Looks like Brent hasn't been reading the blog (and why would he?) because, once again, he's responded to some legitimate reader mail in a pretty wack-ass way. The letter writer, one Eric Jensen, makes a fairly reasonable objection to Brent's Metallica review, i.e. that maybe a publication like Pitchfork shouldn't be wasting space on telling its readers the unsurprising fact that Metallica sucks now.

Hey Brent, leading off a Monday morning issue with a blast on Metallica was brilliant. Who's next on the mainstream chopping block, Puddle of Mud? PepsiCo? Wal Mart? Adam Sandler?...So Metallica sucks, huh? Thanks for yelling fire in a building that burnt down 15 years ago.

A bit harsh, maybe, but respectful, too, and making some reasonable points. Brent's response? Well, it's just weird. You should go read it in its entirety, but let me take it point-by-point.

1) Brent initially defends himself by saying that Metallica is worth covering because they're an important band. This is true. However, the letter was not criticizing the publishing of a review of Metallica; it was criticizing the writing and publishing of a Captain Obvious pan of Metallica. So the point is sort of moot.

2) Brent gives the following reason for writing the 0.8 dis:

It was entirely possible, in theory, that Metallica did make a return to their thrash years. After all, that's what literally EVERYONE has been saying. If Metallica is such an obvious low target, I hope you're writing Spin, NME, Entertainment Weekly, Blender, AMG, Rolling Stone, Dotmusic, Amazon, et al to complain of their raving over the album. I believe AC/DC reviewed the album for E! Online, as it claims St. Anger to be "all balls." The reviews have been so obnoxiously positive, that, as a writer with an outlet, I felt there was a need to offer another opinion.

So, in other words, he wrote a reactive review, and like he told me about his White Stripes review, he skewed it lower because it was too high elsewhere, he felt. But in giving this justification he seems to be willfully ignoring the main complaint in the original letter, i.e. that it was a pan published in Pitchfork. The people who read PF probably don't get their opinions from any of the sources he lists above (except maybe the NME, and you can never trust them about mainstream white American stuff anyway), so if he wanted to counteract those reviews, he would have been far better off publishing it, well, almost anywhere else. Publishing it in Pitchfork simply reifies the standards of the community, i.e. that Metallica sucks, and it becomes just more indie-rock circle jerking. While it's true that, say, Rolling Stone probably wouldn't publish a negative Metallica review due to its, um, "relaxed" upmarket critical standards (i.e. "selling good = sounding good") but hopefully Brent grasps that trashing Metallica in Pitchfork isn't a whole lot more noble than praising it in Entertainment Weekly.

3) In the same paragraph that he says "I felt there was a need to offer another opinion" he says "I wasn't commissioned to hate the album." This is mostly not true; he admits as much. Pitchfork didn't have to run the review, and he says he set out to write a negative one. So there you go. If he wanted to do a debunking or response to some of the other reviews, he was free to do that; indeed, if Pitchfork published response reviews regularly, this might be way more honest as a critical technique. But nope.

4) Brent says the writer "can't call us elitist," but the writer did no such thing. If anything, he's praising Pitchfork's normally high standards, and criticizing this review for not living up to them. Certainly the word "elitist" appears nowhere in the letter, unless my eyes are broken again.

5) Brent finishes with the accusation, "I don't remember you writing in response to my Destiny's Child review." This is misplaced for a whole host of reasons, but here are a few:
- It's the equivalent of one of the dumbass reader mail folks who write in saying "Well Pitchfork liked X but not Y so why are your standards inconsistent?" Dismissing a reader's opinion because you did not know his opinion in the past is just as logically silly as complaining about a review written by X by comparing it to one written by Y and accusing someone of inconsistency. There's no inconsistency there, just a facile comparison.
- It asks for the kind of constant indie-snob sellout policing that presumably Brent despises (although I'm beginning to have my doubts), since according to this scheme the only way a critic could take you seriously is if you constantly criticize him. Clearly not true.
- Metallica and Destiny's Child are apples and oranges. Metallica has been around for 20 years or so; Destiny's Child for 4ish. (I am too lazy to check dates.) Metallica's old stuff is loved by indie kids but their new stuff is ignored; Destiny's Child still maintains a reputation skewing good among Pitchfork's likely readers. So the complaint the letter voiced would not, in fact, apply to Beyonce.

Sounds like Brent read the letter like he wanted it to read ("you guys sold out!") rather than like it actually read ("your standards seem to be declining as you seem overeager to publish some rather easy and obvious pans purely for entertainment value").

The point of all this (besides complaining about Brent and Pitchfork's editorial decisions some more) is to point out why I no longer actually write letters in to the site: they treat their letters page like the "hate mail" section of Bonzai Kitten. Clearly they get a lot of dumb illiterate wackos writing in, but I bet most publications do, quite frankly, and they don't publish 'em, by and large. If Pitchfork wants to take that tack, as they clearly do, they can't then publish the intelligent, well-written criticisms side-by-side as if they were the same thing. Harper's gets some pretty intelligent criticisms of their articles, for instance, and they don't publish them all with insulting banners and snotty responses, because, quite frankly, sometimes their articles are wrong. It would be nice to see Pitchfork admit this.

But I'm not holding my breath.
posted by Mike B. at 4:03 PM 0 comments

The New York Times publishes an update on Gitmo based on the accounts of some released detainees.

Now, I'd just like to do some interpretive damage control before my fellow wacky leftists get out of hand with this. (Not that it'll do much good, I know, but...) First off, let's just keep in mind here that these are not the reliable sources, on either side, so maybe we should take all of this with a few grains of salt.

More importantly, though, I think we have to differentiate between the detainees' physical treatment and their procedural treatment / legal status. They are different issues and we need to maintain separate and, I think, opposing judgments on them.

Their physical treatment, it now seems clear, is not something I think we should be too concerned about. Everyone seems to agree that there were no beatings, and while they weren't exactly living in the lap of luxury (or Florida white-collar prisons), we have to remember that these were not nice men. At the very least, they actively supported a regime that was not, shall we say, soft on the women-killing issue, the Taliban. Most were trying to kill American soldiers, and in the worst case some are actually Al-Qaeda agents. (And don't give me the "they were defending their homeland" line--if there's any army I'd expect you to go AWOL from, for moral and/or self-preservation reasons, it'd be the Taliban's.) These guys aren't the domestic detainees picked up for decidedly non-violent immigration violations--they're killers who have no problem stoning women to death, and we really have to remember that before we go complaining too loudly about them only having half an hour of exercise a week. I'd love to live in a world where neither of those things happen, but given the choice, I'll go with the harsh sunlight any day.

But, you ask, what if they're not killers or Taliban supporters or Al-Qaeda members? Well, that's where the procedural stuff comes in.

On a certain level, the outcry about Gitmo has been prompted by a certain naivety about the way we get a lot of our intel and about the treatment of war prisoners worldwide--this is not, I don't think, particularly harsh treatment compared to that of most other countries. But now we see it not only happening here, but also happening with, as the article points out, "Canadians, Britons, Algerians and Australians, and one Swede." This scares people, understandably so, especially in conjunction with the other various scary rumblings coming out about civil liberties in the last two years. It's a weird combination of alarmist and naive--well, hell, from the conspiracy theory point of view they could always do this to ordinary Americans, but an Al-Qaeda member with Canadian citizenship is still a long, long way from an American student protester--but if we're getting that reaction here, imagine the reaction elsewhere. If the U.S. is to be a beacon of justice and democracy to the world, maybe it's not the best thing for our support of freedom in the Islamic world to be seen to be ducking international law. While our disdain for the International Criminal Court is, unfortunately, starting to look smarter and smarter, this doesn't excuse us from long-standing standards of justice like the Geneva convention.

It also doesn't help our vulnerability to charges of injustice when the guilt or innocence of the prisoners is never formally considered--if they have done monstrous things, which I've no doubt most of them have, why not detail it? And, moreover, why deny them counsel for so long? While I recognize that an uncertainty about their fate can be useful for interrogation purposes, I hope any citizen with a civic conscience would agree that any information gleaned from leaving a person in legal limbo for a year is probably priced too high. We can all agree that a year without a lawyer is too long, right?

posted by Mike B. at 1:55 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 16, 2003

William Safire thinks that the bill overturning the FCC rulings can get passed! Which is way different from what we've been hearing lo this last month or two--"Oh it's a fair accompli, there's nothing we can do, the FCC is just going to bully it through and no one will pay attention or care." Oops. 750,000 pieces of mail later, democracy can be cool sometimes.

posted by Mike B. at 6:17 PM 0 comments

SCOTUS has (thankfully, y'ask me) ruled against allowing the broad, forced use of antipsychotic medication to get defendants fit to stand trial. It was 6-3; the oppositon sez:

In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas, said that the ruling would allow some criminal defendants "to engage in opportunistic behavior" to thwart prosecutions.

Look, guys. (Sandra? Say it ain't so!) I'm sure there are some Jim Carrey or Farreley brothers movies wherein a normal Joe gets diagnosed as crazy and then uses this as a blank check to engage in all kinds of anti-social behavior, but--trust me on this--if you're diagnosed with schitzophrenia or a delusional disorder, and are unmedicated, you really don't have the presence of mind to think, "Wow, I'm crazy, I can kill that guy and nothing will happen to me!" I suppose this thought may occur, but only as, well, a delusion.

Maybe these folks should be medicated, but to do so to make them competant to stand trial when they weren't lucid at the time of the offense seems, well, a bit unjust, and sounds like the court agrees with me.

posted by Mike B. at 5:38 PM 0 comments

The Antic Muse listens to Limbaugh and brings us the following tidbit, spoken by an African-American economics professor named Walter E. Williams:

If you don't pay taxes, why should you have the right to vote? For example, I don't hold any shares of General Motors stock, so should I be voting on what happens in General Motors? No! ... If you don't pay taxes, maybe you should not vote on at least financial issues. Or maybe you should get one vote for each dollar in taxes that you pay.

Yes, you just read a quote from a black college professor proposing a poll tax. It boggles the mind, doesn't it? And this isn't out of the blue: he's written a paper saying much the same thing. I won't get into just how blinkered the reference to a poll tax is, as the muse covers that nicely. I also won't delve into the almost as mind-boggling idea that running the government like a corporation would be a good thing (weren't most white men screwed over by their corporate bosses, or did I miss that part of the country song?) as it's been covered elsewhere and better.

I do, however, want to slice 'n' dice the reasoning he's specifically using here. In the paper, he starts from a thought experiment about what would happen if non-stockholders were allowed to vote on corporate boards (always models of democratic republicanism) and concludes--surprise--that it's not a good idea, and then he exteeeeeeends that reasoning to the government. Here's the condensed logic:

People who have little or no stake in General Motors can be expected to behave differently than those who do, simply because their decisions are less costly to them - others bear the cost of their decisions...From a moral point of view, we might ask just how fair is it to allow those who pay little or no taxes to use the political process to decide how much taxes others should pay?

Oh dear, where to start? First off, the thing about politics is that it's not economics--the raison d'etre for a state isn't profit, but the collective welfare of its citizens. It is, in fact, a separate realm from economics, intentionally insulated, although the two do of necessity interact on a regular basis. So while it's true that a non-stockholder voting on the board of General Motors might impair its profits, it's not true to say that allowing someone who pays "little" taxes to vote will impair the general welfare of the citizenry.

Saying that the "moral" point of view would see a wrong in allowing the poor to vote for a representative who then vote for a measure that would benefit the poor and slightly impoverish the rich is similarly questionable. (Thomas Friedman might see a wrong, but he's hardly the voice of morality, don't you think?) It implies, for instance, that the rich simply materialized their wealth from the sky, whereas it did come from somewhere, and that perhaps the moral thing when you have a lot of money and other people have very little is to perhaps give them some so they can feed their families. This is not to imply that wealth acquisition is immoral, but neither are social welfare programs. Government, like social welfare programs, exists as a collective enterprise that compels everyone to give because we all know that we probably wouldn't otherwise, but we do need firefighters and schools and hospitals and, yes, health care and food if we can't afford it on our own. I know a certain branch of economics gets uneasy at any scheme involving collective action, but I think the fact is that any government is going to involve collective decision-making--there's no reason to have a nation otherwise--so without abolishing government entirely (no comment) I think it's something we're all going to have to collectively deal with.

It's all coming a bit close to the old saw that liberals are simply mercenaries who mobilize the dumb masses in order to victimize the rich for their own benefit. If this were true, of course, we'd see Democratic administrations in which the rich toppled and the poor feasted in the streets. Well, let's see--FDR, definitely not; JFK, nope; LBJ, nope; Carter, not so good for the economy, but the poor weren't doing all that well themselves; Clinton--uh, definitely not.

These kind of arguments appeal to a third-grader's conception of justice and should be laughed out of the building upon appearance. They also base themselves on a model of democracy half a step above mob rule.

posted by Mike B. at 3:45 PM 0 comments