long a part of the American cultural tradition (though it would certainly make sense to register such devices, in case they’re stolen, or lest they’re used to express some untoward or scandalous thought).

Of course, we do need to outlaw the cheap Sunday-night specials, old manual machines still available in pawn shops, with sticky keys, that cause ink stains, and from which a large number of late term papers are produced by the criminal procrastinating class during the witching hours. But really, folks, chill–no one wants to take away your typewriters.

But the Founders would realize also, just as Bill O’Reilly and I do today, that no one, other than the police and politicians, needs the kind of “idea assault” publishing capability offered by word processors, blogging software, and even fifteen-page-per-minute ink-jet printers, which really have no legitimate use–they only propagate calumny and wrong-headed notions, tragically damaging innocent celebrities’ egos, sometimes permanently.

This past weekend, just to demonstrate how easy it is to lay hands on such dangerous equipment, I exploited the notorious “computer show loophole,” and went out to the big show in Pomona, California. There, I saw entire halls filled with purveyors of high-speed idea processors, rapid-fire printers, and even modems capable of transmitting thoughts at frightening rates, up to gigabytes per second. For only $4.99, with not so much as an ID requirement, let alone a background check, I was able to purchase an “assault keyboard,” with several internet hotkeys. It was fully automatic–holding down any key would result in a torrent of characters being spit out, hundreds per minute. I even saw teenaged children buying them.

Yet, when people propose sensible regulations over this, we hear hysterical cries about “freedom of expression,” and “from my cold, dead fingers.” But surely the far-fringe First Amendment absolutists are misreading it–there is a hint of a shadow of an umbra of a penumbra in there, easily accessed by referencing the Second Amendment. Bearing this in mind, it is more properly read with the following implicit preface: “A well-regulated press being necessary for the security of the State and self-important talk-show hosts, Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…”

Clearly, viewed in the light of that implicit purpose clause, these were not intended to be individual rights, any more than they were in the Second Amendment, because obviously, the Founders wouldn’t have meant one thing by the words “the right of the people” in the one case, and a different thing in the other, particularly in two adjacent amendments.

Accordingly it is equally clear that we need to implement what would obviously have been the Founders’ intent had they foreseen the Internet, and immediately pass some laws to get this thing under control. Let’s do it for the children.

Particularly Bill O’Reilly.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama’s Earliest Political Inspiration

December 28, 2012 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

…apparently wasn’t all that inspirational.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The College-Industrial Complex

December 28, 2012 Rand Simberg 9 Comments

…takes a blow:

Let’s see. Where is a teenager more likely to learn the basic and transferable virtue of showing up every day and on time, not to mention how to get along with a boss and fit into an organization — as a communications and binge-drinking double major at Missoula State University, or as a mechanic fixing broken rig equipment? Too many high-school graduates are reflexively going to college as it is, without a clue what they are doing there or how to take advantage of higher education. Mandatory stints in the private economy before college enrollment could do wonders for study skills. If, by deferring or maybe even skipping college entirely, students were foregoing their one hope for immersion in Western civilization, there would indeed be grounds for regret. But colleges’ own curricular decisions have long since destroyed their right to present themselves as a gateway for precious knowledge of the past.

No kidding.

A lot of people are in college who don’t belong there, and don’t really know why they’re there, wasting their or their parents’ money, or accumulating debt undischargeable in a bankruptcy, except society has told them that it is expected of them. Many of them would be a lot better off getting jobs after high school, and then, after they’ve figured out what they want to do, going to school if their goals require it. In general, older students with life experience (and particularly veterans) are more motivated, and will get much more out of college than someone who just graduated high school (and was perhaps unprepared for college by the terrible public school system).

After I (barely) graduated high school, I was in no mood for college (I didn’t even bother to take the SAT), and went to work for a year or so repairing Volkswagens. That was enough experience to tell me that I didn’t want to do it all my life, and I went to community college for a couple years, picking up enough pre-engineering courses with As to get into Michigan engineering school, something that I wouldn’t have been able to do right out of high school with my grades. And if you want to learn, and save money, you’ll actually get a better education at a community college than a major university for your freshman and sophomore years, because classes will be smaller, with more individual attention from the instructors. It’s only the advanced courses that require a university.

[Update a while later]

A campus full of contradictions:

…perhaps a fourth of the liberal arts courses — many would judge more like 50% — would never have been allowed in the curriculum just 40 years ago. They tend to foster the two most regrettable traits in a young mind — ignorance of the uninformed combined with the arrogance of the zealot. All too often students in these courses become revved up over a particular writ — solar power, gay marriage, the war on women, multiculturalism — without the skills to present their views logically and persuasively in response to criticism. Heat, not light, is the objective of these classes.

Why are these courses, then, taught?

For a variety of practical reasons: 1) often the professors are rehashing their doctoral theses or narrow journal articles and are not capable of mastering a wider subject (e.g., teaching a class in “The Other in Advertising” is a lot easier than a systematic history of California); 2) the quality of today’s students is so questionable that the social sciences have stepped up to service the under-qualified, in the sense of providing courses, grades, and graduation possibilities; 3) the university does not see itself as a disinterested nexus of ideas, where for a brief four years students are trained how to think, given a corpus of fact-based knowledge about their nation and world, and expected to develop an aesthetic sense of art, music, and literature. Instead college is intended as a sort of boot camp for the progressive army, where recruits are trained and do not question their commissars.

So the new curriculum in the social sciences and humanities fills a need of sorts, and the result is that today’s graduating English major probably cannot name six Shakespearean plays; the history major cannot distinguish Verdun from Shiloh; the philosophy major has not read Aristotle’s Poetics or Plato’s Laws; and the political science major knows very little of Machiavelli or Tocqueville — but all of the above do know that the planet is heating up due to capitalist greed, the history of the United States is largely a story of oppression, the UN and the EU offer a superior paradigm to the U.S. Constitution, and there are some scary gun-owning, carbon-fuel burning, heterosexual-marrying nuts outside the campus.

If we ask why vocational and tech schools sprout up around the traditional university campus, it is because they are upfront about their nuts-and-bolts, get-a-job education: no need to worry about “liberal arts” or “the humanities” — especially given that the universities’ General Education core is not very general and not very educational any more. Yes, I am worried that the University of Phoenix graduate has not read Dante, but more worried that the CSU Fresno graduate has not either, and the former is far more intellectually honest about that lapse than the latter.

What a disaster.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary